According to this week's issue of the popular Japanese magazine Famitsu, Sega's finally cutting its Valkyria Chronicles franchise a little slack with a completely new game in the series for the PlayStation 4 as well as a remaster of the original game for the same console.
The original released in 2008 for the PlayStation 3, and again on Steam in November 2014, but the two sequels so far received less push, with the second releasing on PSP to far less fanfare and the third not even coming to the United States. That's where things stood with the franchise until now.
Then again, maybe that'll happen again: initial reports seem to indicate that the upcoming game is sort of part of the current series, and sort of part of a completely new and different thing. It's complicated, and it could also mean breaking the hearts of fans of the franchise as it currently exists.
The new game, titled either Valkyria of the Blue Revolution or Valkyria: Azure Revolution, depending on where you read about it, reportedly abandons both the setting of the original series and the battle system — pushing it to something more akin to a real-time role-playing game rather than a real-time strategy game like its predecessors. In their place, a more traditional fantasy setting focused on the supernatural Valkyria and how normal folks deal with them. Famitsu's official scans are pretty small, but it looks like everyone's running around with swords and the like.
Now, most of this comes courtesy of some translations of Famitsu obtained by Gematsu, so take it with a grain of salt. As more official information comes out, it's possible that some of this will make more sense. There's also a better-than-good chance that a little bit of paint and polish is exactly what the franchise needs to make a splash again (at which point, we can hopefully return to the World War I-inspired battlefields and anime soldiers).
Regardless, the remastered version of the original is coming to Japan on Feb. 10, 2016 for the PlayStation 4 and will reportedly contain a demo of the new game. Who knows? Maybe folks will fall in love with the new iteration of the franchise.
