Review: Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga

My mother always taught me, “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” Well, actually, she didn’t, because my mom is actually known for foot-and-mouth disease. Still, especially when it comes to creative works, my motto has always been to try my best to see at least some good in even the worst works. When it comes to the Wii action RPG Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga, I’ve really struggled to find that good.

It was a game I really wanted to like. After all, Nintendo hasn’t been known for RPGs since the SNES, really, and despite the occasional stand out (i.e., Tales of Symphonia, Rune Factory Frontier), for the most part, RPG fans are still waiting for some decent role-playing titles to hit the little white box. Despite the great premise Eldar Saga brings to the table (play as father and offspring over two chapters, play solo or with friends), sadly the game has so many basic elements that go wrong it is impossible to recommend this game to anyone.

First things first: I would hardly call myself a graphics snob. I’m happy to play a game made in 1985 as I am playing one with the best graphics our HD consoles have to offer. However, when the graphics of a game affect your enjoyment of it, I have to draw the line. In fact, in some ways, I think this is where Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga fails so epically. The graphics are really what make this game unplayable, as the other faults perhaps could be forgiven. However, when the quality of the graphics makes it difficult or impossible to play your game, then you have failed as developer, at least in my opinion. What makes the visuals so bad?

At its best, the graphics are poor, and nearly passable. Everything has a blurry, monochromatic, low contrast cast to it, so that at first you might have yourself wondering if it’s time to update your glasses’ prescription. In other words, the world seems a little out of focus, and you will find it hard to distinguish enemies from the ground or the background, as well as having trouble figuring out where a ledge is, as everything muddles together with little definition. All this would be bad enough, but it gets worse. VK:ES includes weather effects (and what might also be day/night effects, but who could know?), which means from time to time it will get cloudy and start to rain, after which you will find yourself in a thick fog. In practical terms what this means is things go from hard to see, to harder to see, to damn near impossible. The fog segments force you to follow the mini map as the only way to have any concept of where you are going, as it is your character walking around in a bunch of gray. My best way of describing it is imagine trying to play a game like Zelda: Twilight Princess, only if you poured potato soup on your tv and tried to play through that film. Yeah. Needless to say, it’s not a whole lot of fun, and it breaks the game extremely quickly.

If you’re patient enough (and you don’t have a headache from squinting) to continue the journey, you might have time to notice the sound and the music. The latter would actually be enjoyable, perhaps, if you could play the game with your volume on. For you see, you will quickly find yourself hitting the “mute” button, since, for some unknown reason, your character’s footsteps are loud enough to be deafening, regardless of the terrain. Perhaps you could ignore this, and I did, at first, but soon found myself muting the volume due to another annoyance. Once you perform a certain number of attacks, your special attack meter will fill. While your hand will glow (and the full meter) will indicate you can now use your special attack, the developers decided that having a recurring beep that repeats endlessly until you use your special attack was obviously necessary to keep the player constantly aware that their power is now available. That incessant beep is what forced me to hit mute, as it is enough to make you want to drive an icepick through your skull.

“You are too harsh,” you say. Graphics and sound aren’t everything. True, true. If you can stand squinting through the game, and you have your sound off, then perhaps you could make it past the earliest segments. At which point you will be confronted by what’s left of the game: story and gameplay. The story could be considered interesting, although a bit cliched (racial conflict, etc. etc.), but I definitely couldn’t say it’s strong enough to motivate most to look beyond Eldar Saga’s other faults. For instance, while certain elements are relatively deep (complex item/weapon/armor/crafting/skill system), the combat itself is about as shallow as it gets. Please don’t confuse “simple” with “shallow.” I’m all for simple. To pick on Zelda: Twilight Princess again, I would describe combat in that game as “simple”: basically just one button with a few gestures. However, in that game, Link learns various new combat techniques (as well as acquiring new weapons) as the game progresses, meaning that while simple, you still have some depth. From what I can see, if Eldar Saga was a pool of water, it would barely be a puddle.

Combat is basically limited to a weak attack (A button) and a strong attack (B button). Whack at enemies enough, and you get the special attack (mentioned earlier), which you use by twirling the remote (you must twirl and not shake, as the game wrongly tells you, for it to work), which is a stronger attack. That’s it. So you basically Z-target (which you need to, because you can’t distinguish the enemies from the backgrounds half the time) and press A and B a lot until they die. That’s about it. I found the special attack pretty useless, as there’s a significant lag in picking up your gesture and then another lag until it is actually enacted, so that in most cases, by the time your character actually does the attack, everyone’s already dead. Although you have the option to equip secondary weapons, I couldn’t (for the life of me) figure out how to use them. You also cannot change your equipment in the field, which, considering how your equipment degrades the more you use it, is an additional flaw. You can use magic attacks (if you’re the right job class), but they use up a lot of MP, so I mostly stuck to melee with my sword.

Even if you can look beyond all of that, the game still has even more flaws, such as loosing half your money and all of your items when you die (even if you had purchased these items in advance): even Demon’s Souls isn’t that cruel. You must pay each time to use the warp system, which is an essential tool considering how poor visibility is and the crappy map system (you can’t zoom out and see a larger map, only the mini map). The game has no voice acting at all, even in cutscenes, which isn’t a deal breaker, but doesn’t add to my love of the experience. Also, to make things even worse, you will often have to go all the way back through a dungeon once you complete it, which is frustrating enough, but magnified by constantly respawning, cheap enemies. You can hire mercenaries to help you on your travels, and they can be a huge help, but the AI can be laughingly retarded, and you have no way to issue commands to them, which adds to frustration. The skill/job system is an interesting one, but it’s annoying that you can only access and level in skills in your job class, even though you basically will need all of them in order to succeed in the game, meaning you will constantly have to pay to change jobs at the guild. Also, your HP is not consistent when you change jobs, which adds another unnecessary frustration.

One nice element of the game was that your HP and MP will regenerate when standing still, and mercenaries who are KO’d will respawn once their HP reaches about 50%. However, even if you use your points (from leveling up) to upgrade your regenerate skill, it can still take half an hour for your HP to regenerate, meaning lots of lag times. This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if you could easily carry healing items with you (remember, you loose nearly everything when you die), or if armor actually protected you (most actually will DECREASE your evasion and defense), or if enemies weren’t so incredibly brutal/cheap. This really kills the pacing of the game, so even if you were a saint and overlooked all the other flaws, you’d still find Eldar Saga to be rather dull as you basically must stop and let your character heal for 30 minutes or more at a time. Personally, I don’t consider that to be very fun.

Overall, this was a game I would have loved to enjoy. I like the concept of a multigenerational story (you play as your child in the second half of the game), but this definitely feels unpolished. The graphics are unforgivingly harsh on the eyes, and that, combined with a multitude of other flaws, leaves me with very little to recommend. Wii-owning RPG fans should definitely look elsewhere, as sadly, Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga has little redeeming value.

Doin It RIGHT:-Concept of multigenerational story is interesting. -Some deep elements (items, crafting). -Adventure is short (16-20 hours).	Doin It RONG:-Graphics make it very difficult to see anything - Sound is incredibly annoying - Combat is unbalanced, repetitive, shallow, and boring
FINAL SCORE: 2 / 10