Valkyria Chronicles 4

Absolutelly love this game. While I prefer story in VC1, this one is considerably more polished.
I really recommend to try this unique tactical shooter, there isn't anything like this on the market.

Pros and cons are down below) If you want to see a (spoiler free) video review, this game is the 3d (out of 3) that I discuss:
Pros:
1. One of the best games ever, on god. A literal gem. I played through the 1st part when I was much younger and that game still lives rent free in my mind to this day. Story is absolutely brilliant, you can't even imagine how many times it made me feel the feels, cry and celebrate with the characters. My fav part is that every unit that you have and can use in a fight is a person with their own personality traits and friends who they feel more comfortable to fight alongside with. Moreover, if you use a character enough, they reach rank "corporal" which unlocks their respective squad story that makes them grow and develop new character traits or change their previous flaws into something positive. So, every single unit goes through their own little adventure (if you use them often enough to promote to corporal). Absolutely amazing. It's ultimately a game about war but for me it's a game about friendship, love, sacrifices, bravery and what people mean to each other. It also has magic just so you know). Story length is about my playthrough time ~ 60h long but there are also reasons to replay fights and there's plenty of post game content as well.
2. Style. I loved the anime vintag-y style, I think it works perfectly for such game. It doesn't take away from the heavy topics but overall keeps the experience light-hearted, wonderful stylistic choice inmho. Every single character looks great, some models are absolutely amazing. It's just a joy to play as them and to look at the cutscenes and story fragments. Complete edition also has an obligatory anime beach episode if you wanted to know XD
3. Combat. SO MUCH FUN! It's a turn based game. Each unit can move and attack during their action and you have limited amount of actions during your turn. The less actions it takes you to beat the level, the higher the grade and rewards that you get. IF you wanna see more, I showcase stuff a little in my vid, so you can get a better idea. It's a strategy game but it doesn't require you to be a strategic mastermind to have fun and be able to beat the game. It's perfectly balanced, hard enough to be challenging to get a rank A and easy enough to make it possible to enjoy the story without try harding the fights (most of them at least).
4. Pacing. The game managed to keep introducing something new throughout my 60h of playtime to keep fights interesting. It never got boring.
Cons:
1. Main villains of the story are poorly written. (2 of them have the weirdest motivations ever, the rest are great). I get that "they're just crazy" is a good explanation but is a very weak motivation for a good story. Made the ending very anticlimactic imho. I feel like the game should have ended 1-2 fights sooner than it did. But it's just my personal opinion.
2. 2 boss fights (not the same one that I talked about in the previous point) felt very puzzl-y. This game is supposed to be a strategy yet 2 particular boss fights that are happening back to back and were meant to be fun and fresh and unique are actually just puzzles that you have to solve by doing a specific thing in a specific order in a specific amount of turns or you gonna start losing units and will lose. These fights were so annoying, they deserve a place in a "cons" list. On a positive note, you can always look up a playthrough of the fights on YouTube and repeat those specific step to get rank A without any issue.
3. If you dislike standart anime overreacting overacting overgasping etc, then there's plenty of that in this game. I don't mind it that much but sometimes it just made my eyes roll. Still, I don't think it's such a big deal. I'm not an anime fan and it didn't take away from the story a bit. It's still SUCH A BRILLIANT STORY!!! imho of course
Overall we got 8.5 Crymarias out of 10 (to be fair) but it's a 10 out of 10 in my heart!
Thank you for reading my review <3 Hope you have a nice day and fun gaming!

A great follow up to a highly underrated franchise that upgraded the artstyle, graphics and gameplay to an entire new level. A system of gameplay that have yet to be replicated anywhere else. This game is a gem.

i have been looking at the reviews for a little bit now some of them shock me. Like to me everything about this game is great. I love everything from the main cast and the side characters to the story and art direction. People are saying the story/characters are garbage, I would have to completely disagree. I would say you get pretty close to the characters and even the side characters. The story is amazing, your pretty much watching friends from when there were kids slowly growing up because of how war changes people. I do got to say though, since it is a anime style game it will have those anime cliche moments but it doesn't ruin the game what so ever as some reviews claim it does, they do it well and gets some laughs from the scenes when necessary. Overall i would have to give the game a solid like 8.5/10 maybe a 9/10. I hope my review makes you give the game a solid chance.

I wasn't expecting Valkyria Chronicles 4 would get made, ever. After:
- a PSP sequel that was too harshly judged,
- a third entry that never made it out of Japan,
- a browser card game that was too early to ride the gacha wave (but served as a pretty good excuse for character designer Raita Honjou to draw more art of the characters, for which reason alone its existence was justified)
- and a spin-off that was Valkyria Chronicles in name only
there didn't seem to be any point in Sega moving forward with the series. That is, of course, until the high early sales of the first game's remaster kicked in, as people uncovered this gem of a series. I'm fairly sure that alone was the impetus for Valkyria Chronicles 4's creation, and I'm thankful for that. Like the first game, Valkyria Chronicles 4 is somewhat flawed, but is a unique and beautiful experience that I highly recommend.
I last played through VC4 in 2020. Four years have passed, and I thought I was no different, until the very end. The anti-war, anti-nuke message of the ending struck a much more powerful chord with me now than it did four years ago. I'm glad to have matured in that way. VC4's plot is actually pretty good: much more grounded, showing heavy influences from European anti-war films, right down to a guy being hung with a signboard saying, "I sold out my country for scraps," around his neck. Amateurs borrow, professionals steal, as they say. It was also one of the few games to make me teary-eyed at a character's death. The localization is pretty good too, with puns aplenty. You can tell the translators had fun working on this game, and I salute them for not bowdlerizing it.
That said, the story does have its weak points. Both the hero and the Valkyria are the dullest of their ilk in the entire series. Claude is a decent protagonist, but he doesn't seem half as memorable as Avan, Kurt or Welkin from previous entries. Despite (and partially due to) her unique design, the Valkyria - Crymaria - is the worst in the series as well, unless you count that chick from the Valkyria Revolution spin-off, which I don't. Crymaria is such a pointless pile of PMS that if she had been removed from the story, it wouldn't have made much difference. All she does is cry and bitch and moan and whinge about being damaged. Go to a therapist, lady. She cries so much her character model has red, puffy eyelids by default. I find it amusing that Selvaria from the first game has such a stranglehold on the series that, despite only appearing for two milliseconds' worth of flashback images in the main campaign of VC4, she recently had yet another figure made of her, being sold under the fourth game's brand. I like her little cap.
On the other hand, the character design and characterization of the femme fatales - the 'girlboss twins' as my friend calls them - is excellent. Raita Honjou is a hentai artist by day, and his character designs straddle this fine line between sexual and grotesque that absolutely fascinates me.
VC4 is the most beautiful-looking game in the series, and is able to simulate battlefields, storms, blizzards and such in a way that the previous entries couldn't - the technology simply wasn't there yet. This game looks absolutely amazing, and is worth checking out for the graphics alone if nothing else. The tank designs, especially in the final levels, are extremely cool too. I love the design of the Ultimate Tanks, with their turrets on backwards. Because they move so fast, I like to imagine their turrets were affixed that way to reduce air resistance. They look backwards and only swing the right way around when they're planning to fire. I just find stuff like this cool.
One small pity is that, halfway through, the story dictates that all levels from then on will be snow levels. After enjoying so many beautiful and varied landscapes in the early game, it's a pity that the second half is so samey. People still harp on about IGN saying that Pokemon game had 'too much water,' but if they had said Valkyria Chronicles 4 had 'too much ice,' I'd wholeheartedly agree.
But hold on, friends and neighbours! I've always waxed poetic about the gameplay of this series. So how is it in VC4? Well, it's very good. If you're a veteran player you'll appreciate the amalgamation of all the positive features of previous games - the always-compelling gameplay improving incrementally throughout the series. However, with VC4 it's apparent that this franchise will never fix its propensity to being cheesed. Nearly every single level in the game can be rendered trivial if you know what you're doing. That is part of why I hold that the PSP games are better gameplay-wise than the console ones: with their divided maps, VC2 and 3 aren't quite as easy to break and beat every level within a couple of turns.
If you're a new player (and VC4 isn't a bad place to start, though I do recommend playing the previous titles anyway) you'll hopefully just be awed by the unique hybrid of real-time and turn-based combat these games have. That was one of the major things that made me fall in love with this series to begin with. So don't even worry about scout-rushing, kitten. There's also a new unit class in this game, the grenadiers. Who are the grenadiers? Just listen to this song and you'll get the gist.
There may never be a Valkyria Chronicles 5. As someone who's loved this series for over a decade, I'm fine with that. If a new game comes out, I'll be happy. If it doesn't, at least it ended without becoming a franchise zombie. VC4 is a gorgeous game with a stirring soundtrack, and an eighth-console-generation experience that I consider a must-play. It tried very hard to amalgamate the gameplay features of every game that preceded it to make it a definitive experience. But it's also flawed, and some flaws are harder to forgive when the series has had 10 years to fix them. Don't let that hold you back from trying it out though. This is a wonderful game.

TLDR: if you played Valkyria Chronicles, this is largely the same, for better or for worse. For me, it's mostly a good thing. Really the only major difference gameplay-wise between VC and VC4 is that you now have artillery units, which are fun additions.
It's a great turn based tactical combat game. There's definitely a learning curve due to the variety of units and mechanics but you really feel like a commander when you pull off some great moves. I love setting up a defensive position with my shocktroopers that just mow down charging enemies. I love getting my lancer behind an enemy tank and shoving a rocket up its ass. And now in VC4, I love drawing a group of enemies together and blasting them with my grenediers. The combat gameplay is truly the highlight of this game and it's really well done. If you are unfamiliar with the series, check it out on YT or pick up VC and try it out first, as VC4 is a little more complicated and builds on VC. That being said, if you only like constant action, this game is not for you as fighting is slow, deliberate and turn based.
My major gripe with VC4 is the same that I had with VC: The story sections are agonizingly slow. In each chapter, you fight usually one battle and then are forced to sit through lots of long cutscenes. And really, only a small fraction are animated cutscenes you can watch. A majority of the story is just dialogue on screen read by the voice actors. The story itself is pretty good but in true anime fashion, two minutes of content is stretched out over 45 minutes as characters do their required anime gasps, monologues and ramble on and on about the most banal things.
It's not just during the story sections either, but also in the required process of using the menues to upgrade your soldiers and equipment. You want to buy 5 improvements to your weapons? You're going to sit through Miles saying the same two lines of dialogue over and over with every button push. What should just take 30 seconds to click a few things takes 10-15 minutes when it's all said and done. I just wanted to get back to the action. It's enough that after I finish a battle, I would love to go on to the next but sometimes I just save my game and come back later because I'm not in the mood to sit through everything again. You can somewhat speed through by pressing continue and reading the text but there is just so much of it.
I do like the characters and the setting, which seems to be a mostly real life based WW2 inspired world but with some (fantasy?) (steampunky?) elements. Even the world map matches real life Europe to a high degree. The art, music and just environment is charming and I am not even super into anime. But the world is beautiful both in the world building and art style.
Overall, this is definitely a must play if you are into turn-based or tactical combat. Just be prepared to sink as much time into watching wayyyy too drawn out cutscenes and frustrating menues as you do fighting battles.

Everything about the first game you loved (moving little doodz around on a map, rochambeau combat, tanks and telenovela romance subplots) but amplified. Eminently replayable. Learning to cheese every encounter is hilarious. The DLC addons are fun and add to being able to cheese the NG+ mode. There's something ridiculously funny about having TWO invincible one-shotters on your team with maxxed-out doodz going up against early game levels in an attempt to one-turn them.

I love this game as much as Super Mario World and it's a cold cryin' shame that Sega has forsaken us and won't give us another sequel.