[NSFW] Valkyrie Profile (PS1)

This classic GameCola article was originally published in August, 2008.

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of complaints (or lack of commenting, which I can more than assume is the exact same thing) about the style in which I review. Evidently (and by that I mean no actual evidence is at all present), people have found my first year as a GameCola staff writer to be pretentious and repetitive. Apparently my reviews are little more than long-winded hyperboles introduced by random childhood stories and then filler’d with ridiculous imagery and literary circle jerking. Oh, and run-on sentences. And SHOUTING! Well, if you knew me in real life, pretentious and repetitive only BEGIN to describe me, so sit back, shut up, and let me sum up an awesome RPG with every fucking cliché I have ever used!

The story behind Valkyrie Profile is one of fond memory. Let’s begin with 2001, the year my balls dropped (off) and the year I purchased Valkyrie Profile for the PS1 for $10 from the hillbilly video store down the road. How they got it is every bit as mysterious as Michael Jackson sitting on David Duke’s CROTCH wearing nothing more than the top half of the BATSUIT during Thanksgiving dinner as a blow against white supremacy. Well, sir, I didn’t even touch the game for four years. I don’t know WHY; I just never did. It was lost for a long time, until somewhere around 2004. I started it up at a pretty bad time, too; it was during my Harvest Festival regiment, when I should’ve been playing Secret of Evermore.

For a game that doesn’t even start until you’re 90 minutes in, Valkyrie Profile is ADDICTING. Wow, it had been YEARS since I played a game that felt like a Super NES gem that made me enjoy wasting 12 hours a day on it. It’s also the last game I PLAYED, even now, that felt like a fucking ENIX game. What is an ENIX game? An ENIX game is one that is blatantly anti-Final Fantasy, COMPLETELY anarchistic in RPG design and still delivers like a pregnant nun in a whore spacestation with its own nursery and she’s about to lose the baby because all the NASA prostitutes are atheist abortion-happy paraplegics with only rusty wirehangers for hands and they’re all crawling toward her and she’s trying to run for her life but she can’t walk because she’s 10 centimeters dilated and they’re closing in and having sex with her and reaching into her with their wirehanger hands but despite ALL ODDS, SHE DELIVERS WITHOUT FAIL AND SO DOES VALKYRIE PROFILE.

It takes some TIME for that to work THOUGH!!!!!!!! Like I SHOUTED EARLIER! The introduction is long and leads you into the wrong idea of what this game is about. You don’t fight for a WHILE. In fact, you have NO idea what this game’s really about until it’s almost too late. Valkyrie Profile seems to love red herrings more than WHAT’S NEW SCOOBY DOO? which was surprisingly decent for an even more children’s version of a CHILDREN’S show that was certainly overdone by that point anyway ANYWAY all those character-getting cutscenes are just slice-of-life vignettes that don’t add to a tangible story. Also, what’s the point of all those towns if there is nothing to do in them but waste time?

Time is very valuable in VALKYRIE PROFILE. You’re counting down to DOOMSDAY, buddy, and your real job in this game is to grab all these characters from their insignificant problems of mortality to put them to work retrieving Odin’s Artifacts. It really adds to the Godly theme of the game when the scenarios you are plucking them from are just useless shorts of human tragedy. And put to the music of the current Deity of Music, J-Prog nightmare Motoi Sakuraba. You’ll just cream your pants every time “CONFIDENCE IN THE DOMINION” plays, which I did. Mom thought I had started a 72-hour masturbation marathon—which was a great idea, and now, every winter, we get thousands of people to jerk it for three days straight, lubricating the streets, brightening the sewers, and painting the town white and then a crusty yellow.

All for testicular cancer.

LOOK AT THOSE SCREENSHOTS! THEY’RE AWESOME AREN’T THEY? They’re just as good in motion, too. Battles are wicked, too. The balance is incredible and challenging without being too frustrating, but what makes this game really fun is mashing all the buttons in just the right order to make everyone rush out and attack a Giant Eyeball, juggling it with 45-hit combo and four limit break attacks totaling ONE BILLION HPs! And you get rewarded for it! It can be difficult finding the right swing with the current party, but when you do, Oh Jesus fo’give me fo’ I have sinned! it’s so good.

But battling is just a fraction of the shit you need to think about before you can win the game. You have to worry about how much time you have left, how many points Odin is accruing against you for taking his valuables, how much potential your characters have in ASGARD, how many characters you HAVE in ASGARD, how many points you get to spend on new equipment, and whether you’re just balanced enough to get the alternate ending (pretty tough) or the other ending where your girl Freya kicks your ass in what I modestly refer to as a cross between Zeromus beating down FuSoYa and Golbez and Dragon Ball Z.

Basically, you gotta ease into Valkyrie Profile. If you go in expecting traditional roleplaying, you will be lost, desperate, and ultimately misappropriating the best non-FFVII RPG for PS1.

And now, because I’m still not pleased with you ungrateful faggots, I’m also going to END this review with a childhood story! HAHA! BOW TO ME, MORTAL!

Meteo X, a boy at the age of nine who was already having rumors spread about him and the milkman, was sitting down to breakfast with his family. They sneered at his presence, as they usually did all day everyday, and fed him his usual breakfast of baby Dilly’s diaper. Dad was also pretty sore with him in the morning, having done no less than jam a pen in the pencil sharpener and devalue the market in Venezuela all before the crack of dawn.

“***dammit, you lobster faggot. Now I’ve had enough!” Dad fumed between fits of cornbread. “How old are you now? 20? 30? 40? 50? 60?”

“You’re 60 years old!?” Dad screamed in disbelief.

“I’m 9…Dad…”

“And you still live here!” He motioned to his 15-year-old daughter Pegg-il, who was naked, covered in honey, and having an entire hairy, naked, French soccer team suck and wipe toast on her to open all the doors. Then he motioned for his other daughter, Fagey, to get him his “screwballs and his pliers!”

“Yes father!” she screamed, and jumped out the window.

“Now you listen to me, Meteo. You’re getting to be a man now, and it’s time you learned the FUCKS OF LIFE. Now then, times are tough! The President wants to pop out your eyes and skull fuck you, so you always need to keep some ribbed condoms on you. Money doesn’t grow on trees and it sure as shit doesn’t squirt out a cow’s fat ass. If the Democrats ran everything, we’d be a nation of walking vaginas praying some bully won’t pick on us. Fur is not murder, it’s MANIFEST DESTINY. A penny saved is a penny earned, so when the barber looks at you with a gimp horse in the mouth, you better shut the fuck up and call him “sir!” … Meteo! Are you listening to me!?”

Meteo looked up from beneath the table. “Sorry dad… My shoelaces were untied.”

And with that, Meteo’s father leapt across the table for his throat, screaming like a bitch. It took three hairy, naked Frenchmen to pull him off.