Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story 2

This game is a total mess. It cannot decide if it wants to be a JRPG, a VN or a stat sim. In the end you get an unholy mess of a game where none of the parts work well. Picture Master of Orion but with a ton of yakking every 2 turns between Xatyipu and Aarod and what they ate. You will find yourself asking for the game to just shut up after about year 1 as you got a TON of these scenes to go through before you can even do much. On top of that the battle system is REALLY bad. The enemies will spam ailments like mad. Prepare to be poisoned, drained, bleeding, etc every turn. Oh and if the skill misses the ailment STILL lands. On the other hand your ailments can miss. On top of that you get 2 actions per turn no matter the size of your party, then all of the enemies get to go. So it is not fair in how the turns work, and is set up to unfairly favor the enemy. To top it off the boss battles are really bad. Bosses spam heal, regen, restore all shields and will do it so fast that you can easily find yourself losing all progress in the fight. The only strat that half works is to get Lightning Bolt, research Mage powers out the wazoo then zap zap them to death. At that point you can at least outdamage the regen. As it is I have no idea how this got out of early access in this state. It feels like either some RPG elitests told them how to make the game or something, as the game is so player unfriendly you feel like you are playing a game made by an 80s dev who hates their players and wants you to fail, and fail constantly. It ignores all we have learned about design. You will get quests to kill a monster, with no idea what it looks like. What is a Screamer? How do I know, you don’t tell me! Text pop ups will block story text. How did no one catch stuff like this before release? In the end I hope the devs return to what they did in the first game if they decide to make a 3. The first game had some charm to it at least, and this game...has nothing. The entire game I found myself yelling at the game and the bad design decisions so often I feel like the game needs to add a warning to the front page that your blood pressure will be 175/140 playing this. Seriously. Learn from other games please. There is a reason game design exists. And do not listen to the RPG eliteists who want games to be like they were in the 80s. Those games we threw stuff at the wall and hope it stuck. We know better now what works, why not use it?

As a huge fan of Valthirian Arc 1, I really, really wanted to like this game. And to be fair VA2 definitely does a number of things right. It's got charm, the art style looks great, good music, and a chill atmosphere all give it a cozy game vibe. The whole problem with this game comes down to one catastrophic development mistake that I just cannot wrap my head around: The combat. In VA1 the combat was a very simple action combat style. Your whole squad would fight with you as you ran around in a little group and you could switch between characters at will and use their attacks and abilities. It was basic, it was fun, and it worked. In VA2 the combat is turn based, which works for some games, but not for this one. Add to that, they made it a system where you just attack with your strongest party member and the other members sit and do nothing. I don't think I have ever seen a more boring, dull, and restrictive system; it takes all the fun out of even having a team of multiple classes. Then the combat itself just does not balance out properly with enemies, which other reviewers go into in more detail, my main point is that this shouldn't have been a turn based combat system at all, to begin with. The whole combat system is just a mess, beyond just being turn based, this is turn based RPG mechanics done completely wrong. So in closing, I think this is an amazing game concept with so much potential, and it's something that no one else is really doing. I love the idea of running a fantasy school for heroes and training all the different classes and building up an academy. I also think that a lot of dedicated and great people have worked on these games and I hope that they make a VA3 and go back to an action combat system, and actually save this franchise, but wow... I don't know how a team of developers could have sat around a table, looked at this combat system, and said "oh yeah, this combat is super fun, everyone's gonna love this." If you want to play a fun little RPG academy simulator, I highly recommend Valthirian Arc 1. Even with all it's flaws, it's way better then this. Sadly this combat system makes VA2 100% unplayable for me.

Not as good as Valthirian Arc 1

I bought this game expecting it to be a fun hero builder and school life simulator that augmenting the hero building. Instead it feels more like a mobile game where the school life and hero building is an afterthought. The combat mechanics aren't bad but they don't make up for the overall disappointment and unsatisfactory experience when playing this game. The combat itself isn't anything to write home about and is extremely grindy. The game allows your to infinitely reset the field of enemies and the only way to gain gold is a slow income drip, slow quests, or mindlessly kill the same enemies over and over. It feels more like a chore to play this game and I just can't recommend it. There were some cool ideas I hoped would make for an interesting game but they pointedly fall flat on execution.

コンシューマ版に日本語で発売したのにPC版の日本語は？ アーリー開始で買ったのにこの仕打ちは詐欺、金返せよ

I'm going to keep playing and I'm going to finish it so maybe my review will change. However I can say the game starts off SLOWWWWWWW. You can't recruit students for a while. You start off with 1, a story trigger gives you 2 more, and you sit with that little group of 3 for a long time. The stamina system ensures that you simply can't do anything with just 3 students. To add insult to injury, if you spend too much time out in the field there's a chance the game with lock. Not freeze per say, but I've entered a battle, chosen an attack, and while the characters and enemy keep moving in their idle animations I can't enter any input at all, the screen buttons are all gone to select. Need to alt+f4 to get out. So now you need to make sure that your field runs are very short because you may just lose your progress if you stay having fun for too long. This gets made worse by not being able to save in the field, or manually at all. Just auto-saves after each cycle. Design choices meant to pace the game, paired with bugs, and painful systems come together to make the game boring and painful. There is a good game under there, and once I have a decent roster of students I hope it will get better. But I can tell you as of right now the start is a crawl through thumb tacks and LEGO.

So this game can be fun, a bit slow to start and the balance with arc stones doesnt really exist. There is no ability to manually save and there are some major bugs still. The issue with the bugs is mainly around the camera and it does break the ability to play the game properly. Honestly, the devs should be ashamed that this is released as a full game with some of these bugs STILL present.

As someone who has played the series since it's web browser days, VA2 does not live up to it's predecessors. Sure the game looks pretty but... that is not what VA is about nor it's charm. VA2 focused a lot on predefined story events and casts (the 3 starters) which causing it to feels rigid and lack of freedom the previous one has. The game play is bland at best, boring at worst, with a confusing diplomacy system. The boss fights are confusing or sometimes down right unfair. I was at the Knocktaur boss fight with the max out starter team, only to be frustrated that I can't do anything to this thing because he kept healing himself while applying defense up buff. After a grueling 30 minutes of back and forth, I decide to give up and realized that I need to bring Sabotage skill, something that none of the starter team would have access to, unless you decide to studies Arcs instead. And so I write this with a heavy heart, because I really really looked forward to this game. Only to be meet with a buggy, unoptimized, uninspired mess of a game.

Sadly it was a resounding meh for me.

Llevo siguiendo este juego desde que sacaron el acceso temprano debido a que el primero me encantó <3 Decir que los cambios por aquel entonces hasta día de hoy han sido pocos (iban arreglando algunos bugs, añadiendo pjs nuevos, enemigos...), cosas muy ínfimas para haber estado en desarrollo unos cuantos años. Por aquel entonces costaba 10 euros y no me importó invertirlos pero si tuviera que comprarlo de nuevo sabiendo como está no lo haría. Los diseños y gráficos son muy bonitos, si vienes del primero probablemente te enamores al verlo. Las batallas y las mazmorras me parecen fantásticas también, pero las clases y gestiones que puedes hacer son peores. -Pocas clases, sobretodo me parece aburridísimo de narices que para levear un personaje a su máxima clase sea una version masterizada de las básicas. No entiendo porque no han invertido en añadir una clase avanzada para las mixtas que han creado, desde luego eso le daría mucha más variedad y juego a los estudiantes y equipos! No obstante, algo bueno es que el sistema de estudios y habilidades me parecieron interesantes y le dan un poquillo de frescor a la evolución de los estudiantes. Pero vamos...que lo pasarás por alto al cabo de un tiempillo... -En el primero podías crear tu propio equipamiento para los estudiantes! Eso era fantástico! Podías ver que cada uno llevaba una espada distinta aunque fuesen guerreros! Aqui no hay nada de eso, y si encima añades lo de las clases que anteriormente dije y aspecto de personajes (que no hay demasiada variedad) te van a saber todos iguales exceptuando los de historia. -Que hablando de historia....vais a tardar poco en darle al botón de omitir o pasar rápido los textos -La escuela tiene poca cosa para edificar y customizar. No puedes ni meter decoraciones como en el anterior. El marcar los activos e inactivos se hace un peñazo, tenían que haberlo dejado de manera pasiva ( Si....como el anterior...se que me estoy repitiendo mucho) Entiendo que quisieran traer algo novedoso con este juego con respecto al otro, y si, lo hacen en algunas cosas. Hay minijuegos, las batallas son por turnos, la exploracion es mucho mejor y tienes dos tipos de monedas con las que gestionarte, las graduaciones cambian ligeramente tambien , las relaciones de reinos...pero han simplificado muchas cosas dejándolo más soso. No sé si en defensa de ellos puedo decir que tampoco creo que tuvieran suficiente feedback para seguir con el juego, lo cual es una pena... Pero sintiéndolo mucho, tal y como ha salido y por 20 euros....no lo recomiendo. Si quieres pillartelo hazlo en una buena rebaja. Estoy jugándolo de 0 para ver el resultado final con mejor perspectiva, y si, es entretenido por el momento acorde a lo que pagué. Veré si más adelante edito esta reseña, pero si no es así es que efectivamente no ha sido para tanto