Valkyria Chronicles Being Ported To PC!

This game looks very interesting and looking forward to it. I believe this is one of the games I meant to try but never had the chance. Hopefully the PC port will come out great!

Oh, and if anyone is curious about the game, I've found a mission sample from the early game on youtube:

It gets harder, but its an incremental thing.

For example, there is one early map that is an open field divided by a river. There is one unguarded bridge over said river. You can easily outflank or outright avoid the enemies on the map and just rush to the enemy command point to win the map.

Later on, at about the mid point of the campaign, you are tasked with retaking a town. The quickest route to the enemy command point is heavily guarded by troops and fixed AT (Anti Tank) and AP (Anti Personnel) guns, backed up by snipers perched in inaccessible high ground that WILL incapacitate any troops that they see. There are, however multiple lightly defended side streets and back alleys that you can send your troops down to outflank the enemy.

So the while the game does get harder, its more that your strategies need to evolve to cope with the battlefield, rather than enemies getting arbitrarily stronger for no reason. I mean, enemies still get slightly more health as the game progresses, but so do your troops, as you level up their roles.

That is a nice preorder deal! Are you getting it?

A quick note: Pre-loading is now live, and the download size is 16.5Gb. The game itself unlocks on Tuesday.

So the game has been out for about a week now, and I've made semi decent progress. My thoughts on the port so far:

There are a couple things that are either a bit odd or don't really work that well:

In engine cutscenes play at 720p, regardless of the resolution selected. Its not a major issue, but it makes the cutscenes not look as nice.
When using Keyboard and Mouse, the menus are entirely driven by the keyboard.
16:10 Widescreen isn't natively supported. You can set the resolution to a 16:10 ratio, but it uses letterboxing to maintain 16:9 ratio.
I haven't not had the game crash when I've tried to exit the game.

However, there are a lot of things that have been done right:

There is no resolution cap/lock and the UI scales wonderfully. I'm currently using a utility to run the game at 4096 × 2160, which is then downscaled to 1920 x 1200 and the game looks amazing.
Save times have gone from 30 - 40 seconds on the PS3 to less than a second on PC.
Performance is much improved in the PC version. It wasn't unheard of to have some sections of the game randomly slow down in the Ps3 version, but on PC the framerate has been rock solid, as far as I can tell.
Once you're in the battles, the game controls really well. Movement is WASD to run or the arrow keys to walk. E enters aiming mode, Tab cycles your currently equipped weapon and Spacebar is the action button and you control the camera with the mouse.

All in all, there are a few missteps, but by and large Sega have done a great job porting VC to PC. Its certainly a better job than other ports that have come out this year, thats for sure *cough*FFXIII*cough*

Random screenshots from a Skirmish mission:

Deployment Map: (link)
Unit Roster (Part of it, anyway): (link)
Mission Intro: (link)
Turn 1, before acting: (link)
Taking control of Marina, one of my snipers: (link)
Taking the shot... (link) (It missed btw)
Wavy made up for it, though. (link)
Skirmish Complete! (link)

Just a bit of an update: I've been playing VC on and off since it came out (I've been rotating through various games lately) and the two missions that I previously had trouble with? Blew through them on my first attempt... Although I only managed a C rank at best. (Ranks are only determined by turn count)

I'm in the definite endgame now, and the game is getting serious. The level I'm attempting atm is being a bit of a pain, although I've got the hang of how the mission flows now, all I need to do is work out the correct strategy.

Also, have a few more random screenshots:


This was the side story map that I was having real issues with on PS3. Just a note: Each black cross is a dead enemy. The question marks are hidden enemies. My forces? A tank, an engineer, a lancer and two shocktroopers. Not shown? Two dead tanks. This map is HARD.

The next 2 screenshots are from a somewhat funny incident on a map in the midgame. What had ended up happening was each turn, the CPU was bringing in reinforcements at it's main HQ... and then doing nothing with them. So they ended up clumping together like this:



My first thought was "Oh ****, that's a lot of dudes!"

My second thought was this:



"Oh yeah, I can call in mortar strikes!" Best 3 command points I've spent all campaign.