Spoilers ahead for both the show and second game.

Presentation

From what little of the PS3 game I’ve managed to gather from the trailers, they seem to have made a great adaptation of the game. If the sequel was anything like the first, it seems they’ve brought in all the huge roster of characters available from the game but don’t give them much screen time. I guess that’s for the best considering how the character development goes mainly towards the protagonists Welkin and Alicia whenever there’s a break from battle. That said, even the side characters are given quite a number of lines in the game during side quests though.

I liked how they kept the game music and pencil lines. Mechanical and other props aren’t overly sci-fi either in terms of setting. I think this is better presented than Persona Trinity Soul which means perhaps A1 Pictures are starting to get better at their work although the animation during action scenes towards the end of the show dropped to a point where it was like watching a slideshow of rough sketches.

After watching all the trailers from the Japanese site, I noticed they fixed the Engrish “Atlantic Ocean Federal Organisation” and “East Europe Empire Union” to what it currently is ^^;

Voice acting wise, I think they’re casting Midorikawa too much because he plays a villain in both games and I can recognise it’s his Persona 3, Akihiko voice instantly. Fukuyama as Maximilian on the other hand isn’t too bad. He still reminds me of Lelouch from Code Geass but he only has serious lines this time instead of the fun crazy antics he might have had at Ashford Academy. I think he’s better suited to villain roles instead of a role in a show like Akikan.

Also interesting to note Alicia’s voice actor Marina Inoue played a small role in Persona 3 Portable as the new Heroine too.

I enjoyed this show because the interaction between the characters is good. Some you can actually relate to in modern day life – Discrimination, questions of loyalty, friendship, loss etc. Then it’s all neatly wrapped up with an epic war going on, looking at how everyone is affected by it and with a little romance squeezed in so there’s something for everyone. Also, one of the rare shows where the male protagonist isn’t portrayed with a harem and sensual fan service is kept to a fair minimum.

There are tense and tragic moments but not to the point where the characters act as if they’re completely invincible. I know how important it is to the Japanese not to give up but really – It gets a little ridiculous in the shows sometimes. It’s also not simply about two sides of good and evil since we see there are corrupt, selfish leaders on both sides of the force that make the situation far worse than it has to be.

Story Continuation

If the shows any indication of her original character, Alicia has changed quite a bit after she’s grown older in the second game. In the show she’s a lot more lively and quick tempered whereas in the sequel, she seems to be a lot more settled. I guess it might have something to do with her happy marriage to Welkin and their unborn baby.

So Alicia was an orphan who was adopted by the bakers and wears that scarve around her hair because it gets in the way of baking bread. She keeps it on because she doesn’t want to forget how she was brought up but… That still doesn’t explain the mini skirt uniforms for the female troops. Well, that’s Anime for you – Has to be fun and fictional.

On the other hand, Welkin hasn’t changed. Still enjoying studying and research! So his father was a war hero, he’s into wildlife and had his best friend Faldio as his rival before he managed to get Alicia’s hand in marriage. Fun ^^;

And Cordelia was only a pawn with a wig and very odd looking hat until the end of the show.

Interesting to learn the history about Valkyrians and Darcsens is fake and that the Valkyrians were the true invaders who wrote themselves down as heroes.

Then we have a flying pig for a cute mascot while in the second game, it’s a bird. Can’t miss out on those cute mascots for any shows now can we? Is this pig really in the game?

As I mentioned at the start, I’m glad to see the story in the sequel picks up from the first game. But in the end, the showdown is still linked to the villains wanting the power of the Valkyrians through science.

Where Next?

If they continue expanding the on the VC universe, I wonder how many more generations or battles will Gallia be caught up in the conflict between the Imperial Alliance and the Atlantic Federation? Or better question – How many titles is Sega planning to create for this series?

They’ve already shown the Imperial invading Gallia for their Ragnite resources in the first game while in the second, a civil war breaks out in Gallia. What can happen next…? I really can’t see Sega bringing Welkin and Alicia’s unborn child into the series any time soon.

Maybe they’ll turn the series into a trilogy and deal with the Federation? They still have the Artificial Valkyria scientist Clementia Forster on the loose after all so maybe she’ll ends up being successful in embedding Ragnite into humans to give them Valkyrian powers for the enemy. Then the Darcsens finally decide to fight back somehow and unites.

Or maybe they’ll go down the old “ancient evil re-awakens” kind of scenario? Not all the details have been spilled about the history between the Valkyrians and Darcsens yet after all and nothing was mentioned about the whole re-written history in the second game. They still portray the Valkyrians in good light mostly but then again, Maximilian never revealed it to anyone before his demise in the first game.

Plenty of ways the VC universe can branch out I guess but if they go with the human experiment route or overly used ancient evil, I think Sega will ruin the little history and details it’s set up so far.

Thoughts

In any case, lets hope any third VC title Sega has planned isn’t on the PS3 again. Still not enough games to make me buy one although Valkyria Chronicles is really tempting… If Atlus’ Persona 5 ends up on the PS3, that will probably make the final push for me. Well, providing they don’t just take P3’s system and add in few little changes like they did with P4 ^^;

Other PS3 titles being considered but not entirely compelled to pick up are Heavy Rain, End of Eternity and Nier Replicant… Maybe FFXIII too although I’ve heard a lot of bad things about it.

It looks as if it won’t be simply a port of the Wii version either…

• The home town of “Yukumo” has a greater Far East atmosphere (mostly Japanese).
• You can now take two Felynes with you in single player mode.
• There’s a new monster resembling a bear.
• New environments.

Seems Capcom’s Group CEO, Kazuo Hirai’s 16 year old son is quite a fan of the game too and has been asking him when a new game was going to come out!

Looks like I might end up playing the game again although the number of people using Xlink Kai to play online will probably have decreased now that the PS3 officially supports online play for the PSP.

Well, it’s officially revealed now but unfortunately, teachers and students who purchase the software at a discount price over the next few months won’t be eligible. Shame.

Otherwise, if you’re paying the full price which can be range between an RRP of £110 – £600, you are eligible for a free download if you activate the software between now and 30th September.

I’ve tried to keep all the technical details to a minimum as best as I could and highlighted the key details that should help you understand why you might want to invest in some more expensive equipment. Any audio enthusiasts who read this and would like to make some comments, feel free to enlighten me if anything doesn’t read right.

Three things contribute to the sound quality of your music…

1. The source of the music.
2. The quality of your listening equipment e.g. earphones, headphones or speakers.
3. The quality of the output signal from your music player.

Source of the Music

These days, most people listen to digital music for various reasons mainly for conveniency so that you don’ t have to carry lots of CDs around with you. Such digital music files come in two forms – Lossy and lossless.

Most of you will most likely be listening to lossy music which come in the form of (but not limited to) MP3 and AAC files.

Lossy Music Files

MP3s are probably the earliest form of digital music around and was designed to keep file sizes to a minimum back in the days when USB memory chips were at a premium and people were still using floppy disks at offices, university or college to store files.

However, in order compress files a compromise had to be made hence why it’s called “lossy”. MP3s work by using a set of rules to strip out all the sound frequencies that are outside of the human hearing range i.e. anything lower than 20Hz or greater than 20,000Hz.

This automated process when converting CDs to MP3s means that the sounds removed aren’t always the ones we can’t hear. Furthermore, once the forementioned sounds are removed, the remaining sounds are packed together and much like JPEG image files, large similar areas of sounds are replaced with a single average pattern to compress the files even further, resulting in even more sound loss – Especially at the lower 128kbps MP3s.

Lossless Music Files

With microchips becoming ever cheaper and large 32GB USB drives the size of a coin available these days, it’s only natural people made use of the extra capacity and allow our music to be stored at higher quality.

Each track on a CD can reach a maximum bitrate of approximately 1411kbps depending on the music you’re listening to and that is why we now have lossless formats such as FLAC, APE or Apple Lossless files available, allowing music to be stored at such higher bitrates of over three times higher than the highest setting MP3s can go.

As the name “lossless” suggests, no sound frequencies are removed and a different kind of algorithm is still used to compress the files – Everyone likes to get the most out of everything after all including storage!

But why would there be frequencies beyond the human hearing range in music? I’ll explain in the next section or if you wish, you can jump straight to the part about “frequency response”.

The Quality of Your Earphones/Headphones

Even if your sound files are at their best, you still need good listening equipment to enjoy the full sound spectrum.

If you have a look at earphones and headphones (also referred to as “cans”) in the shops or online and then look at their specifications listing, you’ll usually see the following…

• Drivers
• Frequency Response
• Sensitivity/Signal-to-Noise Ratio
• Impedance
• Power Handling

Frequency Response & Drivers (Tweeters, Mid-range, Woofers)

As the name suggests, these circular components are what reproduces the sound of your music. The range of sounds that these drivers can reproduce is known as the “frequency response” and the frequencies the human ear can hear are approximately between 20 – 20,000Hz.

Generally the bigger the drivers are, the better your sound will be and their diameter is given in “mm”. However, if you look at the large home speaker systems that can cost thousands of pounds, you’ll usually find they have a lot more than one driver on them. As you can imagine, things designed with a single purpose are usually better than something designed with multiple purposes – That is also the case here.

Different drivers designed for different frequency responses reproduce better quality sound. They are mainly divided into the three following types…

• Tweeter, 7000 – 22,000Hz.
  For example, the jingling of bells. It’s called the “tweeter” because of the high sounds birds can produce. This range of sounds is also known as “treble”.
• Mid-range, 500 – 2000Hz.
  Most of the sounds that you’ll mainly pay attention to such as vocals and mid-range sound of instrumental notes.
• Woofer, 20 – 150Hz.
  The low sounds such as drums. It’s called the “woofer” because of the low sounds dogs can produce when barking. This range of sounds is also known as “bass”.

There are also other factors to consider such as the material the drivers are made of and what shape they are but, that would be too much to cover here and manufacters usually don’t state what techniques they use.

Generally at the time of writing, the slightly above mid-range earphone/headphone models will make use of the more sensitive neodymium magnets while the more expensive models will have multiple drivers built into them i.e. a tweeter, mid-range and woofer.

You will want to choose something that has a frequency response covering the human hearing range 20 – 20,000Hz at the very least.

Sample Rate and “Beyond” the Human Hearing Range

As I mentioned earlier in the “Source of the Music” section above, music can contain sounds beyond the human hearing range of 20 – 20,000Hz range. So why should audio equipment record and reproduce sounds we “can’t hear”?

I’m sure most of you have been in a room with a piano before or, been to a concert where the volumes are turned up full on giant speakers. After a key is played on a piano in a quiet room and you’ve heard the note played, do you feel like it’s still ringing through the air? Or during hip hop or rock music at clubs, can you feel that thumping beat from the speakers?

Those are the sounds that are “beyond” the human range of hearing and ones that you can only feel. They are known as “harmonic frequencies” while the ones you can hear are known as “fundamental frequencies”. Instruments in particular have a great variation in harmonic frequencies as the frequency for each note is different on each instrument.

Thus if your earphones/headphones/speakers have a wide frequency response and you are using lossless files, music should sound better – especially orchestral recordings.

Note that the “44kHz” you see displayed in your music player is not the sound frequency of your music files. This is the “sample rate” the music was recorded at i.e. how many times a sound wave is captured per second. Generally the higher this sample rate, the higher quality music or sound will be.

The average CDs are usually sampled at 44kHz to keep close to the human hearing range according to Nyquist’s Thereom. Movies and sound studios on the other hand use more than twice that because as you can imagine, media such as action movies can have a lot more happening per second – sound track, special effects, voices etc.

Sensitivity/Signal-to-Noise Ratio

The higher this rating is, the better any of the excess fuzzy background noise in the wire is filtered out. 90db is the minimum required to enjoy CD recordings.

Impedance & Power Handling

Impedance (measured in Ohms) is the minimum current that must run through your listening equipment to achieve the full dynamic range i.e. the difference between the loudest and quietest sounds. For example, the vocals and instruments trailing off quietly towards the end of a song.

In other words, the greater the impedance the higher the power rating your music player will have to be for the best results. Small portable players usually don’t have a strong enough current to drive headphones to their loudest volume.

The Quality of the Output Signal from Your Player

I’ve marked this down as the least important factor for better sound quality because most music players cover the full human hearing range (see frequency response above).

If possible, the specifications of your listening equipment should be close to that of your player’s. For example, both players might have the same impedance of 16 Ohms to cover the same dynamic range of loudness.

There would be no point buying a pair of quality earphones that support a frequency response range of 5Hz – 25,000Hz when your player only reproduces the 300Hz – 15,000Hz range of sounds! The results will sound horrible because there will be a lot of distortion where the missing sounds should be.

Some people enjoy using an “equalizer” to help balance out or enhance their music by playing around with the sound frequencies, making some louder or quieter. Maybe you want the thumping sound of bass to be louder or want the vocals to stand out even more for example.

Summary

In a nutshell, if you want your musical recordings sounding their best you should…

• Use lossless music files such as FLAC or APE.
• Look at what kind of drivers the earphones have – e.g. Do they have neodymium magnets? Multiple drivers? How big are they?
• Ensure both the player and earphones/headphones at the very least covers the human hearing frequency response range of 20 – 20,000Hz.

Last but not least, see if you can have a listen to the audio equipment beforehand to see if you like what you hear. Everyone’s standards are different after all and unfortunately, despite the specifications printed, the chosen components used in audio equipment can still be very poor sometimes and reproduce similarly poor sounds. Still, it’s good to have a rough gauge for what you might be buying at least.

Hope this helps you out in picking any future audio equipment!

The following also looks at internet usage and GPS navigation on mobile phones just for anyone curious about how it all works and how well it works.

Box contents:

• Nokia 5800 Phone
• 1320mAh battery and charger.
• Wired remote and neck-chain type earphones.
• USB cable.
• Pick-shaped stylus.
• Nokia MD-8 speakers.
• Software disc and manuals.

Design

The model I obtained says it’s “red” but most of the phone is actually a dark colour with only a line of red encircling the sides. As with my previous Nokia phone, the back of the cover is hard to remove but it’s interesting how they’ve changed the way you insert the SIM card. Well… kind of. You now insert it like a memory card from the side but you’ll still have to remove the battery when you want to remove it oddly enough.

On the back of the phone, there is a stylus and it’s very tough to get out which discourages me from using it. Nokia should probably take some lessons from Nintendo on how to store it.

Charging takes about 1 hour. It’s good to see the battery indicator has since evolved from only 3 segments to 6 segments these days. Battery runs out fast if you use the wireless network and GPS a lot.

An 8GB class miniSD memory card is already inserted into the phone and quite frankly, is hard to remove. It makes me wonder if Nokia does this to discourage people from getting rid of their phone. The packaged USB cable is very short too at 20cm! Fortunately you can use Bluetooth to transfer and manage files.

Music and Sound

Play.com seems to include the Nokia MD-8 branded speakers worth £8 and uses 3x AAA batteries. It’s alright for radio (it actually acts as an antenna for the phone) but the sound quality is very poor because the frequency response range covers only 67% of the human hearing range at only 300 – 15,000 Hz. That means you’re missing out on some of the sound from your music such as the high and low pitches from instruments.

The packaged earphones aren’t any better either with mid-range vocals sounding very rough, high treble almost ear piercingly clipped and the low bass doesn’t thump into your ears like it should. I know the sound output on phones are poor but still… In this case, the frequency response for this phone is 40 – 15,000Hz, 68% of the human hearing range which means it’s just slightly better than the speakers above. It doesn’t help the phone only supports lossy audio formats.

On the bright side, you can use your own ear/headphones and they make 320kbps MP3s sound smoother but the sound quality still isn’t great. Everything sounds hollow and the bass tends to overpower the vocals. In fact, the very same MP3s sound much more balanced on my dedicated DAP than on the phone. It might be passable if you don’t want to carry around multiple gadgets.

Playlists can be created on the phone by selecting a song and adding it but, I think it would have been easier if it let you select a folder to playback. Only lossy formats, ACC, AAC+, eAAC, WMA and MP3 are supported. Album art is also supported and displayed if your music files contain them.

Photo and Video Camera

The camera is a 3.1MP (2048×1536) with auto-focus using a tiny f/2.8 Carl Zeiss lens. Can’t expect much quality from the tiny sensor of a phone – Very noisy even at “low ISO” mode which is under ISO 100 and that says a lot. However, it’s still better than my previous which didn’t have focusing at all.

For the photographers amongst you can also manually adjust the ISO level, white balance and exposure compensation although I probably wouldn’t bother. Saying that however, I think it might get more people interested in photography if they start learning about what these settings do.

Video resolution is at the common 640×480 although you can choose widescreen mode so that the height is reduced to fit modern widescreen TVs better. Auto focus doesn’t work in video mode but interestingly enough, the dual LED flashlights can be left on which can be handy for recording in low light conditions.

Menus, Typing and Auto-rotating Screen

When you’re idle, the phone locks the touchscreen until you drag a spring locked switch at the side and there’s also a proximity sensor so you don’t have to worry about miscalls.

Typing works great. The phone comes with two different styluses – One in the form of the traditional pen and one in the form of a guitar pick. You can handwrite or choose the QWERTY keyboard which can be mini in portrait mode or full-sized while in horizontal. It takes some getting used to holding the phone like a handheld console and using both your thumbs to type but once you get used to it, you can type a lot faster than using the old text prediction. The other great thing is, you can use copy and paste by holding your finger down and highlighting words.

Only slight problem is that the screen goes blank for a few seconds when switching between portrait and landscape mode. The sensor feels a bit too over sensitive – Sometimes a slight movement can change the screen’s orientation!

Turning on the phone you reach the main home screen which by default, lets you add four contacts that you might call often complete with photos. Or you can also turn it back to the old way and have shortcuts to your favourite apps. The screen auto-rotates depending on how you’re holding it although you can disable this feature if you want.

If you don’t use either of the two styluses then you’ll most likely find yourself using your nails to type and navigate the menus. Most of the time I found if I actually pressed down with my finger I’d end up hitting the wrong button and the scroll bars are too narrow not to use nails. Otherwise, the interface is generally fairly responsive although it can be streamlined better.

For example, you can view all the applications you’re running such as perhaps GPS while using the phone but it won’t let you end them from the menu. You have to switch over to the application then close it which is pretty cumbersome. Also, when you change a setting the phone jumps back to the main menu instead of returning back to the list of other settings that you can change.

Game-wise I’ve got Bounce, RT GR and a Guitar Hero clone named “Guitar Rock Tour” on my XpressMusic of the package. They’re pretty fun to play and the graphics look good considering they’re for a mobile phone. There are more free games on the Ovi Store to download although some are actually trials or download ads from the internet. I found “String ‘Em In” particularly fun where you’re given a limited amount of time to compose words from a grid of random letters.

GPS Navigation – How Good Is It and Is It Free?

Before you can use Global Positioning System (GPS) or access the internet, you must make sure the GPRS data service is enabled for your SIM card. You can do this by simply calling your mobile phone service provider to do so and while you’re at it, ask them to send you the internet settings for your mobile phone too to save yourself the trouble of entering it all in yourself. Once that’s all done, you can start playing about with the internet on your phone.

I’ve always wondered how GPS works on modern phones and whether it’s free or not. Well, it isn’t. How much it costs depends on how much you download – In other words, the further you travel the more it will cost you because it’s downloading a lot of map data. In Vodafone’s case, it’s a minimum of 50p for 25MB on their PAYG package at the time of writing and you might be glad to know if you don’t use satellite photos then it hardly creeps up to 1MB.

That said, if you go abroad the costs are much higher at maybe 10 times the usual rate.

You might be thinking, “Well, can’t I just use free wireless networks?” You can’t because the receiver on mobile phones are so weak it can’t pick up good signals from the satellites so it must use whatever mobile phone network’s communication tower you’re connected to to help confirm your location. Hence the extra “A” on mobile phones standing for “assisted” GPS. Wireless networks can’t do that because the computer server could be located far away from where you really are.

By default the phone comes with Ovi Map software pre-installed. For directions, it works as good as Google Map Mobile or maybe even better because it shows places of interests near wherever you are and acts like a guide book covering even local events. It also gives you an estimated time based on how fast you’re traveling, distance and probably most importantly how much data you’ve downloaded. Driving navigation instructions are clear too, showing which lane you should be keeping to whenever you’re about to reach a junction or when you need to turn. If you miss a turn then it quickly re-calculates the route but you will have to subscribe for a free after 90 days.

Google Map on the other hand isn’t quite as user friendly as a travel guide and requires you to find places manually but you can find even the nearest store by name. Also, the fun with Google Maps is it shows exactly which position you’re facing on a street or road and, you can use Street View to see photos of where you should be. However, only Android powered phones offer driving navigation instructions so with the Nokia phone you’ll only get a list of directions unfortunately.

I tried finding a path to places I’m familiar with using both software and they are generally accurate. In my case I found my position was off by a number of metres but that’s normal for GPS unless you’re using higher precision equipment such as that used by the military.

Connecting to the Internet – Wireless Network or Mobile Phone Network?

Odd thing I found was that when you add a new wireless network, it doesn’t let you enter QWERTY mode to enter any passwords or encryption keys you might need. As you can imagine, this is very cumbersome for long keys. Fortunately, after you go in to edit the key afterwards you can use it.

Another odd thing I found was that the built-in browser will always connect to the internet via your mobile phone network unless you specifically pick a wireless network for browsing – It can get pretty confusing actually because you have to categorise all your connections… For example, 2G and 3G might be in a category called “Multimedia Messaging” while your wireless connections will be in “Wireless Networks”. You can then set priorities to tell the phone which to try first and it’s not easy to get your head around.

Using the built-in browser, most of the time you’ll be left viewing the mobile version of websites and it actually runs pretty slow and initially doesn’t support Asian languages either. I suggest going to the Opera Mobile website on your phone to download it as a free alternative instead – Make sure you choose the “International Version” if you want to be able to view Asian webpages too. Sliding, zooming in and entering data is a lot easier. Both browsers support copy and paste though which is handy.

As with GPS, if you’re connecting to the internet via your mobile phone service, it will cost you on a per MB basis so be sure to check what the pricing is.

Surfing can be very slow if you can’t get hold of a 3G signal – It’ll feel like the old 56k modem dial-up days at 56Kb/s. Otherwise if you do get a good signal you can enjoy up to 200 times the speed at 14Mb/s – You’ll know if you have a 3G signal if you see the sign underneath the strength indicator.

Screen Protector

Picked up this third party “Screen Guarder” which is specifically designed for the Nokia 5800 because it doesn’t come with a case. I’m aware that the screen itself is already a screen protector and isn’t the LCD itself but, replacing that would take more effort than a piece of plastic so I still decided to get this for the touch screen anyway.

In the case of this protector it has the usual claims:

• Scratch resistance.
• Improved screen visibility.
• Anti-reflective.
• Washable/residue free.

Taking the single sheet out of the packet you see the protector is taped on two sides and is clearly labelled which side to peel off first. Took a number of tries because it’s almost an exact fit, leaving room for the three buttons along the bottom of the phone, the earpiece at the top and second camera.

Despite peeling it off a number of times, it stays on perfectly well.

Summary

The Nokia 5800 is a bit rough on the software front if you enjoy a lot of features and is multilingual like I am. Fortunately, there’s ways to make up for it but if you want to save yourself the hassle, you could always go ahead and pick up the more expensive but better rounded iPhone or Google Android powered HTC phones.

Good

• Typing with full screen QWERTY keyboard is fast.
• Can copy and paste from various apps.
• Auto-focus camera with dual LED flashlight, supports macro.
• IEEE 802.11b/g wireless network support.
• FM Radio support.
• Number of fun free apps available for Nokia and Symbian OS.
• Ovi Maps works like a guide book with up-to-date local events.
• TV out handy for sharing photos and videos on big screen.
• Light sensor auto adjusts brightness of screen.
• Proximity sensor locks touchscreen when phone is close to face.

Bad

• Packaged earphones sound terrible, low quality sound output for music.
• Can’t use folders as playlists.
• European version can’t display Asian characters in web browser.
• Managing connections can be confusing.
• No manual key for switching between portrait and landscape display.
• Camera doesn’t save settings.
• Pen stylus is very hard to get out from the back.
• Should allow more room for shortcuts on home screen.
• Media bar can’t be customised.
• Packaged USB cable is very short.
• Can’t end apps without switching to them.

Not really much to do with the fanbook but…

Just in case anyone’s been wondering why the Japanese gave the P3P Heroine the unofficial name “Hamuko”, Kita-san kindly explained that it maybe because in Atlus’ TGS2009 trailer, they named her as “主人　公子” instead of  “主人公” (which I think is most likely a typo). If you take “公子” then read the “公” as if it’s Katakana, you get “ハム” thus the unofficial name “ハムこ” ^^;

- Update -

Well, every Persona fans should know about the fanbooks that get released by now. Despite being the third remake of Persona 3, the PSP Portable version has also been given its own fanbook – With a nice group illustration for the cover too.

You can view Kita-san’s preview of it at his blog. The layout and contents appear to be very similar – Photos used for the background and lots of text only this time, the character profiles are laid out like a blog. Highlights of the 192 page B5 size book are…

• Concept art including early boxart designs.
• Musical score sheet of the original P3 opening “Burn My Dread” and ending “Memories of You”.
• Original short story and comic.
• Persona Music Live 2009 coverage.
• Interviews with the directors, sound producer and voice actors.
• Fold-out poster.

Play-Asia doesn’t seem to stock it at the moment but you can always import from HMV Japan too or if you’re in the UK, try Otaku.co.uk.

As cute as the Heroine is (or MShe, Minako as fans call her), I think one P3 fanbook’s enough for me, though ^^;

So can we expect some P3P drama CDs, Atlus?

The 500 point DS Ware game due on March 3rd involves players helping Lettermille the rabbit look for hidden alphabets and pictures then match them up. A 3D picture book basically but the interesting thing is, it makes use of head tracking technology so instead of controlling a virtual camera or character, the player tilts the DSi slowly to look around a 3D diorama!

Looks very impressive and I think it might help keep Japanese children’s attention to learn new English words. Consequently, if you dissect the title “Attakoreda” it means, “Here it is!” which I’m sure those of you who watch plenty of subbed Japanese programmes will have worked out – Atta! Kore da!

One day Avan Hardins receives news his brother was killed in battle but not being able to see the corpse, he refuses to believe it and decides to join the Lanseal Royal Military Academy to train while seeking out more information.

Gameplay

I haven’t played the prequel for the PS3 so I can’t make a fair comparison but, the game makes use of the “BLITZ” system once again and is basically part action and part turn based, usually taking place over a number of areas. You have a number of Command Points (CP) which you can use to give out commands to a single unit. After all CPs are used up, it’s the enemy’s phase.

You can have up to six members on the battlefield at any one time and there are five types of units to choose from, each with their own attributes such as the assault units who have high HP but short range attacks. Leaders have special skills just like in Advance Wars that cost a lot more CP to use such as heal units within an area.

Once you select a unit, you enter the battlefield and the action begins which usually takes place over a number of areas. You can only move between them once you take over an enemy base. Units can move as long as they have enough Action Points (AP) and while you’re moving, enemies will shoot at you when you’re in range which gives it a little bit of the excitement from ARPGs. They don’t as much damage as when it’s their turn but depending on which way your unit’s facing, they can still be lethal. There’s plenty of terrain usage as you would expect from a strategy game such as crawling in the grass and taking cover behind objects. The fun thing is you also get a bit of a FPS element thrown in because you have to aim a crosshair at the enemy and they all have their weaknesses such as aiming for the soldier’s heads. Although the PSP lacks the console’s dual analogue stick setup, it’s good to see you can move the crosshair slowly if you use the d-pad and quickly if you use the analogue stick which makes it easy to aim.

This is all done at a very good pace and the flexibility of CP and AP means you can very much have a single unit storm through the battle field if you wanted to. That said, their max AP drops every after every turn and enemies always ends up facing you after an attack so, it doesn’t quite work all the time fortunately. Otherwise it would be too easy. Then there’s also many other varying environments to take into account too which gives this game plenty of depth.

Want to use brute force and barge your way through the enemy? Or maybe you just want to finish the mission as quickly as possible for that S rank. Well, there’s so many customisations for the tank and team setups available, it really is up to you how you want to go about the missions!

It’s also good to see the mission objectives aren’t simply all about wiping out every enemy unit in the battlefield. They vary quite a bit – Aim for a leader, wipe out a tank, take over all bases, reach a certain point within a limited number of turns etc. Interesting enough, characters can be returned to camp when their HP has been knocked down to zero and if you don’t, they get hospitalised for a number of days. Moral which rises when you are succeeding such as defeating enemy units or securing territory help your units to fight better.

Outside of battles, there’s a top-down view allowing you to travel around Lanseal Academy a little like a visual novel game, experiencing optional random events that let you learn more about the characters. There’s no dating sim element but there are some missions where you can help out classmates to increase your friendship level so that there are more chances of combo attacks, though. These turn out to be slightly more tougher missions because you can’t choose which units can sortie. It’s good to see main and side missions can be accessed at your own pace.

It’s also when you can use the accumulated experience points and money to upgrade your units and weapons. The great thing is it doesn’t just upgrade a single unit like in most RPGs, it upgrades all units of that type which again makes it very flexible. It was probably the best choice for the developers to make when there’s such a wide choice of characters to choose from, not just the protagonists. What’s more, each character has their own unique “Potential” skills which can be bad or good depending on the missions you manage to complete. This gives them a little more personal touch. For example, one of the girls is afraid of blood which lowers her stats whenever she gets hit by gunfire until you help overcome her fear in a certain mission.

There’s so much extra content to unlock (and buy from the PS Store) in fact that it’s also one of the game’s downsides. For example, depending on what save data you have stored on your memory stick such as from the PS3 prequel and Phantasy Star Portable 2, you can unlock even more characters and missions. For this very reason, you’ll find the game checking the memory stick every time you start it which can be pretty irritating.

Presentation

Battles are presented in 3D and textures look fairly decent ranging from the common daytime, night and sandy deserts. The environments feel a little on the plain side but since it’s supposed to be a battle field and there’s a number of full character models to render, I guess some compromise was necessary. On the other hand, the top down view of the academy looks wonderfully rendered, hustling and bustling with little vehicles moving around, gunfire being seen in the training grounds, some weather effects depending on the time of the semester.

There are animated cutscenes by A1 Pictures who just happens to be responsible for the Anime show too. They’re interspersed in the game including the opening itself and they all keep the stylish pencil sketch lines on the shadings. Most of the time the story is played out with portraits but they move about the screen and emoticons help add to the atmosphere quite a bit. Backgrounds are well rendered and illustrated with plenty of detail as you would expect from visual novel style presentations.

The orchestral theme performed by the Czech Film Orchestra makes a reappearance while the rest of the music by Hitoshi Sakimoto (Final Fantasy XII, Muramasa The Demon Blade) sounds pretty familiar from the first. That said, they still work with the atmosphere, different themes playing depending on whose phase it is. I’m sure many tracks will end up reappearing in future titles. There’s also the odd radio transmission playing in the background depending on what you do. Despite your typical Anime personalities, the familiar dialogue between the characters can still be pretty entertaining and the story is mostly character driven. Only the main dialogue are voice acted while other times it’s the odd sound effect which can get pretty repetitive. Do I really need a trainer crying out, “Level up!!” every time I level up a unit type?

On a side note, I just happened to notice Akihiko from Persona 3’s voice actor, Hikaru Morikawa does the voice for one of the villains, Baldren Gassenarl. They look very similar with their short silver hair.

The richly detailed world of Valkyria is pretty funny actually – Instead of alarms followed by fire drills, it’s a bell and students sortie out for war. Then whenever there are main battles, the characters somehow miraculously switch from the ruined black, wartorn battlefields back to their vividly coloured academy. Trivial details I know but still, the inconsistency kind of ruins the scenarios.

Summary

Valkryia Chronicles 2 is a great SRPG to play with so much depth, varying mission objectives and customisation available. It’s got plenty of replaybility with lots of ranked missions and some are so seemingly impossible at first that beating them gives some great satisfaction afterwards. You even get to play on after finishing the game to play through any of the side missions that didn’t come up! Now if the story was a little more intricate instead of focusing on the stereotypical cast of Anime characters most of the time then I think it would almost be perfect. Apart from that, I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of the game.

Time Completed 48 hours

Good

• Interesting mix of action and turn based strategy.
• Large variety of mission objectives.
• Large selection of characters to choose from.
• Flexible levelling up and upgrading.
• Slow and quick aiming controls.
• Ranked battles for replayability.
• Can review all animated cutscenes and events.
• Can continue playing even after finishing the game for any missed events.

Bad

• Like all RTS games, finding that last enemy unit in eliminate all missions.
• Checking for saved files every time you start the game.
• Tank could use some profiles for storing customisations.

The movie is set to hit Japanese cinemas on July 17th and instead of being set in the 1950s England, it will be set in (unsurprisingly) modern day Tokyo, Japan. There’s an official blog up at the moment with quite a number of video clips. The theme song’s not bad!

Will be interesting to see if it ends up getting the same criticism Howl’s Moving Castle received from those who read the original story. And I wonder if Arrietty will end up in Akihabara… ^^;

Finally. If you see this message then you’re now at my new domain and host.

It was pretty troublesome trying to import the big SQL database over because phpMyAdmin wouldn’t accept anything bigger than 2MB. I ended up trying to figure out how to import it directly via an SSH session and the command line. Didn’t take too long after that though.

You may have noticed the old domain name Xcomprandomness.co.uk now re-directs you here to Lhyeung.net. I’ll explain later once the rest of my re-designs are complete ^^;

Until then, I hope you continue enjoying the content I write here.

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My blog’s migrated a number of times. Starting off from free blog services to someone’s own private server and now my own hosting space and domain.

Well, now I’m about to move again to a different host that offers a cheaper and better deal than the current one – And hopefully a more reliable service too. They offer unlimited bandwidth and more SQL databases whereas the current package only offers one and bandwidth that barely meets the current monthly demand.

Quite a bit to backup and move. Even though today’s connections are fast, when you’re working with paid hosting, you need to consider bandwidth i.e. how much data you’re downloading and uploading. If you just happen to have more on the server than your monthly quota allows then you could be in a little trouble. In my case, I’m still in the green so I’m good.

During the move you might have trouble accessing the site. It all depends on how frequently your ISP updates its internet address book i.e. flush its DNS records which could take a few hours to several days.

I’m working on some changes to the site’s layout to better organise the content I’m focusing on. I was hoping to get it all completed before the move but, it looks like they won’t be completed in time… Guess I’ll have to make them afterwards ^^;