Lately handheld systems, especially the PSP, which at first had so much promise, have increasingly become the homes of crappy ports of console games that weren't really that good to begin with. Of course, if more games like Valkyrie Profile get ported, I may have to stop my incessant complaining, fall to my knees, and worship my PSP like the tiny, plastic Nubian G-d that it is. You see, Valkyrie Profile was one of Playstation's forgotten gems - a truly unique RPG where you didn't play as a group of plucky teens battling to save the world from an evil that looked surprisingly like the crummy notebook doodles of some goth high school student. Instead you played as Lenneth Valkyrie who, much like the valkyries in Norse mythology, flies about the world searching for the souls of dead heroes to bring back to the realm of the gods where they will do battle for all eternity. Sweet deal. [For a dead person, anyway - ed.] Despite its unique premise and overall quality, the game was pretty much ignored by gamers (jerks) and seemed destined to fade into obscurity. Fast-forward six years and not only is Square Enix preparing to release a sequel, but they also re-released the original for the PSP. Those wacky bastards.

The way she purifies those corrupt souls is just so... hot!

   The game opens with Valkyrie returning to Asgard (pronounced ASS-GUARD. Tee-hee...) and being issued an order by Odin (the ruler of the gods, for those of you who spent your high-school mythology class mentally undressing classmates) to go down to Midgard, the realm of men, and gather souls of warriors worthy to battle for the gods. You see, the Vanir, a group of grumpy-pants giants, have decided to wage war on the Aesir (the gods), and Odin is hoping to shore up his numbers for the upcoming conflict by fielding some human pinch-hitters. So down to Midgard Valkyrie goes! Once down in the land of the living, Valkyrie can fly around the world in a manner reminiscent of the air ships in older Final Fantasy titles. However, just doing this all day won't land you any sweet, sweet souls, so you're going to need to get down, get dirty, and go find some people. The game, being the tiny vessel of pure love that it is, makes this very easy. Just press start and Valkyrie will concentrate, her focus slowly honing in on someone who is near death. Once that person's location has been pinpointed, off you go to meet your new friend! [Near-dead friends, mind you, are the best kind. They never complain about silly things like being peed on at parties - ed.] Usually, before you can acquire fresh meat for your team, you'll need to watch a few short scenes in which the last minutes, hours, or sometimes even days [we are still talking 'short' here, right? - ed.] of the character's life play out. And let me tell you, make sure you bring a hanky. Midgard is a bleak, hopeless land where death comes suddenly and tragically, and pretty much all the segments where you recruit a new team member are incredibly depressing. From the woman strangled by her husband after he is turned into a demon by a mad alchemist, to the young boy used as cannon fodder in a senseless war, the deaths of your perspective companions run the gamut of pretty much every terrible scenario conceivable. The hardest part of it all is, after Valkyrie has floated off with a new soul in tow, seeing the utter despair on the faces of the loved ones left behind. Trust me, no Final Fantasy has ever done anguish this well.

Now that I'm good and frustrated, bring on the violence!

I smell beefcake!

   The meat of dungeons, of course, is the combat. Unlike most RPGs (and sex at college), encounters here are not random. Enemies appear in dungeons as dark, shambling forms, tiny floating skulls, and other pug-ugly mugs, and will slowly hone in on Valkyrie as she gets near. Staggering into a creature like a drunken frat-boy (or in any other manner, really) initiates combat (although walloping them with a sword first gives Valkyrie and Co. the initiative), and combat is pretty freaking sweet. Battles in Valkyrie Profile are really unlike those in any other RPG I've played. Part turn-based, part fighting-game-style action, the game combines assorted elements in a way that will likely appeal to fans of both genres. Rather than issuing commands to your characters, each member of your team corresponds to a face button. Push a button and the corresponding character (SURPRISE!) attacks the targeted monster. Now here's where things get really awesome. Once you've bitch-slapped an enemy like the pimp you are, if you manage to land another blow before it can recover you'll start to string together combos. Some weapons you can equip allow multiple hits, so pop those into the hands of a couple of your guys and pretty soon you can rack up massive numbers of strung-together hits, juggling your enemy in the air and coordinating strikes to knock loose experience-enhancing crystals (no, not THAT kind!) and treasure chests. The character animations during this are pretty impressive, even (or especially!) for a game that's six years old and a port from an outdated system. Plus, get in enough hits and your characters will be able to execute massive (but thankfully not particularly lengthy) finishing moves. And that's still not all! Get enough hits with a finisher and you can even link multiple ones of those together to visit more rapid-fire carnage on an ass than has ever been seen since that time prison overcrowding forced the Texas Penal System to combine the Prison for Pretty-Boy Corporate Criminals with the Hard-Up Muscley Thug Maximum Security Penitentiary. That was just horrible. Lest you get too absorbed in all this ass-punishment, later on enemies will develop the ability to block and counter your combos, so you'll need to work on guard shattering attacks as well as counter counters. It gets pretty complex.

What does an undead mercenary's resume look like?

   One must never forget, though, that the ultimate goal of all this fighting, apart from helping Odin keep his campaign promise of creating an undead-free world by 1100 AD, is to hone your team into one badass fighting force. As your heroes gain levels they'll also earn points that can be spent learning new moves, upgrading their statistics, or even gaining various tactical abilities that won't really help much in combat, but will make them much more capable once you send them up to join the battle in Asgard (and also totally impress the ladies). Once you've leveled up your characters and their abilities to the point that you feel like they're crazy-go-nuts strong, you can send them off to meet their destiny in Asgard [hehehe, he said "Ass Guard"... - ed.], and since you're always recruiting plenty of new dead teammates, this never leaves you particularly shorthanded. At the end of each chapter (of which there are eight, each in turn divided into various periods) you'll be given a chance to see how the war is going overall, as well as how your characters faired individually. Train them well and their military exploits will win them the admiration of the gods and notoriety for Valkyrie by association. Train them poorly and they'll likely get killed... again. Periodically Freya, Odin's consort [that's ancient Norse for 'secretary' - ed.], will request that Valkyrie send up particular types of warriors, such as archers, tacticians, or someone who can grill a mean pork chop. If you meet her demands during a chapter you can often net some sweet rewards, like rare pieces of equipment.

Open kimono policy

   All-in-all, the game really does offer a butt-load of possibilities. Despite having a very solid story, the whole thing is very open-ended. While you will locate dungeons and characters at specific times, you can go and deal with them in whatever order you want. Conceivably you could also do absolutely nothing and spend the game just mucking around in the towns like a teenager destined to spend his life involved in the service aspect of the Food Service industry (although Odin's pissed-offed-ness at your slacker-dom might lead to an early game over). If you've got a lot of story related events to take care of, you can leave discovered dungeons or characters to later chapters. Or you could spend some time building levels and then really blaze through a couple of trickier dungeons. You have the power, my friend.

Danger, Lenneth Valkyrie! Danger!

   Of course, this open-endedness does lead to both of the game's biggest flaws. Because of the randomness with which certain dungeons, items, and characters appear, the difficulty can get a little uneven. You might zip right through two dungeons only to get pounded into the ground and have your bus pass stolen by the enemies in a third. Once you finally limp brokenly through that one after a few hours of level building, though, it might be another three dungeons before you even catch a whiff of a challenge. Occasionally, though, there's just some bad design work. Those will-o' the wisp enemies that blow up if you don't defeat them with a single big combo and subsequently wipe out your whole party are beyond frustrating. And having to kill the nearly invincible undead dragons with a sword that could conceivably break after every swing [think sex with skeletons here to get the full effect - ed.] leads to a lot of back-tracking to old save points. Stuff like this will definitely weed out the casual from the dedicated. The other problem is with the pacing. As I mentioned earlier, the game is broken up into chapters, each of which is in turn broken up into periods. Entering dungeons, visiting towns, and using Valkyrie's concentration all use up periods. Once all the periods in a chapter are used up, the chapter ends, and once all the periods in the game are used up, you go right to the final dungeon. However, unless you play the game on Hard Mode [always my personal favorite! - ed.], you're not going to get enough events to naturally fill up all the periods in most of the chapters. That being the case, you're going to have a lot of time on your hands. While you can revisit towns and hunt for special items, if you don't spend that time gathering the experience you would have gotten if you did have those extra dungeons, you're likely to wind up getting savagely kidney-punched upon your next foray into battle. And nobody likes getting kidney-punched. So expect to spend a lot of time at the end of each chapter power-leveling your guys while you kick midgets in frustration at being unable to advance the story.

What's the word, turd?

   So, is this game really worth your dirty, dirty money? Well, if you're a hard-core RPG fan and you missed out on it for the Playstation, then absolutely. Show those jerks on e-Bay a thing or two and bring this sexy mama home for $40, a sweet $160 less than what they usually charge. You won't regret it. But if you already played the crap out of the Playstation version, there's nothing particularly new here. The PSP version does have about a dozen positively gorgeous 3D cut-scenes inserted at various plot-relevant points. I'm talking stuff that would look good coming out for the PS2. But other than that, there's no new content. A couple other extras would have been nice (particularly some kind of quicksave function, since the infrequent save points do make Valkyrie Profile feel a little awkward as a portable game). However, since the Playstation version had such a limited release, there are probably only a handful of you in the latter camp. The rest of you go out and get this game right now. You don't want to keep this lady waiting.

       ... Mike Zeller