DEMONstration: Valkyria Chronicles 4 (Patreon)

After the shameful horrors of Valkyria Revolution, VC4 has me feeling good about the franchise again! 4 seems to be undoing some of the missteps of VC2 and getting back to what made VC1 so good. It's rough going back to having the lowest level gear and not being able to hit the broadside of a barn but it's fun to have the game be a challenge again. I love VC's leveling system. You don't level up units, you level the entire class and all the units in it grow. Then, you also get to pick what gear your class uses and you can research new upgrades or branches to change stats. It's so easy to upgrade, you make steady progress, and it doesn't punish you for swapping out team members or trying new things.

VC4 is looking to make improvements to the systems too. Tanks only cost 1 command point now so they aren't utterly useless. I went from never using them in VC1 to using it to attack and serve as a makeshift shield for my Assaults. The new Grenadier class is cool (basically a troop with a tank's mortar) but it doesn't feel super useful upfront outside of manufactured situations where the game places enemies vertically above the field so you're forced to use the mortar. But I'm intrigued enough to keep one on my team. The characters are more grown up compared to 2 so it doesn't have that off-putting anime-ness pervading it. I get another of my dear morose Sniper gals with something to hide. I adored one of my Shocktroopers until she literally said "I'm not racist, but..." and it activated her bad traits on the field from being near a character she didn't like. I love how in-depth the character traits system is in these games. It's simple but it gets you to love/hate characters for these simple things. I genuinely feel disappointed in my racist Shocktrooper and hope she gets a redemption arc and learns to better herself. The highs and lows of war...

There are still some of the lasting annoyances. It's still bad at UI and inventory management. It's still a pain to try to turn a tank around. There's still the same anime junk storytelling with the ratio of cutscenes to actual gameplay is 3 to 1, there's a long delay between each line of dialogue, characters are unbearable anime tropes, and it's loaded with unnecessary vocal gasps and grunts.

The lingering issues aside, this is the best kind of demo. It has content unique to the demo. Your progress and stats carry over to the main game. You get a considerable chunk of the game to experience. And best of all, it assuaged my fears about how the franchise has been going and made me more excited about a game I was considering. Major kudos to Sega on this one. I love forward to VC4 in the... man, it's not out for like two months still.