The History of Valkyrie Elysium

Sixteen years after Silmeria, a new valkyrie from a new studio, and action combat where the measured combos used to be.

Valkyrie Elysium is an action role playing game developed by Soleil and published by Square Enix, released for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 on September 29, 2022 and for Windows on November 11, 2022. It was the series' first home console installment in more than 15 years and its third overall, built on Unreal Engine 4. Motoi Sakuraba returned to compose, the one credit that runs through every game on this shelf, and the character designs are by Yuya Nagai of CyDesignation.

Its valkyrie is Maria, a lesser god created by Odin and sent to Midgard to find and purify souls, gathering einherjar to bolster an injured Odin against Fenrir as Ragnarok arrives. The game is a spiritual sequel: the setting and the einherjar system carry over, the turn based battle system does not. Combat is real time action.

HOW IT WAS MADE

Soleil, 2022

Elysium is the first game in the series not made by tri-Ace. Soleil took the series into 3D action: Maria fights in real time and calls her einherjar to her side, where the earlier games assigned each fighter to a controller button and built combos by timing. The dead are met differently, too. Where Lenneth's einherjar arrived with full dramatized death scenes, Maria reads the memories of the dead from Hollow Blossoms, flowers that hold what the deceased left behind. Reviewers who loved the earlier games noticed the trade, and said so.

The story still turns on whether the valkyrie obeys. A rogue valkyrie, Hilde, warns Maria not to trust Odin; Fenrir claims Odin means to gather souls to escape his own destruction in a new world. The game has multiple endings, decided in its final chapter by whether Maria has gathered all the Verdan Blossoms and how she answers the human Armand, from a worst ending in which the world is destroyed to a true ending in which the harvested souls are restored to Yggdrasil.

THE TWO COVERS

Japan faces the wolf

Japan

Fenrir head on in a violet field, Maria small at the center. Japan sells the wolf and the stillness around him.

Europe

The Western art puts the party's backs to us and Fenrir in shadow at the side: a walk toward the fight, not a stare down.

THE RELEASE

September 2022, and an old friend bundled in

Elysium arrived on September 29, 2022 for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, with the Windows version following on November 11. Square Enix used the launch to bring the original back as well: Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth, the PSP port, was re released for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 the same season, bundled into Elysium's Digital Deluxe Edition and sold on its own from December 22, 2022. In the United States, Best Buy's preorder bonus was a steelbook printed with the game's Japanese box art, offered with either console version: the Japanese cover, treated as the collectible one, in the West.

HOW IT WAS RECEIVED

The scores

Metacritic, 65/100

The PlayStation 5 average, classed as mixed or average: the lowest aggregate on this shelf.

Famitsu, 33/40

In Japan the panel scored it a point above Covenant of the Plume and a point below Silmeria.

IGN, 6/10 and GameSpot, 5/10

The major Western reviews were the coolest in the series' history. GameSpot praised the character design, artwork, combat, voice acting, and music, and criticized the narrative as weak and the environments as sparse and low budget.

RPGamer, 3.5/5

RPGamer called the game's existence a miracle in itself after the series' long dormancy, found the combat gracefully handled and the art gorgeous, and called the world mostly empty and the story brief and predictable.

RPG Site, 7/10

RPG Site praised the battle system and called every other aspect mediocre, hoping the action style would remain a spinoff rather than overtake the series.

THE SALES

Documented figures

In its first week in Japan, Elysium sold 40,362 physical copies across its two platforms: 23,295 on PlayStation 4 and 17,067 on PlayStation 5, per Famitsu's chart for the week ending October 2, 2022. Set beside Silmeria's 281,510 copy opening week in the same country, the number measures how far the series' Japanese audience had thinned in sixteen years, and how much of this game's life would be lived in the West and on PC instead.