Valkyria Chronicles 4

Six years to the day after beating Valkyria Chronicles, I've finished off what might as well be its direct sequel, Valkyria Chronicles 4. (Yes, Valkyria Chronicles 2 and Valkyria Chronicles 3 both exist but they were PSP-only games and the third one never even received an American release. Lame!)

Now, six years is a long time and I've beaten (hang on, counting) - oh wow, exactly 150 games since then, so it's very likely I've forgotten more of Valkyria Chronicles than I remember. But it was my favorite beaten game of 2014 and frankly an all time great. I bring all of this up because I want to stress how impressed I am by Valkyria Chronicles 4 and it's no small priase when I say that it improves on the original game in every conceivable way. Seriously, every single one. The gameplay is identical or perhaps moderately improved by the addition of a grenadier class; the art style is identical and as such the PS4's graphic capabilities make for a prettier picture than the PS3's; the characters - from mains to secondaries to villains to troops - were so much more memorable this time around; and the story was more moving.

I dumped 40 hours into this game's main campaign and I've already played three or four postgame missions. I'm debating spending mroe money on the DLC than I did on the entire game just to keep unlocking content. I've been borderline obsessed with this title for two or three weeks straight, playing it almost every night, the type of thing you can only really get away with doing in the dark and lonely bowels of the calendar known as February. How long can I keep going? Who knows! Daylight Savings Time is just around the corner and spring should be right behind it, so another 20 hours of this game might be a bit of a stretch. But apparently there are just as many postgame skirmishes as in-game missions, so I say why stop playing a game I'm absolutely loving?

I'd say more - I have so, so much to say - but no one reads this blog and I'm just as happy to talk about the game with a couple friends who've partaken. Peace!

Battlefield V

Just over a year ago I played through my first Battlefield game - the World War I one, Battlefield 1 - and liked it a great deal. First person shooters have never been my favorite games, but I appreciate a good campaign in a war game, and I really felt like Battlefield 1 nailed it with four or five short stories taking place all over Europe. When I heard Battlefield V would be a spiritual successor, albeit one that took place during World War II like so many other first person shooters, I was on board.

And yeah - this was fine. It scratched exactly the itch I wanted it to scratch. There were four little three-act campaigns here, and all felt extremely by-the-book. There was a "Brits in North Africa" level, a "Norwegian resistance" level, a "Senegalese French soldiers storm Southern France in history's forgotten parallel to D-Day" level, and a "Nazis make their last stand in Germany" level. Yeah, you heard that last one right - Battlefield V has a level in which you take control of literal Nazi soldiers, killing at least two hundred American troops pushing forth over the Rhine into Germany. And yet, for the second straight Battlefield game, the Eastern Front is entirely absent. Come on! Give me Leningrad, give me Stalingrad! Give me a glimpse of the side of the war where 15 million soldiers died instead of a fourth chapter from the Western Front where I play as the goddamn Nazis! Sheesh.

Anyway, I'd love to see more dumb war games with campaigns like this one. Simple little vignettes that highlight forgotten or underexplored chapters from history.

Oh, and what a gorgeous game. Just an impeccable level of detail put into all the environments, be they ruined cities or French farmlands or semi-arid North African landscapes. Beautiful.