3/5 ★ – nate_mckeever's review of Valkyrie Elysium.

Full disclosure: I wanted to like this game way more than I actually did, but that doesn’t mean I hated it; it’s just kinda underwhelming. I loved Valkyrie Profile and the demo for Elysium was really promising, it’s just that the full game didn’t deliver. All that being said, I liked my time with the game, but that’s all the further it went. The combat and gameplay is actually pretty great aside from the occasional bad camera during fights, but almost everything else is… meh at best. The story is weird and barely coherent with some major pacing issues and holes. Visually it’s fine, but doesn’t really do anything exciting. Sound design is okay, but again, not memorable. The environments are kinda cool, but there’s zero meaningful exploration; so yeah. Oddly enough, while I was playing this game, I kept thinking how it kinda reminded me of Nier Automata. Both of those worlds are barren, empty, post-apocalyptic. The big difference is that the emptiness in Nier is used to great effect, the emptiness in VE just feels… empty. The tl;dr is that the game is underbaked. While I was playing it I constantly felt like with a little more time to tighten up the narrative and maybe flesh out the environments, they could’ve had something really special. Instead, we got what we got. Which is fine. It’s functional. And kinda enjoyable. But not much more than that.