An interesting and unique RPG
Basically the story is that you play lenneth who’s a valkyrie and is sent by the god Odin to find souls in 'midgard' think of that as the world of the living that are worthy heroes who can become einherjar to help the 'Aesir' (Odins team as it were) fight the final war Ragnarok against the supposedly evil Vesir.
It must be said Valkyrie Profile Lenneth is a big game, its divided into chapters of 24 periods and various actions such as seeking out new heroes to add to your team to entering a town/dungeon take up these periods.
During a chapter you also should send of a member of your party to asgard to fight for Odin, but your given requirements which you should meet by Freya (another goddess working for Odin), and in order to meet these requirements you need to train up your characters.
To get a character you need to seek one out and upon entering the town where they are on the map there’s quite a lengthy and sometimes too boring sequence to find out more about them and ultimately for them to join your team, sometimes the sequences work well and obviously serve as both a back story to a character and make some sort of bond with them but other times it can be plain old boring waiting for the sequence to end.
So after you got your character you find a dungeon to train in, each dungeon has its own boss too, but the exploration is done with in a platformer style, you can slash with your sword near an enemy which is on screen and a fight will start, if you slash them first you get the first go in the battle, otherwise the enemy will get a turn before you. Some enemies are balanced but some can be insanely powerful - even more powerful than the boss in each dungeon!
The fights are done quite well I thought, an interesting take on the standard turn based formula, you can just press a button corresponding to the position of a character (in formation) so the top guy is the triangle button you press that and he'll do his default attack (or spell), but some can have combination attacks so you keep pressing the triangle button to continue the attack, now this may sound like button bashing but there’s a fine layer of tactics involved, you can knock an enemy over then unleash all your other attacks at once, doing something like this may expose an enemy to their weak point say the giant crabs who get flipped on their back will take more damage than being hit head on, sometimes they may drop bonus xp crystals, maybe even a few goodie chests, but as you attack your charge meter builds up, and if it reaches 100 you can unleash 'purify weird soul' attacks, which are these insanely powerful attacks which can more often than not, eliminate an opponent outright.
Off course you also get the standard options in any turn based RPG, you can press select to bring up a menu, use items, change spells, run away equip different weapons etc.
So after a battle you'll gain experience, with experience comes level ups and with level ups in this game come extra skill points which you can assign to various combat skills - for example adding more skill points into the 'survival' option will give more DME (divine materialise energy, read as life/hp etc), or maybe adding some into the 'attack pow' option will increase the damage your character does,
But there’s more, you can also add skill points into support options, for example first aid, adding skill points into this will increase the chance that after a round during a battle the character with this skill can heal some 'DME' of an ally.
And lastly there’s traits, each character after a sequence will have a 'Hero' rating which you can see in the 'traits' section of their status, t may be -42 and one of Freyas requirements is to have a hero with 100 hero status, so you need to use up alot of skill points which you get from levelling a character into these various traits , for example self sacrificing trait, add into that and their hero rating goes up!
Once a character is close too/meets/exceed Freyas requirements you can choose to send them up to asgard, so when a chapter is completed you can be congratulated, given items and further the storyline.
Speaking of items, in the game there’s no shops! but you do get to create items (divine them) at the cost of some materialise points (you get these from freya depending on how well you do each chapter) and you can also 'transmute' items you already have in the inventory, this being simply transforming an item into something else.
It must be said that the exploration on the map is ok, really quick infact you fly around and this is were you seek out new dungeons and characters, but the platformer bits were a mixed bag for me.
Some were perfectly fine, running around jumping etc, but later on there are a few annoying parts inherent with almost every platformer that tries to hard to create a challenge, these being obscure areas/hard to reach areas - the mini map is sometimes not of much help for example the tower of lezard, othertimes its incredibly odd finding out where you had to go/slash to further the progress of a dungeon - lost city of dipan for example having to smash a window, but to do this you need to create ice blocks to jump up, unfortunately the window is just above a door, so you miss a jump and you go into the next area (a few seconds loading) only to have to go immediately through the door (another few seconds of loading) to try again!
And lastly in the final game area you get an item called flames of purgatory and have to run across really quickly through two pretty dam tough battles and you need to be dam quick otherwise this torch goes out and you have to back track through the two really tough fights again (respawning baby!) to try again, thank god for tomes of alchemy!!
Sound wise, its pretty dam great, the voice acting is extremely good especially the stern sounding Lenneth herself, the music is pretty good, nothing spectacular although there are a few nice tracks such as the music in Hai Lan and when your in asgard itself.
Graphically, valkyrie profile lenneth is really good, im a fan of the crisp 2d visuals that this game has, the backgrounds are superb cant really fault them, however the characters whilst they do generally look really good and well animated, they sometimes look abit too blurry upclose! and the world map looks pretty poor and grainy.
Finally, because Lenneth is a huge game with many many different characters, different difficulty settings and endings if you are pulled in sufficiently into the game, I imagine you will be inclined to play it again, also if your a perfectionist gamer you'll probably want to uncover as many or all secrets/items/characters in the game as possible.
The game itself lasts easily 20 -40 hours easily depending on what you do, and it is quite challenging, unique and fairly complex compared to most other RPG's that you'll likely enjoy the game.