Valthirian Arc : Daybreak

Here we have a game that is unique in a couple of ways. It is a SIM game, which is pretty rare on RMN, and it is a flash game, which is almost unheard of. What does such a unique game have to offer?

In Valthirian Arc you take on the role of a Principal at an academy, teach students in the arts of combat and magic. Your goal is to teach your students, help them grow stronger, see them to graduation, and make a name for yourself. You accomplish this by sending your students into the field to help the nearby townspeople. You are constantly being monitored by a King who threatens to punish you if you do not meet his expectations.

Balance: 2.5/5:
This aspect of the game was incredibly difficult to rate so I will try to go into great detail here. Basically, the core of the gameplay is an Action Battle System in which you lead party of four students around a battlefield attacking enemies. You cannot issue individual orders to a specific student, they all attack in tandem, though you can choose which student is “on-point,” meaning they’ll take more hits, generally. Finally, periodically you can perform an “intervention” to briefly endow your students with special abilities, ranging from enhanced HP regeneration to increased attack rate.

The problem with the gameplay is there’s no variety. There are only a handful of monster types in the game of varying difficulty. All you really do is click on a monster to tell your students to attack it. You’ll know right away if a monster is too tough for you, and if they’re not too tough then they tend to be no real challenge. Essentially, you’ll know if you’re going to win most fights in the first minute, and the remaining time spent hunting down other monsters on the map has no real tension. The intervention is rarely game-changing, and charges regardless of what you’re doing. You could hide in a corner until it is charged if you wanted to, as enemies are not very aggressive.

There’s also no real way to influence your students’ growth in any meaningful way. You cannot influence how they level, or even what class they want to be. You can’t teach them new skills or give them new equipment, though you can pay gold to give them a chance to level up their attack strength (usually a high chance, 90%, though there’s no way to influence this either except through the student’s level.)

This isn’t to say the game can’t be fun. While this system has no real strengths, there’s nothing wrong with it. It can be enjoyable to watch your students grow and level up and become stronger. If you’re the sentimental type and become attached to your students, however, this can lead to a whole new host of problems.

Level Design 3/5:
This may be the longest individual section of any review I will ever write, so get comfortable.

The graphics in the game are quite stunning. Everything is vibrant and colorful and looks incredibly professional. Even the interface and menu systems are very pretty, which is good because you’ll be spending a lot of time sorting through the menus. The game has two “modes” as it were. In the Menu, you can level up your students, their weapons, change their class, pick your active party, or choose what students you want to hire, or which you want to “graduate.” (more on this later) In battle mode you’ll navigate your students around a wide board looking for enemies to kill. The maps are once again very pretty but there isn’t much to say about them, they’re all the same type of terrain, you never enter any kinds of new areas such as forests or the like. The most obvious flaw in this mode is the pathfinding, your characters can’t distinguish impassable tiles such as water from others, so they’ll try to move through these tiles instead of around them. Nothing that can’t be solved by manually clicking around the object manually, but it can still be annoying. More annoying is that your students sometimes get hung-up on obstacles and get stuck, separating your party (anyone who’s played secret of Mana knows exactly what I’m talking about) Fortunately, you have a function that can instantly teleport all your students to your lead character, so it seems the developers were at least aware of the problem and tried to do something about it.

Now, here’s where things start to go downhill.

The game takes place in a weekly format. Each week you can level up your students and send them on one mission, of which there are several types. Hunting missions allow you to go kill monsters for experience. Errands are carried out independent of your input, based on your students’ stats, similar to the missions in Final Fantasy Tactics. These errands give less experience but also let you earn gold. Every two months you can participate in a tournament to test your students skills against powerful opponents and earn prestige for your school. Your goal is to accumulate fame for your school by graduating talented students (the higher level, the better), or winning tournaments. Failure to achieve a certain level of fame at the end of each four week period leads to penalties in your gold intake. Repeated failures have worse consequences. The problem here is that you’re being pulled in two directions. The fame quota for each month goes up at a staggering rate, requiring you to graduate multiple students in the course of four weeks to keep up with it. There isn’t enough time to train most students even to level 10 in four weeks, especially since you can only train four students at a time. Ultimately, you’ll be forced to either graduate your most powerful students to keep up with the demand or graduate a handful of weak ones you spent the whole month working on. This quickly leads to stagnation; you’ll no longer feel like you’re progressing, you’re just trying to keep up with the demand, selling out your students like livestock to sate the tyrannical king. Also, winning tournaments requires very powerful students, meaning that getting the fame from those tournaments is almost impossible because of the fame demands that have forced you to send off your most powerful fighters.



These problems are compounded by the fact that the missions available every week are random, and their difficulty varies widely. You might have only difficult missions available for very weak students, or only easy ones for powerful students. Finally, on Hunting missions there is a random chance of encountering a being known as “The Apprentice.” Who this guy is or where he came from is never explained, but he really hates your guts. He also happens to be powerful enough that he will annihilate anything but a full band of legendary heroes with a thought. Running into him is a death sentence unless you have an extremely powerful party, and can cost you the badly needed learning points you needed to fulfill your fame quota for the month.

Basically, many parts of the game that would be fun are spoiled by an unreasonably high fame demand each month. Lowering the amount required each month would allow the player more leeway to play the game instead of being caught in a downward spiral of trying to meet unreasonable demands. While you should have to graduate all your students eventually, I quickly found myself in a pattern of sending off students as fast as I could admit them, thus robbing me of any opportunity to actually let the students grow or develop, which was the most fun part of the game. The concept behind this system is really great, it is just the implementation that is off, weakening everything.

Characters 2.5/5:
There’s really only one character in the game to speak of, Eve, an assistant who monitors your progress and offers you (completely optional) tutorials on the various game functions. However, the stars of the game are, of course, your students.

In general, male students are physically-oriented attackers, and female students are magically oriented. Each gender starts as a fairly basic student that can evolve into one of three classes each. Upon reaching level 10, the students will decide for themselves what class they’d like to be. Male students start as the apprentice which has a basic melee attack, but can evolve into the gunslinger which attacks at range, the dragoon which can block damage and has very high HP, or the Duelist which is adept at dealing high damage. Females start as the mana scholar with a basic ranged attack, but can become the Magilancer which fights melee and can use her mana as a shield, the Sorceress which deals high magical damage, or the Mirage Caster who can heal her allies. So there’s some variety in what your students can do.

The most interesting aspect of this is that you do not choose your students’ classes. They choose for themselves. While it can be annoying if you would prefer they evolve into another class, this more than anything drives home the fact that your students are individuals. Moreover, they are at a school. Choosing their class is deciding their future. It’s really a pretty clever touch. And really, the classes aren’t different enough that one has any real advantages over another.



Unfortunately, due to the demands of a certain despotic monarch, you’ll ultimately be forced to send off even your most favored students, which can be quite hard if you’ve grown attached to any of them. If you really view this from the viewpoint of a student and teacher parting, it can become especially poignant.Truly, the life of a teacher is a hard one…

Story 2.5/5:
There…. Really isn’t much of a story going on besides you sacrificing your students en masse upon the altar of the King’s greed. You’ll hear about festivals and rituals going on in the nearby town, monster incursions you’ll need to deal with, a school you apparently have a rivalry with, and even some sort of divine war your students can fight in. And also there's apparently a nigh-omnipotent lunatic wandering the world whose sole purpose seems to be to hunt down your helpless students. But none of this is developed or explored in any way. I really wanted to know more about some of these things, which is a plus, but narrative wasn’t a focus in this game.

Music and Sound 3/5:
The music was entirely original as far as I could tell, and quite fitting. You’ll be hearing the same few songs a lot, so it is a good thing that they don’t get dull or repetitive. The game also has voice acting which I found surprisingly tolerable, but if such things annoy you, you’ll be pleased to know that options exist to turn them off if you desire.

Overall 3/5:
You might be surprised after that diatribe I went on for two pages up there that I am giving this game a fairly positive score. But the game’s concept and ideas give it a unique kind of flair that is rare in this community, and its problems, while numerous, are mostly very fixable. Furthermore, the game was designed for flash, meaning its purpose was to be entertaining for but a few moments, and it does deliver on that front. Despite the various problems I mentioned, I still enjoyed the game a lot. However, its entertainment value wears thin after a while, once it becomes repetitive and it becomes clear that new content or challenges ever arise for you to face. Still, if you’re looking for something new or different, there are many worse ways to spend a few minutes.