#enix

There’s a Youtuber I like named Yaz Minsky, who sadly seems to have hung up his mic and gone off to do… I don’t know, whatever Youtubers do once they leave the Youtube game. Anyway, he has a video that everyone who wants to have a public opinion about video games really should watch, which I’ll link at the end of this post, which talks about ludonarrative dissonance and Japanese RPGs, using Sega’s 16-bit masterpiece Phantasy Star IV as an example.

The teal deer here is that there has long been an opinion that games of this sort were for many years among the worst examples of this dissonance, with the gameplay and story having only a tenuous connection to each other. You roam a dungeon, you wander over the world, you fight some monsters, and then some story happens. Occasionally, a boss monster will impact the plot in some way, or be given a reason for existing by the plot, but mostly the story is just kind of a thing that happens after you’ve crossed certain thresholds.

You do, and then you watch, and the doing and the watching have nothing to do with each other.

Now, Minsky rightly calls bullshit on this entire school of thought and dismisses it as (basically) the product of guys with big opinions on video games but who largely slept through and/or failed any literature courses they might have taken, and lack the perception and (what’s worse) the curiosity to look any deeper than the surface to find any real meaning or resonance. He doesn’t say it in so many words, but I like to think it was there, unspoken, near the heart of his thesis.

At the end of his video, he invites the viewer, next time they fire up an older game, to “turn your critical brain on, read too much into it […] and really try to unpack what you’re seeing.”

Now, I have never, ever, one single time in my entire life required an invitation to overthink things. My brain is wired to do that the same way it’s wired to work my heart and lungs. But it’s comforting to think I may not be alone in my desire to overthink, to analyze, to read deep where others maybe don’t care to read at all.

So let’s do this. Let’s take some time and think “too much” about Valkyrie Profile.

* * *

Before we do all that, though, some history.

Games are products of their time, just like any art or entertainment media. The decisions that went into how they were made and why they were made that way — or at all — are informed by the circumstances around their making.

Valkyrie Profile is, as alluded to earlier, an unorthodox game. The phrase “Japanese RPG” conjures up certain ideas of how the game will progress and what will be expected of the player, the way “first-person shooter” does. But Valkyrie Profile is a Japanese RPG in roughly the same way Killer7 is a first-person shooter. It does most of the things you expect a game in that genre to do, but frequently does them in such a radically different way that it seems like it almost shouldn’t belong.

Incidentally, this is part of what I love about it. Japanese RPGs, especially in this era, had begun to get a bit stale and predictable. Having a developer willing to change up the formula wasn’t just enjoyable — it felt necessary.

tri-Ace, the developer in question, had been formed by a group of developers spun off from Wolf Team, a studio under Telenet Japan. They’d made several games up to this point, but the one which brought them lasting fame was a little Super Famicom game you may have heard of called Tales of Phantasia. That game was ultimately published by Namco, in part because Telenet Japan as a studio lacked the kind of resources and clout to get a game as ambitious as Tales of Phantasia was shaping up to be published.

But Namco had their own ideas about how that game should ultimately turn out. And since Namco had the money, Namco had the final say. And this sat poorly with three of the developers in particular: per Wikipedia, that would be programmer and current tri-Ace president Yoshiharu Gotanda, director Joe Asanuma, and game designer Masaki Norimoto. These three “aces,” as they saw themselves, were so thoroughly cheesed off by Namco’s meddling that they packed up and left Wolf Team to form their own studio.

tri-Ace was born.

Less than a year after the publication of Tales of Phantasia by Namco, tri-Ace managed to release Star Ocean for the Super Famicom in 1996.

The original version of Star Ocean never made it out of Japan, though not for lack of quality. I suspect the reason mainly has to do with the timing. In 1996, the world was firmly into the next generation of console gaming. Sony’s PlayStation and Sega’s Saturn were already out, and the Nintendo 64 was forthcoming. Nintendo in particular was keen to shift their audience’s attention to their newest console.

Things would ultimately go poorly for Nintendo in Japan. Many of their third-party developers had hightailed it for Sony’s greener pastures, or at the very least were no longer exclusively making games for Nintendo. Of course, in the U.S., we remember the N64 as coming in at a distant but respectable second place behind the PlayStation. But in Japan, it came in third, behind both the PlayStation and the Saturn.

This bitter reversal of fortunes put Nintendo in a difficult spot, and splitting their audience between the older hardware and the new would do them no favors. Nintendo seems to have considered their best move to be pushing their audience toward the newer hardware, which could compete technologically against the PlayStation and the Saturn, at all costs. Given the gap between a game’s original Japanese release and its U.S. launch in those days — often months, sometimes a year or more — role-playing games which required large amounts of work (and therefore time and budget) to translate late in the 16-bit era languished in Japan, to be ogled and drooled over by kids looking at import news in magazines… and to be left largely to the imagination, at least until the fan translation scene picked up steam toward the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium.

Star Ocean was one of those left-behind Super Famicom RPGs, along with the likes of Trials of Mana and, well, Tales of Phantasia itself.

The Western world’s introduction to tri-Ace came with their second game: Star Ocean: The Second Story, a direct sequel to their first game that nonetheless stood alone well enough. It hit the U.S. in early June of 1999, as the demand for RPGs on the PlayStation was hitting a fever pitch. It was published by Enix, who would go on to publish the lion’s share of tri-Ace’s output until they merged with Squaresoft in the early aughts to form Square-Enix.

Both of the Star Ocean games borrowed Tales of Phantasia’s broad concept of RPGs with active, non-menu-driven combat, giving the player direct control over one character and putting the others in the hands of the game’s AI, though the player could pause to issue direct commands to the other characters at need. But where Tales of Phantasia was side-scrolling in battle, the Star Ocean games gave each battle a small arena for characters to rush back and forth. It was fast, frantic, and offered a more immediate and hands-on experience than anything else on the market.

Then came Valkyrie Profile.

If I can keep on top of this project and not get distracted from it too badly, we’ll get to see all the things that set this game apart, so I’m not going to spend too many words on it right here and now. There will be plenty of time as we go.

Suffice it to say that it’s tempting to say of the game that they don’t make them like this any more. That’s not really true, though. And the reason, to paraphrase a dialogue from Ghostbusters for just a moment, is that nobody ever made them like this. The developers were either certified geniuses or authentic wackos.

Given that I plan on throwing quite a few words at this project over the next little while, you can guess which way I lean.

* * *

A few final notes about my play-through:

There are four different releases of Valkyrie Profile for a player to choose from.

The original PlayStation version comes first, naturally. When it was brought to the U.S. in 2000, some quality-of-life improvements were added. These mainly come down to being able to sort inventory items and switch freely between characters in the equipment and skill menus, rather than having to back out to the main character menu to do so. The Japanese version lacked these options, which is by no means a dealbreaker, but does make the U.S. version play a little more smoothly.

The PSP version in Japan was, as you might expect, a port of the Japanese PS1 release. As that featured none of the U.S. version’s quality-of-life improvements, the Japanese PSP version likewise lacks them. This means the U.S. PSP version also lacks them, since the developers simply took the Japanese version, applied the original English translation, and then added or re-recorded a few lines as needed for the new CGI cutscenes which were otherwise probably the most notable difference.

The image of the PSP version is also horizontally stretched, since the original was designed for the 4:3 aspect ratio which was standard for its time, and the PSP features a 16:9 display. This resulted in screen tearing, which by no means made the game unplayable, but was ultimately unpleasant wherever it popped up.

When the iOS and Android ports of the game came around in 2018, that issue was fixed. However, being currently free-to-play, the mobile ports feature the exact kinds of in-app purchases you should expect. Also, a side-scrolling platform game seems unlikely to be well-served by touchscreen inputs.

Meanwhile the 2022 version for the PlayStation 4 and 5 seems to be a port of the PSP version as well, judging by the presence of the CGI cutscenes and the graphics for the on-screen button prompts, which resemble the PSP’s buttons rather than the original PS1 controller’s. However, issues with screen tearing appear to have been fixed.

In terms of pure ease of acquisition, the mobile versions are probably the most accessible, given that almost everyone owns a cell phone these days, and it’s hard to argue with free. However, the PS4 and 5 version would probably be the easiest to play and closest to the original experience, given that it uses the same controls as the original version, on an actual controller, and without microtransactions. And the price is at least still reasonable.

Pricing for the PSP version is also pretty fair for a copy complete in box, assuming you have a working PSP. PS1 prices, however… not so much.

Nonetheless, that’s the version I’m playing, because I bought that version of the game when prices were merely unreasonable, as opposed to downright silly; because I dislike the stretched image of any of the other versions; because I’m generally allergic to microtransactions; and also because playing it via emulation makes it trivially easy to grab screenshots as I go.

Lastly, this play-through is intended to be “organic,” in the sense that I don’t intend to follow a guide.

I generally find playing according to a guide to be more tedious than fun, as I discovered when I was playing Final Fantasy VII that way, years and years ago. It eliminates the aspect of exploration and discovery that’s a large part of what makes RPGs fun, and in that instance in particular also resulted in me reaching the end catastrophically under-leveled, because I hadn’t gotten into nearly the same amount of encounters as I would have if I’d been exploring on my own, chasing my tail trying to figure out some dungeon puzzle or running into the occasional dead end or what have you.

I have made attempts at Valkyrie Profile before, and I have looked over a few guides in those efforts, so I have a little knowledge of how things are meant to work. That said, I’ll almost certainly wind up with the B ending, because you just about have to be trying to do everything wrong to get the bad “C” ending, and the best ending, “A,” is also a little unintuitive. I plan to go back through and at least get the “A” ending afterward if I can keep focused on the game long enough, but mainly I want to experience the game as naturally as possible, without laboring under a sense of what I’m “supposed” to do.

In the end, after all, it’s a game. And the point of a game is to be entertaining. If it was work, I’d be getting paid. Well, that or going on strike if I wasn’t.

So.

Next time, we’ll dig into the game proper.