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[lateparty on] Valkerie Profile: Lenneth PSP
Captain Vash
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I just picked up Valkerie Profile for the psp, and I bought it used.
I'm playing through and it's a really great game, beautiful cutscenes, dripping with gorgeous visuals, an amazing Square Enix product. However I seem to have a problem... My copy didn't come with the instruction manual, and I cannot for the life of me figure out exactly what I am supposed to be doing.
I've been using the "heart listen" to find new dungeons and I presume that I should just keep doing them in order, leveling up and making new items for my party as I go, but I was disheartened when I reached the end of the first "chapter" and I was informed that my progress was abysmal, so I've resolved to figure out just what I should be doing with my limited time before the end of the world, and I came here to ask what the hell I should be doing.
I'm playing through and it's a really great game, beautiful cutscenes, dripping with gorgeous visuals, an amazing Square Enix product. However I seem to have a problem... My copy didn't come with the instruction manual, and I cannot for the life of me figure out exactly what I am supposed to be doing.
I've been using the "heart listen" to find new dungeons and I presume that I should just keep doing them in order, leveling up and making new items for my party as I go, but I was disheartened when I reached the end of the first "chapter" and I was informed that my progress was abysmal, so I've resolved to figure out just what I should be doing with my limited time before the end of the world, and I came here to ask what the hell I should be doing.
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Buried in the menu where you learn new skills for your character is an option to spend points on traits. You increase your character's 'Hero' level by improving good ones, such as brave, and decreasing ones such as cowardly or self-centered.
For the early chapters, I think you need a hero rating of about 50, and it slowly climbs higher.
Anyway, the best piece of advice is to just google a FAQ, which will have everything and more in it. Honestly, the book it came with is pretty crappy and does a really bad job of explaining the mechanics, so it best to find a FAQ anyway.
PS - Do you know when you push the attack buttons and in what order has a dramatic effect on how much damage your characters do? IE teaming up with certain attacks, and unleashing combos will result in much, much higher damage and can lead to more items and exp being gained in battle.
Everything you do to a particular character effects how they perform in Valhalla. Even the very last accessory has a pretty big impact. So yeah, HARD.
I've been told this game is fantastic, but man, do they ever punish you for exploring.
They give you a timer that counts down every time you explore a new zone, but they give you no direction as to which zone you need to go to next, what you're supposed to accomplish there, or which zones you need to revisit. To further this problem, they leave the old zones open and introduce new ones before you need to go there, so you can often visit a town where no one tells you or gives you anything important, or miss a town where you're supposed to get a critical item.
AND USE THE FREAKING EXP ORB. Use it on new characters and such but don't save the stuff! You get so much it's not even funny. It makes grinding unnecessary.
The hard part is the navigating the dungeons and trying to get the A ending. I recommend a guide for both (in fact, it's almost REQUIRED for the A ending) since figuring them out takes longer than necessary.
But yeah, definitely get the A ending. This game is one of my all-time favorites and makes a great replay from time to time.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
I'd recommend getting the B ending on Normal difficulty so it'll give you a good feel for what to expect out of the game and then do the A ending on Hard difficulty.
Hard difficulty is awesome because you get more characters, more dungeons, and more items and more story as a result.
Hard difficulty is a bitch because it is, well, HARD.
Protip: Lezard Valeth's Tower is going to be the best place to grind per "time period" in-game until something like Chapter 6 or even 7. If you're just looking for "real time invested," there's some decent dungeons where there's a mini-boss part-way in that you can just slay and then teleport out and that's a ton of experience.
But yeah, play the game for the B ending on normal or easy, then replay for the sweet A ending.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
I've recorded most of the A ending scenes anyway, except for the last ones if you're really lazy. :P
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=aroduc+valkyrie
Also, thread needs more Freya.
I have 4 copies on PS1, and of course the PSP version.
I never asked for this!
With a Level 8 in Guts and an Angel Curio or two I think there was only absurdly low percentage chance that you'd actually die when killed.
In fact, later bosses demanded such a setup since they'd kill your entire party outright with every attack.
"I killed you!"
"No you didn't!"
Or the hamsters.
I never asked for this!
If you going for the A ending, the story appears to go away during the early/middle portion of the game while you're still building up einherjar. But then it comes back in full force later.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
There are even speed runs of the game which take down the B ending boss in under 30 minutes of play. :P
Basically, if you want to win bonus points with Odin and the crew, just send up two folks every chapter. The end. Make sure that they've got as much hero points as you can milk out of them and send 'em on up. Equipment's not as important as level and Hero Points.
As far as worrying about running out of time, just save at the beginning of a chapter and visit all the towns you feel like visiting, and you'll see which ones are useless and which ones aren't, so then you just reload and visit the critical story towns.
Other than that, just have fun and level up only the folks that you really, really like, and moderately train the goons you're going to send up to Valhalla.
I really liked Jun and Suo (when he came; Arngrim before then), and for a caster I just went with Mystina after you get her halfway through.
Lenneth with a bow is pretty cool too.
Oh, and your hits get more powerful as the combo hit counter goes up, so start your super combos with something with a lot of moves (like Jun's 36-hit super or whatever it was) then end with a big low-hit move (like a single-hit spell or the Nibelung Valesti).
Other than that, get a feel for milking as many crystals as you can out of every enemy -- they help and they help HARD.
This isn't totally correct. Equipment is important and the better you have, the better the evaluation of the hero is. In addition, some of the more esoteric requests Freya makes (must be a swimmer) you can equip people with the seemingly useless accessories that you can buy to give them bonuses to that for those chapters. You really only need to send up one person a chapter, but the more the merrier.
I imagine what happened is that he kept a lot of the artifacts and forgot to transfer someone, so his evaluation was negative overall and Freya was pissed.
But yes, Lenneth with a bow is nearly twice as strong as Lenneth with a sword. So, uh, keep her with a bow.
Every time I play through, I realize more and more that besides Arngrim and Lenneth, pretty much all the characters are comparable. Just choose whose personalities you like, and they tend to do just about as well as the other characters. Except if you're playing hard, and you get some tasty extra characters in the gate.
Playing through Valkyrie Profile 2 now only makes me want to play this game more.
but I did not keep a single artifact!
Take a look.
It's buried somewhere in the interface menus. I can't tell you where. Play around a bit. Maybe somebody else could help.
Seriously, fucking retarded.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
What towns do you need to go to? When you use your meditation and it shows you a story and town to go to, you usually get a character. Always go back to that town right after you recruit them. Look for the screen where they spent most of their time, or their house, and investigate. Usually you'll find a special item. Arngrim has a sword, Bellanus has some sort of pendant, Janus has a special crossbow, etc.
Half of the fun in this game is the special attacks. The sound test can amuse me for quite a while. Also playing them for your friends, so you can tell them who all the random dubbed anime voices they are. Prettymuch every dubbed 90's anime voice is in this game.
Ash is even someone in a random cutscene. Jessie is half the girls in the game. James is also hanging out, along with Gary. I believe *one* of Zelgadis' voices is in the game. The blonde princess Jelanda is played by...the blonde princes from Slayers Next. Gohan is the equally wimpy first archer, which is quite funny, because most of his quotes are about how everyone else is so powerful and he feels weak and useless. Which he is.
Also, half of the voices are also in Star Ocean 2. I could go on and on...I love the quotes from this game. I tend to randomly mutter them to myself, or subject my friends to them. My favorite is probably Suo, because he just yells out EVERYTHING.
I really wish they had the option for Japanese voices with English subtitles. Sorta like Soul Calibur for the Dreamcast where the Japanese voices were insanely awesome when they yelled stuff.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
Horrible, horrible dub actors.
Plus, some of the quotes were changed slightly in VP. It's in the translation quote FAQ. Originally, Lenneth's attack was "I will destroy your soul." But, the word for 'engrave' is one letter off 'destroy.' So they mistranslated it, but it ended up sounding pretty cool.
Ougi roughly translates to 'Secret Skill.' For Suo's, I know that 'hojin' is 'ice' or something similar, but the FAQ doesn't translate the other word. I just know that one because an ice character in a fighting game yells it out. Jun's means something like, "The limitless art of the flashing blade. Thousand slash attack." Rough approximation from that FAQ and the one in Thrash that translates some fighting game move names.
...man I love this game.
You mean to tell me this this the whole game? Christ! I thought it was your typical JRPG! I was waiting for the "tutorial" to stop so I could start walking around towns and talk to people and stuff.
>_<
But yeah, the opening hours are absolutely terrible to go through. Makes it a difficult thing to get past when convincing one's self to do a replay.
They really aren't, and some (Badrach) are completely situational. Almost all of the mages are completely identical, except for Mystina and the Hard Mode/Seraphic Gate ones. There are five different growth rates though. Great Sword users (which doesn't include Gray for some reason), Light Sword Users, Spear Users, Bow Users, and the Mages. Great Sword people have the best growth rate, but their PWS attacks tend to have pissantly awful multipliers. Gray's attacks especially are the worst around. The spear users have the best multipliers (outside from the Seraphic Gate stuff), and the bow users are strictly situational. Janus' 3 poisons for example, Llewyn's 3 breaks guards, and Badrach is a gem generating machine if played right. Of the light sword users Belenus easily is the best and has the best multiplier for his PWS, but Lucian's 3 is glitched and has some weird properties that it shouldn't have, so he's pretty overpowered as well.
As for the dub voices, it's from a group of workers at 4Kids. They worked together to do all the Slayers stuff, then got scarfed up to do Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh and that's a successful career unto itself.
Typically my party will be Lenneth (bow), Arngrim, a spearman or light swordsman, and the mage of the current chapter. Mages are pretty easy to switch out with each other. It all comes down to who doesn't annoy me the most.
Also, Belenus is awesome. Unfortunately he's got such a high hero value (which makes sense because of his scene) that the game tempts you to send him up in the first chapter, which I may or may not do. He's one of the few good light swordsmen besides Valkyrie, but she should be using a bow. I don't send up any spearmen because there's only a few to begin with. Send up all the mages you want though.
Did you know that the same guy who voices Arngrim also voices Lezard? That's pretty wack.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
Here's the most amazing walkthrough for this game - it tells you EVERYTHING you need to know for full completion and more, and it's all done in videos:
http://hosted.filefront.com/triAceFanboy/1694873
I tend to send up Bel in chapter 2 or 3 just because I tend to use him a bunch when I get him and his attacks are just too simplistic for me to have any fun with him. He's still the best light swordsman behind Lenneth and arguably Lucian (though without Lucian's absurd 3, there's no contest), but he's basically just a weaker version of Lenneth's sword version right down to the attacks. Lawfer really does have the best multipliers in the game even for regular attacks since his 3 doesn't have a reduction multiplier applied, which makes it usually a stronger attack than even glitchy Lucian 3, glitchiness notwithstanding.
I'm pretty sure I've corrected most of it. It's internal (and external for that matter) documentation is pretty poor so a lot of it has been figured out and crunched to death by the crazy Japanese folks who seem to live for this sort of thing.