Ok, so last Friday I was lazing around and decided to check out the playstation store for a demo or something to keep me busy for an hour or two. Lo and behold, buried under a slew of FIFA content and the heavy weight of the God of War 3 demo was a small gem, a diamond in the rough if you will. There was Valkyria Chronicles DLC. Why was I not informed of this?!? I mean I didn’t hear about this anywhere! This is big news people! Sure the playstation network is kinda broke at the moment, and sure there was only about a 24 hour window to download it before it broke, and sure even if you did download it whatever is going on with the PS3s has deleted it now, but those three perfectly valid reasons are no excuse, you have all disappointed me. I suppose I’ll have to review the feckin’ thing as well.................*sigh*....... fine, Jesus I have to do everything around here.



Handys kinda sorta definitive review of the third Valkyria Chronicles DLC: Challenges of the Edy Detatchment. (working title).


Ok, so the DLC is 3.99 and contains six new skirmish missions, five that are specialised for the each different classes and one that requires all their skills. Each mission reuses a map from the main game but the objectives are different and things are changed around enough that it still feels fresh. Every mission is presented as a challenge from each member of the Edy detachment (except Lynn, because nobody cares about her), before every mission you’re briefed by a member of the class (except Lynn, because she’s boring) and afterwards they’ll give you a different response depending on your score (except Lynn, because she’s just a token Darcsen). This brings me to my main complaint about the DLC – no English voice acting. The fact that I can’t listen to John DiMaggio (the voice of Bender, Marcus Fenix, and the wonderfully camp Jann) give out orders laden with more sexual innuendo than a hooker in a meat packing factory is a damn shame, but still we press on.


Susie’s mission.

Susie, whose habit of fainting in the anime seems to have bled back into the game, challenges the player to clear out a huge area of woodland with plenty of places to hide using a single scout, thankfully there is a base so reinforcements can be called. This one is all about using the scouts, well, scouting abilities to find the enemy and hopefully take them out before they take you out. I got an A rank on this one and was treated to a victory faint by Susie – it’s still not funny.



Jann’s misson.

Jann is camp. Really camp. He’s camper than Campy McCamp the camper from Campton camping in a game of Modern Warfare. His mission’s about a monstrous amount of tanks and stuff but rather than talk about that, I’d just like to fill this part with quotes from Jann himself.

“Are you ready for a challenge from the butchest gal in Gallia?”
“Our lances are long and hard and we know how to use them.”
“Seeing this many tanks lined up on front of me waiting to fire off, I feel so worked up I might burst.”
“You got a C? Are making sure to go around from the rear? The tanks I mean, oh you’re terrible.”

There was a lot more of this but the destruction of the worlds PS3s (probably by Microsoft spies) has garnered the DLC inaccessible at the time of writing. I don’t know if I find Jann offensive or endearing but I’m going to let him away with it because the game has other gay and bisexual characters that aren’t massive stereotypes.


Marina’s mission.

Marina’s mission may have been my favourite of the bunch. She tasks you with using two snipers to protect a small isolated area dotted with sniper towers while preventing the enemy from reaching their base on the other side of a ravine, and to do it quickly because she just saw a cute fox and wants to pet it. It was simple, fun, and the enemies were tricky. I pride myself on my sniping skills (in the game where people stand still) and managed to get an A rank, prompting Marina to blush because the fox should still be nearby, hinting that she may in fact have a soul after all.


Possibly alive inside.

Homer’s mission.

Keeping to his masochistic personality, Homer’s challenge can get an engineer killed at any moment. The objective here is to get Welkin’s tank from one corner of the map to the other, the catch is that his treads are damaged and he can’t move without engineer support, and the engineers are on the other side of the map, and there’s about fifty solders between you, and engineers aren’t great fighters, and there’s land mines, and tanks.........I hate you Homer.


Edy’s mission.

Hey! Didn’t get enough of Edy acting like a bitch in the first batch of DLC? Well you’re in luck! The bitch is literally back for this mission. You’re tasked with clearing out an area of all enemies with your shock troopers, the catch here is that the enemies will be trying to escape the map as well as there being a constant stream of reinforcements coming in. You’ll have to balance offence to clear them out while defending the exits because if even one escapes its mission failed. I did not strike a balance and got a low rank, Edy was a bitch about it, this did not come as a surprise.


I’m pretty sure that’s Japanese for “Total Bitch”.

Tank mission.

The final mission had you completely surrounded by enemies and gives you the job of getting Welkin’s tank to a certain point on the map. The problem is that the map is packed with obstacles, landmines, snipers, lancers, blocked paths, mortars, gatling guns, you name it. The point is to force you to use every unit to support the tanks journey, and in this it succeeds, you find yourself sniping threats, clearing blocks with lancers, disarming mines, and taking on enemy troops all at once. It actually feels like something like this should have been the final mission of the story mode, using everything you’ve learned up to that point in tandem, instead of what we got, which was still good gameplay wise but not what I expected.

At the end of the day if you like Valkyria Chronicles you’ll like this, if you don’t like Valkyria Chronicles that means you didn’t play it and that means we have a problem. I’ll forgive you if you pick it up, its dirt cheap and one of the best games of the last decade......Chad said so. The low points include the lack of a story and no voice acting for what little talking there is, the high points include no voice acting for Edy.........did I mention she’s a bitch?


7 out of 12 hats.