Hello, readers! (please for forgive me for recycling the title!)
I'm back with another game made by Watermark studios (makers of Blacksword Chronicles and an interesting experiment I've recently reviewed, Shinobi), a game that was one of the finalists in the IGMC 2017 contest (so two years after Blacksword Chronicles, and it's interesting noting that it tied with another game I reviewed some time ago, Icebound, at the 15th place): Einherjar! This is a term that I've already learned when playing and reviewing Balmung Cycle, a "Einherjar" is a dead warrior that has reached Valhalla, but can be sent to Earth to perform missions, as we can see.

The game starts in media res with a character, Arah, running inside a forest while pursued by many enemies. In the end she's forced to battle (time for a little tutorial!), and outnumbered she summons Achilles (yes, the hero of the Trojan War) but the outcome is never showed because the scene ends and now we're... inside an american highschool of the 21th century! Here we meet the protagonist of the story, Brooke.
Now, this girl is an odd protagonist since Brooke is the classic blonde popular mean girl seen in countless school movies, but fortunately she's not a mono-dimensional character: she has not a good situation at home and when later she's seto to her aunt Hilda's manor, she discovers her true powers: the powers of a Valkyria!

Yes, because like her aunt Hilda, Brooke is one of these people able to summon the dead spirits in battle, anyway as we saw in the prologue the Valkyries are hunted by the forces of darkness (the Ragnarok) and for this reason Brooke has to learn the art of summoning. Like a sort of Professor Oak, Hilda offers one of her pokem... ehm souls (or einherjar). The choice is between Halfdan the Viking, Makeda the Priestress or Atalanta the Huntress, each one with different abilities.


Uhm you should be a terrible Valkyrie if you can summon only harmless people in battle! Poor souls!

Obviously this is just the beginning, and soon Brooke will be able to find and summon new souls of characters like Sinbad, Billy the Kid and D'Artagnan that can assist her in battle, using the Seidhr power "pull" to extract soul shards from the undead Lost Souls (you can get the three characters previously mentioned using repectively this power on a sailor, an outlaw and a musketeer, for example)
The Seidhr power is something that only the Valkyries like Hilda and Brooke posses beside a supporting abilities, and in the end they act as a commander/supporter of the spirits, the Einherjar that are the real combatants in the party of four.

The Einherjar can also be improved and tranformed in new types, getting an elemental resistance or a new skill or an improved attribute... by the way they restart from level 1. An important thing to note is that, like in Pokemon (again!) there are three magical and three physical damage types, and they work as rock-paper-scissor, so it's alwaysa good idea to exploit enemies' weaknesses, of course! But the best strategy consists in making some experimentation to find out the devastating party combos that can turn a difficul battle into a joke (including the final boss!).

Visually the game uses RTPs and the Character Generetor for Mv to make the various characters and facesets. And the result is pretty good, I liked the maps, of this game, the locations are well designed and there is a good quantity of different characters between npcs, spirits and opponents. Music is also pretty good in my opinion, and I especially liked the soundtrack during battles.

Concerning the story, this is just a single chapters that leaves the story open for more adventures, but being an event game (like other games of the IGMC 2017 contest such as Icebount), that's pretty much ok! Writing is good, and nice idea creating a flawed protagonist, unlike the usually kind hearted orphans, saints and do-gooder farmboys seen in too many games.


OUCHIE! Outlaw versus outlaw. These may be Lost Souls but they can shoot pretty well!

Final Verdict
Einherjar for being a game made for a contest, is pretty good, it still has some flaws like a wild difficulty balance (a LOT depends from your party composition and combos) and some less interesting aspects like some unoriginal assets, by the way the story is interesting and while the combat system doesn't add a lot to the default rpgmaker battles you may have played before, it stills adds a couple of interesting gimmicks. I'm also a bit sad that the story isn't longer and wasn't followed by a sequel (Einherjar is not directly connected to Valkyrie, another game from Watermark Studio but set in ). While not my favourite game from Watermark, I liked it for many reasons, and it's a little scenario that I would not have minded if it was also expanded with further episodes or spin-offs.