Dark Rose Valkyrie

Japanese developer Compile Heart is best known for its simple and quirky JRPGs that are recogznied for their easy-to-understand gameplay and copious amounts of fan service such as the Neptunia and Fairy Fencer franchises. But Dark Rose Valkyrie is meant to be a divergence from the company’s tried-and-tested formula that, while still providing some fan service, takes on a more serious tone than the studio’s other games.

Compile Heart have made some fantastic RPGs over the years and now they're at it again. Dark Rose Valkyrie is a rewarding and unique take on the genre yet it retains enough classic elements to make it an overall familiar experience.

Dark Rose Valkyrie has some exciting aspects, but may fall short in the overall package.

Overall, Dark Rose Valkyrie is trying to be a game that will supposedly surpass all the other JRPGs but instead it flops hard with all the mess it created. It’s trying to be too many games all at once and it can’t seem to decide what it should be that it loses its identity among all the features. What could have been a breakout game became a game that I would easily want to forget.

Despite the promising names behind the title, Dark Rose Valkyrie stumbles over its own ambitions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the parts of the game that were the responsibility of the Tales series veterans, the art and the writing, were the most successful, but where other collaborations have been able to balance each party’s strengths an diminish their weaknesses, that’s not the case here. Rather than find collaborators who could help balance Compile’s consistently lukewarm gameplay design, this joint effort substitutes Helvetica for Times New Roman instead of fixing 10 pages of typos.

Dark Rose Valkyrie is the latest Japanese role-playing game presented to us by developer Compile Heart and publisher Idea Factory. It’s set in an alternate version of 1929 Japan where Black Garnet, a meteorite, has hit the Earth and caused a virus that transforms the public into deadly creatures called Chimera.  The protagonist, Asahi Shiramine, is the captain of Task Force Valkyrie – a special unit created by a military agency in order to defeat these beings.

Even though Compile Heart had a couple interesting ideas with this game, its execution failed to bring out its true potential. And despite having two Tales of series members on board, their involvement couldn’t stop Dark Rose Valkyrie from wasting people’s valuable time. At least Fujishima’s character designs continue to look gorgeous.

Despite its interesting premise, Dark Rose Valkyrie is hard to recommend.