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Sega Of America not touching Valkyria Chronicles glitch
By Heath | June 26, 2008 at 11:38 pm
Valkyria Chronicles, which was known as Senjou no Varukyria (Valkyrie of the Battlefield) in Japan, has a well-documented glitch. I was prompted to search for info on this after I became a victim of it. After clearing the story battle in chapter 10, the game froze, giving me just a black screen to stare at. Unable to reset or any other such thing, the only option was to turn off the system. Finding this strange, I took to the internet, and found out I was definitely not alone. This has happened to plenty of people, for no apparent reason; and when it strikes, trying to clear the battle from a mid-battle save is not sufficient, as the glitch will strike again. One must re-enter the potentially very long, tricky battle from the beginning. Wondering if this would be fixed in time for the North American release, I contacted an overall indifferent Sega of America about the matter.
“How will Sega of America handle this glitch?” I asked.
“Will it be addressed and fixed for sure?”
Alas, each and every one of the normally vocal contacts that represent Sega of America wholly avoided the issue, perhaps content to pretend that it does not exist. Numerous attempts to get Sega to even so much as acknowledge that such a glitch exists proved futile.
This is sad for some gamers, as it means they are taking what seems to be a very high risk of wasting quite a good chunk of time (perhaps an hour for cautious players on the first try, what with all the feeling-out that can happen in this game) of hard-fought war and strategy. The battles in Valkyria Chronicles can take some time, especially later in the game, and even more especially on the first couple of tries, before a player comes up with a materful strategy. But even when a certain strategy can end a battle in three turns, those three turns can take a while.
This being said, getting nothing but a black screen at the end of a story battle is disheartening for sure. And the fact that the only way to get around the glitch is to start the battle over, not even using a mid-battle save to preserve some progress, twists the knife. Even restarting the battle from scratch, the player is rolling the dice, and who knows, the glitch may appear.
Judging by the way PR generally goes, silence here means a lack of action. If Sega would have actually addressed the existence of this glitch in the last month of contact-tag, then perhaps one could believe it was being addressed. But acting like it doesn’t exist and/or not saying anything is either an awful PR strategy, or a sign that nothing will be done, and the North American will have the same glitch as the Japanese version.