Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria
Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria tells the story of another valkyrie sister that takes place hundreds of years before Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth. In this latest installment of the legendary RPG series, divine insurrection besieges the heavens. Invoking his power as king of the gods, Odin hastily reincarnates the spirit of rebel valkyrie Silmeria into Alicia, Princess of Dipan. However, unbeknownst to Odin, the spirit of the battle maiden awakens within Alicia, still seeking vengeance. Believing his daughter to be possessed, King Barbarossa of Dipan declares Alicia dead and exiles her to a faraway castle. Odin learns of Silmeria's awakening and dispatches the imperious Hrist Valkyrie to summon her spirit to Valhalla. Alicia runs in fear -- and Silmeria in defiance -- as they embark on a journey where nothing is what it seems and all hide behind a mask.
Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria Accessories
 Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria Official Strategy Guide
Final Fantasy XII
Rogue Galaxy
Odin Sphere
Tales of the Abyss
Xenosaga Episode III
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES
Okami
Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth
Radiata Stories
Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria Reviews
And don't forget Seraphic Gate, if you think you've done it all. You'll run into some difficulty problems on your first play through if you're not the type to go out leveling, but that's fixable by learning skills and going out to farming for new weapons and armor. No new game plus, just harder to clear each time. This game is awesome, anyway. But it's a very solid four and a half, and a really fun RPG that's worth trying, even if you didn't play the original like me.
In-battle curing/status recovery is a huge pain. Not giving it five stars for the hassle of cures, and a few other minor annoyances. Somewhat boring and repetitive battle system. So yeah, traveling the word is two-dimensional. There's cure-all items, but the spell.
But it's circumventable with skills and sealstones sometimes anyway. But, you know what. Forget it. The game's biggest downsides, honestly.
Same enemies repeatedly, re-skinned. Lack of a party-wide cure spell, short of sealstone usage. Steep difficulty curve, side quests, huge dungeons, breathtaking landscapes, truly unique travel and battle mechanics, and a fun farming system combine to give you an unforgettable title, and that's before the excellent storyline even gets involved. And yeah, the world map is broken up, making travel a pain sometimes.
It's a challenging title with plenty to do and see, and you won't just breeze through the final boss.
The arena is in full 3D (hooray). Now, you may find another Sealstone early on in the dungeon that cuts the holders defence in half. Once you are on the battlefield, things change drastically. Now to make these fights easier there is a HUGE array of equipment available in the game. Well that's a taster for you. By attacking certain enemy body parts (how you aim is quite difficult to work out, but certain attacks seem to point at various levels, and you can also run around to the back or side of an enemy), you can break them off, and this gives two important bonuses - special item drops that can be traded to make rare equipment, and extra points in the form of crystals that can be spent later on in the complicated "Sealstone" system (more on that later). But being hit also makes it go back up again so a nice balance is kept. There's certainly a lot to do in Valkyrie Profile 2.
Enemies are dotted around semi-randomly, and you need to knock 'em out to survive. You know, the type of thing you would have done on a SNES or Megadrive 1o years ago. Recommended, and even if you don't know what a Valkyrie is or what "Nibelung Valesti." means, you will still find this one addictive and rewarding. Lots of mean status effects in battle. They have either a positive or negative effect, and it's up to you to get the good ones and leave the bad ones alone.
Fighting is done anytime you bump into an enemy on screen. I don't really have any big gripes except for the character system which rather cruelly takes characters out of the game and brings in new ones at most unexpected times, so you could level up your favourites only to lose them all of a sudden due to the plot. Side quests in the shape of optional dungeons that only appear after talking to the right people - actually you really need to do these as they have vital rewards that make the main game much easier, so make sure not to miss any. The enemy will attack you too of course.usually when you have zero attack bar left of course. Especially towards the end when new characters come at you thick and fast. As I said, this game is going to be heaven for stat-geeks but it can be quite a chore if that aspect's not particularly interesting for you. In such ways, Alicia can do very complicated jumps and mid air warps to hard-to reach places, which is of course where treasure chests often are.
Once you start, you can go mad, as each press makes a character attack with their own special moves and they might have up to three goes each.or as many as you can get in before you run out of attack bar. You can only attack with sufficient attack points, and so attacking is always best when the bar is at full 100 points, because if you chain attacks well enough you can gain a special "limit break" move called a Soul Crush (great name). Are you starting to see how much you have to do in this game yet. I really liked this game. The princess meets up with a few team-mates and together they explore the world, venturing into many dungeons in search of mystical treasure and sacred items which are required to defeat some all powerful evil, etc etc. Now you could go through the whole game just doing that, but there is A LOT more to it than just that. This photon warping/jumping can be teeth-grittingly hard and you may not have the patience to reach every secret place in the dungeons, but most of the time it's fun.
with slopes and obstacles and everything. And there are a lot of them.for a game that lets you use a team of just four to fight with, there are an absurd amount of temporary characters to choose from.it's very hard to stick with a winning combination. Of course the graphics look absolutely gorgeous but it's still quite a shock when you first try and make your character (Alicia) move about. Alicia can fire "photons" which immobilize enemies.
If you want to avoid one you have to make a well timed jump over it, or run back in the other direction. Points are re-gained for clever chaining, critical blows and bits of enemies breaking off. But, despite the lack of 3 dimensional screen depth, the game has instead made it's other apects far more full of depth to make up for it. Characters have a button each - you get four to a team max, so each of the right hand side controller buttons is assigned to a team mate. There's loads to do, so chances are you could be wrapped up in this for weeks. which does mega damage.
There's an absurd amount of customization, and because everything can potentially be traded to make something else, you will never sell anthing just for cash so your inventory will very quickly spiral out of control. The attack bar starts at a maximum of 100 and runs out as each attack is carried out, and it takes around 10-30 points to do an attack, depending on its power. Once the whole bar is empty, it's kind of the "end of your turn" and you have to run around to build the bar back up again. While you are not carrying it, all the enemies are attacking you with double power. I like to explain the combat in all RPGs I review because for me it's often make-or-break in a game if the fighting is done well.
Enough of that, although as plots go, the story is quite basic although the amount of characters you have to meet and get to grips with can be quite bewildering. But if you are the type who loves menus, equipment and stats, then you're going to go cross-eyed with excitment at this game, and I recommend you take the plunge immediately. So, now back to the dungeons, and the designers have put in several fiendish puzzles, a lot of which revolve around jumping. Everything else is standard RPG fare. Put simply, all the main dungeons contain one or more Sealstones in them. Firstly - be prepared for the rather unusual step this game has taken of making everything SIDE -SCROLLING.
I spent a lot of time on it, and even though I got frustrated trying to do double and triple jumps onto secret platforms for treasure, or repeat fighting enemies in the hope of breaking the right body part for a rare item drop, I still had fun. Let me try and put this simply.somewhere in a tough dungeon there may be a Sealstone that grants the holder double attack power. Fighting is real time. Lots of plot twists. A young princess called Alicia seems to hold the personality of a Valkyrie goddess inside her body, one who is guiding her towards a destiny that will save/change/destroy the world (I forget which). The story of VP2 is a little obscure. Carrying it gives you a big negative effect in battles, but you need survive the dungeon with this impediment long enough to seek it out the good one, grab it and replace it with the bad one and turn the tables on the enemy, so that by the time you reach the boss, all the favourable effects are held by your party and all the bad ones are affecting the enemies. But it's still very odd to see Alicia running through a town in constant left to right motion as the streets and houses peel past her.
The other thing about the dungeons is Sealstones. You can run into them, or let them run into you.side-scrolling, of course. There's all sorts of things like this, so menu navigation can get very time consuming. Anyway, lets get the basics out on the table.
And once you are used to it, you'll soon forget that as a drawback anyway. Each piece of weaponry, equipment, armour or clothing will affect your stats, strength, resistance and HP totals, and wearing certain combinations allows your characters to learn skills, which are only learned if the combination is kept in place for a fixed amount of battles (a bit like in Final Fantasy IX). I just about managed it, despite the actual menu screens being very hard to navigate - check the screen closely to see where all the options are because several sub screens are within other sub screens and you do need to know them all to get the full benefit of all the stuff you are accumulating. It's quite a challenging game simply because there is so much to take in. Characters have up to three attacks, so what you do is rush up close to an enemy, and start pressing the buttons. Some can just be bought in shops, some can only be found, and some can only be made as a trade for rare found (or battle-drop) items. Anyway, let's talk about the battles, because that's what we need to know. Although the meat of the gameplay is kept to quite a strict path (and not a very long one at that), the level of depth and customization is immense.
These can then be jumped on or pushed around, or switched places with. Now here are the main facts about fighting:. Anyway all that takes some getting used to and there's really no easy way to undertand it right away so you will just have to be patient if you want to play this game to the maximum. You can also slash at it to ensure you get the first move, but whatever happens, as soon as you touch it, the screen goes WOOSH (as they do) and you are in battle mode. The slash to get the first go reminded me a bit of Breath of Fire - Dragon Quarter, if that helps (but thats the only similarity). Yes that's right, in nearly every part of gameplay exploration, its strictly left-to-right action against a scrolling backdrop, with jumps and leaps across gaps or up and down the terrain.
There's more.any Sealstone can be bought and owned permanently, so you can use the ones you like a lot in later dungeons, but they can only be bought with the special crystals that you get awarded after battles, and these crystals take a LOT of skill to earn. Phew. So that will take some getting used to. And here it pretty much is. After the skill is learned, you can swap all the accessories around and learn the next lot of skills.phew. Fighting can give you more rewards than just experience points and money if you are skillful.
Sometimes a well planned set of Sealstones is the only way to beat a boss.
So let's get to the bad points. The monster can move while you do this, so just using the right attack is not enough. Due to the specific locations of certain parts, you will have a minimal number of attacks, as few as one between your whole party, that can actually target that part. When you combine all these things, (actually probability works multiplicatively) getting this item is a chore that takes so much precision that it won't double up for you leveling, since that just revolves around killing monsters as quickly as possible. So if you randomly get characters that lack low attacks, I hope you're not planning on getting any hooves in any reasonable amount of time. Lack of Strategy/Ridiculous jumps in enemy levels. Despite the fact that so much time has passed since I got this game, there are still no one star reviews that truly do justice in describing how truly awful the game is.
Next you have to break off a specific part of a monster before or when it dies. Just so there is no confusion about what complex means- maximizing your gear, attacks, and passive abilities (the dangerous ones that can carry negative consequences) and executing them with perfect timing- is not enough to win a battle by a long shot. I really didn't mind all that. Here is where the problem sets in. Only absurd amount of leveling will do the trick. In short the combat system is seriously flawed, the itemization is horrendous, and most characters are poorly thought out and are completely irrelevant to the story. This couldn't possibly be. The problem comes is that these specific items that have to be sold are a huge pain to gather.
Finally, on top of all this, even if you brake off the proper part, there is still a rather large probability the item you need won't drop. First, you have to get a specific monster to appear in battle, something that may not happen every battle. Characters. This means you have to stand at a very specific place relative of a monster and use the same attack over and over again in order to have a chance for the part to drop. The problem is you might think "No problem, I like difficult games, I'll just use strategy to overcome the difficulty." Well, here's the thing, you can't use strategy in this game. Well, not really, The thing is just most of the characters you get are random.
Even if you take your time to set up very complex combos and execute them properly you will do minimal damage. The other annoying part is that certain characters can give you very helpful items, but if you didn't get that character, I guess you're just out of luck. Wait, did I just say you only have one attack that targets a specific area. Naturally, these things are better than normal equipment.
As mentioned in other reviews the levels incredible amounts from area to area, making the game very difficult. I must have messed something up. In stores if you sell specific items, you can unlock new things you can buy. Other people may complain that it has 2D sidescroller elements or that in battle you have to run to a specific part to escape.
Building Items/Armor/Weapons/etc. While at first the sealstones make a huge difference, eventually you'll reach an area where you can't use them. I actually found it to be kind of refreshing, but there is no way anything could make up for the fact that the game absolutely lacks tactics, requires grinding that makes Everquest grinding look soft, and boils completely down to luck in certain points.
Story - not so interesting. Battle mode - Difficult and boring. Dont buy it please. ;_; It was a present for Christmas. you will regret. This not a Square-Enix game just logo. Graphic - Good for ps2. I wished have decided for another game at that time.
a ton of experience and a really cool sword were two i got), which is cool go track down character get cool stuff. The battles are a real time affair with you being able to dash (this is a slightly annoying feature in that one can sometimes get stuck on the scenery and then get whacked with that attack one really thought was going to miss) at the enemy and then hit one of the controller buttons to attack it hopefully knocking off a bit of the monster that you can then take to a shop to get special items. In this game you get regular old humans who stick around and eienjhar (ghosts of the fallen, picked by the valkyrie to participate in ragnarork or whatever battles the gods choose) which you level until a certain point and let them go back to being human. There is also a lot of stuff to find in the dungeons and a lot of items that you can "craft" that are better than the normal fare you get from the shops. Star Ocean:TTEOT did this to an extent with your choices during the course of the game determining which characters you could finish the game with. Monster bashing is great stress relief, and its fun going back to shops to see if you finally got that elusive monster bit to get that really cool armor. Just get a game walkthrough somewhere before you spend 35 some hours backing yourself into a corner like I did. Make the wrong choices and you may be at lv.60 while the rest of your party is at level 20 while that next dungeon you have to clear has level 80 monsters in it.
The only problem is (to me anyway) is that apparently even though you level these guys up, you need to keep some of them. If you let all of your eienjhar go then at certain parts of the game your out of luck until you find more of them with their only being 20 or so objects in the game apparently, this can be a bit of a problem if you don't know this. If it was explained in the game it wouldn't be that bad or if the characters weren't around afterward saying have a nice trip (leaving you to trudge for the 90th time back to town restock on revives because that darn lvl 80 monster sneezed on most of your party again, it even said excuse me).and then going back to pruning roses or whatever. After these characters become human they usually give you stuff that makes the game easier (i.e. The game itself looks great and has good detail. Along the way you manage to lose a good two or three humans out of what I thought was a permanet reserve.
I like to spend time leveling up my characters and getting their skills and such. Which brings me to my problem with this game and the Star Ocean game. I'll make this a short one since I didn't finish the game. To anyone who wants to play this game, it is fun and if you know going in that you have to have some team management you'll proably make it through the game just fine. The story was interesting enough to keep me going till I found out that this game shares the same problem with the other tri-ace game I played. m.a.c
Not fun. Since this process takes a lot of time it is useful for leveling up and gaining skills for your characters.
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