I'm getting better at not buying more games than I can consume in a year, but I still play the occasional free-to-play indie title and wind up with a number of commercial games through promotional giveaways. The result is that I rarely play any game in its year of release unless it's a part of a favorite series, and even then, depending on how busy I am, a much anticipated game might get postponed.
These are the 12 games I liked enough to finish for the first time in 2020, in the order I played them. If the game is available on multiple platforms, the one I played on is listed first. My top three picks of the year are marked with an asterisk (*).
AI: The Somnium Files (Switch, PS4, Windows) *
I didn't think I'd find one of my top 3 games right out of the gates, especially since it had a fair number of early road bumps that would have turned me off had this been any other game. Date and his AI partner Aiba make for a winning team though, and I lived for their banter. By the time I was about a third to halfway in I was seriously invested, and by the time I finished I was sad that it was over. This might be a game about solving gruesome murders, but the frequent moments of levity keeps it from getting too dark. I also like Date for being able to keep a professional face for his job while being a complete dork on the inside. It makes him highly relatable.
Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly (PS Vita, Windows) *
A mystery visual novel with romantic overtones. The mystery element is an overwhelming part of the main story, with the romance tacked on as alternate and arguably optional endings so this is probably not a first choice for romance fans, but the mystery is fantastic with two big twists which put a number of events in a different context on replay. Though the characters start out as five strangers trapped within a mysterious manor, there's so much about that statement that isn't necessarily true or doesn't properly represent their true situation.
9:05 (Web)
I played this little text adventure web game because it was in an article I read about the best video game endings and it promised that it was a short 5 minute playthrough. I think it was actually closer to 10 for me and I did not like the surprise ending. Ironically, 9:05 was created to show why it's a bad idea as a game writer to hide certain things from the player, and in that respect it works beautifully. So I agree with the author, that this is supposed to be bad!
Valkyria Chronicles (PS3, PS4, Switch, Windows)
If you ever wanted a change of pace from medieval fantasy and far future sf for your strategy RPG, Valkyria Chronicles has you covered with its WW2-inspired low fantasy gameplay. The small touches like having characters break line of sight, take cover in tall grass or behind bunkers, are details you just don't get in similar titles out of Japan. Magic is rare so most of your squad consists of regular people running around with guns, and each one of them is an individual with their own backstory. The watercolor-inspired art style still holds up twelve years later, and the overarching story does too.
The Sexy Brutale (Windows, PS4, Switch, XB1)
I'm not entirely sure what to call this. Maybe a puzzle-adventure game? The protagonist is stuck in a time loop inside a marquis's manor and is tasked with saving the guests from the mansion's murderous staff. Though the subject matter is dark, the game itself is more of a black comedy, with staff taking a certain amount of glee in their over-the-top murders (and the sheer variety of ways they can off someone). By taking advantage of the time loop, the protagonist can learn which events need to change in order to prevent a murder, and each "solved" murder gives new abilities that can be used later in the game. Took me about 9 hours to complete, which felt like just the right length for this kind of game.
Return of the Obra Dinn (Windows, PS4, Switch, XB1) *
As chief inspector of the East India company, the player is dispatched to investigate the listless Obra Dinn, which has drifted into port with damaged sails and no sign of the crew. Armed with a mysterious watch that allows the wielder to see and listen to a dead person's final moments, the inspector is tasked with documenting what happened to all the souls on board. There are no jump scares, but the atmosphere can get unnerving just because there are a lot of dead people to catalog and most of them did not go out on pleasant terms. A lot of the gameplay is unraveling the mystery, so the less you know going in, the better.
Norn9: Var Commons (PS Vita)
Otome visual novel following a group of espers on a flying ship in an alternate 1919. Unusual for having three playable protagonists, all voiced, and a total of nine fully fleshed out romance routes. One of the better otome I've played, but really faceplanted on anything that wasn't romance, resulting in unanswered questions and a half-baked frame story. Taken in pieces it's fine, but this is a case where the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Some of the parts are pretty good though!
Path of Exile (Windows, PS4, XB1)
Gritty action-RPG in the style of the Diablo series. You mass murder monsters and they drop loot. It's free to play and microtransactions are only for cosmetics or quality of life (like additional storage space beyond the generously sized stash they give you to begin with). The skill tree is pretty gnarly, but as a result it's super customizable so if you want to do something weird like a melee witch or a cold-blasting ranger you can. Path of Exile has a feature called "leagues" where every three months a new league is introduced with its own special set of mechanics to liven up the game and give something new for players to do. Leagues can be hit or miss, but the right mechanic can add enough spice to play through the game again.
Murder By Numbers (Windows, Switch)
Murder mystery game combined with solving nonograms to earn clues. Music is by the same composer as the Ace Attorney series and it really shows. Most of the tunes are really good, though they may start to grate if you're slow at solving puzzles (I had to mute a couple times because I couldn't take them anymore). The mysteries are entertaining with the usual colorful group of characters for this type of game, and considering the game takes place in Los Angeles, the cast is fairly diverse with a woman of color in the lead role. I would have to say though that I'm not good enough at nonograms to love this game though, and there was a point where I had to take a long break, not because I lost interest in the story, but because I honestly couldn't look at another nonogram, and that may impact your enjoyment of the game.
Cafe Enchante (Switch)
Romance game based around the owner of a cafe that serves a group of non-human regulars. The first half of the game is very low stakes, slice of life storytelling, which makes it a bit jarring when things go off the rails in the second half for most of the routes. Three of the five endings are on the bittersweet side, which I did not expect given the fluffy intro about life in a cafe with non-humans (with all that absolutely gorgeous food art). I enjoyed this game a lot, and I hope it gets a sequel/fandisk, but I also have a lot of bones to pick with it.
Hatoful Boyfriend (Windows, PS4, PS Vita, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS)
I technically finished this back in 2015, but only did one ending and never got to the fabled Bad Boys Love ending which turns the rest of the game on its head. Now that I have, I'd have to say that the world building is pretty good and deceptively deeper than you would expect from a game that presents itself as a high school romance with pigeons. The gameplay itself is not to my tastes though (I found several of the choices to be too arbitrary and I dislike stat building in visual novels) so I wouldn't have given it another shot if not for a walkthrough.
Capcom Beat 'Em Up Bundle (Switch, PS4, XB1, Windows)
Technically seven games in one since this is a collection of Capcom's old beat 'em up arcade brawlers, but because they're all short individually I decided to count them together. Final Fight is the most polished of the bunch and is the marquee title, but I bought it for The King of Dragons which is my childhood favorite. I also enjoyed Knights of the Round and Warriors of Fate, though I wish the latter had been accurately translated as a Romance of the Three Kingdoms game.
Showing posts with label valkyria chronicles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label valkyria chronicles. Show all posts
Monday, January 11, 2021
Monday, July 27, 2020
Racism in Valkyria Chronicles
I happened to start Valkyria Chronicles at about the same time the Black Lives Matter protests over the death of George Floyd began, which tinged my playthrough to the point that I had to break my discussion of how the game handles racism into its post.
While I enjoyed the game, this was the one aspect of worldbuilding that I had the most difficulty with. The game doesn't map the Darcsen ethnic group directly to being Jewish (in fact they're portrayed as the Europan continent's indigenous people), but the comparison is hard to avoid given that we're in a WW2-inspired setting and the Darcsen of captured territories have been funneled into concentration camps as forced labor.
However, the Darcsen aren't discriminated against for religious differences, so much as they supposedly incited a calamity in ancient history, causing many people to die, and as a result they lost their nation and have become a people without a homeland. Nobody really knows exactly what went down back then (being close to two thousand years ago), but in the present day the Darcsens are a persecuted minority in all the places they live and the legend serves as a means to justify it.
The problem is that the game is not terribly good about showing racism and characters overcoming racism aside from broad strokes. Part of this is because we play as Welkin, who is not Darcsen and he's such a nice guy that of course he sticks up for his adopted Darcsen sister Isara, and forces the rest of his squad to work with her and like it. The other part is that I don't think the writers really understood how racism works, resulting in an inconsistent application throughout the story.
We see that Largo and especially Rosie initially aren't too keen on working with a Darcsen squadmate, but Rosie's racism is a bit hit or miss. She's just short of openly hostile at the start of Chapter 3 and still pretty cranky towards Isara at the start of Chapter 8. But at the end of 8 she's oddly considerate and goes to downright pleasant (for being Rosie) during the optional beach chapter that chronologically takes place between 9 and 10. Then she goes back to being hostile in Chapter 10.
This makes it hard to buy into her change at the end of Chapter 10 when she discovers that enemy forces have herded Darcsen prisoners (including children) into a warehouse and then set fire to it. The way she reacts with anger and horror makes it seem as though she'd never seen a Darcsen child before (which I find unbelievable), and this event is the trigger to get her to be less racist as she joins in helping the laborers look for survivors.
Valkyria Chronicles goes out of its way to include racism against Darcsen. It's even present as a character trait in recruitable squad members. So having a prominent character in the squad serve as a racist mouthpiece is necessary for what the game wants to accomplish. That said, I can see why the writing would want to eventually rehabilitate Rosie so we're not left with a major character being a racist the entire game through. This probably would have been okay, except that the game isn't really good about showing racism anywhere outside of Rosie's transformation.
Largo's only skeptical about Isara for about a chapter before he treats her like anyone else. Alicia seemed to be confused at first whether Isara was Darcsen at all and didn't change her treatment of her once she knew better (or offer backhanded compliments like "You're much nicer than I expected a Darcsen would be"). And the other engineers in the R&D workshop who aren't part of the squad treat Isara as just another person.
The game only brings up Isara's race (or the race of other Darcsens) when it wants to make it a point, and then forgets when it wants to focus on something else. For instance, Darcsen characters all have black hair, and so does Welkin's superior, Captain Eleanor Varrot. From the slander "dark-hair" we can infer that only Darcsen have dark hair, so is Varrot Darcsen? It turns out she's not, because Darcsen do not have family names, but the player can only learn this by reading supplemental codexes. However, Varrot is never accidentally discriminated against or slandered in a case of mistaken ethnicity, when there is no way to visually tell her apart from a Darcsen character.
And it is easily confirmed that aside from their dark hair, it's impossible to tell a Darcsen from the rest of the Caucasian appearing population. We know this because Princess Cordelia is secretly Darcsen and no one can tell because of the headdress that hides her hair. Both the majority population and the Darcsen one possess the same range of skin tones.
Isara is also clearly allowed to wander where she wants without being worried about her personal safety and she gets to go to all the squad events. Imagine if she couldn't go to the R&R on the beach because she was Darcsen and it would "look bad" to have her on royal property. I get the game probably wouldn't want Welkin constantly sticking up for her and making a substantial portion of the speaking cast racist, but the result is that the racism really feels like it comes from one character on our side and of course the really mean people on the other.
This is likely because the game is the result of Japanese developers who live in a highly homogeneous country where racism isn't something a significant portion of the population will ever experience. And considering that, it's surprising they made the attempt to the extent that it's codified in the game mechanics where some characters literally don't work as well because they're racist against the Darcsens in their squad. It's not game breaking bad due to how character traits don't always flair up, but I still left all the racists cooling their heels back at headquarters.
Probably one of the worst things in how the game handles racism is how Isara dies. As a writer I like the complete suddenness with which it happens. This is a game set during a war with firearms, so my gut reaction to Isara getting sniped by an enemy soldier when the squad thought they were safe was great. It would be realistic for the squad to have a casualty among the main characters, and in broad strokes I don't mind that it was Isara in particular who was killed.
However, what I do mind is how they handled the impact of her death and how it serves as a vehicle for Rosie's redemption. Despite being the team's token racist, I actually like Rosie, because she's complicated and she's also an unapologetically tough woman who we don't see a lot of in JRPGs. Both she and Isara deserve better than what they got.
After Chapter 10, Rosie begins to soften a bit towards Isara, but has trouble showing it because she's stubborn and not good at apologizing. So initially she refuses Isara's gift of a good luck charm and brushes it off as something she doesn't need from a "dark-hair." Meanwhile Isara works really hard on a plan to protect the squad on their next mission so it doesn't turn into a suicide run, and succeeds. After the mission, Rosie thanks Isara and reveals that she actually kept the good luck charm.
The two agree to become friends and when Rosie asks Isara what gift she would like in return, Isara wants to hear Rosie sing. So of course that's when the bullet catches Isara. When Rosie finally does sing for her, it's at Isara's grave.
Presumably because they had a chance to reconcile that means that Rosie's racism is gone, because Rosie now has a precious Darcsen friend who died and she needs to carry on for. But that reduces Isara to being the magical minority friend who makes a white person better for dying. And the thing is Rosie should still be a bit racist. Learning to be better, sure, but if it's really ingrained she should still slip up without meaning too, and in more ways than just dropping a slur.
The fact Rosie is suddenly not racist is really hammered home when her optional chapter is unlocked and she pushes for the squad to go out and stop imperials from rounding up Darcsens for slave labor. Not only does it suddenly boil her blood, but she's very kind to the Darcsen kid she meets up later and explains that she started hating Darcsens because of an attack on her village when she was a kid during the last war, and she blamed the presence of the local Darcsens for the attack happening in the first place. This pins the source of Rosie's racism to a particular event rather than a systemic societal problem and makes it easier for her to realize she was wrong.
After this point, Rosie's racism or former racism is never brought up again. And it's not for lack of other Darcsen characters for her to interact with. Zaka's part of the squad from Chapter 11 onward, but she has no conversations between him about growing or wanting to do more, even though meeting him and his fellow prisoners in the concentration camp was the start of her awakening.
And heck, just before the penultimate battle Princess Cordelia appears publicly in front of Welkin's squad as a Darcsen for the very first time and nobody says a thing about her dark hair. I realize they have other things to worry about at the moment (like an enemy tank the size of an aircraft carrier), but the fact that the head of state is secretly part of a persecuted minority surprisingly goes unacknowledged by everyone who wasn't present at the moment she revealed it.
At points I wondered if the half-baked Darcsen racism could actually be lifted from the game entirely without hurting it (rendering its inclusion pointless), and I can think of one reason not to. According to generally accepted history, the Valkyrur came from the north and fought with the native Darcsen population. Supposedly the Valkyrur stopped the Darcsen menace and eventually disappeared, perhaps by interbreeding with the local population to such a degree that they could no longer be distinguished as a separate group.
However, over the course of the game, we learn that the Valkyrur were not actually benevolent and pretty much beat the snot out of the Darcsens to get a hold of their geographical resources. Being the winning side, they got to rewrite history and blamed all the atrocities they committed on the Darcsens.
That the legendary Valkyrur were actually a race of conquerors was a nice twist and dovetails with the fact that the first Valkyria revealed in the game is a powerful general on the other side.
While the game could have written the Valkyrur to be remembered as conquerors, I did enjoy the added complexity to the worldbuilding. I just wish that if the game writing was going to include racism that the writers had done a better job of it so it actually meant something.
While I enjoyed the game, this was the one aspect of worldbuilding that I had the most difficulty with. The game doesn't map the Darcsen ethnic group directly to being Jewish (in fact they're portrayed as the Europan continent's indigenous people), but the comparison is hard to avoid given that we're in a WW2-inspired setting and the Darcsen of captured territories have been funneled into concentration camps as forced labor.
However, the Darcsen aren't discriminated against for religious differences, so much as they supposedly incited a calamity in ancient history, causing many people to die, and as a result they lost their nation and have become a people without a homeland. Nobody really knows exactly what went down back then (being close to two thousand years ago), but in the present day the Darcsens are a persecuted minority in all the places they live and the legend serves as a means to justify it.
The problem is that the game is not terribly good about showing racism and characters overcoming racism aside from broad strokes. Part of this is because we play as Welkin, who is not Darcsen and he's such a nice guy that of course he sticks up for his adopted Darcsen sister Isara, and forces the rest of his squad to work with her and like it. The other part is that I don't think the writers really understood how racism works, resulting in an inconsistent application throughout the story.
We see that Largo and especially Rosie initially aren't too keen on working with a Darcsen squadmate, but Rosie's racism is a bit hit or miss. She's just short of openly hostile at the start of Chapter 3 and still pretty cranky towards Isara at the start of Chapter 8. But at the end of 8 she's oddly considerate and goes to downright pleasant (for being Rosie) during the optional beach chapter that chronologically takes place between 9 and 10. Then she goes back to being hostile in Chapter 10.
This makes it hard to buy into her change at the end of Chapter 10 when she discovers that enemy forces have herded Darcsen prisoners (including children) into a warehouse and then set fire to it. The way she reacts with anger and horror makes it seem as though she'd never seen a Darcsen child before (which I find unbelievable), and this event is the trigger to get her to be less racist as she joins in helping the laborers look for survivors.
Valkyria Chronicles goes out of its way to include racism against Darcsen. It's even present as a character trait in recruitable squad members. So having a prominent character in the squad serve as a racist mouthpiece is necessary for what the game wants to accomplish. That said, I can see why the writing would want to eventually rehabilitate Rosie so we're not left with a major character being a racist the entire game through. This probably would have been okay, except that the game isn't really good about showing racism anywhere outside of Rosie's transformation.
Largo's only skeptical about Isara for about a chapter before he treats her like anyone else. Alicia seemed to be confused at first whether Isara was Darcsen at all and didn't change her treatment of her once she knew better (or offer backhanded compliments like "You're much nicer than I expected a Darcsen would be"). And the other engineers in the R&D workshop who aren't part of the squad treat Isara as just another person.
The game only brings up Isara's race (or the race of other Darcsens) when it wants to make it a point, and then forgets when it wants to focus on something else. For instance, Darcsen characters all have black hair, and so does Welkin's superior, Captain Eleanor Varrot. From the slander "dark-hair" we can infer that only Darcsen have dark hair, so is Varrot Darcsen? It turns out she's not, because Darcsen do not have family names, but the player can only learn this by reading supplemental codexes. However, Varrot is never accidentally discriminated against or slandered in a case of mistaken ethnicity, when there is no way to visually tell her apart from a Darcsen character.
And it is easily confirmed that aside from their dark hair, it's impossible to tell a Darcsen from the rest of the Caucasian appearing population. We know this because Princess Cordelia is secretly Darcsen and no one can tell because of the headdress that hides her hair. Both the majority population and the Darcsen one possess the same range of skin tones.
Isara is also clearly allowed to wander where she wants without being worried about her personal safety and she gets to go to all the squad events. Imagine if she couldn't go to the R&R on the beach because she was Darcsen and it would "look bad" to have her on royal property. I get the game probably wouldn't want Welkin constantly sticking up for her and making a substantial portion of the speaking cast racist, but the result is that the racism really feels like it comes from one character on our side and of course the really mean people on the other.
This is likely because the game is the result of Japanese developers who live in a highly homogeneous country where racism isn't something a significant portion of the population will ever experience. And considering that, it's surprising they made the attempt to the extent that it's codified in the game mechanics where some characters literally don't work as well because they're racist against the Darcsens in their squad. It's not game breaking bad due to how character traits don't always flair up, but I still left all the racists cooling their heels back at headquarters.
Probably one of the worst things in how the game handles racism is how Isara dies. As a writer I like the complete suddenness with which it happens. This is a game set during a war with firearms, so my gut reaction to Isara getting sniped by an enemy soldier when the squad thought they were safe was great. It would be realistic for the squad to have a casualty among the main characters, and in broad strokes I don't mind that it was Isara in particular who was killed.
However, what I do mind is how they handled the impact of her death and how it serves as a vehicle for Rosie's redemption. Despite being the team's token racist, I actually like Rosie, because she's complicated and she's also an unapologetically tough woman who we don't see a lot of in JRPGs. Both she and Isara deserve better than what they got.
After Chapter 10, Rosie begins to soften a bit towards Isara, but has trouble showing it because she's stubborn and not good at apologizing. So initially she refuses Isara's gift of a good luck charm and brushes it off as something she doesn't need from a "dark-hair." Meanwhile Isara works really hard on a plan to protect the squad on their next mission so it doesn't turn into a suicide run, and succeeds. After the mission, Rosie thanks Isara and reveals that she actually kept the good luck charm.
The two agree to become friends and when Rosie asks Isara what gift she would like in return, Isara wants to hear Rosie sing. So of course that's when the bullet catches Isara. When Rosie finally does sing for her, it's at Isara's grave.
Presumably because they had a chance to reconcile that means that Rosie's racism is gone, because Rosie now has a precious Darcsen friend who died and she needs to carry on for. But that reduces Isara to being the magical minority friend who makes a white person better for dying. And the thing is Rosie should still be a bit racist. Learning to be better, sure, but if it's really ingrained she should still slip up without meaning too, and in more ways than just dropping a slur.
The fact Rosie is suddenly not racist is really hammered home when her optional chapter is unlocked and she pushes for the squad to go out and stop imperials from rounding up Darcsens for slave labor. Not only does it suddenly boil her blood, but she's very kind to the Darcsen kid she meets up later and explains that she started hating Darcsens because of an attack on her village when she was a kid during the last war, and she blamed the presence of the local Darcsens for the attack happening in the first place. This pins the source of Rosie's racism to a particular event rather than a systemic societal problem and makes it easier for her to realize she was wrong.
After this point, Rosie's racism or former racism is never brought up again. And it's not for lack of other Darcsen characters for her to interact with. Zaka's part of the squad from Chapter 11 onward, but she has no conversations between him about growing or wanting to do more, even though meeting him and his fellow prisoners in the concentration camp was the start of her awakening.
And heck, just before the penultimate battle Princess Cordelia appears publicly in front of Welkin's squad as a Darcsen for the very first time and nobody says a thing about her dark hair. I realize they have other things to worry about at the moment (like an enemy tank the size of an aircraft carrier), but the fact that the head of state is secretly part of a persecuted minority surprisingly goes unacknowledged by everyone who wasn't present at the moment she revealed it.
At points I wondered if the half-baked Darcsen racism could actually be lifted from the game entirely without hurting it (rendering its inclusion pointless), and I can think of one reason not to. According to generally accepted history, the Valkyrur came from the north and fought with the native Darcsen population. Supposedly the Valkyrur stopped the Darcsen menace and eventually disappeared, perhaps by interbreeding with the local population to such a degree that they could no longer be distinguished as a separate group.
However, over the course of the game, we learn that the Valkyrur were not actually benevolent and pretty much beat the snot out of the Darcsens to get a hold of their geographical resources. Being the winning side, they got to rewrite history and blamed all the atrocities they committed on the Darcsens.
That the legendary Valkyrur were actually a race of conquerors was a nice twist and dovetails with the fact that the first Valkyria revealed in the game is a powerful general on the other side.
While the game could have written the Valkyrur to be remembered as conquerors, I did enjoy the added complexity to the worldbuilding. I just wish that if the game writing was going to include racism that the writers had done a better job of it so it actually meant something.
Monday, July 20, 2020
RPG Talk: Valkyria Chronicles
In which I talk (write) about RPGs from a storytelling perspective...
Platform: PS3 (also on PS4, Switch, and Windows)
Release: 2008
Valkyria Chronicles won my second Reader's Pick poll for my Ko-Fi supporters, and it's a game I've been meaning to play for years.
Taking place in a pseudo-WWII setting, Valkyria Chronicles follows the story of Lieutenant Welkin Gunther and his squad's exploits during the Second Europan War as they defend their small nation of Gallia against the invading East Europan Imperial Alliance (hereafter called the Empire).
Though the bulk of the war is actually between the Empire and the Federation, the two superpowers on the Europan continent, Gallia is closer to being Switzerland, being politically neutral and opposed to forming alliances with other countries. Similar to Switzerland, Gallia also requires all citizens to receive military training as part of their education, so when Welkin is conscripted, it's not surprising that he's quickly given a command (being university educated) and thrown on the battlefield. He probably needed a refresher, but not the full boot camp.
Unsurprisingly, the Second Europan War is over resources, specifically the MacGuffin known as ragnite. It fuels everything from tanks to medicine. The Empire wants more and invaded the Federation; and later, to get at even more ragnite, it invaded Gallia. This means that Valkyria Chronicles is centered around just one smaller front in a larger war. In fact, the game itself is presented as a book by the narrator Irene Koller called On the Gallian Front. We really don't know much about what's happening in the larger war, whether things are going well or poorly for either side. But we know how Gallia is faring, and for our characters, who are the ones with boots on the ground, that's all they care about.
Welkin is perhaps an unusual protagonist for a war story. He's introduced as an easy going nature lover and a bit of a doodler. Though he's the son of an important general from the First Europan War, he's not interested in following in his father's footsteps. As a recent university graduate, he wants to become a teacher. The only reason he ends up in armed conflict, even after the Empire drives out the people of his hometown, is because he's conscripted.
It takes a lot for Welkin to get upset. In fact, the only scene in the game where he really gets angry is when he confronts Faldio, his best friend and fellow officer, over whether Faldio intentionally shot Alicia, Welkin's sergeant. Even the death of his sister, Isara, doesn't get as much of a reaction out of him (though narratively I think that's because Isara's death was to focus on Rosie's transformation, which I'll get to in a separate post because addressing the game's handling of the Darcsen is going to take up too much space here).
By making someone like Welkin the protagonist, Valkyria Chronicles is able to insert more humanity into a game about modern warfare. Even though yes, our hero and his squad are killing a lot of people as part of their operations, Welkin never loses sight of what needs to come after; the peace and the rebuilding. He's not out to get anybody.
One of the best scenes that captures a glimpse of humanity in the middle of a warzone is when Welkin and Alicia are separated from their squad and take shelter in an abandoned cabin while evading enemies. A mortally wounded imperial soldier stumbles into their cabin, and instead of finishing him off, they choose to comfort the dying man. When he passes away, they bury him.
That's when they're found by General Gregor and his men, who are looking for their missing soldier. On seeing Welkin and Alicia's treatment of their fallen comrade, Gregor is appreciative of the kindness they gave him and leaves them be rather than taking them prisoner.
And the thing is, prior to this Gregor is presented as the most severe personality out of the three enemy generals. After this, the next time we see him, he's presiding over a concentration camp that is close to working the enslaved Darcsen laborers to death. He dies when we free that camp, but the fact he acknowledged a human kindness with a mercy of his own made him a more complex character that he otherwise looks and I was actually disappointed when he died. His capacity for both empathy and racism made him a surprisingly realistic character and I would have liked the game to run with him longer.
In general though, the imperial generals are fairly interesting characters. I wish I could say the same for Maximilian though. He's one of the princes of the empire, but because his mother is of lower birth he's not the heir, which probably explains why he's off invading a small country like Gallia instead of hitting the Federation.
I wanted to like Maximilian, because the guy wants better than he got (due to his low birth), and he's not afraid of doing his own dirty work. Welkin first faces him just before the halfway point in the game and Maximilian is on the front lines in his own tank. (Granted, it's a super tank, but he's definitely not a pampered snot afraid to risk his own neck.)
But the game squashed my only other reason for liking him, and that has to do with Selvaria. Selvaria is the first powered-up Valkyria to appear in the game. She has the power to wipe out multiple enemy squads single-handedly and not even artillery shells can harm her. Her story is unfortunately common for villainous powered women, in which they use all their power to help a man who rescued them and showed them their worth earlier in their lives. But I thought I could tolerate it because Maximilian genuinely seemed to trust her.
Then, after Alicia awakens as a Valkyria and Selvaria loses, Maximilian suddenly decides he no longer has a use for her and has Selvaria sacrifice herself in a rear guard action. Granted, it was a really effective sacrifice, taking out almost the entire Gallian army, but why he would throw away any further use he could get out of her, especially once his enemies have a Valkyria of their own, doesn't make any strategic sense. While he neutered the Gallian military, in exchange, if things went wrong (and of course they did), he would no longer have Selvaria for backup.
Because Valkyria Chronicles follows Welkin throughout the war, it's perhaps not surprising that the story is less about him than the portion of his life he spends in it. The ending isn't Welkin freeing his hometown (that actually happens just after the halfway point). It's Welkin defeating Maximilian, who he does not have any personal grievance against aside from the fact he's the enemy commander.
The heart, the emotional highs in the build-up to the finale, are the principles on which Welkin decides they will win this war.
He first meets Alicia during a visit to his hometown, just before the invasion, and while they start off on the wrong foot, they quickly come together as a team, which is fortunate because when they're conscripted they're placed in the same squad. Though Alicia is not Welkin's only NCO, she's clearly the one he has the most affinity for.
Considering that she's his direct report, Welkin is generally pretty good about keeping any attraction buttoned down. While it's clear that they become close, given the number of scenes they have featuring just the two of them, none of their early to mid-game scenes are overly romantic, and it's possible to read Welkin as being simply too thick to realize that Alicia might actually like him. (This is a guy who compliments his sergeant's uniform because it reminds him of a rhinoceros beetle.) Neither of them flirt. They mostly just talk.
Though Faldio certainly seems to think Welkin loves Alicia, because he wrote as much in his notes, there's nothing to suggest more than a possible crush for most of the game, which I liked given that they're in the same unit and she's his direct report. It wasn't hard to see the potential, but they kept things professional.
Until they don't, but to be fair, it was a good moment, and if you're going to break decorum that was the time to do it, and this is where the emotional climax comes in.
Alicia, having awakened as a Valkyria, sees that the last ditch attempt to stop the land dreadnought from reaching the capital of Gallia has failed and realizes that there's still one thing left she can do. Like Selvaria did, she could sacrifice her life and essentially nuke the enemy into oblivion.
Alicia didn't appreciate the change in her life or the pressure of having become a Valkyria since it set her apart from the rest of the army and she realized other soldiers had begun worshiping her as their salvation. Blowing herself up would save the day and she wouldn't have to deal with the pain anymore.
Welkin is the one who talks her down and makes her realize that there are still people who look at her as one of their own, and he talks about after the war and wanting to spend the rest of his life with her. He gives her a future to look forward to and assures her that winning the war by using her power isn't the right thing to do. (And it doesn't hurt that he makes a temporary engagement ring for her using the flower she put in his uniform the other day.)
So when he and his squad face Maximilian they do so without Alicia turning into a Valkyria (thus preserving game mechanics) and without escalating things to the point that other powers in the war might consider finding Valkyrur of their own. Shortly thereafter, a ceasefire is called and the war ends between Gallia and the Empire.
Perhaps because the characters are a little older, I also appreciated the epilogue which runs over the fates of all the major characters after the war. Welkin and Alicia do return to their hometown where Welkin becomes a teacher like he wanted and Alicia now owns a bakery. Unusually, the epilogue is also far enough forward that the two of them now have a daughter who's old enough to "help" with the baking herself.
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