Dark Rose Valkyrie

After playing this for about 12 hours I can honestly say this game is not all that great of a jrpg. I have enjoyed its battle system but its story is too cliche and the missions are really repetitive. This game feels like a copy and pasted version of a past game, Omega Quintet. It even has the same mechanic that if the female characters take too much damage they lose their clothes so now you can look at a girl in her underwear. Now I don't care how a game looks graphically, this is just to inform you, but the levels do look like something that should be in a late PS2 game or early PS3 game. Many scenes are done in the form of cardboard cut outs with moving mouths and blinking eyes which never really convey what is happening in the scene and most of them honestly have nothing to really add to the story like moments where you can chat up the valkyries. The characters are weak and some of the voice acting is cringey at times. If you are a fan of jrpg's then buy at your own risk but I would advise you at least wait til it goes on sale

Smoke and mirrors. What seems like complex combat systems can actually be run on autopilot with no strategy to be had. The story is bland. There's some unfortunate humor targeted at the women characters. It gets old after an hour or two.

I want to like this game, I really do. I think it’s a bare bones precursor to amazing rpgs like those in the Trails series, or Persona franchise. But it’s so, so flawed. The slow pace of battles, even with fast forward on, made traveling the map seem like sailing across the globe on a rowboat. I found myself stuck in chapter 2, trying to complete missions and even taking out enemies that matched the requirements, and yet the missions would not say the requirements were met. I looked up a walkthrough and it appears I have to search the area for the “right version” of the enemy whenever it decides to appear. And finding out where to go on the map is surprisingly difficult, even with the legend. Since I’m not in the mood to waste hours on finding an enemy that may or may not appear , it appears I won’t even get to the “investigative” portion of the game. Honestly, pass on this game, unless you just want mindless battles and to waste some time.

The setup (fighting infected + a visual novel / dating sim) could be fun, but the execution seems very flawed. The UI is complex and the effect of leveling up certain attributes is not explained. I gave up when I had to level up all team members without the game giving any idea what the team member's strengths and weaknesses are. The chacters are mostly stereotypes: the shy clumsy guy, the flirtatious girl, the tomboy or whatever. Go get another JRPG. This is not a hidden gem or anything. also, the presentation is lacking (the typical low res texture + lack of anisotropic filteting so it's a big blur).

This game is primarily for save scummers who can handle a generic harem story and combat that's worse than the typical Idea Factory (IF) game. Save scumming or following a guide is required to get a desirable ending in the game. I don't like these types of games, which is one reason for my low rating. In this game, you're a male military captain, leading a group of mostly girls (because harem), into combat against monsters who are attacking your supposedly functional, but apparently empty, city. The world building is almost nonexistent. You interact with your team and about 5 other people throughout the entire game. There's supposedly citizens who you're protecting, but I saw no evidence of them existing. The story consists of going to places and killing monsters (and people-turned-monsters) using your super-powered soldiers with transforming weapons (that aren't explained) to protect your city. The plot doesn't move past this until near the end of the game when you find out who the villain is and his motivation. To avoid spoilers, I'll just say that the main plot is based on harem logic. The writing is acceptable, but is not well done or interesting. During the story, you'll spend time talking to the girls in your team (harem). And this is where save scumming is necessary. Despite the conversations ending in the same way every time, if you pick the wrong dialogue option, the girls affection for you will not increase, which limits your ending options. This wouldn't be bad, except that there's no indication of when you choose a bad option. The character writing is not impressive. The girls are mostly generic and uninteresting. At some point, they'll get split personalities, but those are more silly/comical than they are good or interesting. Besides talking to girls, there's several set investigations where you get statements from the girls and try to figure out who's lying. This is great, but has two major flaws. First, there's no set topic. You're just asking girls what they think of other girls and they'll talk about seemingly random things. So you have no idea what topic you're trying to find lies about. Second, there's a limit on how many statements you can get. In one session, it's not possible to get everyone's statements about everyone else. So more save scumming is required. So as someone who didn't do any save scumming or reading a guide, the investigations were almost entirely worthless. I lucked out only once and happened to get two statements that contradicted each other and was able to determine who the liar was. The combat is bad. It's a big step down from the standard IF game. You have the same sort of attacks as in other IF games, but you can now choose only a single target. There simply aren't attacks that can hit a wide area or all enemies. Strategy is almost nonexistent. You simply hit a monster until you find what weapon or element it's weak to and use that from then on. Most monsters have different sections you can choose from, with each section having different weak points, so you'll need to match your attack with the right section. More than anything, it's annoying, since having to look up the weak points for each monster in every fight greatly increases combat time. This is somewhat solved by Easy mode, where I was able to auto-attack through every normal monster battle and only needed to worry about weak points for boss fights. Skills are a mess. Each character basically gets the same set of 50+ skills, so when you want to use one, you'll be digging through menus to find the few that are useful. But skills are expensive and overpowered, so I ended up saving them for boss fights. Customization is overly complex is more tedious than fun. Here's the things you can equip that affect your stats: visible armor, non-visible armor, accessory, shotgun, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, shield, main weapon level, main-weapon add-ons, character traits. Most of that gets unequipped whenever someone leaves your party, which adds to the annoyance. And most of these require the grinding of monster drops to upgrade. Thankfully, switching to Easy mode and equipping whatever you find is enough to get through the game without extra grinding. After 47 hours (most of which was fighting monsters), I completed the game. Based on PS4 trophies, only 6% of people who started the game completed it, which didn't surprise me. This game is for the hard-core save scummer only. Everyone else, beware: there's not much good here.