Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story Review - Be the school principal of your own hero academia

Making games is hard, and it becomes even harder if you want to make one that touches on several genres. Our case study today is Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story for the PS4, so allow me to share my experience with this ‘franken-game’ that wanted to do it all. 

Class is in session

At first look, Valthirian Arc is a combination of three different types of games: a visual novel, hack-and-slash RPG, and a management game. That last one puts you at the helm as a school principal for these fine strapping youngsters. This immediately reminded me of a few other games, namely Recettear and Moonlighter. Valthirian Arc’s setting and aesthetic take on the fantasy anime style, which is right up my alley. 

As a series, Valthirian Arc first began life as Flash games. The first two games can still be played on any browser that runs Flash at kongregate.com. The second game was basically remade to Valthirian Arc: Red Covenant via Kickstarter, and then released as Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story for Steam, PS4, and Switch.

The game starts you off like a visual novel, introducing you to a land ruled by six queendoms. Characters are introduced in-game as a part of the world-building as the story unfolds. The main gist of it is that you'll be taking on the role of principal for a school of adventurers, and your goal is to train them up and graduate them off for prestige and money. 

Training involves sending your plucky young warriors on missions across the land so they can gain experience and grow as adventurers. Once they've learned enough, you'll be able to advance them into their own specializations. The class system involved here starts your students off as apprentices, and they can class change into either Knights, Mages or Rogues. And before you ask, yes, you can make a school full of mages and call it Hogwarts, if it fancies you. Each of the classes do also have an advanced class as well, but I won't spoil them for you. 

The third part of the game involves the duties of school management. You're basically given a plot of land with no roof, and will need to convert it into a place suitable for students to live, and for classes to be held. Various rooms give out different bonuses to your students that help them out in the field, or grant weekly money and fame for your school to sustain itself. 

Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story runs on a gameplay loop that involves sending out your students on missions, gaining experience and levels, and then finally graduating them off as per the queendoms’ requirements. It's kind of amazing and ambitious to think about combining these three systems and having them work together to form a single game. It’s a recipe for instant greatness… right? 

What?! Your grade is a C+?

As alluded to in my opening statement, nobody said making games was easy. Here's some of the issues I encountered.

It doesn’t take long to notice that every area to which you send your students looks the same - a grassy knoll with carbon-copied, winding elevated paths. The only variation occurs in some missions that have different biomes.

As you progress, rather than offering any new or unique challenges to test your skills or adaptability, enemies will only hit harder or have more HP. Robbing the player of challenge in this way made progress very easy and straightforward, to the point where I’ve even fallen asleep just running these missions! It’s also difficult for the newer students to gain XP, because once a quest is done, it can't be re-done for the newer batch of students. 

I got to the point where I was able to max out most of my school's prestige. But once I’d achieved this, I realized that there was no point in graduating my high-ranking students for further cash and prestige. I ended up only graduating level 10 apprentices for the remainder of the game, which kind of defeated the purpose of the school's graduation mechanic. 

But the most frustrating challenge I've experienced while playing this game stemmed from the frequent crashes. Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story has crashed for me at least 30 times during my over 20-hour playthrough, with each crash happening just before I send a party out on a mission.  

For me, the redeeming factors of the game are the art style, and the idea of playing a management game in an RPG setting. The story initially felt like it was going to be really compelling, but then they didn't do anything with that potential. Though your school was working with 5 other queendoms, the story alluded to gaining or losing favor of the different queendoms, and consequences arising from that. But in actuality, there was very little interaction with each of the different queens, so I felt there were many missed opportunities and possible scenarios about the queendoms and the cast of characters. 

The same can be said with regards to the game's music. It’s pretty generic, and some of the grunts and weapon swinging sounds can be repetitive. The mission music only changes in specific missions, too, so you may end up getting tired of it. Fortunately, the school music and the very limited amount of voice acting is well done, which is a great thing considering you’d be spending a lot of time managing your school and characters. The anime art style is obviously not everyone’s cup of tea, but I myself am happy with it. 

Also, that steel case is pretty nice-looking. If anything, Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story feels like a game I would buy as a gift to someone who’s already tried most of the AAA games out there.

Points For Effort

This game is not bad; it has a lot of fun concepts, and the schtick of your being a principal of a school for up-and-coming adventurers is a stroke of genius. The execution, on the other hand, is another matter. While the game falls flat due to a lack of depth and intrigue, I can't fault it for trying to do something big. While I was playing, I did wish that I got it on the Switch instead of the PS4, since its resource needs don’t seem too demanding, and portability would have helped with the grind.

Overall, the experience was pleasant, but it left me wanting for something better. A great conceptual foundation alone did not translate to a strong enough incentive to keep me playing. For me, this is a pass, but only barely, since I’m comparing it with the newer, better games coming out. I'm hoping that there's a sequel with more polish at some point in the future. 

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5/10

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Highlights

+ Beautiful Art and 3D World

+ Small storage space required

+ Great and ambitious concept

- Game has crashed for me a lot

- Gameplay becomes repetitive and stale

What I’ve Played

[This review is based on a PS4 review copy provided by Scrysoft.]

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