I don’t usually get real personal on this blog, but I think I know you all well enough now that I feel comfortable telling you about this. I just need to tell *someone* y’know? Just need a willing ear to listen to my tale of sorrow.

Y’see, Valkyria Chronicles and I have had our first fight.

Things were going so great, and even when the fight happened, I just thought it was a little thing that we’d just get through. A speed bump on the way to our long term bliss. But days later, we’re still at an impasse.

I just can’t beat Chapter 7.

Worse, it’s a *long* battle and I’ve played for over an hour before hitting the “Game Over” screen. It isn’t that I’m a poor battlefield commander: rather, the problem is the mission is one big fat puzzle, and you pretty have to resort to trial and error before you can get past it.

## CHAPTER 7 BATTLE SPOILERS FOLLOW ##

The goal is to stop a mammoth tank that follows (it turns out) a pre-set route through the battlefield. The tank is bristling with turrets that’ll kill a squad member in one turn if caught out in the open. And the tank can’t be hurt until it blasts a stone wall (which it has to do every so often in order to move forward), at which point some vulnerable Radiators are exposed for 1 turn. Classic boss-battle stuff. There are 3 of these radiators, and after you knock off two of them, enemy reinforcements arrive, including an unkillable character with a 1-shot=kill weapon. Worse, by the time these reinforcements show up, the AI has a so many Command Points that the newbies sweep across the battlefield all at once. So you’d better have everyone in deep cover when they show up.

There are 4 stone walls that the enemy has to blast, and 3 radiators to destroy, so you can muff one attempt. Basically you need to use your tank and lancers to destroy the turrets, then when the radiators appear, charge the tank with a grenade-carrying troop (ie, not a lancer) and stuff a grenade down the opening of the radiator (and once you destroy one, the others drop, so its not good trying to get 2 from 1 wall blast). So far I’ve gotten as far as trying for the 3rd spot, and I gosh-darned MISSED throwing the dang grenade (and really you’re just dropping the thing in a hole). ARGHHHH!

Each play through I get a bit farther along, but again..we’re talking an hour each attempt. I just now googled and there are some walk throughs for this mission, and I guess I’m going to resort to them. It’s just been such a shock and a disappointment to find such a puzzle-based, trial & error dependent mission after all the fun I’d been having finding my own way to fight each battle.

I’m hoping this battle is an anomaly and not the way the rest of the game plays out. I hate “puzzledy” strategy games. I want to develop *a* winning strategy, not find *the* single pre-programmed ‘win’ strategy through trial and error, y’know? [Having now read a few of the aforementioned walk-throughs, it’s clear there isn’t literally 1 way to beat the mission, but still all the methods are pretty similar, and you’d still never be able to beat the battle until you played a few times to learn where and when the triggers were.]