Collection essentials #390: Valkyrie Profile (PS1)

Here we have a truly marvelous and totally unique RPG from developer “tri-Ace”, whose founders first worked on Tales of Phantasia on the Super Famicom and then went on to form their own studio. Valkyrie Profile probably technically qualifies as a JRPG, but it’s so incredibly unique that saying so doesn’t give you a good idea at all of what the game is actually like, and even future games in its own series don’t even truly resemble it. 

As you may guess, this game is loosely based on Norse mythology. The main character Lenneth is a valkyrie, who serves Odin and recruits newly-deceased warriors to fight in a war waged by the gods with the ultimate goal of saving their home Asgard from destruction. 

The basic gameplay loop of Valkyrie Profile involves a limited schedule. There are a limited number of “Periods” in the game until the final battle (something the game makes very clear), and performing certain actions such as entering a dungeon or recruiting a warrior take up one or more of these periods. Lenneth’s goal is to train up the warriors she recruits by either using them alongside her in battle in the game’s dungeons or by using accumulated resources to instantly level up and strengthen them. The game is divided into chapters, and in each one Lenneth is expected to send at least one warrior away to Valhalla to fight in the war. 

When navigating dungeons, the game resembles a side-scrolling platformer, as Lenneth can jump and use her ice crystal ability to navigate looking for treasure and ultimately the boss (if there is one). There are visible enemies who roam the dungeons, and touching them will bring the player to a battle screen where a turn-based battle begins. 

The game’s battle system is very unique. The good guys and bad guys take turns as a team. Each of your characters (up to four) is represented by one of the face buttons on the controller. To perform a normal attack with a character, you simply press their face button. But timing matters a lot, because you ideally want to attack with multiple characters and chain their attacks together. You also have to consider what type of attack each character has, so you won’t want to strike with a high attack while an enemy is on the ground, for example. Successfully chaining attacks together builds up a temporary meter, and if you can fill it up in one series of blows, you’ll get to unleash a powerful special attack that will do lots of damage! It’s very fun and satisfying. There are of course actions that can be executed from a menu such as using items or certain spells.

This game’s soundtrack is phenomenal, with another amazing job done by the legendary Motoi Sakuraba, who is one of my favorite composers. The music definitely has its own style which is a little hard for me to put into words; some of it is instrumentation. You’ll hear exhilarating battle music, tunes that evoke a sense of awe, catchy upbeat dungeon tracks, and perfect somber tunes for the game’s emotional moments. 

When recruiting a dying warrior, you are treated to a vignette of several minutes which shows you who the character is and the circumstances that lead to their death. They are often technically not important in the long run, but they are usually very well done and emotional scenes.

There are various unusual gameplay features and I’m not going to describe them all here. The ways that you obtain items and the way that you learn and equip skills for your characters, for example, are a little different than you’d normally see in an RPG. It can feel a bit daunting at first, and you can be tempted to spend a ton of time in the game’s menus in hopes of optimizing everything. But thankfully the game isn’t all that difficult and definitely doesn’t require the player to come anywhere close to true optimization, so players shouldn’t feel pressure to spend extra time in the menus if they don’t want to. 

Valkyrie Profile more than any other RPG I’ve ever played feels like art. This is partially due to how unique and creative everything in the game is, and the sense of style it all carries. And it’s helped by the fact that the actual literal character art that displays whenever people talk is absolutely gorgeous. Rather than just a small portrait, you see a highly-detailed rendition of a character which takes up a large portion of the screen, and despite being a Japanese game the art has a bit more of a “Western” style to it as opposed to anime-style as you might expect. Many characters have multiple pieces of art which emote in different ways to give them more expression. 

No RPG is perfect, and Valkyrie Profile isn’t an exception I’m afraid. One cool thing about the game is that there are multiple endings, one of which is much harder to get than the others. But the problem is that getting this ending pretty much necessitates using some kind of a guide. Getting the ending takes a lot of deliberate effort from the very beginning and requires some specific steps, and it’s simply not intuitive at all. The process leading up to the good ending is where the game’s best storytelling is, so it’s something that you definitely want to do. Players may find frustrations in certain places as well, such as one particular long and complex dungeon (though it’s only in hard mode) which forces you to backtrack the ENTIRE thing upon reaching the end which is incredibly difficult if you don’t use a YouTube video or something.

I obtained this copy of Valkyrie Profile shown in the photo a little over 20 years ago, in late 2004, after a recommendation from my late friend Brian Castleberry. I thought the game was super cool, though I didn’t understand a lot of it very well, and I failed to finish it. A friend of mine had tried the game a little after I did and expressed that he didn’t care for it that much, and that actually kinda dissuaded me from revisiting it for a long time. But not long ago, towards the end of 2022, I picked up the game again…and I was totally floored by how great it was. Valkyrie Profile is an absolutely incredible and stunning masterpiece, a strong contender for the title of “Best PlayStation RPG” (which is saying A LOT), and dare I say one of the greatest video games of all-time. A true quintessential essential which you definitely should play if you’re intrigued by what I’ve described. 

A port of the game called “Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth” is available digitally on modern PlayStation consoles, which is probably the most accessible way to get it at this time. This port has some pros and cons from what I understand and I’m not too familiar with it, but it ought to get the job done. Go and let your inner valkyrie take flight, and regrets will not take place.