➤ Valkyrie Anatomia: The Origin, the review 🎮

It took some time but Square Enix has finally found its dimension in the mobile market: after having spent years converting (often hastily) old console titles with simple touch screen adaptations, placing them in stores at prices somewhat out of logic, in this last period we have seen a much more targeted strategy able to follow and exploit current trends. Valkyrie Anatomia: The Origin, protagonist of this review, is a good example of this new organization by Square Enix, very efficient on paper as it is based on the exploitation of the famous historical catalog of the label but with titles declined more precisely for mobile use. It is no longer a question, or at least not only, of taking old RPGs and adapting them to a new interface, now we try to build the gaming experience modeling it on mobile use, however maintaining some historical characteristics of the company between settings, stories, characters and atmospheres.

Valkyrie Anatomy: The Origin Looks Like prequel of the Valkyrie Profile series (which has been absent from the console scenes for a long time) and the fact of being based on a brand of this invoice and of such high value even among the nostalgic is enough to distinguish the game from the countless similar titles present on the mobile stores. Because in fact, with all the positive things that can be said about the care in story building, the charisma of the characters and the smooth functioning of the combat system and party management, the problem is that this is just another mobile JRPG. free-to-play with fights interspersed with dialogue scenes, concentration on the evolutionary aspects of the characters and the inevitable use of the gacha system for the purchase of new elements to add to the roster. In short, from a structural point of view nothing different from Brave Frontier: The Last Summoner, Epic Seven or even the same Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius, however between the charisma of the Valkyrie series and the care put into the realization of this mobile game we can find several reasons to take it seriously in relation to the tide of competitors.

The power of Valkyrie

The combat system and the structure of the quests, all set on progressive battles interspersed with narrative moments in the form of dialogues, are directly borrowed from similar titles, as well as the access screen to the various components of the game (story, quests, special events, character management and evocations), therefore Valkyrie Anatomia: The Origin fits perfectly into the well-defined canon. It must be said that the game was originally released in Japan in 2016, so more than riding the trend it can be said that it helped to shape it, but for us Westerners at this point the substance does not change. In particular, the combat system it is very similar to that of Brave Frontier and is based on touching the various characters of the party in order to carry out chained attacks between standard and special moves, with the need, especially in the more advanced levels, to study the sequence in which to make the fighters attack in order to maximize the damage with combos. As we have said in the past, given the absolute equivalence of the structural characteristics with the other exponents of the genre, the evaluation of this type of games depends above all on the interest aroused by the setting and history and the honesty of the system progression, in the deep mechanisms of the gacha and the evolution of the characters. On the first aspect we can give an absolutely positive opinion in no uncertain terms, on the second we can see a rather honest model, between energy duration and drop rate of the characters in the porridge, but it is difficult to give a definitive evaluation after a short time and with possible future adjustments on the way. In any case, there are no obvious injustices with regard to the complex of free-to-play and micro-transactions.

There are particular elements in the quest, with the characters to be moved within a 3D map considering the expenditure of AP for each move. This requires a minimum of strategic setting in the exploration of the environments, often equipped with crossroads and ramifications, which require the choice of investing AP for additional movements that can lead to the discovery of treasures or not, or face fights or avoid them following different paths, because once the AP is exhausted, it is necessary to resort to waiting for the energy recharge or to the classic micro-transactions. A bit cumbersome, as often happens, the evolution system of the characters and weapons but from this point of view the depth and quantity of content is guaranteed for those who intend to immerse themselves in the game, while theevocation, whose division between weapons and "artifact" (ie the additional characters) is not entirely immediate, seems to have drop rates that are all in all accessible, with the whole economy of the system based on gems, which can be found in good quantities simply by playing , and on various additional materials to be applied for upgrades. Where Valkyrie Anatomy: The Origin proves superior to many other titles is in the construction of the setting, characters and story. Although the narration happens in a rather mechanical way, through pre-set dialogues, the story is fascinating and engaging. It is a dark and powerful story, full of clichés as often happens in RPGs but interesting and enriched by references to Nordic mythology, demonstrating how Square Enix on this front has a decidedly different step from many other competitors. The 3D graphics are very basic in the exploration of the map, becoming more detailed in the combat phases, with a good realization of the characters and the respective animations but they are rather the 2D illustrations, also thanks to the splendid original character design of the series at work by Kou Yoshinari, which give the game a very special characterization.

Comment

Tested version Android, iPad 1.0.5 Digital Delivery App Store, Google Play Price Free Resources4Gaming.com

7.7

Readers (1)

9.2

Your vote

Valkyrie Anatomy: The Origin remains fully faithful to the canon of the mobile JRPG, a by now cemented sub-genre that offers very few original ideas, moreover arriving in the West three years late and thus finding itself in the full jam of games of this type. In such a rigidly codified structure, the Square Enix game does little to deviate from the rules imposed in the gameplay elements but its strength derives all from belonging to the Valkyrie series, able to endow everything with a charisma difficult to find elsewhere. Fans of the series can certainly find solace in it while waiting for information on the possible future on consoles, but in general Valkyrie Anatomia: The Origin can be considered one of the best exponents of this mobile sub-genre thanks to its solid background.