First Thoughts on “Dark Rose Valkyrie”

So, I recently went on a game buying spree, and one of the games I purchased was Dark Rose Valkyrie. This game is, well, the typical sort of game I’d like, where it mixes a dating-type simulator with a tactical RPG and adds in a traitor mechanism. So obviously this would be a game that I’d be very interested in. However, after playing it for the first time it turns out that the game has a number of annoyances that make me less interested in playing it.

The first annoyance is that I can’t figure out how to save in the base itself. This means that if I want to save to make sure that my choices are captured before heading out for a mission, or just to quit for the night, I have to find one of the more dangerous save points, either in a dungeon or out in the field, and save there. Remember the lack of easy-to-find save points was one of the main reasons I quit playing Nocturne, and if I can’t get to an obvious ending point in a game when I want to stop for the night that really, really does discourage me from playing the game. So that’s a pretty big strike against it right there.

The second annoyance is that they aren’t very good at indicating where you need to go for your quest. Maybe there’s some setting that I’m supposed to change, but it isn’t obvious on the map where I’m supposed to go most of the time. I spent a long time running through a dungeon because I thought that the “bridge” I was supposed to patrol was in there, and only later figured out that it was elsewhere in the city. And still got lost on my way to it. And the entire quest was just showing up there, which since that was the required quest seemed anti-climactic.

The third annoyance is that events in your room seem to, at least much of the time, trigger a progression in the story, despite the game not making that clear. I missed all of the interactions in one part because I went to my room first and the commanding officer demanded that I rush down to the command room. This was incredibly annoying, and just highlights how bad this game is at telling you what’s going on.

So, not a good start. However, the characters are generally interesting, and the combat system is an interesting way to implement a turn-based-with-delay system. Essentially, there’s a gauge that each combatant appears on, and they move at various speeds up it until they hit the decision point, where you can decide what action you want them to take. Each action takes some time to trigger, so you can select level 1, 2, or 3 actions. Then they keep progressing until they hit that level, and the action activates, and then they start climbing up the gauge again. This allows for some interesting decisions because you might, say, want to trigger an action first to get in on combo action or to kill an enemy before they can attack, even if the longer option might have other benefits. And if you aren’t really thinking about that, you aren’t rushed to decide what your best option is either, which is nice.

Since I have so very many games on the go right now, it’s hard to see when I might get back to that game, especially since it’s starting off so “Meh”. But I do think I’d like to give it another shot at some point in the future, if for no other reason than to see what the interview mechanic is like, where you try to determine who is the traitor.