With two weeks to go before its release, and taking advantage of the Tokyo Game Show 2022, Square Enix released this morning a demo of Valkyrie Elysium, the first installment for consoles in the Valkyrie series since Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of The Plume back in 2008, and also first not to be developed by tri-Ace.
But unlike the previous three games that were vast RPGs with meditative stories, Elysium seems to be taking a whole new direction that saw a rather lukewarm reception upon its announcement, and has fans quite divided. Having played the entire first chapter, was it worth it?
Valkyrie Elysium introduces us to a new continuity for the series, unconnected to the events of the previous installments, at least for now. Ragnarök is drawing near. Odin was wounded in battle, and decides to create a Valkyrie -who, like Lenneth in the first Valkyrie Profile, the game only calls Valkyrie- to travel the human world in order to seek and purify the souls of warriors who can add their ranks to the forces of Valhalla. At least in this first chapter the story is minimal, far from the long and exposition-filled intros that previous games have accustomed us to.
Although Square has been advertising Elysium As an action RPG, I have a hard time really calling it an RPG, at least considering what I’ve played so far, and it honestly feels more like a squareenixzed (!) version of a beat em up or character action a la Devil May Cry. The game is divided into individual linear missions that we select from the hub, and exploration is minimal, with an on-screen indicator marking the next objective at all times. The first chapter map has a few alternate paths branching off in other directions, but the vast majority just lead to a chest with some potion or orb. This first quest also had no NPCs to interact with, and side quests were unlocked by encountering spirits asking for help (*I guess* we could stretch the definition of NPC a bit to make it fit by being generous, but hey).
Elysium does a pretty decent job of introducing us to his combat in an extended tutorial before the first mission proper. We have the obligatory weak and strong attack buttons, as well as block and dodge. We start with some basic combos and an elemental magic attack assigned to R2. Of course, being Valkyrie ̶P̶r̶o̶f̶i̶l̶e̶, we are accompanied by two Einherjar, spirits of warriors fallen in combat. Unlike previous games we choose when to summon them and there is a cooldown to be able to use them again. Also, this time they not only help in combat but can be summoned at all times, and even used to solve some fairly simple environmental puzzles. Each Einherjar has a different elemental affinity, and each enemy has an elemental weakness as well that appears as an icon next to their life bar, and combat revolves around the balance between using melee or summoning the right Einherjar or the correct element magic on every moment to increase damage or paralyze our opponents. In my opinion, it might have been more interesting if the enemies didn’t openly show their weaknesses at all times and instead had to be found out by trial and error, but the change is understandable considering that it would be cumbersome during combat in time real and we need to make instant decisions. But the best tool in our repertoire is a hook that allows us to instantly close distances, and that we can use during combat to quickly move between enemies, attack opponents in the air, or extend our combo if they are too far away to reach them with an attack. normal. I haven’t been able to experiment with it enough yet, but it opens up a lot of interesting possibilities. The hook is also used outside of combat to reach certain areas of the map, but purely scripted.
It’s a shame that after letting us play with all these mechanics during the tutorial the first mission doesn’t have any Einherjar to recruit, although at least we will have a quite interesting variety of elemental magic to equip and experiment with the different affinities and weaknesses, in addition to a second melee weapon to expand our moveset a bit.
The main quest took me a little over an hour to complete, going through basically the entire map. The two secondary missions seem to have been designed by some graduate of the Escuelita Nioh of How to Sidequest, and they see us returning to a reduced/sealed section of the same map via an alternate path in search of a particular item or enemy.
Our Valkyrie has three different upgrade trees for attack, defense and life, enabling different skills such as special attacks or parries, or even improving our movement palette such as being able to perform additional dodges in quick succession, or double jump.
Things that I did not like / did not close me for now:
-The technical performance on PS5 leaves a lot to be desired, with that feeling of playing on 60-fps-that-are-never-really-60 that we had already seen in Elden Ringfor instance. Elysium It’s not a game that seems to push the technical limits of the console – in fact it seems pretty low budget overall – so hopefully it’s a lack of polish issue that they can fix for release.
-Enemy density feels low, more like what you’d expect in a soulslike with slower, heavier combat. It is normal to spend long moments without encountering enemies and even when we do, they are usually small groups of no more than three or four at a time. Only a couple of specific moments had arenas with waves of enemies and they were by far the best part of the demo.
-At least in the first level, the enemies have very low HP and almost no room to experiment with combat and elemental affinities, which was a bit weird after the tutorial put so much emphasis on this aspect.
-There are savepoints located throughout the levels that allow us to manually save and use materials to upgrade our weapons, which is not bad, but skills can be upgraded at any time from the options. Not only is this an arbitrary and inconsistent split for no apparent reason, but there’s a maximum number of orbs and materials we can carry on top of it. I spent a good part of the level without being able to pick up certain materials for exceeding the maximum, when if I had known I could have invested them at any time and continued collecting.
-Some of the skills available in our upgrade trees are things that should have been part of the base moveset and not have to be unlocked. The total lack of cancellation of movements or attacks is striking, a standard of the genre, which again would make sense in a soulslike but not in a game with action combat. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it available later to unlock as a skill, but an upgrade should feel like a new tool or expansion of our abilities, not like our character is intentionally nerfed to sell us the solution later.
-Flowers scattered throughout the map that reveal optional dialogue. They don’t seem to serve any purpose at the moment, and I already see some unbearable trophy coming that requires collecting them all.
-They wouldn’t let me shoot *UN* Nibelung Valesti, brother. All wrong.
But Valkyrie Elysium It shows a lot of potential, at least at the gameplay level, and by the end of the demo my range of possibilities in combat had already expanded quite a bit, so we can only hope that it does so even more. I don’t put a lot of chips into the story, but hey, they have time to surprise me. I don’t see him being anyone’s GOTY, sure, but he doesn’t need to be either, he just needs to live up to his name. It remains to be seen if it is.