The show wasn’t great, but at least it did the sunset ending correctly. I’m looking at you, Phantom.

What should I say about Valkyria Chronicles? For starters, it was a disappointment. The word ‘disappointment’ is usually synonymous with bad, but I don’t mean it in that sense. It’s just that it didn’t live up to the excellent source material. The game was about high-octane action with no shortage of thrilling battles, with the Welkin-Alicia romance acting as a sub-plot. The anime was more focused on the Welkin-Alicia romance (with Faldio along for the ride), with the war acting more as a sub-plot. Definitely not as expected. The anime itself wasn’t bad, really, though it wasn’t great either. Game-to-anime adaptations tend to suck, and in that regard VC was actually above par compared to its brethren.

I’m being generous when I say the VC anime was a loose adaptation of the original story. It never does much good to nitpick the hell out of one, since liberties will always be taken with the plot. VC was faithful enough in the first half. Sure, I was miffed that some of the game’s best battles early on were abridged or outright skipped, but it more or less followed the plot, albeit with lots of Faldio love tossed in along with Isara-love-interest, Ramal. I mentioned these points before, but I’ll go ahead and mention them again because redundancy is fun. The increased screen time better fleshed out Faldio’s character to set him up better for his tragic fall, as he was rarely seen in the game until his pivotal scenes near the end. I also really liked Ramal too, especially since I typically loathe the male-tsundere archetype. He was a well written character all-around, and though he didn’t add much to the story, I thought he added a new dynamic to the story by becoming a romantic interest for Isara. Ramal’s death was a crowning moment near the show’s end and made me a bit teary eyed… Ironic since the story’s best death was supposed to be Faldio’s sacrifice, who instead went out with a whimper after the tons of character development he had gotten previously. I’m still pissed that the generics (Edy, Homer, Marina, etc) didn’t get much screen time until the end of the show. They weren’t all that important to the big picture, but I liked them. I really wanted to see the short lived Edy Detachment come to fruition since we had all the necessary members, but alas it was never meant to be. A shame too because it would have been a good filler episode at the very least.

Faldio love-fest and Ramal aside, the first half of the show was more or less faithful to the original story. Then it completely jumped the shark in the second half and ran with its own story, roughly around the time of Cordelia’s kidnapping in episode 12. From that point up until episode 19 or so, the show was really “meh” for lack of a better word. It just wasn’t interesting, and the emo Welkin and Welkin-Alicia drama (forgive me for using the word emo) was way too dragged out. Things turned around in episode 20, and the show steadily got better again.

The two duels between Alicia and Selvaria, especially the latter, were friggin’ awesome. The guerilla warfare in the streets of Randgriz and the foot assault on the Marmota were also friggin’ awesome. We finally got awesome fights at the end of the show, which begs the question, “Why couldn’t the whole show be like this?”. I have no qualms with putting more focus on character drama and romance, which were done well for the most part, but there just wasn’t enough action. The aforementioned scenes were well choreographed and exciting. Why didn’t we have exciting battles like that more often? The second OP constantly teased us with a great city battle that never happened (Which I assume was supposed to be the very epic, second Battle of Vasel against Jaegar). Well… Better late than never right?

Since the show skipped so many of the early battles, we also hardly ever saw the iconic symbol of the story and vanguard of Squad 7, the Edelweiss. That thing kicked all sorts of ass, perhaps too much for the anime to handle. We only saw it in a handful of episodes, and most of the time it was just Isara performing maintenance on it. Squad 7′s super tank was pivotal to the game’s story but was strangely out of action for much of the anime for one reason or another.

Anyway, the ending was pretty satisfactory. Maximilian is defeated, peace returns to Gallia, and the members of Squad 7 go their separate ways after the war, ultimately ending with Welkin and Alicia returning to the ruins of Bruhl (complete with our always beloved sunset ending). Good, somewhat bittersweet ending overall, but I’m especially disappointed that we didn’t see the epilogue that wraps up the story and puts the cherry on the sundae. I doubt we’ll get a proper epilogue, so I’ll just tell you Welkin and Alicia get married and name their daughter after Isara. It’s not much to see in text, but it was a heartwarming ending.

Overall, VC was disappointing but adequate enough to be decent. It had the tools to be great but didn’t fully utilize them, instead settling for mediocrity. Did I have fun watching it? Sure. Would I watch it again? Probably not. VC was a decent, if at times frustrating, adaptation. I’ve said VC anime and decent in the same sentence quite a bit, but I can’t think of another word that really fits. An okay beginning, bad middle, and awesome ending average out to make a decent show.

PS: As with all adaptations play the game, doubly so for Valkyria Chronicles. It’s a masterpiece of artistry and awesome.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Anime, Valkyria Chronicles.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.