Valthirian Arc : Daybreak

Valthirian Arc is one of those rare games that has achieved exactly everything that it meant to do, but somehow still been wanting. Don't get me wrong. VA is a great game, both in terms of polish and execution. It manages the fine balance between interactivity and simulation that a lot of strategy/resource management games have struggled with without much trouble, and it revolves around a core premise that's both fun and just different enough to be eye-catching. However, after a certain point, the gameplay in VA turns to grind and the challenge becomes somewhat trivial. This dampens the experience, reducing what should be pivotal decisions to rapid clicks, and highlighting combat instead of the circumstances that surround it. This isn't bad, per se, but it does feel like it could be even better. Without a central plot to draw the player along, Valthirian Arc is just clever, fun, and a great way to spend an hour or two, when instead it could be more.





VA is a strategy/resource management game centered around the running of a for-profit school of witchcraft and wizardry. The player takes the role of the school's principal: enrolling new students, graduating upperclassmen, organizing outings, and supervising tournaments. The interface is simple and easily navigable, without sacrificing interactivity. There are stats to keep track of, various ways to train your students (allocating their combat exp or your gold, accordingly,) competitions to enter or quests to take, as well as an ever-increasing monthly deadline to keep ahead of. As far as premises go, this is solid, and the excellent artwork and visual design result in a great-looking product.



Gameplay in VA is divided into two distinct sections. There's the planning stage, where--as the principal of the academy--you supervise your students, manage your budget, and decide which optional activities you'd like your students to undertake. Quests can range from simple skill checks to monster-stomping, and it's entirely possible to play only one or the other if you so choose. The second phase of the game only happens if you chose the monster-stomping, and lets you take a break from your carefully organized menus and follow a party of adventurers out into the fields to murder adorable critters in a very Ultima Online sort of fashion. Combat is loosely interactive, with you telling your party of adventurers generally where to go and sometimes activating professorial field effects from on high. Your little minions fight their own battles, sometimes with extremely poor decision-making abilities, but generally do the AI proud. There are one or two little exploits here (enemies with only a physical attack can be kited into the scenery, stuck there, and then picked off at leisure while they try endlessly to clamber over the rock they've somehow lodged themselves on,) but the gameplay is generally smooth.



Appropriate, but generally not note-worthy. It all feels console-high-fantasy, which is certainly fitting, but none of it seems like the sort of thing I would download and listen to again.



VA is nothing if not an incredibly pretty game. The character portraits are gorgeous (and there are a lot of them, owing to the wide variety of classes that your students can become,) and the spriting and background design is just as good. Even the enemy sprites, who you mostly see as ambling mobs of aggro, are well animated and nice to look at. To the absolute credit of the design team, there is not a single screen in VA that does not look wonderful.



VA is deliberately story-lite, and for me, this is a complaint. For a project like this, one where the central challenge is keeping your numbers ahead of the game's numbers, a plot would give the player something to sink their teeth into. It would add a little emotional kick to the otherwise mathematical goal of making money and fame. Rather than "do these tasks so you can remain as headmaster so you can do these tasks so you can remain as headmaster," something like "do these tasks so you can remain as headmaster because you're the only financial support for your foppish prince brother and also you're hoping to date the dean and meanwhile your kingdom is going to war" wouldn't just turn the numbers into meaningful personal decisions, it would give the game a definable end-goal.