[REVIEW] Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story

 You know me. I'm a big fan of both RPGs and simulation games. Give me a game that satisfies both of those cravings, and chances are I'm going to be pretty darn happy about it.

And that was mostly the case for Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story.

Developed by Agate Games and published by PQube in 2018, Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story is actually the 3rd game in the Valthirian Arc series, though you'd never guess it from the name. The previous 2 games were Flash games that are decided harder to play now than they used to be. But Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story not only had a Steam release but also was released on PS4 and Nintendo Switch, allowing more people to experience this entry into the franchise.

It should be said that I haven't played the previous 2 games in the series. I didn't even know those games existed until I did research for my video review of the game. But I played the absolute heck out of Hero School Story, and by and large I enjoyed it.

Albeit with a few caveats.

WE'RE RUNNIN' A HERO SCHOOL NOW!

The game opens with you playing as an unnamed principal who will henceforth be running the prestigious Valthiria Academy, training up locals who want to become heroes. I mean, I say "heroes," and that's kind of implied by the game's name, but honestly, it's mostly training up people and maybe setting them up in various job classes. You start out only being able to train apprentices, eventually expanding the Academy enough and purchasing enough upgrades that you can turn people into Knights, Mages, Paladins, all sorts of definitely stable careers for young people to try out.

The year is split into semesters at your illustrious hero school, which makes sense, and there's a rule that you have to graduate at least 1 student per semester, which makes less sense. Each graduating student means payment from the crown, and if a student is at their maximum level at graduation, there's a hefty bonus to that payment. And this money is important, because school facilities and upgrades to said facilities can get a bit expensive at times. So it's worth taking the time to max out as many students as you can before graduation time.

The better your school is, the higher its level goes, unlocking better facilities and allowing students with higher level caps to enroll. Some job abilities can only be unlocked when the student is at a certain level, so higher level caps can allow you to access those abilities as well as potentially access more complex jobs than the basic few. As with many simulation games, the better you do, the better you're going to do, and the more opportunities you're going to have. It's a decently implemented gameplay loop, though there are a few drawbacks that reveal themselves before too long.

UNFORTUNATELY UNBALANCED

While students can gain limited amounts of experience just being at the school, the biggest source of experience -- and thus levels -- comes from missions. You can send a party of 4 students on missions, most of which involve defeating a certain number of enemies, escorting someone to another location, or collecting a number of items. Student level does matter in this, due to higher stats, but students who are on their first or second job specialty might be a lower level than a un-jobbed apprentice but still have higher stats.

Missions are usually a fantastic way of gaining sufficient experience, but at a certain point, that stalls. The game gives me very few repeatable missions, and most of those are pretty low-levels runs, so higher-level characters get next to nothing from doing them. Near the end of the game, the only available missions I could do were repeatable ones that gave me almost no benefit, and ones that were too hard for any of my teams to complete. The only option I had was to try each too-hard mission over and over again, hoping that my students gained at least a little decent experience before they were overcome by enemies.

Much of the game is decently well balanced, but at the end, the balance goes out the window in favour of a dull and discouraging grind. This could have been easily avoided by having some higher-level repeatable missions, or just a greater variety of non-repeatable missions toward the end.

It's in this way that the last section of Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story feels weirdly like an idle game. I mentioned the small amounts of experience that students gain just from being at the school, so yes, it is technically possible to just let that be the method that students can use to get stronger when missions don't provide a suitable alternative. It may take literal hours for a student to go up a level this way, but it's a possibility.

But this isn't an idle game, and the students don't soak up that experience when the game isn't running. You can't turn the game off and then come back 2 days later to find stronger students in your teams. So this method would mean leaving the game running for a very long time, and when you're playing on console, that's not really an option. Keeping track of the passage of real-time and providing a large amount of experience when you return after a day or two would have been another way of dealing with the problem, though I can see why that wasn't something implemented here. That would basically reward a player for not playing the game, and that's not what most game devs are out to do.

Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story does have a sequel, so maybe this problem is something the devs took to heart and worked around in the subsequent game. I can't be sure, though, since I haven't played it as of writing this review.

SURFACE-LEVEL STORY

You might be forgiven, at various times while playing this game, for forgetting that it actually has a story. The reason you take over leadership of the academy is because the previous Principal retired, to spend more time with his wife, the Queen.

Who dies pretty shortly after the game starts. So that's a downer.

With the Queen dead and a power vacuum sweeping across the land of Valthiria, you're tasked not only with making the hero school a success, but also finding the Queen's estranged daughter, who is heir to the throne and can end the power struggle. But you're not the only one looking for the lost heir. A cult dedicated to the Wicker Princess is also trying to find her, for reasons of their own, and you just know those reasons can't be good.

But it's often so easy to forget that Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story has, well, a story. More often than not you're dealing with the management sim aspect of the game, building up your students and graduating them, improving the school grounds, all that good stuff. You can go in-game years between each story beat, and it makes no difference to the overall story.

This gameplay-time passage incongruence happens a lot in games with in-game calendars. Unless the in-game calendar matters to the story as well as the gameplay, then it's going to seem really weird when you attempt to reconcile the two aspects. "Oh no, the Queen is dead and I need to find her long-lost daughter in order to save the land, but just lemme chill at school for a few years while I train up some kids to fight bears, okay?"

It's not a huge problem, it's not like this incongruity makes the game unplayable or anything, but it's just a little weirdness that pops up when you consider the story and sim elements side-by-side. You can take as long as you need to and you won't miss any story elements.

FLAWED BUT ENJOYABLE

Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story is far from a perfect game, but it's still fun. At least, I enjoyed my time with it. The management sim aspects are fairly solid for the most part, the story's okay, and while the ending was a brutal and frustrating slog, most of what led up to that was pretty decent. It's not too common to encounter fantasy-themed management sim games, especially ones that are available on consoles, so I can appreciate that.

If you understand that the game is flawed and you're going to struggle at moments for no fault of your own, then you're going into this more prepared than I was. I think, on the whole, the game is worth playing, warts and all.

Actually, writing all this out, I kind of want to go back and play it again myself. I kinda miss it.