Thanks to PQube for the review code
Title: Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story
System: PS4
Price: $14.99
Release Date: 10/01/2018
Story
In this management/Action RPG hybrid, you take control of a newly hired principal, raising a band of students as you deal with an increasingly tense situation after the queen passes away. Now five queendoms of Valthiria want her throne, and you must continue to improve the school while choosing which path to go down in this regional conflict!
The story, while playing things pretty safe, still offers enough of a motive for you to get to know the five royals competing for queen, and giving you some choice in the affiliations. That being said, the character dialogue for your recruits is very dull, and the same sort of day-to-day tasks that you take up on campus will drive you insane in no time; hope you enjoy returning missing wallets or being lenient to late students constantly! Outside of a few plot-related characters, almost nobody has anything worthwhile to say.
Presentation
Valthirian Arc has a very odd presentation, coming across as something that feels like it started off with a more chibified style, before worrying that the game may look a bit too silly if everything was presented that way. Thus, you have a chibi look for the main game, and more realistic looking character art and images for the cutscenes and dialogue. The menuing is fine, though it feels very mobile-friendly, with the layout feeling like it was meant for a tablet screen. Still, I was able to go through my tasks and navigate the school just fine with the analog sticks, and controlling the action stages felt very responsive and natural.
Your party looks goofy, as do their 3D models, and since none of them are particularly unique, it isn’t uncommon to end up with two or more recruits that look or sound identical, since they seem to be randomly generated from a set of voices/attributes. Speaking of voices, the audio in this game is just all over the place, with the voice acting getting on my nerves big time. Your party will have members that act under certain behaviors, (ie, a cowardly one, a more confident one, a sassy one) and their voice/gender will determine how they sound. Some of these combinations have incredibly grating voice lines and to make things even more obnoxious, they loop constantly during action stages, along with the usual grunts made when attacking. Even switching characters is enough to give you repeated lines, leading to a very irritating performance you’ll want to mute ASAP.
The music also sucks, with a lot of generic sounding tracks and a lot of the stages looking samey enough that you’ll hear the same songs over and over and over again. Then, when stuff finally picks up and you see different biomes, you also get to hear new music that sounds just as dull as the other songs in the game. Pretty much the closest to a “good song” in this game was a track that played in a cutscene, and I promptly forgot it shortly after my play session. Nothing offensive here, just very, very mundane.
Gameplay
Valthirian Arc tasks you as principal with ensuring that your students perform well, clear out missions and grow over each semester. You start off with a pretty puny building, but gradually gain more space and resources as you clear missions, raise your rank, and earn enough funds for new facilities to motivate students to work harder and thus, bring in more money. It feels a bit like a city builder/clicker game in a sense, only with a lot more interactivity, since the bulk of the missions are action stages.
These take place from an overhead view, and you send a party of four students into an area to fight enemies under three combat styles; speed focused, defensive, and offensive. You swap between these with the square button and mostly spend time hammering away at the attack button to slash at any foes in your way.
Most of these missions are very quick and take no time at all if you just focus on the main objective, but I did find some merit in going around and defeating every foe on a map, mainly for the sake of getting more gold or material, along with leveling up my students. Upon clearing a mission, time will pass and the game’s plot will progress along with the impending graduation for the semester, where you have to send a student up to graduate in exchange for a hefty bonus of funds and school experience.
It may seem very silly to train up your students only to immediately send them packing, but after picking two or three main members to keep full-time, I actually found this loop to be pretty decent, since you can have multiple parties set up at once, and there are errand missions those extra parties can be sent to, granting them EXP and just requiring that you wait a certain amount of time. If you really wanted to, you could do a real time idle for them to clear the mission, but just clearing other tasks and going to an action stage is more than enough to help progress time. Thus after the end of my first semester, I had a huge surplus of cash that quickly went into expansions and helping rank up my Students to new classes, along with unlocking more skills on their skill trees.
Still, even with the loop of going into a dungeon and progressing toward graduation being fairly decent, Valthirian Arc becomes very repetitive, and passing the quarter mark of the main story I quickly found myself tiring out after my first few school upgrades. When the action stages become button mashing tests of patience with only escort or out of sequence quests throwing up a real challenge, the game quickly felt like busy work, especially with a lot of the action stages taking place in the same few biomes.
Conclusion
Valthirian Arc is just not a fun game. The concept has some promise, but the execution is absolutely repetitive and not in an engaging way. To make things even worse, I lost my last review of this and had to play even more of this game and redo all my notes, and the game still didn’t get any better, despite making it way further into the story than I did before and finding some more fun out of the school expansion aspects.
Just a bunch of monotony with little appeal, and one that just fails to hook with the core action no matter how hard it tries. I really don’t have much else to say here, and part of me wonders if the game would have been more engaging if the city builder aspect was more polished compared to the clear focus on the dull action stages, since what I dabbled in was way more promising than the chores required to improve said school.
I give Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story a 5 out of 10.