Valkyrie Elysium Makes Me Want More B-Tier JRPGs

thegamer.com:

I cannot overstate how much pointless garbage I played as a teenager. I was a JRPG diehard, happy to scoop up anything in the genre regardless of quality. In the PS3 era this often meant titles like Hyperdimension Neptunia, Trinity Universe, Enchanted Arms, Eternal Sonata, Resonance of Fate, and countless others were regular members of my console library. If it was a role-playing game, chances are I had found some way to try it.

But I was also a normal gamer, playing Modern Warfare 2 with my friends and dabbling in big exclusives of the time such as Uncharted 2, Halo 3, Infamous, and Viva Pinata. Even thinking back at how much time has passed since some of these games came out makes me feel ancient, but before I crumble to dust I want to remember a forgotten age of JRPGs, one where budget titles and strange experiments were far more commonplace.

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This week saw Square Enix announce the release date for Valkyrie Elysium alongside a gameplay trailer that is a huge improvement over the initial reveal. When it was first shown earlier this year the game looked terrible, with grey environments, dull characters, and a combat system that seemed to abandon everything that made the series so special in the first place. I’d never call Valkyrie mainstream, but it maintains a cult audience of players who adore its attitude towards battles and storytelling, none of which are present here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXG0xBnY_zo

So who is this game even for, and have fans already written it off as a needless expansion of a property that was best left alone if all Square Enix had planned was to bastardise it? I’ll be real with you, it still doesn’t look great, but