Started playing it yesterday and it’s set in not-WW2 where you fight for the good germans that are dutch people whose kinkade-esque homeland is in the baltics because the evil soviet empire nazis want to invade the not-NATO that is also straight up the Hansa. Could you not have picked a different war for this
The virgin anime WW2 game series vs the chad furry WW2 game series
Valkyria Chronicles is reverse orientalism. It blends together cultures and historical events in a way that doesn’t make any sense, it completely disregards how the cultures view and treat their own history, it basically just picks out whatever parts the devs thought looked cool or that they could use to tell their own story they had in mind. It’s less that they had some really confusing take on WWII and more that they were ignorant and lazy and didn’t really care about getting the details right or about the cultural significance of how we talk about those events.
Trying to figure out what Valkyria Chronicles is saying about WWII is like trying to figure out what Disney’s Aladdin is saying about… whatever country it’s supposed to be set in.
There’s also the Darcsens, who are the stand-in for the Jews and probably also Roma as the minority that everyone hates and distrusts. In the past they destroyed the world with dark magic or evil science or something. There’s a forced labour camp level later
I know they love this sort of thing in Japan but when I’m playing these games I’m just grimacing whenever a cutscene happens. It’s even worse in the sequel since it’s set in a military academy for child soldiers so it piles on those tropes on top of the dodgy WWII allegory
Edit: I also love that there’s no communism in this fantasy early 20th century Europe. It’s just the evil Russian/German empire, the alliance of presumed generic liberal democracies and our good little neutral monarchy in the middle. In the second game there’s a revolutionary movement trying to overthrow the monarchy but they’re just motivated by racism and basically stooges for the rooskie krauts
In the past they destroyed the world with dark magic or evil science or something.
It really is depressing how common that is in fantasy/alt history fiction. Whenever there’s a stand in for a marginalized community, there’s always some reason for it, they always did something to deserve it, but the morally upstanding protagonists are willing to “let bygones be bygones.”
I don’t get it, the Jews IRL were also persecuted because everyone thought they controlled the world and shit.
It didn’t happen, (not to the scale Hitler said anyway) but the Darksens in VC didn’t “use black magic” either. It’s propaganda.
I can kind of see why writers would keep writing stories like that. It’s more satisfying narratively if the hatred is motivated by something tangible other than just prejudice. Making the oppressed group secretly powerful in some way might also be an empowerment thing depending on the story
Usually it feels like it is to excuse past atrocities unfortunately, like a “yeah bad things happened in the past, but we all need to just move on.” I usually see it in very white liberal stories about prejudice, not often Japanese writers though.
In the fourth one the American/Anglos faction is portrayed as being evil enough to kill a child in order to nuke FakeMoscow, essentially making the entire game a suicide run
Cutscene skippers stay winning
Wait until you play the trails series, cold steel will give you a aneurysm from how krauty it is
Uncritical support to the Imperial Liberation Front in their struggle to free all of Zemuria from the genocidal Erebonian Empire.
Problem is that they’re tools of the reactionary feudal aristocracy who want to roll back the encroaching capitalist system that’s threatening their socio-economic system. With giant mech suits lol.
It is absolutely infuriating to me that the rebel faction is the damn aristocracy
Yeah, it’s just a shitpost and not that deep.
spoiler for Cold Steel II
Although the whole twist at the end of CSII is that there’s no “rebel faction” and no real civil war.
