Two roads diverged in a wood and I, I took the one that caused me to spend hours grinding. The biggest chunk of your gaming time will be spent fighting enemies and leveling up your characters. This is also the best factor in determining if you will actually derive any joy from Valhalla Knights 2. Personally, I can spend an infinite amount of time fighting, resting, equipping, and tweaking my party. Patience becomes your best virtue in a game that is woefully lacking in direction. Or should I say, directions. When you begin the game, you will select your race from the fantasy archetypes (human, elf, dwarf, karate kid) as well as your gender and facial features. Now don't go getting all excited at the chance to tweak your avatar's look. There are only a few faces to choose from and they tend to fall into two categories: manga and stoner. I decided to play as a elven magic user thinking I would be able to actually cast magic. Cut to the very first quest in the game in which I'm told to head into a forest to chuck a rock at another rock. I died ten times (each death sends you back to the inn with a lighter wallet) before the game refused to load and I had to restart.

What the game fails to mention is that if you hope to travel into a dungeon, going alone is suicide. This is doubly true if you play as a magic class, because casting a spell entails navigating several menus in real time. If you actually get to the correct spell, casting it leave you wide open to enemy attacks. There are no polite turns to be taken, either you learn fast to stay on the run or you make friends with the innkeeper. Once I figured out soloing my quest was fruitless, I took my newly made fighter to the guild, a building in town where you will accept quests and recruit new members, and added another member to my party. Going into battle with a fighter and a healer made a lot more sense. I eventually filled in my 6 person battle party with a mage and a thief, and 2 other warrior classes. While Valhalla Knights encourages you to take chances, it won't hold your hand through the game. Make a wrong move in choosing your characters and pay for it later. I admit that I started out frustrated with the game but once I developed a working strategy found the battle fun.

I mentioned grinding above, and trust me there is a lot of it. Grinding can be a pain in the ass if the gameplay doesn't back it up. Fortunately, while it does stumble in a few areas, Valhalla Knights 2 has a solid combat system. You control one member of your party while the other five act based on set behaviors. As you level up you can push their behavior into certain directions with skill points such as support, healing, and damage dealing. Rather than having a healer who sits back and waits for party members to take damage, a player can choose to have the healer also back up your main fighter. As I previously stated, selecting spells is cumbersome and damn near impossible, so keeping your magic users set on auto pilot is the best course of action. As a fighter, each face button has a different action assigned to it from normal melee damage, a special attack that you can execute upon filling a gauge through regular attacks, and a set skill from a pool of learned abilities. Most battles can be won by smashing the attack button, but learning when to use your other abilities only deepens the combat. Most RPG's released today can be won with the press of one button, so Valhalla Knights 2 isn't breaking any laws here, but I wish they would have required a bit more skill in battle. In addition to mashing a button, having six party members make most of the early battles a cakewalk.

The benefits of grinding is not only a buff party, but also loot. Why there is more loot than any adventurer can hope to carry in their pockets of adventuring. Slight downside to looting though is that your party is full of vision-impaired individuals and all loot has to be identified using an item in your inventory or from your guild leader for a price. I get not knowing that the first blade you pick up is a dagger, but after that I'd hope my warrior could identify another dagger seeing as how it looks exactly like the one in his hand. Equipment is specialized to jobs and races so don't expect your diminutive healer to share pants with your ax-wielding strongman.

Valhalla Knights 2 is a dungeon crawler, and as such you spend your time in a never ending dungeon. There is only one entrance from town, and for the first bit of the game, any progression required trekking through every previous part of the dungeon. Luckily, all encounters can be avoided thanks to monsters that appear on screen, meaning no random battles every three steps! While this alleviates some of the annoyance, knowing that you have to wade through the slums and forest every time you want to get any farther smacks of artificially increasing the games length. Later on, you'll receive objects that allow teleportation to and from certain areas, not exactly an airship but still a good means of speedy travel.

Visually, Valhalla Knights 2 is a bit of a give and take. The graphics are some of the best I've witnessed on the PSP with detailed character models that change depending on their equipment. Monsters come in multiple variety from annoying oversized insects to massive dragons. Locations are detailed and cover the RPG cliché gambit with towns, slums, forests, and caverns all with the appropriate level of grime and creepiness. While the game engine is producing technically impressive visuals, the actual design is unreasonably bland. Is there some documented advantage to choosing brown and gray as the only colors in your design palette? It isn't bad enough that the game is monochromatic, the layout of dungeons are a copy and paste affair with a map that does you no good beyond telling you that there is a wall in front of your face. Often times in battle I lost site of my character thanks to a spastic camera and everyone looking like they crawled out of a mud pit. When they NPC's in the game are more recognizable than my party, we're looking at an inexcusable issue.

In the end, Valhalla Knights 2 walks the fine line between greatness and utter junk. Sadly, within that fine line sites mediocrity. I enjoyed the 40 hours of grinding to make my party the best in all the land, but I can't overlook the numerous faults. Obtuse game design, uninspired level and character design prevent this game from being anything more than a solid dungeon hack. There are horrible RPGs on the PSP and there are amazing RPGs. I wish Valhalla Knights could choose a side and stick to it.

Final Score
6.5 out of 10