The Final Word game review

Valkyrie Profile -- Enix

Evan Morris
Valkyrie Profile is sort of an early nineties relic that somehow escaped into the future. Since Game Zero can hardly afford graphics, let alone demographics, I honestly have no idea what age group dominates our audience. That said, as a disclaimer for the following odd comparison, Valkyrie Profile is kind of what you might think would happen if the Ys III (TurboGrafx-CD) and Actraiser (SNES) teams were brought together to engineer an RPG.

Off the top of my head, I can't really think of a legitimate side scrolling RPG for an American console, which is one of the reasons why I consider Valkyrie Profile so staggering in ambition. I applaud Enix for translating what will certainly be viewed as a PlayStation classic by future gamers who like to point to the past. It's a 16-bit game that I always wanted to play -- it just kinda missed its market by about nine years. Which is a shame because I don't think that it'll reach all the gamers that would actually appreciate it.

The world of Valkyrie Profile is unarguably beautiful both in sight and sound. The story line is emotional and engaging. The battle system is, while not particularly innovative, at least somewhat interesting even though battles can be frustrating at times.

I do have a couple of major gripes with the game, but these problems would not keep me from adding the game to my library had I known about them before I purchased it. The problems are:

It's hard to actually figure out what you're supposed to be doing, which caused me to debate whether or not I should restart the game after I was about ten hours into it. On top of that, the game can get pretty repetitive after the halfway mark.

The control of your character in the side scrolling dungeons is not very well implemented: The buttons are mapped in an odd way that you can't really alter into a normal side scrolling configuration, and the response time of your character when asked to execute pretty intricate patterns is sluggish at best and frustrating at worst.

Even with its problems, Valkyrie Profile is a must-own game that should be part of every mature gamer's library.

(12/2001)