Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga Review

Fantasy games seem to be popping up everywhere now a day, and the Wii takes no exception to that.  With XSeed Games newest Wii title Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga now available, will it hold its own on the console?  Or will it simply be a story we all want to forget?

Let’s take a look at the Hots and Nots!

HOT

A lot to do
During the course of the game there are plenty of jobs you can take up.  These jobs are essentially classes that you get to choose for your character.  In the games two chapters you will get to choose different jobs.  In the first chapter, your options range from a bard, a mage, a priest, a soldier, or a thief.  In the second chapter you can choose more specialized jobs such as an archer, knight, ninja, or a samurai.  With each of these jobs, the player needs to focus on certain stats to make the most of their skills.  The nice thing about Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga is that you can always switch your job; however, you will get the most out of it if you simply pick one and stick with it since you cannot change your stats when you change jobs.

NOT

Terrible camera
A lot of games out there are notorious for having a bad camera system, and this game is differently one of them.  The camera can never seem to stay in a good place during combat, making you lose track of the enemies you are fighting.  The game tries to help this by giving you a lock on feature to help you keep your eyes on an enemy, but that only makes things worse.  Once you lock onto an enemy, your movements become restricted, making it even more difficult to fight.  This is even worse when there is more than one enemy around.  You will find yourself taking hits from every direction as you try to simply figure out what’s going on.

Eyesore
The game looks bad.  Plain and simple.  The environments are simply bland and the enemies look as those you are fighting blurs.  When you are trying to decide which enemy to fight to take out the stronger ones first, you will have a difficult time trying to distinguish one enemy from another.  Everything simply looks the same.  To even engage in combat is difficult because of trying to exactly locate the enemy.  It is simply easier to let them come and attack you so you know you are in combat.  Even the main characters don’t have any detail to them.  The characters expressions and movements in battle just look bad.  Playing this game reminded me of a late Playstation one game; it is just so out dated.  Graphics do not have to make a break a game, but in this case, it puts s serious dent in trying to enjoy it.

Repetitive
It seems that repetition is simply the nature of Valhalla Knights: Elder Saga.  The missions that you will encounter are dungeon crawls.  This does not have to be a bad thing, but when you are sent from the main city, to a dungeon, back to the main city, and then sent to that same dungeon all over again, you start to get annoyed.  Even the enemies that you fight are repetitive.  The majority of the enemies see to attack the same and even attack in the same order over and over again.  This makes combat less engaging and extremely boring.  Even outside the main story, the side missions all seem to have you do the same task.  Kill a specific number of monsters, protect a character as they go to their destination, or go talk to a certain person.  There is no verity what so ever.

Takes forever to learn
Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga is not a deep game in its premise, but the outdated and confusing interface makes it take even longer to get into the game.  Learning how your character attacks and how to control other NPCs in the game will become a headache and will soon drive you away from the game.

Laggy Multiplayer

I can’t exactly say much about the multiplayer seeing as I could never find anyone to play with.  And when I did, the connection for games had so much lag that me or the other player would simply quite out before even a minute had gone by.

VERDICT

Valhalla Knights: Elder Saga is just simply a bad game.  The repetition and the poor level design make playing a game a chore instead of making it fun.  I tried to have a good time with it, but the only thing I can say I enjoyed was managing what points helped increase my characters job abilities. Other than that, I found nothing enjoyable after the first thirty minutes of play.