Dark Rose Valkyrie Reviews

First things first, performance was abysmal - the game was stuttering every second. [url=steamcommunity.com/app/726950/discussions/0/3030299604456934374] This method[/url] fixed it. The FPS drops remained, but they were tolerable. I also had a couple of crashes at most. Now for the game itself. Story. Quite simple, nothing to write home about. Characters. The MC is too wimpy for a squad captain. Other characters, especially waifus, have good personalities. Unfortunately, these personalities aren't fleshed out much. There's barely any character progression, but the worst things is that they don't have conversations without the captain, and even during group talks they talk to the MC one by one. Thus, the game doesn't show any bonding situations between the squad members themselves. There are a couple of events that show discord or chemistry, but they are plot devices rather than character development. Romance. It's bland here. You increase the girls' affection levels by answering correctly during one-on-one conversations, just like in traditional VN dating sims. However, as opposed to VNs, these events here are too short and not very interesting. There's only one short date event with each girl. At some point before the end, you can choose which heroine's ending you want to see. It's just a short scene after the credits, so not worth the effort, to my mind. No harem ending either. You also can't romance the best waifu - the commander Miyako Osatani. A big shame. Script / Dialogues. A bit too simplified and sometimes repetitive. I wish the quantity was bigger, so you could know more about the characters. Difficulty. Difficult on the hard (there's easy, hard and very hard here) difficulty. Now, I don't like grinding. Usually in RPGs, I kill every regular monster in the current location and that's enough XP to enjoy the game while keeping some challenge. It doesn't work here. First, there's too many mobs on the map, and at some point, every third encounter leaves you are almost dead. There are no HP/AP fountains, you can only restore those by teleporting back to the base. You can't even dodge or outrun the mobs properly, since there's too many of them, and in case your preemptive attack fails, they decimate you. This becomes more egregious as you progress in the game. I'll admit, I bought the cheat items and points for this game, and restarted on very hard, because for some reason they locked greater affection bonuses behind this difficulty level. By the end of the game, if I didn't one-two shot a regular enemy with my strongest skills, the mobs would paralyze and KO most of my party. Before cheating, I managed to get to the shopping mall boss (Chapter 2 or so), and then the difficulty spike happened. Why do I have to use up my whole inventory of healing items so early? And then I realized what's the biggest problem with this game... It doesn't tell you anything. What's the most effective way to guard break the enemies? Which character abilities to upgrade to get the skills? What are the party members' proficiencies? WHO CAN ACQUIRE HEALING SKILLS? I spent 8 hours without a healer in my party because all the members have the same starting skills and you need to increase certain stats to unlock the healing ones but only for specific characters. It's also the same stupid system with party points that was in Agarest. You need a guide for everything. How to fight a boss, how to increase affection, since correct choices are inconsistent, what stats to increase to have a chance against the foes, what members to have in your party, etc. It would all be part of the experience if, say, your first run was an introductory one, and then the game encouraged you to do a NG+. But here, you lose almost all progress if you decide on replaying the game. Experience: gone, affection stats: nulled, money, party points: halved. IIRC, only equipment fully transfers. The bonding events are missable, so you sometimes need to fast-forward the time to make them appear. Constant alt-tabbing for correct choices just as in the Agarest games ruins the experience immensely. I'd rather prefer the choices were black and white - you either go for the heroine's affection or not. You can't quickly skip the game as you can a VN just to make another choice, what's the point of complicating the process then? There's also an interview mechanic, where you need to find the lying member of your squad. You need to submit several correct reports on these interviews to get the true ending. They don't have any relation to the traitor plot, so you're not weeding out the real culprit. Like, a girl is for some reason lying about another girl's opinion about her phone strap. What does that have to do anything with the traitor sub-story? And once again you have to use a guide to do them correctly, because the number of questions you can ask is limited, and if you fail at an interview, you will only find out about it at the end of the next one, which is a whole chapter away. And it's not even a real mystery anyway, because it's YOU who decides a traitor - not discloses or unveils, but specifically chooses who have been betraying the team the whole time. What's the point of playing the game if the only way to do it properly is to either use multiple guides or sink countless hours experimenting without any joy? There's no reward for it, no feeling of accomplishment, and the punishment for not "sticking to the script" is too severe. This game is simply too much fruitless hassle.