Welcome back to our review of Valthirian Arc: Hero School, no wait, this is the sequel! Welcome to our review of Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story 2! Even more school management for us to enjoy. Let’s dive in.
Not all heroes are born; your finest Hero School forges many. Build and manage your very own hero academy within this simulation-RPG genre blend! Nurture a unique, ever-growing roster of students and fight in strategic turn-based combat as you experience a narrative spanning over ten years. As you may have read in my review of the first game – I wasn’t very impressed by the first one. Let’s see if the sequel did any better, shall we?
Valthirian Arc!
Combining the RPG and Simulation genres is again the main selling point of Hero School Story 2. In this entry, you will manage your students by determining their learning schedules and courses, building their stats and skills to shape them into the heroes you desire. These stats are key when sending your students to fulfill quests from people all over Valthiria, defeating various enemies in strategic turn-based combat and adding to your academy’s renown. Yet there’s no time to rest on laurels – every school year, the seniors will graduate, and first-year students will enroll, so managing your academy to fit the dynamic roster of students is crucial.
Create Your Hero Academy
As Principal of the academy, your task is to allocate your students what classes and courses to learn, shaping them into the heroes you want them to become. Will you focus on magical courses and become a school of great wizards, one for mighty warriors, or perhaps a bit of everything? Your management style will determine the kind of quests you can take – as enemies are locked to students’ keys, fulfilling more challenging quests will require building specific rosters to solve these challenges.
As a teacher, managing the schedules and breaks of your students can quickly become tedious and monotonous, especially with over ten students to handle. The system’s developers must categorize students based on their class year or grading system to eliminate the hassle of clicking on each student and navigating their information panels to check their progress. This enhancement is essential for efficient filtering and must be implemented immediately.
Plan, Forecast, Execute, Repeat
To excel in the ‘unique’ turn-based combat system, it’s crucial to have foresight and make strategic decisions at every turn. Our system revolves around class-based proficiencies and exploiting enemy weaknesses. Players who bring an optimal team composition and take calculated risks in combat will be rewarded. Whether you prefer a cautious approach or a more reckless one, you can solve challenges as you see fit. Or so the developer’s state.
However, I feel that the exploration missions and combat could use some improvement to make them more engaging. I was bored and skipping through all but the story missions and the shortest ones that offered the highest rewards. It’s worth noting that your character has an attack animation that can interact with treasure chests, portals, and a few boxes that only appear in the tutorial mission. Unfortunately, this animation has no other function, so you can’t use it to destroy the environment or attack enemies before battles for a pre-combat advantage.
Quite a few cutscenes in the game provide valuable exposition and advance the story, but occasionally they play out of order and disrupt the narrative flow. Additionally, some quest lines are linked to cutscene triggers, causing you to miss time-sensitive tasks if you haven’t unlocked the relevant mission chain. However, I remain optimistic that these issues will be resolved in future updates.
Conclusion
There is enormous potential here, but not enough to keep me engaged or entertained past the first few hours. It did not offer enough new and refreshing elements to elevate my gameplay experience from a mediocre and somewhat tedious experience with Hero Academy School Story 2. I want to revisit this game down the road after some serious progress has been made, but at this time, I can’t recommend it in its current state.
