Valkyrie Elysium And Similar JRPG Revivals Deserve Way More Respect
What is it with smaller JRPG names being dragged through the dirt recently? Star Ocean hasn’t had a good game in years, and the reveal trailer for The Divine Force looked awful. Its characters were uninspired, its performance dire, and the overall vibe exuding a level of carelessness I wish the genre wasn’t so accustomed to.
Unless you’re Final Fantasy, Persona, Tales, or one of a select few niche properties, you’re often left to fade into obscurity. That’s understandable, it’s a saturated genre filled with all manner of melodramatic anime nonsense that only a few legends ever shine through. Valkyrie Profile has always occupied a middle ground, failing to ever penetrate the mainstream but maintaining a cult classic status thanks to its brilliant characters and original combat system.
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It inspired plentiful indie games and even a handful of triple-A titles, quietly influencing the wider genre while never receiving the attention it deserved. You can even consider it on a similar level to Nier, except Valkyrie is yet to receive its unexpected million-seller sequel that hurls it into the stratosphere. Following the reveal of Valkyrie Elysium at this week’s State of Play, I’m not sure if we’ll be seeing that game emerge anytime soon.
Elysium finds itself in a similar position to Exoprimal. It's the return of a fan favourite IP (if we take Exoprimal as a stand-in for Dino Crisis) but not in the way any of us either imagined nor wanted. The gorgeously detailed environments of past games have been swapped out for an aesthetic that washes out all semblance of colour, leaving characters and locales to feel bland and lifeless in a way I’m not sure was intended. The Profile
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