I actually completed this game several months ago. I've really been itching to talk about it somewhere though. The reason for this is: I haven't found a single person on the internet who's covered it all the way through. I might be the first English speaker to beat this game and review it.
Zanma Chouougi Valhollian is an SRPG that's most similar to Fire Emblem with a pretty unique team up mechanic. You can pair up any two characters to do a single combo attack that will increase in power when paired up together many times. There's also an ability system with high damage single target attacks, heal spells, and AOE attacks. Other than that, it's a lot like Fire Emblem. There's a player and enemy phase, and counter attacks when range permits.
In short, this game SUCKS. It's extremely slow, tedious, and difficult. I do not recommend this to anyone unless you have a lot of tolerance for old school jank. Now despite all that, I enjoyed my time with this game well enough and thought it had some charm and fun gameplay at certain points. It's right there in the repo so no harm in giving it a shot.
The Good
++ The team up mechanic absolutely carries this game. It is fun to plan out a turn pairing up your characters in a way that will eliminate enemies in one attack so that they cannot counterattack. Enemies are STRONG in this game, they are abundant, and healing is limited, so it's important to prevent counterattacks at all cost. A useful strategy is to soften an enemy with two ranged attackers and then finish them off with one or two melee characters.+ Yeah, I like the graphics. Early 3D has a chokehold on me for whatever reason. The screenshot above actually appeals to me a lot. YMMV
+ The battle theme very obviously rips off "Beat It" by Michael Jackson at the beginning. I never got sick of hearing it from the beginning of the game to the end, and you'll be hearing it a lot. It was a hit song for a reason.
+ The animations are actually really good. They were punching above their weight for this part. Fire Emblem doesn't have battle animations like that even today.
+ The main characters name is Ray Brightforce. Your favorite game doesn't have a name like that.
The Bad
-- This game does not respect your time. On enemy phase, the cursor will go around the map for each individual enemy on every turn and have them think for 5 seconds before making their move, even if that move is NOTHING. This will occur on every single turn. On larger maps, as you crawl from one side to the other, you will sit there for several minutes every time you end your turn and that is not an exaggeration. Even with turbo, this is a long process. I can't imagine how mind numbing that must have been for Japanese gamers on real hardware.-- The difficulty is punishing. Even at the beginning, enemies will do a lot of damage and you will not have enough healing to take it all. Many times success will be praying for RNG dodges, otherwise units will die. There isn't actual perma death but it is basically perma death. I will explain later. Certain enemies move when passing through designated tiles, so I crawled through the level square by square until they triggered and then tried to funnel them through a chokepoint. This is how I was able to beat the game.
-- EXP distribution is insanely whack. This game isn't on a 100 exp system, rather the thresholds scale exponentially higher as you go. At the start, damaging an enemy gives you a paltry 1 - 2 exp and it never goes up from there. That means that the only way to truly be able to level up is to get kills. Remember how in the good section I wrote about the strategy of softening an enemy at range and finishing them at melee? That's actually a trap. If you do that, your ranged units will NEVER level up and quickly fall behind. Enemies get stronger fast, so if you neglect a unit for a chapter they are basically done for. Also, only damaging abilities grant exp. Healing doesn't give any at all. What this means is that you will have to put units in harms way in order to spread kills out evenly and keep everyone useable. So once again, we are praying for RNG dodges, because there's not enough healing. This is how I failed my first playthrough and had to start over. I was softlocked.
-- Many characters are useless. The game scales enemies up fast but don't scale the recruited characters with them. After a certain point early on, the characters you get will not be able to deal any damage and will likely die in one hit. There are two archers in the game and I have no idea what any of their abilities are because I couldn't level them up a single time, they were that weak. The exception to this is a mage that is a recruitable enemy (the only one in the game) and the final character who is actually pretty strong right away. This is where the perma death thing I spoke about comes into play. Characters don't actually die, but if they are knocked out they are unusable for one chapter. Like I said though, enemies scale so fast that missing one chapter means they will fall too far behind and will be useless on return.
That's basically it. The story is really basic and the characters are one dimensional but I can't say it's bad enough to ruin the game. It's fine. I hope the 2 people out there who were somewhat interested in this game are satisfied. This is basically a review for no one. Maybe a retro Youtuber who covers this game in 15 years will use it. Thanks for reading!
Last edited:
