Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story 2 is an interesting and fun mix of a traditional JRPG and School Management sim.
Ah, the classic JRPG, a genre we are all too familiar with. I mean, who doesn’t like seeing courageous adolescents save the world with their rainbow hair and questionable fashion choices? While games such as Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy have been loved by many and have definitely brought a lot to the table, the genre itself has become a bit stale. The reason for this is the reuse of tired and old tropes, but it would seem that Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story 2 has tried to bring something new to the table.
Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story 2 is the sequel to Agate’s Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story, except this time around, the game was developed by Agate’s International branch, Agate International. Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story 2 isn’t the company’s first game, mind you, as Agate themselves are one of Indonesia’s most prominent game developers and have been around since 2009; in that time, the developer has made a whole variety of different games.
From the Flash game Earl Grey and This Rupert Guy to the mobile Code Atma. However, despite putting a lot of their focus on the mobile game front, one of their most notable game releases was Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story. The project was definitely their most ambitious, but it was sadly met with mostly mixed reviews, with most of the criticisms coming from the errands being underwhelming and many students not being viable. But has Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story 2 been able to learn from its predecessors’ mistakes? We’ll go into that.
We begin our story like you would any other by choosing your appearance. You see, in Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story 2, you play as the new principal of the titular Valthirian Hero School, even though you yourself look like you just freshly graduated, but that’s beside the point. After this, we are immediately thrown into the RPG aspects of the game, where we meet our student “Rodno”, who has been chosen to be our escort.
As stated earlier, Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story 2 is a fusion of the RPG and School Management simulator, and these two aspects of the game are kept separate from one another. So, during this first sequence, we learn how to move around in the overworld map and how to engage in battle.
You do so by walking up to an enemy and attacking them when the prompt appears above Rodno’s head. This feature isn’t perfect, as even if there’s a bit of distance between you and the enemy, as long as you click when the prompt appears, you will get the advantage, so we’re already off to a rough start.
Another thing to note is despite you picking your character’s appearance, you hardly ever see them in-game, aside from the occasional cutscene. When you venture into the overworld, you don’t play as your principal; you instead play as one of the students, which makes the point of choosing the principal’s appearance somewhat redundant. But back to the game.
After this brief introduction to the overworld movement, we are then thrown into the school management side. In Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story 2, you have two currencies Gold and Arc Stones; you gain gold from completing quests and slaying monsters. On the other hand, you get Arc Stones from students’ seasonal tuition fees and by also completing your tasks. Fulfilling your principal duties is vital if you want to not only stay well-funded but also if you want to keep students happy.
As for the students themselves, they will essentially act as party members. Unlike in traditional RPGs, where you have to grind if you want your party to get stronger, in Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story 2, you will need to send your students to study if you want to improve their skills and stats.
However, learning takes energy, and you restore that energy by sending them to the dormitory to rest. Now as principal, you will also be able to change what major a student studies towards. A major is essentially that character’s class and will change what skills that character can learn.
The most important thing in Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story 2 is how you manage your time and resources; you cannot overwork students, or else they won’t be happy and will then not be able to study correctly. Now if you want more students in your school, you will also need to make sure you’re on good terms with the other rival schools. You do this by completing favors and making correct choices during scenarios. Everything is a balancing act, and it may not be for many first-time players.
If you remember earlier, Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story 2’s predecessor didn’t fare all too well and sadly, neither does its sequel. Remember when I said everything is a balancing act, well, sadly, it seems to have fumbled a bit. As mentioned earlier, the game seems to keep its RPG aspects and simulation aspects from one another, and that’s because they butt heads heavily.
If your party encounters a difficult target, you can’t simply grind on lesser mobs to get stronger; you instead have to wait a couple of in-game months just to get through an area. This brings the RPG gameplay to a screeching halt because your cleric needs to spend three months studying a healing spell.
Even if you do learn a useful skill, most of the time, your party won’t have the necessary AP (Action Points) to use as your party all shares the same amount of AP. This means, you guessed it, time to go back to studying to get more AP or less costly skills. The fusion of School Management simulation and RPG could, in theory, work beautifully and allow players to level up their characters in-depth, but instead of feeling in-depth and detailed, leveling characters feels slow and tedious.
The game puts heavy emphasis on managing your time properly and completing your principal duties, but yet you waste so much of it literally doing nothing, unable to complete said duties. A good example of this is with doing research. This takes huge amounts of time to finish and often costs a lot of resources. While research does unlock things that will make the game easier in the long run, it takes so much time and resources you can’t do anything until the research is complete, which also means your cleric takes even longer to learn that healing spell!
As for the game’s story, it does flesh out and expand on the typical JRPG tropes, such as the reason why all the heroes look so young is because they’re all freshly graduated heroes. But then it also throws in a few loopholes of its own, such as how a school can run with only one student.
And how are you getting tuition fees if one of your own teachers is paying for their tuition? Why did they send a first-year student to escort the new principal? Why do they send inexperienced heroes out on the field unsupervised? There are just so many things that don’t make sense, and all of this happens in the first two hours of the game!
Overall, Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story 2 is a great idea that should have excelled and offered a fun mix of fantasy adventures and high school slice of life, in theory. Instead, the RPG gameplay gets halted by tedious management aspects that don’t give anything to be excited about. This is definitely more a game for fans of the School Management simulator and less for those looking for an interesting RPG.
