I play it for the plot!
Valkyrie Drive -BHIKKHUNI- is a game based on an anime about fondling anime girls. Have I sold it to you yet? And I had the “pleasure” of reviewing it for PC. You might compare it to the Senran Kagura series of games and that is a fair comparison. It originally came out on the PSVita and though I did not catch it there I’m glad I did here because I was surprised to say that I had a ton of fun with this game.
STORY
Before I start talking about the story let me ask you this? You clicked on this review because YOU KNOW what’s about to go down. So the story is about a kind of virus. Known as the VR virus. Which turns girls into weapons. And they are sent to the island known as Bhikkhuni to receive treatment or something, or maybe it’s a quarantine type situation. You think I followed this plot while “other things” were on my mind? The characters are your typical anime girl stereotypes. They have fun raunchy dialogue that I mostly skipped through because I stopped caring and just wanted to fight stuff with half naked girls
GAMEPLAY
So surprisingly the gameplay is quite good. It’s a typical hack n’ slash and from what I hear it’s a lot like Senran Kagura but since I’ve only played like 5 minutes of Senran I can’t really compare it all that well. For me the combat was super satisfying and sometimes even rewarding. There is nothing inherently wrong with it and it serves it’s purpose well. It is easy to pick and up it won’t take you long to master it and mess around with the mechanics. But due to the simplicity of the combat I kinda just found myself mashing more often than not, even though I had the option to do some crazy cool stuff. One of the main focuses in the game is the Drive system. Once you’ve done enough damage you’ll notice a bar that’s been filled. And at the press of a button a you’ll trigger a small cutscene where your partner character is turned into a weapon through “interesting” methods. The more you level the more “interesting” these methods get. You can also play as different characters as you progress through the story, with different fighting styles which I though was a neat little addition that spices things up since I feel as if I’d get tired of the first character if it was just her.
PRESENTATION
The game looks quite nice even if you scale it down to 720p and the anime style helps it so it doesn’t look dated at times. The character designs are neat I guess, I don’t know how well I can judge how skimpy they’re outfits are but take my word for it and believe me. There’s not much to say about how the game looks really other than it looks nice.
CONTENT
For a game that seems super shallow at its exterior it certainly has quite a lot of content, in the form of unlockables, art, music and a whole lot of costumes and accessories. And I found myself spending way too much time making them look at least somewhat wholesome but it’s almost impossible. And you’ll be playing this game for a quite a long time since the game has quite a few missions and the main story will last you about 15 or more hours.
PERFORMANCE
The game runs at a solid 60fps at around a slightly lower resolution for me. To help you understand I have a 940m on a laptop. So I’d say I’m pretty happy at the performance since I mostly just play indies and some old games on my laptop for the most part.
VERDICT
Valkyrie Drive has seriously impressed me I don’t think I was expecting to like this game as much as I did. I seriously despise the fan service-ey type anime that’s always around and yet I liked this because of it’s almost self-aware, raunchy nature. If you want a dumb little action game and you have a lot of time to spend check this game out on either PSVita or PC
Valkyrie Drive -BHIKKHUNI- gets a 7 out of 10 from me.
Senran Kagura was a BLAST for me! Great to find out about about Valkyrie Drive. Cheers!