#tri-ace

The original Valkyrie Profile was developed by Tri-Ace and published for the original PlayStation by Enix in the U.S. in 2000 (late 1999 in Japan), just a couple of months before I shipped out for basic training in the Army. It was ported to the PlayStation Portable in 2006 with a few minor changes. It was later ported to iOS and Android in 2018, and later still to the PlayStation 4 and 5 in 2022.

Back in 2000, I passed on it because I didn’t have much time left for the games I already owned, and in the case of this one, I thought I’d hate it.

My understanding of the game at the time, based on reviews I’d read, was that you played a Valkyrie who recruited party members from among the recent heroically dead, trained them up, and then sent them on to Valhalla to prepare for Ragnarok. Then you recruited more characters and did it all over again. Lather, rinse, and repeat for forty-plus hours.

This sounded like the unholiest grindfest ever conceived and devised for a role-playing game, and I wanted no part of it. I loved and continue to love RPGs of all types, but one thing I dislike in all of them is a need to grind battles over and over, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, to get characters to where they need to be. But a grind was absolutely what Valkyrie Profile seemed to promise, and reviews of the time were mixed, if I recall right.

So file this one alongside Metroid and Metal Gear as games I disliked at first because I didn’t understand what they were asking of me as a player, and came to absolutely love once I finally did understand. But at least in the case of the other games, I’d played them first.

I’m still not sure where or when I changed my mind. All I know is that by the time the PSP port of the game came out in ’06, I felt like I had made a terrible error in passing on the original version and wanted to correct it. That was the first version of the game that I bought.

I didn’t play it particularly far, but that was mainly because I wasn’t very far along before I felt like I would enjoy the game a good bit more if I was able to play it on the TV, controller in hand, lounging in my chair. I do have a special fondness for portable games, make no mistake — I’ve been toying for years with the idea of running a side-blog devoted to talking about handheld games and systems in particular — but Valkyrie Profile was developed for a console, and its graphics were designed to be seen on a TV. The characters, backgrounds, and effects all benefit from having room to breathe. It’s not bad portable. It’s just better on a TV.

I finally got around to buying the PS1 version around 2014 or so, long after I ought to have, and for a significantly higher price, though not as high as I’m told it could have been. Meanwhile, I bought all the rest of the games more or less on launch, so evidently I learned my lesson.

Over time, I’ll try to post here my impressions as I play through and have things to say. I’ve been through the game’s lengthy beginning a number of times, and so while I could start there, I think instead I’ll just start with a simple introduction.

So:

What is Valkyrie Profile?

In simplest terms, Valkyrie Profile is a turn-based RPG set in a fantasy world based on Norse mythology. You play as a Valkyrie named Lenneth, tasked by Odin with recruiting warriors from among the recently slain to fight on the side of the Aesir (the Norse gods with which most players will be familiar) at Ragnarok, which is now imminent. All of the game’s towns and dungeons are presented in side-scrolling form, with a lot of running and jumping involved in traversing them and solving their puzzles. This provides one possible meaning behind the game’s odd title: You play as a Valkyrie, in profile.

Combat is fast-paced, especially for the time, when even if you don’t take loading times into consideration, the involved attack animations and magical light shows, never mind the possible menu diving, made most RPG combat move at a glacial pace. It works in Valkyrie Profile by assigning each character to one of the PlayStation controller’s face buttons. Press their button, and they perform their pre-assigned action. Actions other than attacking with a character’s weapon or assigned spell are either triggered contextually in battle (such as with counter-attacking) or accessible through a general menu any time during the player’s turn.

Timing your party members’ attacks just right will cause a combo meter to fill, and when it gets high enough, you can execute special, highly damaging attacks with the delightfully Engrish-y name of “Purify Weird Soul.” Time these right, and you can string together multiples, one from each character who dealt damage to the target enemy, for outrageous damage and a chance at earning better items after the battle.

The result is that battles feel faster and considerably more hands-on than in other RPGs, and create an experience that, even just considered in mechanical terms, is more engaging than a lot of other games of the time and type.

The rest of the major engagement comes from the story.

Recruiting one of the game’s many party members involves first viewing a sequence showing how they came to their end. The circumstances are always tragic, noble, heroic, or some combination of these. The kinds of people they are and the various ways in which they meet their ends are linked, as they must be by nature. True tragedy — by which I mean actual tragedy in terms of storytelling, not just as a superlative term for something sad — can never be an accident. Tragedy is calculated, by fate if not by any of the characters, with an almost mathematical precision.

In addition to the usual growth in terms of strength and abilities, each character has a series of traits which break down their personality and comportment, as demonstrated during their recruitment and their circumstances leading up to it. Using the skill points earned from leveling them up, these traits can be increased, which in turn increases the hero value of the character, a number that indicates their fitness to fight for the Aesir. Positive and negative traits alike count toward their hero value, since it’s a combination of these things that made them who and what they are, and determined their worthiness of Valhalla. So this is a second potential source of the meaning behind the game’s title: a Valkyrie, profiling recruits.

But in a more general sense, Valkyrie Profile seems largely concerned with the inevitability of fate. And so even as the game plays so fast and loose with Norse mythology that you should more accurately consider it to be “inspired by” rather than “based on” its source material, it still captures the spirit. It does this perhaps not despite being more inspired by than based on, but because of it. Unshackled from the minutiae of the individual myths, the story is then free to reinterpret the characters and symbols of it all while keeping true to the heart of the mythology.

And there is no getting around it. Ragnarok will happen. Midgard and everything else will be destroyed, and there is nothing anyone can do about it, though they will try. Oh, they will try. The gods will fight, heedless of the impossibility of victory, because that is just What You Do when you’re a Norse deity. The worse it gets, the more certain your destruction, the harder you fight. Not because you really hope to win (although you might, if you can hold out long enough, and if a miracle occurs), but because this is how you assert yourself, how you prove you existed despite it all. This is how you make your mark on the cosmos.

This is the indomitable Northern spirit that J.R.R. Tolkien so desperately loved, the appropriation and perversion of which inspired his incandescent hatred of Hitler and the Nazis — and which dovetailed however surprisingly with his strong devotion to Catholicism, with its (and Christianity’s in general) repudiation of despair in all its forms.

This is a game about dying. More, this is a game about dying well. Those who die exceptionally well, either heroically or for a noble cause, earn the right to die again, even more heroically and more nobly, in an even higher-stakes struggle, which is itself all but certain to end in fire and the ruin of all.

This is Valkyrie Profile.

And it is glorious.