For everything it gets right on the battlefield, Valkyria Chronicles 4 is defined at least as much by what it does off of it. For all the narrow escapes, the nervy sorties into uncharted territory, the stressful hold-your-position-at-all-costs defensive missions, it understands that war involves plenty of preparation and a lot of downtime. It captures both the intensity of conflict and the effort (and occasional tedium) of the long hours and days—weeks, even—in between. And all without losing the player’s attention. 

Then again, discounting the at-best-misguided console-only offshoot Valkyria Revolution, the series has always managed to find a balance between slow, considered strategising and bursts of exciting action. Each turn begins with you looking down at a tactical map, from which you can spend your limited supply of action points: you’ll either select a soldier to move and fire, or sign an order to buff or heal a frontline unit beyond easy reach. Whether you’re sending a scout ahead for a bit of reconnaissance, launching a brute-force assault with a tank, or flanking the enemy with a sniper or shock trooper, you’re not limited to moving individual units just once. But once they have moved, they’ll be left with less stamina to reposition during subsequent actions. Their meter only resets when a new turn begins. 

While you’re moving them, they’re at risk. Should they wander into the sightlines of any enemy units within range, they’ll be fired upon: it’s up to you to dodge the bullets and mortars as best you can, or position them behind cover so they can’t be hit. Once you’ve committed to firing, the incoming barrage will stop, letting you aim your shots precisely, with your chances of success determined by everything from visibility to range to the aiming stat of the weapon you’re using. And, crucially, by individual personality quirks and how they pertain to the current battlefield situation. 

These positive and negative character traits have a chance of triggering at any given moment. Take Neige, for example, a timid sniper who suffers from stage fright. Should she wander into a position where she can be spotted by several enemy units at once, she’ll freeze in her tracks, her stamina bar instantly drained. And yet if shock trooper Fleuret is nearby, she might well avoid taking a hit: her eagerness to impress her colleague gives her a boost to her evasiveness. 

Some traits might seem a little silly, but it’s remarkable how these idiosyncrasies—combined with exaggerated animations and the odd celebratory cutaway when they take a base or earn a kill—give the units under your command a sense of personality. You might find yourself growing attached to particular troops for the strangest of reasons: despite her shyness, I decided to keep Neige around after a desperate move on the last action of one turn saw her take out a crucial enemy unit with a perfect headshot when she was a single health point from death.

Squeaky moments like this aren’t uncommon. There’s probably some behind-the-scenes number fiddling that ensures you finish most missions feeling like you survived by the skin of your teeth, or maybe it’s my own risky tactics and determination to leave no soldier behind. The game has a knack of finding ways to keep you on your toes throughout, in fact, whether it’s a change in objective after a certain number of turns, or simply through the mission objectives themselves. The middle section in particular has several standout battles. 

One asks you to rescue two units stranded behind enemy lines while keeping your base protected. Another asks you to clear a path through thick snow with Imperial troops approaching from the rear, letting you trigger avalanches that can sweep away several units—including your own if they finish their turn in its path. 

Sometimes it’s merely the unusual context that livens things up: in a flashback episode, two units must sneak into a training exercise, shooting targets while remaining unseen to trick their superior into believing that their sniper friend is a crack shot. (They are, it turns out, it’s just that their sights needed adjusting.) The painterly art, meanwhile, makes for an arresting vision of war, and though the violence is sanitised, the story does offer some stark reminders of the consequences of conflict. After encountering a local tradesman selling Imperial goods, your squad later stumbles upon a grim sight showing just how they’ve made an example of him.

It’s a pity that its moments of light relief sometimes strike the wrong note, and that later chapters introduce more far-fetched ideas that sit awkwardly next to the more sober character work. Yet these aren’t ruinous by any means: Valkyria Chronicles 4 has the narrative depth to match its tactical smarts, with enough small refinements to outrank its predecessors. 

2008's Valkyria Chronicles was World War II by way of a JRPG: it opens with a chipper guy returning to his hometown, meeting a feisty girl, and immediately watching the bad guys (in this case, Nazis) blow the town to hell. And off to war we go! Valkyria Chronicles 4 is still anime as all hell, but takes a welcome cue from war movies that start in the midst of the action, with an established squad that has already seen its fair share of the action. For a game that's as much about its characters as its turn-based combat, knowing these soldiers already have relationships and piecing together their histories is a welcome way to kickstart a story.

Whole new cast aside, I was surprised at just how similar Valkyria Chronicles 4 is to the game Sega released a decade ago. I mean, really similar. As before, Valkyria is an uncommon blend of turn-based strategy and real-time action. From a bird's eye commander's view of the battlefield, you spend action points to select a unit, then run them around in third person to close in on enemy soldiers. Get close enough and they'll start firing on you, but you can freeze time to take aim and attack yourself. On turns where I got close to the enemy and fired, but didn't get a kill, I'd be scrambling to end that character's turn before they started getting shot at again.

That hybrid of real-time and turn-based always felt slightly awkward to me. So did some of Valkyria Chronicles' more blatantly 'gamey' level design touches. There's a cover system, but units can only hide behind sandbags placed around the map; sidle up to a corner or crouch behind a fallen tree, and the same mechanics and defense bonuses don't apply. So I went into Valkyria Chronicles 4 expecting a decade of refinement on those systems, or some new twists on them. I didn't find either.

At least in the intro mission I played, and two missions that take place later in the campaign, I was still crouching behind sandbags and wondering why they're the only form of cover that exists in this world. I was wondering if Sega, at this point, couldn't devote resources to more expressive animated cutscenes, rather than the storybook-style talking heads that frequently deliver dialogue between missions. Valkyria Chronicles 4 runs on the same engine as the recent remaster of Valkyria Chronicles that brought the game to PC for the first time, and it shows: other than its nice, sharp resolution, Valkyria Chronicles 4 feels like it could've been made a decade ago.

This is not an ambitious sequel, but it's true that there's really nothing like Valkyria Chronicles except Valkyria Chronicles. In a couple hours I was already getting emotionally attached to some members of my squad, all of whom have stats and attributes or personality traits that can be good or bad. Let me tell you about my sniper, Aladdin. Aladdin got so many headshots for me he ran out of ammo. I played this game like Aladdin was a one-man army. He was Tom Berenger from the movies Sniper, Sniper 2, Sniper 3, Sniper 5: Legacy, and Sniper 7: Ultimate Kill.

He also had a weakness: his smooth-shaved bald head was super reflective, making him easier to spot. That seems like a terrible trait for a sniper, but thankfully his rifle's scope keeps him out of the relatively short vision radius of most enemy troops, but still within killing range with a headshot. I appreciate that Valkyria Chronicles 4 gives me the freedom to spend my squad's action points as I see fit. On some turns, I had Aladdin move and attack two or three times in a row, obliterating enemy soldiers like a bald Billy Zane in Sniper 4: Reloaded, before everyone else moved up safely. On other turns, I'd sacrifice the chance to attack to move someone into flanking range, so that when I caused enemy troops to move, they'd take automatic fire from my soldiers (Valkyria has an innate XCOM-style overwatch system).

Playing Valkyria Chronicles 4 well is satisfying—I was proud to make it through a tough mission without taking any casualties my first time touching the game. Playing well also means playing slowly and carefully, and I'll admit I quickly started to tire of methodically creeping forward and taking out stupid AI. At least from what I played, the soldiers you're up against are not sophisticated: they mostly stay in place, shoot at what's in range, or move forward on a preset path.

I was never nervous between turns wondering what they were going to do or where they were going to go. I wasn't facing complex flanking tactics or difficult choices about who to save and who to sacrifice, as in dedicated strategy games like Into the Breach or XCOM. And I wasn't pulling off clutch attacks with the physical skill required of real shooters—time stands still while you take aim with a soldier, and a large circle rather than a crosshair represents your accuracy and chance to hit.

So while it was satisfying to make it out of a mission unscathed, Aladdin racking up headshot after headshot, it felt a bit like going through the motions. As long as I moved methodically, I would come out just fine.

That's probably not the case with every mission in Valkyria Chronicles 4—I hope there are harder missions that really force you to adapt your strategy on the fly, and more proactive enemies that move around the field in more complex ways. A single mistake in Valkyria can rob you of a soldier you've invested tons of time and heart into, though in VC4 there's an option to turn off permadeath to make the game easier. Sega told me permadeath is really in the spirit of the game, though. You're in a war, after all, and feeling that jolt of loss, knowing you won't get to learn more of that character's story or use them on the battlefield, is part of the theme.

I would've liked to see Valkyria Chronicles grow more between 2008 and now—aside from adding a new class, the long-range grenadier, it's a remarkably similar game. But no one else is making bizarre strategy games with ensemble casts set in a fantasy World War II, and that's something I'll welcome more of on PC any time.

Sega announced today that the strategy-RPG Valkyria Chronicles 4, "a coming-of-age story in a time of war" featuring an all-new cast of characters, will be out on September 25. The new game will follow the adventures of the Federation's Squad E as they fight a desperate battle against the enemy, the elements, and the god-like Valkyria. 

The members of Squad E sound like a typical war movie cast. There's the determined young Commander Claude Wallace, heavy weapons specialist Riley Miley, the hot-headed Darcsen Raz, the stone-cold sniper Kai Schulen, and even a dog (who is apparently also a medic) named Ragnarok—friends since childhood, but can that friendship hold up under the pressures of war? 

The new game will feature an updated version of the Blitz battle system, which will include a new Grenadier class, new offensive and defensive battleship support options, and larger-scale maps with more units than previous Valkyria Chronicles games. Original composer Hitoshi Sakomoto is back, as is the watercolor-inspired visual style, enabling "an expressive world filled with colorful emotions," as Sega put it. That's maybe a little over-the-top, but it does look nice. 

The PC version of the game will also support 4K resolutions and ultra-wide displays, customizable controls, and Steam achievements and trading cards. What it will not have, unfortunately, is a physical edition like the ones coming to consoles. That's not necessarily a big deal unless you're a big fan and/or collector of such things, but the "Memoirs From Battle" edition being released in the EU and UK also includes two DLC adventures featuring characters from Squad 7, the unit at the center of the original game. The DLCs will cover four story missions totaling more than three hours of play, and once completed the Squad 7 characters will be unlocked for use in Valkyria Chronicles 4.   

I would assume (and, honestly, expect) that the bonus content will also be available for PC, perhaps as a preorder bonus or in some kind of "launch day edition," but for now Steam gives no indication about its status. It also still lists Valkyria Chronicles 4 availability as just 2018, though, so maybe the page just hasn't been updated yet. I've emailed Sega to ask and will update if I receive a reply.