Every now and then a free flash game gets a full-fledged version that you have to buy – the story’s swan song is Super Meat Boy. With Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story, we get a management simulator with RPG elements and visual novel story telling. On paper that sounds like it’d be good, albeit for a niche audience, but fun nonetheless. In actuality, it ends up being a pretty large disappointment.
At a quick glance of this game, I was reminded of Ni no Kuni 2. This by no means had the visual charms of Level-5’s latest JRPG, but it certainly had potential with the different aspects displayed in the trailer. I mean, let’s look at what the game offers. You are the principal of this militaristic school and you’re tasked with enrolling pupils and training them by building up the different factions of the academy. You’ll take the students out on the battlefield and fight off a wide array of creatures, cultists, and mythical monsters, building their skills so they can align with new classes like Knights and Magi. On top of this, there’s a narrative pertaining to the death of one of the queens and you must decide the best way to pursue the game’s ending. Doesn’t sound half bad, right? Given more time to flesh things out, it may not have been.
When I think of something like city building, I want there to be a bit of choice layered into the gameplay. When I unlock the different quarters for classes, I don’t want the game to make me wait until I have the teacher to actually use them. In doing this, you are limited to basically following a straight path opposed to exploring all the possibilities. Aside from building new things on the campus, you can also accept any student that is wandering about and click on little speech bubbles to see an event. These are repeated over and over, so you can choose the different options to see what nets the best result and stick with that every time moving forward. That’s about it for the school portion of this. Seriously. The room to build things is extremely limited, so you won’t even want to do all that much in terms of the development of your school. Things open up as you increase your accreditation, but the amount you can build in comparison to what is ultimately available is a bit of a joke. Of course, you will want to build up the academy as each piece provides bonuses in battle or additional spoils back home.
Starting the game out, your characters will be a basic class with no real special definition. You’ll be able to create multiple parties, equip them with gear you find, create, or buy, and then you’ll graduate them out of the school to much fanfare. This means you lose your top tier fighters, but it also means additional fame (needed for the next accreditation rank) as well as a pile of money. The different students you recruit will have different stats, some being far superior to others. As you progress, you’ll be able to change their classes, giving them additional abilities and making them more difficult to graduate as you’ll rely on them more. However, the only attachment you’ll have is their ability to kill enemies, as the story doesn’t really lend itself to any sort of character development or emotional depth. It’s as if an AI was made to watch a number of visual novels and management sims with some action segments thrown in for good measure and told to make the game. It has all the elements to make something cool, but it feels shallow and lacking heart.
There are two types of events you can partake in with the students. With errands, you send off a party to do whatever they’re going to do on their own. Essentially, this is a time based event that will go much faster if you decide to take on a task where you play as the characters. Once complete, you’ll receive whatever rewards you were promised at the forefront. This is a good choice for the lower level characters that will be worthless in battle to level them up while also gaining gold, fame, and experience. When you’re on the battlefield and actually playing, chances are you’re being tasked with killing enemies, escorting someone, or collecting something. Clearing a battlefield will net you the most experience, gold, and spoils, so it’s typically a good idea to do this each chance you are given. This is definitely the best part of the game, but it gets tiring after seeing the same map environment and doing the same task three times in a row. The environments themselves seem to be in low demand, as they are reused many times over. Even with the varied amount of classes you can eventually have, the attacks between them boil down to being close range or long range, and the special ability just allows for some slight visual flare with extra damage. The character sound bites become annoying before you finish the first map, and don’t get any easier to stomach as you just run around pressing attack until everything is dead. The music isn’t much better – it’s a bit generic, but I can only listen to the same two tracks so many times.
Surely the narrative is slightly more redeeming, right? As I mentioned, none of the characters evoke any sort of emotion to make you care about them, so while a queen dying and cultists showing up would normally lead to some sort of intrigue, it seems like the game is just throwing in tropes to have them. In fact, one of the first faction lead missions in chapter 2 exemplifies this perfectly. Sea monsters board the ship you’re on, and the queen essentially says “of course there are sea monsters, we’re at sea – oh, but I need your help, I can’t defeat them.” Why wouldn’t there be sea monsters while on a boat? Why not weird cultists trying to perform some sort of ritual? Why not a few different endings that don’t make a difference in the grand scheme of things? Even the character portraits fail to show any sort of emotion as they do not change despite the tonal differences in what they are saying – whether they are making a joke or talking about the death of someone, you always see their smile. I never found the varying portraits to be all that big of a deal until I played this.
As much as it pains me to say, this is a game that doesn’t do anything particularly well, and seems to have different mechanics to try and hide that fact by keeping you distracted. Ni no Kuni 2 has a number of the same aspects in it, and while I would get tired of the city building or the combat, switching from one section to the other lead to a bit of solace and I found myself enjoying the different pieces of the puzzle. In Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story I never found a part that I enjoyed; my hope was to complete the missions progressing the story so I could feel better about play this, but ended up discovering my sense of enjoyment was in another hero’s academia.
2 out of 10
Pros
- Wide Array of Mechanics
- Easy to Pickup
Cons
- Very Linear School Progression
- Overly Simple Battle Scheme
- Uninteresting Story
- Grating Dialogue and Repetitive Soundtrack
Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story was developed by Agate and was published by PQube Limited. It launched on NS, PC, and PS4 October 2nd, 2018 for $14.99. The game was provided to us for review on PS4. If you’d like to see more of Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story, check out the game’s official site.
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