Part 1: "I'm coming for you Leon!"

Update 1: "I'm coming for you, Leon!"

A short note: All original text from the game is in print and any comments I have to make will be in italics unless we’re out of a cutscene, marked by a line of dashes: --

--

The game has an animated opening video, but it spoils a lot of plot points like VC1 did. You can watch it if you want, but I’d suggest you don’t. It’s not bad, it’s just filled with spoilers. I’ll likely show it at the very end though.

Music: Valkyria Chronicles 2 Main Theme

The composer is also the same person who did Final Fantasy Tactics apparently. The music in this series tends to be pretty good, so I’d recommend a listen if you get the time. VC2’s music isn’t as great as some of VC1’s, but I think it matches the theme overall pretty well. I'll make all of these links to the soundtrack.


I just have to note that selecting options on the main screen actually makes a gunshot noise. I guess it goes with the military theme, but I always thought it a bit odd. I’m used to it by now, just like a great many things in this game.

We’ll be starting a new game, of course.


Easy mode just makes your units take less damage. I’m picking Normal just because I’m used to it. Bullets don’t usually do as much damage as you’d think they would for quite a long time.


After I choose a save slot, the game goes to loading. It’s a nice little animation of each bit on the page fading in as if it was being written. We’ll see it a decent bit, but not nearly as often as we would if I was playing this on the console itself and not the emulator.

--

Music: Valkyria Chronicles Series Main Theme
This is all narrated by a character we’ll meet soon enough. I’ll point it out when we get there.



Welcome to Pseudo-Europe, basically.



The two big names on the continent of Europa. We’re not part of either of these, though.


Narrator: As they vied for control of the continent,


Some footage of the Imperial Army charging in. This is brought over from VC 1.





If you look above the flag, you’ll see a faded blue splotch. That’s Gallia. That’s us.


Here’s a closer look. Randgriz is Gallia’s capital. Don’t ask me why the other capitals are in lowercase though.


Narrator: -a valuable energy source.

Ragnite is basically a miracle material and is probably magic or something. We use it for both medical kits and grenades. The empire attacked us because of this stuff.




A bomb drops for a massive explosion while these two civilians flee.


Pictured: Ridiculously huge Empire landship slamming through the main walls of Randgriz.


A tower familiar to those who’ve played VC1 starts falling down…



The filter clears as we begin covering the modern day: EC 1937.



The pieces meet up, signaling military encounters.






Music: Unknown Remixed Theme from VC1
It’s a calm piano, similar to VC1's "Quiet Chat". It only lasts about 5 seconds though.



The speaker here is the same as the narrator from before…


Pictured: Avan Hardins, our protagonist, speaking this line..

Avan here is apparently one of the most hated parts of this game, which is bad because he’s the guy you’re stuck with 24/7 in this game. I can say I partially get this; he’s definitely got some annoying aspects we’ll see as time goes on, but I think they do work towards trying to give him some likable bits too in the process.


I won’t lie, this screenshot looks kinda off, but it’s not my fault. That’s just how he looks in this animated bit- he looks better nearly everywhere else though. This one’s just particularly off.


Music: Royal Military Academy
*All dialogue is voiced for the following scene.


Here is the narrator, Brixham. This is the in-game art that we’ll be seeing often in comparison to that four second long cutscene from a second ago. In fact, most art is better than that last cutscene. That was probably done as a last second rush or something, judging by the fact it could've easily be done with this art.


The art style for this game is a bit different than what you'd typically see, but you get used to it quickly.
Meanwhile, we learn that Avan’s brother is in a military school.


Uh oh. This doesn’t seem good.


: I realize this is sudden, and it pains me to be the bearer of sad tidings…



Music: None


: I offer you my sincerest condolences.

Music: Conflict


: All that goes on at the academy is classified for national security.
: I am afraid I cannot tell you any of the details surrounding his death.


I’d be angry too, honestly. I’d imagine most people would be ticked off to hear this.


Avan then immediately goes into denial.




*A loud explosion can be heard.*

Music: Unknown Track (Substitute: Return Battle)

: That was close.
Gunshots start ringing out in the distance. They keep coming after every bit of dialogue as well.




One of Avan’s better character traits is his tendency for heroism. He’s also a bit reckless, though, and hardly ever stops to think. A pretty typical combination, really.

O-okay!

: Just remember what we learned in training, and we’ll be fine!
: Now let’s go!

--

Music: Briefing

Now we’re met with our first mission of the game. You can’t back out of this because, well, rebels are attacking.
This is a minimum grade mission and at a difficulty of LV 1. It really doesn’t mean anything right now, so feel free to ignore it.


Going to the next screen takes us to unit deployment. This is all still tutorials-ville stuff so I’m not really able to change anything meaningful here.




Music: Exciting Battle
I think it’s perhaps a bit too upbeat for this moment, but then again, a lot of the early tracks will be.


Every map opens with a voiced exclamation from Avan. In a few special cases, someone else will do these, but we won’t see that for a long while either.


So here’s the map view-


Soundbite: "Listen up, now."

-Well, how about I just summarize what the game gives me.

Tutorial- Unit Actions:
When we begin a mission, we get a map view of all the units.
Here we look at what we have to deal with, and select a unit to move forward with.


All those binoculars icons you see are Scout class units. They move fast, have decent accuracy, and have average firepower. The blue ones are mine, and the red are the enemies. The yellow lines indicates which enemies I can presently see.
The other two units on my side are identical:


You’ll note that Avan has nearly double their HP value. This is because he’s the main character, naturally.


Here’s Avan’s stats. HP is exactly what you think it is, AP is basically stamina for moving, Shoot determines accuracy and damage, and Evade is our percentage chance to completely dodge an enemy attack.

Those three items off to his side are his equipment. Gallian-1 is a 5 shot rifle (all guns have unlimited ammo), the grenade is a grenade, and the Field Suit is just body armor.

Those stats will make more of a difference when I get more units, so I’ll just go ahead and select Avan and move forward.

: “Okay, let’s go!”

Every character also has specific lines for selecting them, attacking with them, rescuing, etc. I’ll list’em as they come. Later on, there's also some neat radio chatter which I'll list out, but that won't be for a while.


Tutorial- Moving
It costs AP to move. When it runs out, you’re left standing in place.

This is what the game looks like in action mode. We now get to run around freely with Avan just like it’s an over the shoulder shooter, provided we still have AP left over. Nobody else actively moves, but enemies will still shoot at us from where they’re standing, provided they can see us.


Tutorial- Targeting:
Enemies won’t make suppressive fire while in this mode. Line up your target with the aiming crosshairs.
Once you fire at an enemy, if they’re still alive, they’ll counterattack.

I move up to the sandbags and tell Avan to crouch. Crouching reduces the damage we take and makes us harder to hit, but can only be done at sandbags. It also nullifies headshot damage.

At any point we can enter targeting mode by using the square button. I’ve already done this, so Avan here shoulders his gun and now we get an aiming reticule. There’s a crosshairs in there somewhere, but JPG compression isn’t nice to it. Those orange dots in a circle represent our accuracy deviation, and it’s pretty bad early on.

While we’re aiming, enemies won’t make suppression fire but we can’t move from our place either. We’re given all the time in the world to precisely line up our shot, usually to go for headshots.


The game is helpful enough to give you an estimate of how many shots need to land to kill at your current damage output. Because this fool here has his back turned away, it gives us bonus damage and counts as a surprise shot (he won’t counterattack).


I adjust my aim towards his head, and the shots needed to down him go to 2. At this poor of accuracy, it’s more likely I’ll take him out this way.
Now let’s shoot this man because he shot at our mans.

: “Comin’ at ya!”


: “Enemy down!”

Every headshot makes a louder ringing noise, just to let you know that you hit them. It’s actually kind of rewarding to hear it when you pull off a long-range shot.

Tutorial- Ending Actions:
A unit can only attack/use equipment once per action.
After acting, you can still move if you have AP left.


Avan’s still got plenty of AP left, so I run him up to this next line of sandbags. I eat a few bullets on the way there, but they do hilariously low damage at this point in the game. A good thing to also note is that suppression fire does use rounds out of an enemy’s clip, so when they use every shot in their gun, they’ve got to stop for a moment to reload.

Also, Avan only takes 3 damage from these rebels' bullets.


Your units visually reload when you end their action. Units without guns have a different little animation.


Tutorial- Command Points:
Making an action with a character costs one Command Point (CP), represented by the medals at the top of the screen.
When you run out, there’s not much else to do from end your turn.

You’ll now note that Avan’s AP bar has restored, but not fully. Every consecutive action with a unit has them starting with less AP than before, up to the point of nearly nothing. All AP is fully restored when you end your turn, so this is mostly to keep you from blazing across the map with only a few units (which we’ll get away with later, anyways).


Let’s give one of these town guards a chance.
“Y-yes, sir!”

Tutorial- Sandbags
I already covered this, so I’ll note that grenades knock enemies from cover.



Watchman B here goes for the head. It’s worth noting that since this guard is looking at us, we won’t get bonus damage on our shots. Doesn’t really matter, since these guys are complete pushovers anyhow.


This screenshot makes the game look more gruesome than it is.


I’ll move him over a bit and end this guy’s action. Not much else we can do right now.


I use my last CP on Avan. Watchman A down there is too far to get a comfortable shot on this last guy, and we only get one turn for an A rank on this mission. With three enemies to kill, you cannot afford to spend more than one turn fighting any of these guys.

Yet, the stakes are pretty low on this mission. It rewards nearly nothing anyways.


Oh, and you can also vault over sandbags. This doesn’t use any AP, so it marginally increases the range you can move provided you don’t waste that saved AP shuffling back and forth behind the bags.


I get Avan to move over to the sandbags farthest ahead so he can take a shot at this last guy. Using the sandbags so much on this map is uneccessary because these rebels do so little damage. The quick strat for this map is to just march Avan right up to all 3 of their faces and headshot them point blank. A strategy which we will use quite commonly later on.


I line up the shot…
At this range and accuracy, I’d actually be questioning this decision a lot in the late game if I wanted to make this shot. Doesn’t matter here as much though.


And he’s down as the first two shots hit true. Avan fires his last three bullets in the same direction, likely taking out the window on that house for no reason.
(All units will fire every bullet from their clip before stopping, as to provide a way to take out more than one enemy in the same action.)


Yep, that was all!


I can’t remember if he says either of these intro/outro lines later, but they’re all similar to this.

Music: Reward


Bam, A rank. I’ll go ahead and explains some stuff about this screen.

Dct is money, Exp is exactly what you think it is. The first row is our base value for the mission, the amount we’d get for a minimum rank. As you can see, A rank tends to give you double, which is really handy as the battles go on in this game.

The “Defeated” table lists out how many enemies of a specific type we took out. Generic mooks like the guys we just took down reward nothing. Leaders are special units that add bonus CP on the enemy’s turn, provided they’re still alive. Aces are just particularly powerful units. Tanks are literal tanks. Key targets are any unit specified by the map as needing to be taken out, which is sometimes all of them. We get bonus exp and money for each one we take out.

Lastly is “Allies Defeated”. Having nobody go down on your side is nice but remains an incredibly pitiful reward throughout the game. You get nothing if one person goes down, and it turns into a penalty if more than one goes down. The penalty only gets bad when maybe six or so units go down, but we likely won’t see it ever go that far down (until late game).

--

Music: Days With Classmates
*All dialogue is voiced in the following scene.*


: (A fine bit of leadership, gathering those men in the face of surprise attack.)
: (Apparently it’s a family trait.)


: You really won’t tell me how my brother died?
: That is correct. It’s classified information, I’m afraid.


Yep, that’s it. You know how I kept referring to a late game and how I got most of the way through this? I was bluffing. This game was a tech demo-


-Yeah, this is what we’re going with instead. Avan is going to enroll at a military school so he can try and get information out of the government. It’s not a bad start to a plot, but… well, this doesn't seem like a smart way to get answers.
He’s actually incredibly calm when he says this, which makes me think this portrait was used by accident.

: What? You want to enroll?

Yep.

: Leon can’t be dead. My brother wouldn’t go down that easy. Period.

That's, uh, some kind of logic.
Also, this portrait reminds me of a piranha, but I don’t know why.


: Spare me the paperwork!
*Ripping noises*

Dude, I don’t think you can just tear up government documents like that.

: I’m telling you, I don’t buy it. Not until I see the proof with my own eyes!

To be fair, I’d be denying it too. I wouldn’t be running off to join a military academy and ripping documents up in front of officials, but still.

: Hm.
: Then I suppose you’ll be needing this.


: An application for new enrollment at Lanseal.

I’d question why he’s just carrying this around, but then again it’s a private school and he’s a teacher so I suppose it makes sense.



Uh…It is a private school, man. So private in fact they’ve already established that the stuff they do is classified by the government, remember that part?



*Insert witty comment about this whole thing seeming like it was probably scouted out in the first place.*

: If you still wish to apply, I won’t stop you. All are at liberty to try.
: But if you think just anyone can get in, well… You’ll learn soon enough.

Shouldn’t you be encouraging this kid? I mean, you said to yourself that he’s a born leader, and you just saw him take out 3 rebels without breaking a sweat.

…Perhaps he’s already realized what a mess this is going to be.

: Now, if you’ll excuse me. Perhaps we’ll meet again. Good day.
*He walks off*

Music: Valkyria Chronicles Series Theme

: If Gallia's ever gonna be at peace again, guys like us have to fight for it.
: Application for student enrollment? Fine, I'll pass your stupid test.




--

Next Update: Entrance exams!
(…and I make more fun of the game than I did this update, because a death in the family really ain’t funny.)