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It probably won’t reach the kind of players who’ll most appreciate it, but Valhalla Knights has the oddest kind of nostalgic appeal. Despite some concessions to modern graphics and game design, it’s based on a model roughly 25 years old, dating back to the very oldest days of PC role-playing games.

Chop off the realtime combat system, replace the graphics with a primitive first-person view, and you have Wizardry, The Bard’s Tale, or any number of other PC adventures. You have to have been there to get in on the joke, but a few players over on the shady side of 30 should some pleasant reminder of their youths.
 
As for everybody else, well, there’s not as much here. Valhalla’s a well-meaning blend of old and new, but most of us have come to expect a little more from an RPG.

Proving Grounds…

Valhalla begins in one of those villages that only exist in role-playing games, where the local economy is purely devoted to supplying the needs of the freelance dungeon explorer. There’s a shop with armor and weapons, an inn to heal your wounds, an “Adventurer’s Guild” for hiring new party members, and a chapel for bringing back the dead. (The latter’s an especially old-school touch, dating back to the original Wizardry’s Temple of Cant.)

Of course, the town is dwarfed by the castle next door, riddled with hidden tunnels and filled with the promise of loot. (The hero’s missing memory is in there as well, but what story the game has gets a lot less attention than the simple business of digging ever deeper into the dungeons.)

Starting a new game involves picking a character class – from the reliable staples of fighter, thief, wizard, and cleric – and a few other basic bits of customization. Then it’s off to the dungeons, to hack, slash, explore, and pray the next monster doesn’t off you.

…of the Mad Overlord

In its main concession to the modern age of game design, Valhalla’s game world is realtime 3D. Monsters run around in plain view, so you can dodge them when you want to. Though battles involve a transition to a separate playfield, combat takes place in real time – it’s a little like the action combat system in Star Ocean, but with twice the party limit. You can eventually hire up to five AI allies.

In keeping with the oldest-school RPG style, though, Valhalla is mercilessly difficult in the early game. You’ll scrimp and save every gold piece and hit point while dying like a fly in at least half your trips to the dungeon. Monsters are deadly, healing is expensive, and making poor choices with your first handful of cash can reduce your chance of survival to practically nil. This is not a game for the impatient, especially since there’s no in-game help system. When it comes to combat tactics or building a party, you have to learn by doing (and probably dying).

Some clumsy quirks in combat and movement don’t make things any easier. When you’re running around the dungeons, many spaces are too confined for the camera. There’s no routine to turn walls transparent when they get in the way, so sometimes the camera just won’t respond when you try to move it. Sometimes this compounds a problem with the inset map, which can get so crowded with overlays representing monsters’ cones of vision that you can’t see the arrow that indicates the main character’s facing. When you’re dodging encounters in areas where every wall and corridor looks alike, that’s a fatal lack of information.

In battle, the camera’s no problem, but hit detection is. Some attacks whiff when it looks like you’re in range, while certain monster attacks have an area effect that’s far bigger than the graphics indicate. You can run well out of range and still take damage from a seemingly invisible blow.

In the late game, when you have a full crew of six heroes and take on pretty sizable groups of opponents, the size of the battlefield also becomes a problem. It’s not big enough to accommodate a full-size party and a comparable number of enemies, especially since monsters tend to smother a single target rather than split up and fight several at a time. The usual result’s just a confused, hacking melee.

Thief of Fate

Those complaints aside, once you hire a good crew of allies, the going’s a little less rough. (A priest to heal the party is vital, because healing items are practically worthless for what they cost.) Even when you’re not dying all of the time, though, Valhalla’s not nearly as much fun as it could be. The scenario is haphazard and confusing – often you have to just stumble around before tripping over the next step in the quest.

The optional side-quests – available at the Adventurer’s Guild – are doubly annoying, because sometimes the game won’t even tell you how to get started. After accepting a quest, you have to go somewhere or talk to somebody to find the first event trigger. Some quests don’t offer any clues as to where that is. You just have to find it by accident. You can’t discard your current quest, so if the one you’re on is ridiculously frustrating, you can’t put it aside and try another quest instead.

Knight of Diamonds

At the very beginning of Valhalla Knights, there’s a neat little tease of the kind of party you can field in the late game. There’s some really cool stuff there, hidden character classes like steam-punky robots with gigantic chainsaw arms.

Then you find out what you have to go through to eventually get at the good stuff. Sadly, it’s just not worth it, not with better games out there to play. It’s all well and good to look back fondly on the past, but even a nostalgia trip has to change with the times.

Article by: D.F. Smith
Video produced by: Jeanne Goshe