Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume
Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume isn’t just a game where you kill people. It’s a game where you kill them dead.
I haven’t found a tactical RPG so enjoyable since the original Final Fantasy Tactics. It is also a poster-child for my belief that games and their stories shouldn’t necessarily be kept separate, but can be intertwined together to make a better product.
The premise of the game is that you control a young man named Wylfred whose father had fallen in battle and thus was taken by the Valkyrie to become an Einherjar (pronounced Eye-n-hair-ee-yar). The loss of his father caused devastation upon Wylfred’s family, and as such he goes out on a path for vengeance that leads to his own demise. The Valkyrie spares him, but in her place the Queen of the Norse Underworld Hel forms a pact with him. She will grant him life and a power to defeat the Valkyrie, but he must match her price in blood. Each battle must result in the proper accumulation of Sin, and if he cannot meet this demand then he must face her Realmstalkers, super powerful beings that are one giant pain in the ass (and in many situations, near impossible to defeat).
The game’s tone is a very dreary one carrying a theme of “revenge is bad”. Different characters demand recompense and will do anything to get it, and ultimately it causes harm to themselves or those they care for. There are five total Chapters, and the third allows the player to choose a path that will influence the rest of the game. Each subsequent Chapter will vary based on that first choice, as well as any characters the player chooses to sacrifice.
This is, of course, the big catch. Hel gives Wylfred a “Destiny Plume” that grants any of his cohorts great power, but their body is unable to take the strain and as a result they die. Any ability invoked from the Plume is then unlocked for the player to use in combat.
It is possible to play the entire game without invoking the plume (well, except for the one moment in the beginning you are railroaded into doing so), and if you can manage this feat you get the “best ending”. However, this tends to be a difficult path to follow and may even seem impossible during certain fights. By invoking the plume the player gains a boost to Sin wrought, more easily meeting Hel’s demands. Otherwise the player must try it the old fashioned way.
This is where you get to kill people dead.
Battles take place on two screens. One is dedicated to the battlefield as a whole and is where players move, use items and use other support-style abilities. When you choose to attack a foe you are taken to a “zoomed in” screen of that confrontation. Each character in range of the fight gets a chance to attack and is tied to one of the face buttons (X, Y, B or A). If the player strikes enough consistent hits in a short amount of time then they fill up a meter which allows them to pull off finishing attacks (as long as they have a weapon that allows that sort of thing).
These smaller fights are where the entire system is built around. While you can have one character attack an enemy, the amount of damage will typically be minimal and there will be little Sin wrought. Having multiple characters surround the enemy will allow multiple attacks, and by taking certain positions will even allow for a “siege”. If the foe is caught with characters on two opposing sides, three sides or all four then the player gets bonuses to the Attack Gauge (meaning more chances of executing more finishing strikes) as well as bonuses to “plunder”.
Most importantly, however, is making sure you are able to keep striking the enemy even after they run out of hit points. Every strike on a “dead” foe accumulates Sin, and the longer a player’s turn can last the more Sin you can gather. In addition, in the event that a foe is powerful enough to survive a siege, the chances of them being stunned increases and thus they cannot counter-attack.
It is a system that seems simple at first, but soon you discover that it works best when you pay careful attention to what sort of weaponry you equip (more power could mean fewer attacks or the lack of a finishing strike), the attacks the character is set to use (some boost the attack gauge more, so if you’re limited to two strikes you may want to make sure it’s the two that yield the highest rewards) and the order in which you have your characters attack (some moves throw an enemy into the air, and while some attacks can reach, others cannot and will be wasted).
This creates a tactical strategy game with more in common with Chess and other strategic board games than your typical game in the same genre. It’s more about careful positioning and planning than it is about power. If you can master this system then the difficult hump towards the beginning will pay off in later chapters and the player won’t have to sacrifice any of their characters.
Of course, a player may still want to use such abilities anyway. While the game doesn’t allow the player to carry over levels and stats, their equipment and some abilities will carry over to a new game. If the player wants to see the three separate endings then they’ll need to kill varying numbers of their allies each chapter, or none at all (in fact, I recommend sacrificing a friend or two in tough battles, as playing without sacrificing anyone is hard). The characters that join your side will continually change and, while the overall result is the same the details will be different each time.
Of course, being open-ended it would have been nice if each side character got their own special ending. Each chapter you meet new characters that appear as guests in your roster. This means they cannot be sacrificed to the Destiny Plume and thus are free to be given dialog during cut-scenes. Once their situation has been resolved and they join your team permanently they are no longer involved in the story. After all, it would be troublesome to write all the possibilities of who might be alive and who might not into the plot. So the characters stop developing and merely continue on as disposable soldiers.
Yet if you managed to keep certain characters alive it would be nice to see some resolution to their small trials and story arcs, particularly tied to how you played the game. Maybe some characters became cut-throat after you were so vengeful and sacrificial. Maybe they’ll redeem themselves. It would be nice to see something extra done with them and would boost replayability in terms of who is chosen to keep alive. Unfortunately the game is all focused on Wylfred instead.
That’s the only real complaint, however. While the game’s political plot is an excuse for the player to go around killing things, Tri-Ace managed to construct it so that it can be changed based on the player’s actions. The story influences the gameplay, weighing the player with the choice to sacrifice a character and take the easy way out or to face the challenge by doing right. Of course, if a player is too willing to sacrifice their comrades the game will be even more challenging, punishing them for their blind desire for power.
It’s a well rounded game and the sort to remind players that the Japanese Role-Playing Game isn’t dead. They’ve just changed from being on major consoles to handheld devices. Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume is, simply put, everything a game should be. It’s too bad that it is bound to get overlooked for being on the Nintendo DS and not being one of Square-Enix’s major titles.
