[REVIEW] Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story 2

 After having a pretty fun time playing Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story despite some of the game's drawbacks, I was thus pretty excited for the sequel, aptly named Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story 2. There aren't enough fantasy RPG/sim hybrids around, and I'm happy to have more on the market.

Hero School Story 2 was developed by Agate and published by PQube, just as with the last game in the series. And while it still centres around you, the player, becoming the principal of a prestigious hero-training academy, a number of things have changed from how they were before. Which makes sense; game franchises have to innovate, to keep titles from feeling stale or like basic rehashes of what came before. That being said, sometimes it can be odd to adjust to the changes between 1 game and the next, especially when you consider that this game seems to be a prequel. That's a lot of change along the timeline!

EVERYTHING CHANGES

First, let me say that I really enjoy this game's art direction. It's a nice blend of 2D and 3D graphics, it's cute without tipping over into cutesy, and overall, it's just nice to look at. Graphics aren't everything, but I do like to call attention to things when they do look pretty nice.

Now, the rest of the review!

The overall premise of the game -- running a fantasy school for heroes -- remains the same as before, as I stated, but a lot of other aspects have changed, so if you got used to how things were previously, then get ready to feel like you're not even playing within the same franchise anymore. Instead of needing to graduate at least 1 student per semester, now each student stays at the school for 3 years and then automatically graduates. Where previously battles involved action combat, now it's all about turn-based combat. Last time, the number of dormitories determined how many students could have a place at the academy, where now you only need 1 dorm, and all it does is allow students to recover stamina when they're not studying or on quests.

If you're coming into this as a brand-new player, no prior experience with the franchise, then none of this will really matter, because you don't have anything to compare it to. But if you played Hero School Story, then the amount of differences are staggering sometimes, feeling like an entirely new franchise is being set up rather than it being a continuation of what came before.

I want to say that there's nothing inherently wrong with this. But I do wish that some things hadn't been changed. I liked the simple action combat of the previous game, and seeing it change to turn-based combat, which I normally really enjoy in games, felt like a step down, and in many ways felt like it was change for change's sake. The prior game had a number of balancing issues, and in my time playing Hero School Story 2, I didn't feel like those issues had been addressed so much as just changed so that the same thing wouldn't happen again... but a new and different set of balance issues got introduced instead.

LET'S GET FIGHTIN'!

 Each character starts off as 1 of 4 classes. Knight, Magi, Cleric, or Arcsmith. So basically, fighter, mage, healer, and gunman. That much is very similar to the previous game. But here, due to the turn-based combat, every enemy has shield types, which you can see in the above screenshot. If an enemy's shield is physical, then an attack from a Knight (or other physical-based job class) will break that shield. If their next shield is magical, even a weak physical attack from a Magi will break it. And so on, until all of the enemy's shields are broken, at which point any attack will do extra damage. The shields are less "I am strong against this sort of attack," and more, "I am weak against this sort of attack but strong against all others." And even if only 1 student can act per turn, any student can act per turn, so you can use whoever is in your party that will do the most strategic damage to an enemy.

So you have to build your party around not just which students are at the highest level, but around the enemy shield types you may encounter in your quests. For the most part, this isn't too bad, as you can access hybrid classes pretty quickly and ensure you're strong against whatever you encounter.

But to some degree you're at the mercy of what the RNG decides when it comes to your students. Each year you'll be able to select a couple of new students to admit into the school, and if your luck is bad, you'll end up with an extremely unbalanced selection of students to train. Now, I tend to keep students with their initial starting class and go from there. If I admit a Magi into the academy, they're going to stay as a primarily magic-based class, because I figure that's what they're here for. I can always change their initial class if I train them a certain way, but I usually don't, because why would I? I didn't need to last time, and I didn't think I needed to this time.

 
Until I encountered a boss that required Knight attacks to break its shields, and I didn't have any Knights in my school. My 1 Knight, a plot-relevant mandatory character you get right at the beginning, had already graduated, and no Knights had been RNG'd to me as options for new students. And that boss healed for as much damage as I could do to it. Every turn. It was a stalemate.

And since plotlines in this game are on time limits, unlike the previous game, I was faced with a choice of being punished for not completing that story segment by the deadline, or restarting my game and hoping for better luck next time.

Maybe it's just me being old-fashioned, but I don't think that a game's worst enemy to overcome should be the RNG.

And it wasn't a case of just me needing to level-grind to get stronger. My party was at their max level, all around. If I had the classes to break the boss's shields, it would have been fine. But I didn't have that ability, due to rotten luck.

MICROMANAGEMENT CAN BE FUN, THOUGH

 While Hero School Story was very political in its story (you're literally trying to find a missing princess so she can take the throne and rule the 5 Queendoms), Hero School Story 2 goes for a different flavour of politics. Each place you can run quests is in a different nation, with different rulers, and the experience your students will have can change depending on how friendly or hostile that country is to your academy. If they're hostile, then enemies will be harder but rewards will also be greater. If they're friendly, then there's no real plus or minus to the situation, so far as your students are concerned.

How do you change political alliances? Lots and lots of bribes.

No, seriously.

If a nation turns hostile to you, you can improve things by sending them money. The game even recommends it. You can also admit more students from that nation, or take other actions that might favour them, but the potential for those is far less than just bribing the crap out of them so long as you've got the cash to afford it. This means a lot more grinding for your students, since while they don't gain experience from individual battles, they do gain money. You can stay on the same may for hours and just keep killing respawning monsters. Which is honestly kind of fun, because even if I like the simple action combat of the previous game, I'm still a sucker for turn-based battles. And being able to rest and respawn all enemies on the map without needing to leave and come back is a great touch. Since you can only go out on quests at the end of each month, doing it any other way would result in an almost unbearable money-grind that still likely wouldn't keep up with what you need, so this was a great way of balancing that.

Which is good, because you need a lot of money in this game. Buildings not only need to be bought, but also improved over time. Between gold and arcstones, another in-game currency, you'll be spending a lot of resources on improving buildings and training students, so farming can turn from just being beneficial to being absolutely essential.

At least you don't need to grind for equipment or resources to make equipment, though. While I did enjoy that in the previous game, I have to admit that it would have just been 1 thing too many had they kept that here.

VERY UNPOLISHED

 I honestly think my biggest complaint about Hero School Story 2, aside from that time I was steamrolled by the RNG's lack of mercy, is how unpolished it is. The game was in early access on Steam for many months before it hit consoles, so a lot of the issues I encountered... I don't really think there's a great excuse for why they're still there.

There are a crapton of typos, for instance. I know I'm a bit of a stickler for this (I literally hire myself out to proofread and correct game text so that typos and grammatical errors don't get in the way of a player's immersion and enjoyment), but wow, this felt excessive sometimes. Nearly every cutscene had at least 2 textual problems, many of which could have been caught with the most basic of spell-checkers. I know you don't exactly get spell-checkers in a lot of game dev kits, but again, hire sometimes to iron this stuff out.

Every season has a mini-game that goes with it (fishing, building a snowman, etc), and you get asked if you want to participate but you're given no tutorial as to how the mini-game even works. You just have to figure it out on your own, while you're losing because you have no idea what's expected of you.

When students graduate, you have to recommend a career path for them, and the 3 career options presented might have absolutely nothing to do with what your student spent 3 years studying. Rodno, my starting Knight character and so a guy who was trained in beating the crap out of things with swords, had the options of Fortune Teller, High Apparator (whatever that means, but it sounds magical), or Cleric (literally a different starting character class). ...What?

Random events happen that may give your bonus rewards or change political alliances, but some of them feel like a dev copy-and-pasted text from a previous random event without changing it to be appropriate to the new event. "A delegation from Novoresk has arrived. Should we arrange a Novoresk-style celebration?" is fine, and it makes sense when that delegation likes it. "A delegation from Mokosil has arrived. Should we arrange a Novoresk-style celebration?" seems like a political slap in the face. But no, they still like it. Because it seems that nobody noticed the problem in the text.

This is the sort of stuff that I expect to see in early access games, when issues are still being ironed out and fixed. By the time it reaches a full release, I would hope these oversights would be long gone. Instead, they're still here. They can be patched out later on, yes, but that they're even here now... It doesn't speak well of Agate's quality control, unfortunately.

Do I recommend Hero School Story 2? Sure, but with the caveat that you shouldn't have high expectations of it. It has a lot of small issues that really add up over time. While I enjoyed many aspects of the game, even the ones that I felt were different just for the sake of making them different, there were also a lot of things I would have preferred them to keep from Hero School Story 1. I feel bad saying it, but I legitimately think I prefer the 1st game to this one, even with the problems it had.

A lot of my issues with this may get fixed later. If so, the frankly, this game would stand poised to be really good, a fantastic blending of a JRPG-style game and a management sim game. It has a lot of potential, but I don't think it's fully realized that potential as of the time of writing this. If this changes in the future, I'd be happy to revisit the game and do an updated review.

Until then, though, if you want to play this game, just do so with the understanding that it's not perfect and may screw you over at times, but it can still be fun if you figure out how to work around that.