Welcome to our review of the high school management RPG-Sim-crossover – Valthirian Arc Hero School Story! Out now for the Nintendo Switch.
As my introduction suggested Valthirian is a mixture of genres, all blended into a cutesy looking game, which reminded me of the more cartoony JRPGs. When I first opened up the game, I thought this was going to be a standard high school RPG/Visual Novel mixture. But hey, they threw in a lot of other stuff as well.. And that’s not always a good thing.
High School Trouble
The story revolves around you, the protagonist, being appointed as the new headmaster of your self-to-name academy. I named mine Shez Academy, since that’s my go-to online name, and went off to find out why I got a school in the first place. Basically, you run a school that trains heroes, differed over three different classes – Magi, Scouts, and Knights (and some hybrid classes) – all with their own pros and cons. Your academy is situated in a land filled with local kingdoms, all run by a color-specific queen. Once the head queen passes away, the five neighboring countries wage ‘war’ on each other, in which the academy comes into play.
A quick summary by the developer:
Build and manage your school infrastructure – From the dormitories your students sleep in, to the classrooms where they learn – there are over 20 buildings and facilities you can build and upgrade to make your school!
School rooms and extensions – The lifeblood of your school, these include the likes of classrooms, libraries, cafeterias and practice rooms. Improving these will help make your students more powerful!
Out buildings and school grounds – Open-air theatres, blacksmiths, dormitories and training grounds! These facilities will help your students feel at home or provide them with the means to craft powerful weapons!
Quests and missions – Sending your students out on quests is the best way to get them ready for the world!
Take control – You can send students on quests unsupervised or take control of them directly, battling and adventuring in real time! Slay monsters for XP and search areas for materials and loot!
Party strategy – Switch students on the fly, tell party members to stand their ground or attack – using the correct strategy in battle will mean the difference between success and failure!
Graduate the best – Your finest students can’t stay in school forever! The highest achieving students are your prized asset – with powerful mages, priests and warriors earning your school great reward
While you were busy discovering cultists schemes, killing of wild boars in the search for the perfect pet food etc., you get quests from the neighboring countries, which can differ from fighting in an arena to fetching quests. By completing quests for a specific kingdom, you will get points with the said kingdom. You get the gist of it, it’s pretty standard nowadays.
In most of these missions, you can control your students, and attack enemies with your own special attacks (once they are fully charged). The control scheme is simple, and switching between students can be done with a click on the d-pad. Most of the mission are pretty simple, and just have you kill a number of enemies, or explore a repetitive area with switches and more of the same enemies.
Building up an academy
By completing missions you gain ‘accreditation’ for your Valthirian academy, which means you can upgrade certain facility’s and hire mentors to gain new skills for your students. The problem, however, is that this turns the game into a huge waiting game. You can control your students on the special missions, but not on the errands, or side-missions. Which will take around 20-40 minutes to complete (real-life-time). So if you send all your available parties on errands (by mistake), you can launch Netflix, and wait for time to creep by.. very.. slowly. Only to find out that they failed to find the right flower.
Is this a bad game then? No, but Valthirian is repetitive, easy and time-consuming. It does not feel very rewarding to level students since you’ll have to graduate at least one every six months, but the systems does not care which one. If you meet certain standards, you’ll get a bonus, but if you fail to meet them, you still get a reward for graduating one. No penalties, just time-consuming errands, which most of the time don’t really help with the main story.
Conclusion
I really think Valthirian could have been more, and it’s fun for a little bit.. but please, don’t buy it a full price. You can always pick up a demo on another platform or watch some Let’s play video’s on YouTube if you are contemplating if you should buy it.
