The most important reason is the gameplay. I am a firm believer in that a game should introduce something that has never been done before. Valkyria Chronicles delivers. It laid the template that all other SRPG developers need to follow.  It took the traditional SRPG with its square and hexagonal chess-like playing board, and turned it into a completely 3-D experience! Instead of moving on a square grid you select your unit and are thrown into the 3-D watercolor world in third person, and can walk around and explore the battlefield. The system has you selecting your unit, and heading towards your destination. Dodging bullets, tank fire, and finding cover is part of the journey. But the really interesting part is that when you go to fire, the action is paused. So you can aim, and characters statistics for accuracy are taken into account. This allows for perfect head shots.

Valkyria Chronicles also eliminated the pointless grinding of one character because one of your characters is over-powered. There is no running through the game with one Terminator like unit and then replaying levels over with all your weenies to level up. Everyone is leveled outside the battlefield on the training field. Which in my opinion is a huge improvement. The last reason is the story. It’s not your typical JRPG story geared toward 16 year olds, but it’s not completely serious either. It finds a good middle ground to attract all ages of gamers. I also must add that some of the boss and tank battles are fantastic. The game was developed by Sega, and if you know Sega, you know you can probably count the number of bad developed games on one hand.

Valkyria Chronicles is just one of those titles that can pull people who never played the genre in and make them fans. I highly recommend it. This is one you need to pick up now while it can still be easily found at your local used game store, because this will easily be one of the most sought after PS3 games a few years down the road.

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