Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga is an action RPG marred by frustrating design choices and a lack of polish. While the customizable character creation system and potential for multiplayer cooperation offer some appeal, the experience is hampered by repetitive quests, uninspired environments, clunky combat, and a dull story. Exploring dungeons is tedious, and balancing a team with the limited AI companions is a struggle. Unless you're absolutely desperate for a niche action RPG on the Wii, this one is best left undiscovered.

The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/tZ4h3YSrjGw

Iterative works aren’t a crime within video games; doing something that has already been done is a good way to get a development team up to speed as well as draw in customers who want more of a certain thing. Some new blood engaging with an older idea can often result in some unique twists that lead to a project with an identity all its own. There is a point where those iterative works become derivative instead, and the changes being made to the base design become a detriment to the final game. Whatever fresh ideas that the change in personnel was supposed to bring to the table are just bad and the lack of talent or the refusal to take any risks keep the final product from being anything worth engaging with. This kind of thing happens regularly, but normally the bad product is singular. So when Capcom hesitated to bring Monster Hunter to the PSP and Wii, another developer decided to seize the opportunity to create a series of similar games on those platforms. The wheels were put into motion, and nothing could prevent the Valhalla Knights series from being summoned into this plane of existence. Somehow, even after the second game received the same disinterested reaction from audiences and critics, K2 decided they were still going to go ahead and create a spin-off for the Wii. Marvellous Entertainment, XSeed, and Rising Star were still on board to publish the games too, meaning that enough people had faith that this series would pull through and eventually become a worthwhile investment. What were these businesses seeing in the series that the video game playing public couldn’t? Did they truly believe that an entry on the Wii would salvage Valhalla Knights’ abysmal reputation? And why would they allow that last ditch effort to be so undeniably awful?

Valhalla Knights is a series of action-role playing games developed by Japanese developer K2 and published primarily by Marvellous Entertainment. The series debuted in 2006 on the PSP and culminated in 2013 with Valhalla Knights 3. Every entry received mixed reviews and were overlooked at the time, often receiving comments of a perceived “competence” as the highest praise, excluding the sex minigames in 3. Every game contains the same generic fantasy settings, the standard mage-warrior-thief class selection, and plenty of orcs and dragons to slay throughout the world. There was no shortage of games like this on every system the series found itself on so the awkward combat and lack of spectacle were more than enough to keep the series on the fringes. The games also rarely attempted much in the way of narrative, often introducing some bland villain to take charge of the monsters and lead them against the allied races. Valhalla Knights 2 would introduce local cooperative play to emulate Monster Hunter even further and the spin-off Wii game would even include some online play to distract the developers from creating a title people would actually be interested in playing.

Spinning the series off onto the Wii was an incredibly savvy business manoeuvre due to the system’s ubiquity at the time. The Wii was approaching 50 million unit sales by 2009, far outstripping the PSP’s sales at the same time. Clearly, this was a market that would be more receptive to the Valhalla Knights gameplay format and the disconnection between entries meant that new players could just hop in and not be concerned about missing story details. In PAL regions, the “Valhalla Knights” portion of the title was rightfully dropped in favour of simply titling the game Eldar Saga, allowing the game to sneak past anyone who happened to be familiar with Valhalla Knights and owned a Wii. I don’t believe K2 ever intended to use the Wii’s motion control functions for anything beyond a button press, and the primary reason for embarking onto the platform was the system’s technical capability. Wii games aren’t much different to PSP games technologically, so creating assets for a Wii game was something K2 were already fairly capable of. This does mean that the game looks cheap and stiff on its own, but when compared to its contemporaries Eldar Saga’s presentation is downright inexcusable.

I imagine the visual portion of this game’s design document is a single word, because describing the game’s visual style can be effectively done with that same word. Eldar Saga is brown. Every environment is glazed in a sickly brown grime, covered in an offensive layer of brown dust, or buried beneath a dry, brown smear. People used to complain a lot about games from this era; visual styles consisting of little more than “brown and bloom”, but I have to say, some bloom would’ve gone a long way toward fixing this. It’s a magical, fantasy war front with fairies and dragons so there’s every opportunity to include more colours but K2 chose not to. This is a gritty, apocalyptic setting. Very serious business. Now excuse me while I propose to this elf. The particle effects used for the magic are muted and uninteresting, and while there are some humorous gear pieces to find, even they aren’t spared from being drab and miserable. The enemies out in the world have a habit of disappearing into the environment, so if the player had the game muted for a very good reason, they might find themselves being ambushed by a small grey smudge.

I’m still not quite sure what language I’d use to describe Eldar Saga’s soundscape. The game’s music wavers between relatively harmless and surprisingly good, I wouldn’t be opposed to using these tracks in another game or as backing in a video or something, they aren’t the worst. It’s rare that the player can actually hear them, though, as the overall sound mixing is absolutely terrible, with the footstep sounds being the loudest thing in the mix. It doesn’t change when the surface of the floor changes, nor does it change when the characters are wearing different footwear. The sound is always the same and if the player fails to numb themself to it then the monotony will get very frustrating very quickly. The other sounds in the game are usually of much greater quality. The weapons and magic use fairly competent sounds and the vast majority of the enemy sounds are great. I’m always a fan of screaming and Eldar Saga features a few good screams. It’s a shame there wasn’t any voice-acting because it could have been a hilarious travesty, but the game’s narrative is so barren that it isn’t a surprise that K2 didn’t employ any voice actors.

Upon reaching the main menu, the player is given the option to play through the game’s prologue or to skip straight to the main campaign. Naturally, I started with the prologue as I assume most others would. A movie explains that this world has been locked in a timeless struggle, the allied humanoid races battling against the massed forces of the destructive monsters in desperation for survival. Eventually, the allied races manage to force the monsters back to a northern stronghold where the war meets a stalemate. The stalemate lasts for such a long time that the army of humanoids begins to waver. The alliance breaks down and the races separate, each group gradually becoming more insular and isolated from the rest. Something triggers the monsters to begin amassing again, and the player must travel throughout Eldar and reunite the old alliance, at the behest of a wheelchair bound mage. The process of reunification is the same for each of the three races: travel to their village, engage in some light narrative hijinks, and then clear a dungeon to defeat a boss. Sometimes the boss is related to the prior hijinks, like the ethnostate dwarf king, and sometimes the boss is a big bee that has nothing to do with the narrative in the area. Defeating the bosses rewards a macguffin that the player returns to the mage. Once all of the pieces are in the mage’s possession, the player is given the opportunity to propose to one of the women they had been interacting with throughout their adventure. There’s a human girl, a dwarf girl, an elf girl, and… Oh…

Aside from their brownness, the lands of Eldar are in a sorry state, with many of the structures having been reduced to rubble long ago and most of the plant life leaning toward death. The first area the player will have access to is a field to the north of the human settlement Vestlia, which is surprisingly empty. This deeply soured my first impressions of the game. There’s nothing to see here, nowhere interesting to go, and nothing engaging to do. It isn’t until the player advances to the Rhianos Mountains that the terrain to the north is interesting at all. The pathways through the mountains involve a lot of climbing and doubling back, with enemies hiding around every corner. It’s brown like the rest of the game, but these mountain pathways are the only really defined pathways out in the world. Every other overworld environment is similar to that field just outside of the city, wide open and empty. This makes the side quests to complete certain actions out in those fields quite tedious, as there aren’t any landmarks to be described within the quest text. Just go out into the field and find 20 lizards to kill. Across each field are the villages that are occupied by the other races in the game. I like the dwarf town, even if it is a little uninspired, and the elven town is just a bunch of trees that aren’t numerous enough to house all of the people who live in the village. The halfling village is located on the outskirts of a massive ruined castle but the village itself is just a bunch of wooden boxes dropped on a road in the middle of a field. Each village contains two points of contact within the population: the male village elder and a female love interest. These are the people who dispense the main quests and provide the context to the dungeon dives, at least for the first dive.

By my count, there are five dungeons to explore within Eldar Saga, although the player will have to explore the first three twice before they’re able to enter the final two. During the prologue the player must “liberate” the villages by defeating bosses within the nearby dungeons. The first dungeon the player is directed to is the Dwarf mines, probably my favourite looking environment in the game since it’s bleakness and colourlessness is quite appropriate, but also because the sound design is surprisingly well done. The level design itself is sort of disappointing, unfortunately. The only path through the first room, for example, winds through the entirety of the gigantic level and doubles back on itself, leading the player to the exit right beside the entrance, higher than when they started but the stairs are supposed to be leading the player deeper down into the mine. This would be extremely inefficient for actual mining operations, but it also forces the player to interact with all of the enemies within the level which is something they’d be desperately trying to avoid. I’ll be talking about the combat next, but for now just keep in mind that it’s preferable to avoid enemies instead of engaging with them. Let you… consider that for a moment. The swamp dungeon is surprisingly similar in terms of obstacles, but the layout gives the sensation that the entire swamp occupies a flat plain and that the player is travelling deeper into it. This is much better than the mine, but I don’t enjoy the aesthetic of the swamp, and the elf archer doesn’t help much at all. The boss at the end is also kind of strange. The Castle of Ruins, the ruin that the halflings live outside, is my favourite of the dungeons in terms of mechanical activity but that bar isn’t very high. There’s a short outdoor segment before the player enters the interior section which is inhabited by some of the rare enemies that are interesting to battle. These are the locations the player must travel around multiple times and none of these are worthy of repeated exposures. Zelda dungeons are filled with puzzles and gimmicks that make each dungeon distinguishable from each other, and while Eldar Saga seems to be mechanically similar to a Zelda game, Eldar Saga’s dungeons lack much of the assets that comprise a great experience. They’re empty, characterless hallways with a promise of progress at the end.

The controls in Eldar Saga aren’t atrocious, but the combat is shockingly terrible. The game uses the most standard wii-remote and nunchuk layout, with the d-pad used to control the camera. A for light attacks, B for heavy, C to sprint, and Z for camera targeting. Supers are activated by shaking the controller and the plus and minus buttons cast spells if they’re set to anything. I played with a sword throughout the prologue and then again during the main campaign despite being given the option to change. I tried a mage and it simply didn’t work. Moreover, I saw what a fairly high level archer character was doing and have to conclude that doesn’t work either. Combat is horrendously clunky, with attacks taking excessive lengths of time to activate and conclude. Spells take even longer to cast and the caster is fully vulnerable while they’re casting. So if the enemy isn’t killed in a single hit or it isn’t also locked into a long attack cooldown then they’ll land a series of hits onto the player. Even using a sword as my primary weapon didn’t keep me safe from taking excessive damage from a missed attack. Because of this, and how the enemies are similarly susceptible to being punished for whiffing, I mostly used the dash attack to damage enemies. It has the lowest cooldown of any attack, and moving away from the enemies trying to retaliate is the most reliable way to avoid damage. There are shields and a hit/avoid stat ratio that both have a chance to avoid incoming damage, but the chances are so low that they aren’t reliable methods of damage mitigation. And the consequences for dying are ludicrous. The player loses a huge quantity of their money and a random selection of items from their bags, which usually includes the valuable gear and most useful consumables. So death is a massive setback and supremely frustrating. Avoiding damage at all costs is highly incentivised. The enemies also have hit and avoid stats that are unimaginably frustrating to deal with.

Eldar Saga’s gameplay systems are sneakily reliant on stats, although the game wouldn’t ever admit to that. The total number of stats is overwhelming. There are so many stats, and so many of them are useless depending on the character’s job. Not only are there the standard health points and mana points, as well as the less standard D&D style Strength, Dexterity, Luck etcetera, there are stats for weapon skills, which hand those weapons are in, defence, magic attack, magic defence, hit, guard, avoid, crit, status application chance, status resistance chance, each individual magic type, resistances to each of those magic types, and three different weapon attack styles. Every piece of gear could impact any and all of these stats in any way, and they do. Not only does the player have to guess what kind of stats they’re actually using, but they’ll also have to try to blindly find gear that applies to those stats. And most gear has down sides. Throughout my play time I focused mostly on trying to gain hit chance, Slash weapon types, and as much health as possible. I knew I’d have to take some damage occasionally because the combat is so stunted, but I had no idea if Hit and Slash were the right stats to collect. I also often found items would increase my hit chance at the cost of my avoid chance, and, in the case of my main story character, almost never changed my gear from the starting equipment. The enemies can also have large quantities of these stats too, with spectral enemies having perfect Avoid so that they could never be hit by non-magic attacks. One of the bosses also had absurdly high Avoid which turned the battle into a 20 minute slog as I rolled dice against the spider’s stats. Weapons can also break and the player cannot change their equipment while outside of the game’s villages, meaning that battling through all of the enemies to reach a boss is a non-option. The player needs their sword health to beat the boss, and can’t switch to a dummy sword to retain the durability of their primary weapon. I was fortunate that supers could hit enemies through near perfect Avoid stats because I would have been unable to defeat a number of these encounters without it. And reskilling is far too expensive to entertain. There aren’t enough quests to earn money quickly enough to be able to purchase the quality equipment for even one job, let alone multiple jobs. Grinding enemies for drops and experience is possible, but that involves further engagement with the atrocious combat system and in most cases it’s easier to just restart the game.

The player gets a character reset upon completing the prologue, they cannot bring that character into the main quest so all of the gear and experience they had earned are totally wiped upon the return of the evil wizard. If the player chose a wife during the prologue, then the player plays the main quest as their child. I chose the dwarf girl and played as a half-dwarf throughout the main quest. Choosing the human girl or no wife doesn’t get the player any racial buffs, but I’d say that’s preferable to choosing the halfling. This model looks like a child. This is not an acceptable choice. Someone should be arrested for this. The new character enters the world some time after their father disappears; they have joined the alliance army and have been sent to try and retake Vestlia from the dragon that’s taken over. This fight is very silly and laughable when playing as a spell caster, since the player literally cannot know spells by this stage. The human leader of the Alliance forces tasks the player with travelling to all of the villages again and fighting another boss in each of their dungeons. He doesn’t do a very good job of explaining this, nor are the benefits of doing so really made clear. A mysterious armoured character appears whenever the player defeats these bosses to KS the player and steal their exp. He never talks, nor does he appear to be a threat to the player, but since he gets all the exp and money the player has significantly less of it when they have to fight this guy later on. After the bosses are excised, the player is sent to scout the final areas of the game which is a ridiculously long trek through multiple gigantic environments with no breaks in between. These locations are packed with ghosts and so many other opponents that running through the environments is basically the only option.

I must confess: I could not finish this game. The latter half of the main campaign was such a heinous balance failure that I wasn’t able to defeat enough enemies that were actually worth defeating. I couldn’t find quality equipment; none of the vendors and none of the loot locations ever contained equipment that was worth having. There were some interesting items, but nothing was ever useful. And it’s very possible that I had something useful in my inventory at some stage but I was killed and lost it. Or that I had enough cash to purchase something useful but died and lost most of it. Without strong gear I would have to rely on my character’s stats to carry me through the later areas. Enemies, even late in the game, are worth very little experience. Grinding enemies is not an option for someone who wanted to stop playing this game before the end of the year. The guild doesn’t supply enough quests to gain enough experience either. And even with all of that, the KSer has an attack that draws the player to them and renders them helpless, so even with the ideal stat and equipment loadout, there’s a decent chance that the player will be killed by this attack. I think this was an intelligent, tactful choice to hide the credits from anyone who managed to play this game for long enough, a method of refusing the list of people to blame for the mess the player had just finished with.

… No. There are plenty of significantly more interesting video games to play, even on the Wii. Play anything else. Please.

Multiple businesses were involved in the creation and distribution of this game, and enough confidence existed for Marvellous Entertainment to choose to distribute Eldar Saga to the international market. Marvellous had been publishing some quality games during this period so it’s bizarre that they’d invest in something as weak as Eldar Saga, and perhaps the objective was to overcome the Wii’s tiny selection of Japanese role-playing games by simply flooding the market with as many titles as possible. Titles like The Last Story or Pandora’s Tower are going to appear much better when their competition for “best rpg” on the system is as weak as the likes of Eldar Saga. As much as it might seem cynical to suggest this, there’s nothing else that makes sense in this scenario. The Valhalla Knights series shouldn’t have proceeded past the second game, let alone cross to other platforms and persist throughout hardware generation change. Don’t expect any of the other games to appear here any time.

A different conspiracy next time.