Valkyrie Profile 2 - Silmeria

The strangest thing about tri-Ace's Norse prequel is that its dungeons are platforming puzzles. You hold a bow, fire a photon, and an enemy in its path freezes into a crystal you can then teleport onto, using it as a stepping stone to a ledge you otherwise could not reach. Freeze a bird mid-flight and you have a floating platform. It is a mechanic that belongs in a 2D action game, dropped into a role-playing game about Valkyries and dead heroes, and it works far better than it has any right to.

Combat keeps the first game's idea that each party member is bound to a face button, but gives them a shared pool of action points and the freedom to move around a small arena. You position four fighters, then trigger attacks in sequence to keep a target airborne, and crucially you aim at specific body parts. Break an arm or a tail and it drops as loot, which means the greedy approach to a fight is also the technical one. Fill the gauge and a Soul Crush finisher goes off with the overlong animation the series has always loved.

The Einherjar system is where it gets dense. Silmeria recruits dead warriors as party members, and each arrives with equipment permanently fused into them; you strip the gear out through Materialize, which weakens the fighter but arms everyone else. Sealstones placed in dungeons rewrite the rules of an area, buffing enemies or boosting experience, and carrying them into boss rooms is a calculated risk. None of this is explained with much patience. The game assumes you will read menus.

The story is the weak half. Silmeria's soul shares a body with the human princess Alicia, which is a good premise rendered in a lot of stiff dialogue and slow revelations about Odin, and the connection back to Lenneth's chapter only pays off for players who already know it. The 2006 visuals hold up unusually well because the fixed side-on camera let tri-Ace spend its budget on character models rather than open terrain.

It is one of the last big PS2 role-playing games made without any concession to accessibility, and its ideas pull in three directions at once. Push through the opacity and it rewards the kind of player who enjoys taking a system apart to see what it is hiding.