Happy holidays, everyone! I hope everyone is having a great time. I’ve been trying to play quite a few games over the holidays so far as I recommended in my previous column, but I happen to be battling the flu which makes things a bit more difficult. If I were feeling better, I might have challenged Save State columnist Vincent Mahoney with a special rhyming holiday column of my own like he did for his own holiday column, but my brain is not really functioning at peak capacity right now. So, because I am feeling a bit like living death, I wanted to talk about a game that I was able to play that featured it heavily in its story.

Valkyrie Elysium was a title I had wanted to play since a friend of mine got a demo of it last year. The graphics looked amazing, and I was genuinely curious about it and its lore. At the time, I did not know this was an installment in the long running Valkyrie Profile series. I must also confess that I have never played a Valkyrie Profile title, so I have no biases on how Valkyrie Elysium compares to other ones in the series.

Valkyrie Elysium starts out with a rather traditional narration about different ancient Norse prophecies, you know, like gods, Ragnarok, and that type of stuff. Then it goes into the tutorial after it mentions that Odin created a Valkyrie with the last of his power, the only being strong enough to prevent the end of the world. Going in, I honestly kind of expected a more traditional JRPG type of experience. Instead, Valkyrie Elysium is extremely unique. I don’t even really know how to describe it. Maybe like a sexy version of Darksiders? Honestly, it harkened back to the older Devil May Cry series with intense combat and plenty of action.

But what I liked most about Valkyrie Elysium is the characters. You get four human spirits (called Einherjar) that help provide elemental backup for your Valkyrie, and they have a lot of character. As the chapters go on, you see the Valkyrie soften up around them and really get to know the Einherjar, while Odin starts to get a lot meaner. It was interesting to see actual characterization as I played.

I also loved some of the banter after side quests. For example, at one point two of the Einherjar are talking, and the one spirit wants to know what happened to her homeland after she died. Because the other spirits died after her, they were able to fill in the historical blank spots for her. For the world being pretty empty, that kind of characterization helped to breathe some life into it.

All of this made my holiday gaming time pretty fun. There were a couple downsides, however. As much work as the dialogue does to try to make the story lifelike, the rest of the story goes out of its way to make it stilted. The combat also feels very bland or paint by numbers. The enemy designs don’t change very much from area to area and half the time there are so many particle effects I can’t see what’s happening. Gods help you if you missed a collectible flower needed to get the so-called true ending too because you will have to redo the entire story chapter to try and find it.

Honestly, Steam reviews have made the last point kind of mixed. I am going into Valkyrie Elysium’s last two chapters now as it approaches New Year’s Eve.  I have completed every side quest and found every collectible, and I’m only about twenty-two hours into it. In theory if you are just trying to get to the end, I bet you could do it in about ten hours. I got Valkyrie Elysium very cheap, but if I paid full retail for a twelve or so-hour experience I would be kind of upset.

So, even though I am pretty ill, I still have managed to get some fun playing time in over the holiday.

If you still have some free time before you have to go back to the real world, maybe you can do the same thing, even if it’s with older titles that you can probably get on Steam for a big discount.