What's Valkyrie Profile All About?

It all comes down to dying. Every character who joins you, from the hardiest warriors to the most innocent newcomers, faces the final moments of existence in a world thick with strife, bloodshed, and sorrow. And death is no release for them, as they take up arms for the sake of the gods and a looming apocalypse.

Sounds like a fun game, doesn't it?

That was Valkyrie Profile's angle. The success of the PlayStation and Final Fantasy VII launched a new age of RPGs in the 1990s, and most of them portrayed death at some dramatic point. Perhaps every story does in one way or another. Yet it was rare for a game to confront dying and its aftermath so directly—and rarer still for a game to do it through the Norse myth of the Valkyrie.

Enix and tri-Ace's creation did just that upon its 1999 debut. Valkyrie Profile cast players as an ethereal Norse battlemaiden recruiting dead warriors known as Einherjar to join Odin's forces in the world-ending battles of Ragnarok. And it launched an RPG series that would consistently gather a cult following and hover just shy of major success.

The Valkyrie's name is Lenneth, and the game's intro makes it plain that she's somehow connected to an ill-fated girl named Platina. Summoned by Odin and Freya and other Norse gods, Lenneth soars above a bleak, war-ravaged medieval fantasy realm and attunes herself to the imminent demises of valiant mortals. Before she collects any souls, the game introduces them in tragic and interconnected tales: an arrogant soldier runs afoul of a bratty princess, a swordsman sacrifices everything to heal his afflicted sister, a naïve young archer heads to war and meets a realistically swift fate, a nefarious thief finds redemption, a woman disguises herself as a guardsman in search of revenge, and a cadre of warriors joins the Valkyrie one by one.

The game tells its broader tale through these short stories. Each future Einherjar's inevitably morbid vignette builds toward a deeper struggle with Lenneth, who finds humans by turns pathetic, noble, arrogant, foolish, and fascinating. It's perhaps the bleakest game of its era: no matter how they excel in Odin's service, all of Lenneth's allies stay deceased, connecting with their loved ones only in limited ghostly exchanges. To quote Grim Fandango, a game with a more humorous vision of the afterlife, “Death makes sad stories of us all.”

Just as in Grim Fandango, though, death isn't the end of things in Valkyrie Profile. In order to prepare this motley assortment of spirits for afterlife battles, Lenneth must take them through dungeons and combat. Valkyrie Profile's stages are side-view mazes where Lenneth runs, jumps, slashes at foes, and creates ice crystals to solve puzzles. The actual battles invoke a novel concept: each character is mapped to a different action button on the PlayStation controller, and success depends on tapping those buttons just right so you can set up combo attacks.

Valkyrie Profile also looks the part of a grim Viking saga. It uses hand-drawn 2D sprites and subdued palettes, all enlivened by some gorgeously illustrated character portraits courtesy of animators Kou Yoshinari and Yoh Yoshinari (the latter of whom would go on to anime like Little Witch Academia and BNA: Brand New Animal). It also benefits from extensive voice acting and a Motoi Sakuraba soundtrack made long before the composer was working in seemingly every other RPG. From the moment Lenneth awakens and marches through the verdant fields and castles of Valhalla, Sakuraba's music is perfectly matched to the game's mix of somber and glorious tones.

If Valkyrie Profile was unique, it didn't bend over backwards to please everyone. It's a game that very much does things its own way. Some players accused Square's PlayStation-era Final Fantasies of being “more movie than game” for pairing each hour of gameplay with about two minutes of cutscenes, but Valkyrie Profile, like Square's own Xenogears, truly is dedicated to its narrative. It finds nothing wrong with putting players through relatively long story scenes before recruiting each character. Nor does Valkyrie Profile make it easy to see that tale through. The best ending (and the only satisfying one) is hidden behind such exact and seemingly random requirements that it's hard to imagine any player reaching it without a strategy guide.

Such a creative, despondent, and strict vision of Norse mythology was perhaps destined for an audience much smaller than those of the latest Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest. Valkyrie Profile arrived in Japan in late 1999 but wouldn't make it to America until the fall of 2000, when the PlayStation market was overloaded with major RPGs. Everything from Final Fantasy IX to Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete hogged the spotlight that holiday season.

Valkyrie Profile at least got a nice localization courtesy of producer Jeremy Blaustein and translators (and former Gamefan writers) Nick Des Barres and Casey Loe. The voice cast also came through fairly well, though there's a sense of repetition as most of the actors pull double or triple duty in playing multiple characters. Many of them were (and still are) also instantly recognizable as the same crew that dubbed the original Pokémon anime.

The sights of Valkyrie Profile stood out even more when paired with its creators' other work. Masaki Norimoto, Joe Asanuma, and Yoshiharu Gotanda had founded tri-Ace shortly after creating Tales of Phantasia for Namco in the mid-1990s, and their first two games were the sci-fi/fantasy mixes of Star Ocean and Star Ocean: The Second Story. Phantasia and Star Ocean both introduced fast-paced battle system, but neither pushed the RPG genre beyond comfortable themes and storytelling.

Even so, Star Ocean and its Star Trek-inspired space opera were always tri-Ace's signature series, while Valkyrie Profile stood alone. It inspired some Valkyrie Profile anthology comics as well as a short manga series from Yu Hijikata, who apparently had to rush the second volume to cram in the game's ending. A fan-made fighting game called Valkyrie Fight Tag used the game's sprites. Yet years passed with no sign of a new Valkyrie Profile from tri-Ace.

Valkyrie Profile bore the signs of a one-off experiment. The game sees things through to Ragnarok and brings Lenneth's story full circle. Loose ends are acknowledged after the credits, however, concerning the monstrous king Brahms, the scheming (and Valkyrie-besotted) mage Lezard Valeth, and Lenneth's Valkyrie sisters. In one of its bolder breaks with textbook Norse mythology, Valkyrie Profile combines the battlemaidens with the three Norn goddesses of fate. The original game shows brief glimpses of these other two Valkyries: the imprisoned Silmeria and the coldly obedient Hrist.

That planted enough seeds for a sequel. tri-Ace letValkyrie Profile sit quietly for a few years and busied themselves with Star Ocean, allowing a few Valkyrie Profile character cameos and in-jokes in Star Ocean: Blue Sphere and Star Ocean 3: Til The End of Time. In 2006, however, Square Enix and tri-Ace announced a port of the original Valkyrie Profile for the Sony PSP as well as an all-new PlayStation 2 sequel, Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria. Many names from the first Valkyrie Profile's staff returned for the sequel, though directing duties fell to a newcomer: Vagrant Story planner Takayuki Suguro.

Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth put the original game on Sony's handheld in early 2006, with new rendered cutscenes and little else changed. It also prepared players for Valkyrie Profile 2. The first game had wrapped up Lenneth's arc, so now the attention turned to her siblings. Defying Odin's law and angering Hrist, Silmeria the Valkyrie ends up in the mortal vessel of a timid princess named Alicia. While the gods intend for her to remain there unconscious, Silmeria won't be suppressed, and she and Alicia are forced to share one body as they uncover conspiracies that span the mortal realm as well as the heavens above.

Like many RPGs of the PlayStation 2 era, Valkyrie Profile 2 built itself from 3D polygon graphics, but the game retained the side-scroller approach to dungeons. Alicia jumps and slashes just as Lenneth did, but the princess/Valkyrie's magic of choice is a crystal shot that lets her switch places with enemies. It results in some crafty stage design, and tri-Ace didn't leave it at that. Battles take place in 3D environments where players manage their position and movement as well as the button-tapping attacks of their characters. It builds nicely upon the original game's reflex-driven combat, giving players the feel of an action game without losing its more complex workings.

Although Valkyrie Profile 2 excelled in gameplay, it neglected some of the original's strengths. Silmeria, despite having her name in the title, spends most of the game stuck inside Alicia's head, and the meek princess' gradual journey to empowerment isn't nearly as interesting as the potential tale of a renegade Valkyrie. Stranger still, Valkyrie Profile 2 revised the Einherjar themselves. No longer introduced through their own grim stories, the dead warriors are now just collected by Alicia checking out objects in dungeons. Their tales are reduced to just text on the menu screen, and their personalities emerge only in battle quotes and the occasional conversation.

Valkyrie Profile 2 was overshadowed both in Japan and North America by another Square Enix release, the long-delayed Final Fantasy XII, but it still arrived with a competent localization and modest marketing. In Japan it enjoyed a four-volume manga series from Fumino Hayashi, but Valkyrie Profile 2, like its predecessor, struggled to get noticed in a market thick with RPGs like Dragon Quest VIII, Final Fantasy XII, Disgaea 2, and Persona 3.

Competition wouldn't deter tri-Ace's RPG ambitions as a new generation of home consoles arose with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The developer labored on big-budget RPGs, including Star Ocean 4 and Infinite Undiscovery, the latter of which was daringly made an Xbox 360 exclusive. Meanwhile Resonance of Fate was something of a follow-up to Valkyrie Profile 2 in gameplay, as Suguro and others from the team expanded on the idea of free-roaming, combo-heavy 3D battles.

And how did Valkyrie Profile figure into these ambitious plans? Well, tri-Ace hedged bets there. A new Valkyrie Profile ended up on the DS, where budgets were smaller and cult-favorite sequels less risky. Once again, familiar tri-Ace talent popped up in the credits while the directing duties went to a relative unknown, Shunsuke Katsumata.

The game also made a daring change: it was a Valkyrie Profile without a Valkyrie protagonist.

Logic and fan demand suggested that a third Valkyrie Profile should be all about the merciless and loyal Hrist, but Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume told a different tale. Wylfred, a young and hotheadedly ignorant warrior, blames Lenneth for the battlefield death of his father and the consequent hardship of his family. Before anyone can tell him the truth about Valkyries (they only recruit from the already deceased, don't you know), Wylfred himself falls in battle and strikes a Faustian bargain with Hel, Queen of the Underworld. He's granted a chance at revenge thanks to a magic feather and a beguiling demon-maid companion named Aylith.

If it neglects the Valkyries themselves, Covenant of the Plume at least returns to the original game's idea of a strong supporting cast. Instead of collecting deceased warriors for Einherjar, Wylfred encounters a memorable and still-living lineup of mercenaries, assassins, rebels, bickering mages, beleaguered nobles, and general misfits to join his cause. His demonic plume allows him to send their souls to the netherworld at any point in battle. This leads the game down three possible plot arcs, depending on how many companions Wylfred cruelly sacrifices.

It's there that Covenant of the Plume upholds another tenet of the first Valkyrie Profile: make the player feel bad. Katsumata cited Yasumi Matsuno's landmark 1995 strategy-RPG Tactics Ogre as a major influence on Covenant of the Plume, and it's not hard to see how this Valkyrie Profile side-story stays true to that harsh inspiration: no matter which path you take, you'll have to watch some good people die.

Much like Tactics Ogre, Covenant of the Plume also adopts a straightforward strategy-RPG approach. Wylfred and his allies wander battlefield grids, positioning themselves for combo attacks. The series tradition of tapping a button for each character is in full effect, and it greatly enhances the usual attacks and spells of a tactical RPG. The game requires players to go through all three paths to recruit every ally, and as with previous Valkyrie Profiles (and nearly every other tri-Ace game) there's an ample bonus dungeon.

Covenant of the Plume was impressive in pairing strategy-RPG mechanics with Valkyrie Profile's tragic themes and kinetic battles, but it was perhaps not what series fans truly wanted. Some expected a lavish production for the Xbox 360 or PS3 instead of a DS game, and others took issue with the focus on Wylfred. The game's own extra labyrinth mocks this, as Hrist shows up and complains that the whole production is more like “Human Profile.”

A fight for shelf space also led to Covenant of the Plume's slight impact. The RPG market was again swamped, since many companies had flocked to the DS as a profitable alternative to the more demanding budgets of PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, or Wii games. tri-Ace had not, though, and their gamble at making big RPGs for home systems didn't pay off. The company scaled things back, and Valkyrie Profile was not a priority. One of Covenant of the Plume's endings saw Lenneth going into mortal slumber, and it unwittingly foretold a long hibernation for the series itself.

In the years after Valkyrie Profile's DS outing, the market saw the rise of new and profitable mobile games hinged on randomly doling out “gacha” rewards for players. Square Enix didn't hesitate to adapt several of their bigger names to this model, and in 2016 even Valkyrie Profile got a chance.

Valkyrie Anatomia: The Origin offers a roundabout prequel to the other Valkyrie Profile titles, though its premise is much the same as the original: Odin summons Lenneth to recruit worthy humans in preparation for Ragnarok. It also returns to the traditional portrayal of the Einherjar, as Lenneth watches each of her chosen mortals stumble onward to an untimely demise, whether it's an ill-fated dragonslayer, two young princes sacrificing themselves for their kingdom, or an archer who's never seen a single battle in his life. Playwright and producer Bun-Ō Fujisawa handled the script, and it's an ambitious mixture of established Valkyrie Profile lore, familiar legends, and even the Rhinemaidens from Richard Wagner's "Der Ring des Nibelungen." If the composer could play fast and loose with Norse myths, why not Valkyrie Profile?

For gameplay Valkyrie Anatomia presents simplistic stages of linked islands, letting players move around them like a board game. Gone are the challenging side-scrolling mazes of the first two Valkyrie Profiles, though developer Dokidoki Groove Works preserves the series' signature battle system: a party of four unleashing attacks in time with the player's button-taps.

As a free-to-play mobile game, Valkyrie Anatomia was fated to be more simplistic as well as more mercenary. Players could earn bonus characters from across the entire Valkyrie Profile and other Square Enix properties, but of course the real rewards were often found just by paying a lot of money. And even for a gacha-driven mobile RPG, Valkyrie Anatomia's prices were high.

Much like the Einherjar themselves, Valkyrie Anatomia's time was limited. The Japanese version launched in 2016 and an English international release appeared in 2019, but Square Enix decided to shut down the servers before long: the international version ended in August 2020, and the Japanese one eight months later.

That was the end of Valkyrie Anatomia. Only the most successful mobile RPGs get more concrete versions, and there would be no deluxe Switch or PS Vita port of Valkyrie Anatomia's. At least Square Enix released a Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth mobile version that's still available.

One should mention some homages to Valkyrie Profile. Spike Chunsoft and tri-Ace's own Exist Archive, released in 2016, pays distinct tribute with its button-tapping battles, side-view stages, and a tale of deceased heroes exploring a strange world. Lab Zero Games' 2019 RPG Indivisible also made no secret of the Valkyrie Profile inspiration behind its side-scrolling levels, four-character combat, and lineup of warriors for its heroine to summon.

Valkyrie Profile itself didn't sleep for that long. Earlier this year Square Enix announced Valkyrie Elysium for the PlayStation 4, PS5, and PC (with a port of the original Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth). Like Valkyrie Anatomia it does away with the “Profile” part of the title, and like Valkyrie Anatomia it's made by an outside developer, in this case the comparatively new Soleil.

Elysium is a 3D action game instead of a straight RPG, though its premise is familiar: a new Valkyrie is created by Odin to deal with Ragnarok and its aftermath. Hints of the older games emerge in other ways, including the Valkyrie's Einherjar-summoning ability and a warrior that bears a mild resemblance to Hrist. Maybe she'll get her own game someday.

Valkyrie Profile has an undeniable following but never knew a mainstream breakthrough—it hasn't even gained the standard anime adaptation that most popular RPGs get at some point. tri-Ace and Square Enix routinely put more faith in the colorful sci-fi adventures of Star Ocean, and even now Valkyrie Elysium is arriving just a month before the new Star Ocean: The Divine Force. Perhaps the Valkyrie Profile games are too demanding, too complicated, or even just too depressing and overdramatic.

Yet that also sums up their strengths. Even in the clumsier outings, there's something about Valkyrie Profile and its follow-ups. It's the way battles mix button-mashing to sate the player's lizard brain while offering more complex background mechanics for the strategist. It's the way the dungeons offer puzzles in an inventive 2D environment. It's also the way the games embody the myth of the Valkyrie in several meanings: the fleeting comfort of a noble death, the fragility of human life, and even the hope that there's something beyond this mortal plane. It's a rare combination in any field—and the reason Valkyrie Profile still resonates with so many.