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Gamertell Review: Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga for Wii
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Boy, Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga sure sounds impressive, doesn’t it? The title makes it sound like a game that shouldn’t just be played but conquered. There should be figures and books and a movie. It just sounds epic.
Sadly, it’s not.
This is a game that sucks the joy out of gaming and that’s too bad because there probably is something great buried under the many layers of muck.
Layer One: You’ve Been Here Before
The story is fine, if not typical. An ancient meteor shower awakened foul creatures in what becames the age of chaos until humans, elves, dwarves and halflings banded together to drive them back. That alliance fell apart and the races settled back into mistrust.
Things are getting wonky again, so, guess who gets to try and save the world?
Nearly everything about this adventure is typical of every role-playing game you’ve played before. Eldar Saga brings nothing new to the table and, normally, that’s fine. RPG fans want and expect certain things. There’s a decent mixture of story and combat. There’s plenty of “dungeon crawling.” There’s a massive world with plenty of non-player characters to engage and enemies to fight. There are swords and magic. There’s a robust character control system with plenty of options for leveling up, assigning your skills and choosing a class. There are dudes with ugly hair and women in thigh-high boots. What else could we possibly want?
Well, controls that work would be a nice start.
Layer Two: You’re Not Ready to Fight
There are two major problems with the controls. First, they’re sluggish to the point of slow motion. Your character moves so slowly that, without exaggeration, you’ll hit your action button three times before you can even tell he’s moving. That’s bad enough but combine that with combo attacks and you’re stuck swinging at nothing but air for three attacks while your enemy has jumped behind you, hit you and probably gotten in a few stabs at your partner as well. This is completely unforgivable. I tried to compensate by swinging early as my enemy charges but that doesn’t work. It seems that if the game can’t figure out who I’m attacking, it won’t let me attack.
Adding to that problem is that you can call up your menus while the battle is progressing. I think this is supposed to be a feature but it only gets in the way. Hit the wrong button, and you’ll find yourself shuffling through potions instead of attacking. Don’t back out far enough and guess what? You’re shuffling through potions instead of attacking.
Layer Three: Your Friends are Idiots
You can hire NPC mercenaries to help you on your adventures but they’re not much help. They’ll constantly get stuck behind walls or ledges and, when you think someone has your back, he doesn’t. He’s not smart enough to walk around a rock. So, you die. Or he dies. If he does, you can stand still for ten to fifteen minutes while waiting for his health meter to reach the point where he comes back into play. If you die, you can go back to the beginning of the level and try again but for half the reward. Whether you do that or just reset and start over, you’re stuck trudging through the same bland scenery and listening to those relentless footsteps and fighting the same respawning enemies.
Layers Four Through ?: Your Adventure Feels More Like Work
The graphics in this game are drab and without detail. When it rains or when it’s nighttime, the color palate doesn’t change or dim. Instead the details just disappear. It’s like you’re playing the game on a PC that can’t handle the graphics, so you’ve turned them down as far as they can do in order to get a playable frame rate.
As bad as the graphics are, the audio is worse. Something as basic as footsteps are so loud and fake sounding—like someone whacking a shopping bag with a tennis racket over and over—that it’s painful to even move in this game.
To make things even more difficult to take, enemies respawn. Considering how painful combat is, it’s almost unbearable to kill some goblins, orcs or whatever they are, run down a hallway, figure out you ran down the wrong hallway, turn around and fight the exact same enemies. Spend to long lining up your potions and the the enemy you killed only a minute or two ago gets retribution. You’d love to just keep running but you can’t because the sound of your footsteps is giving you a headache.
When you are lucky enough to kill an enemy, it’ll often drop an item for you to pick up. Let’s say it’s a pair of boots and you appraise them to find out they’re better boots than the one you have. Can you put them on? No. Because that would make sense. Rather, you’re stuck carrying them around until you get home because you can only change your armor and such when at one of your bases.
Layer Five: Just Stop Digging Already
I could go on but I won’t. I feel as guilty asking you to read about Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga as I would asking you to play it. Once you finish the game, you can play through it again as a female character but chances are great you won’t bother finishing it the first time unless you have to review it.
There’s a multiplayer component but don’t do that to your friends or to complete strangers. Just avoid this game. If you’re in desperate need of an action RPG to hold you over until The Crystal Bearers comes out then remain desperate.
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