At the start of Valhalla Knights, players create a character, give them a class and are given character points to divide amongst his or her attributes. Once this is complete, the story begins. You wake up in a strange bed, which you soon learn to find out it is in an inn. You don’t remember anything, how you got there, who you are etc. and the innkeeper is pretty upset that you haven’t paid him since you started staying here, and you apparently owe him a substantial amount of money. The innkeeper tells you to go to the castle and bring back something of value. Now most people starting this game don’t realize that this castle is full of monsters, unless you read the instruction manual. Fortunately it doesn’t take long to figure it out. Now all main characters need motivation, ours hears voices in his head telling him that in order to get his memory back, you must go to the castle. Well, I guess we are on our way then.

The first thing you will notice about this game is that it looks remarkably well for a PSP title. The best part of the game is the load times; there are practically none, which is extremely impressive on the PSP. The textures look as good as can be expected on the system, and the music fits the mood quite well. The town where you start in is pretty small, there are only five different buildings you can enter, and two or three different streets you can go down. Well I guess most people would pack up and leave if the biggest building in town started spewing out monsters.

When you start wandering around the castle, it’s fairly obvious that it is going to be a rather large map and it is extremely easy to get lost if you are not using the on screen map. To get stronger, players must fight monsters while wondering around the dungeon, and when they are touched, a battle ensues. Battles are played much like a Tales game. Players control the character they want, and run around the field in real time hacking and slashing their way to victory. If a monster is attacked from behind or the side, without seeing the player, damage is automatically dealt to the monsters, the same would happen if the player was hit from the side or behind, and this is an extremely lazy way to do back and side attacks. The developer could have made the enemies confused for a couple of seconds or had their backs turned until hit. This, I believe, would allow for the player to have a little more fun trying to hit something from behind.

The combat is dull and repetitions. Upon entering combat, there are 3 attack buttons, 2 of which do the same thing. The third does a big hit when the character you are controlling is powered up. This makes for some dull game play. Thankfully, you can control any character at any time. This at least allows for some diversity in battles.

The customization is what sets this game apart from most other dungeon crawlers. When the game starts and even after you create characters, players can go back to the guild and change character classes whenever they want. So if you are getting sick of your current party configuration, go to the guild and change classes, it’s much cheaper than asking the guild to find a new character for you. Also the number of items that you can equip on characters is at least twice that of what can be equipped in most RPGs.

Valhalla Knights puts a refreshing twist on a genre that is very overdone on this platform. With the amount of customization that can be done on characters, it is worth looking into. The game would be much better if they added combos into the combat system and allowed for blocking. If you are a fan of the dungeon crawler, rent this one before you buy it. If you like the combat system, players will find this game enjoyable.