I had read that Valkyria Revolution, a spin off to the excellent Valkyria Chronicles games was bad. What I failed to appreciate is that "bad" is only a word and the reality was simply far worse. It's so excrutiating in fact that trying to describe it goes beyond my capability to get the message across in the medium of text but I will do my best.

I played this game for maybe 2-3 hours and I use the term 'played' loosely. I think saying I watched cardboard cut outs with two animations discuss war situations with all the effort and enthusiasm of a narrator at a milk bottle collecting competition would be more accurate. 90% of this game is cutscenes so boring I feel like my soul was trying to escape my body watching them as my natural body decay simply wasn't fast enough anymore. Monotone bland voices with uninteresting dialogue and utterly forgettable characters with a tone all over the place.

I have never played a game that made me so uninterested in events so quickly as this. I read a review somewhere that stated "The whole time you're playing Valkyria Revolution you're thinking of better games" and I fully agree, simply any game would qualify.

It reminded me of another Sega gem, Sonic 2006. A compliment this is not. A cutscene followed by a loading screen into a cutscene interrupted by a needlessly long loading screen. These can go on for 40 minutes. Like why? It made me question my choices in life that led me to this moment. If the combat made up for this it could possibly make it through but it's just as tepid, vapid, boring and soulless as the writing. It's an action game that also wants to be a little stealth, a little strategy giving you commands and spells.

It's all redundent.

All of it.

Cover is pointless, everything is weak, skills are unneeded, your AI companions don't need direction. Just run up and hit things with the sword is all you need but it's not fun hitting a 3 hit combo into a few brain dead enemies. It has tutorials constantly for different things you'll never use. Even the small hub with a few stores is introduced terribly and the user interface for equipment and skills is baffling.

The visuals occasionally have some ok backdrops but the original 2008 Valkyria Chronicles looks better. That game is almost 10 years older on previous hardware. The animations are especially flat out terrible. It's the only time playing this I laughed simply because they were so wooden it made the cast feel like puppets. Speaking of which there are times where characters seemed to float or not fit in scenes or were missing shadows etc. It's a bizzarely ugly game and the character designs are painfully bland to match their terrible stereotypes.

Honestly I hated this. I would rather cover myself in meat paste and flick the testicles of a sleeping lion then play this again. It feels like a completely unfinished, unoptimized prototype that needed editing, fixing, play testing and pruning just to reach the level of mediocre.

Play literally anything else.

- Terrible writing.
- Laughable animations.
- Long pointless dull cutscenes.
- Long load times.
- Redundent gameplay mechanics.
- Boring combat.
- Boring voice acting.
- Boring dialogue.
- Boring.