Valkyria Chronicles

Valkyria Chronicles is a tactical war RPG set in the fictional nation of Gallia during a conflict inspired by World War II. The game combines turn-based planning with real-time direct unit control via the BLiTZ system - the player selects a unit on the map, then moves it directly across the battlefield in third-person view and aims at a target, blending strategy with action. The story is told through the striking watercolor visual style called CANVAS, which resembles an illustrated book coming to life before your eyes, and it's accompanied by characters whose individual fates are tied to the main war storyline. The game also features an elaborate system of individual soldiers with their own names and specializations - if they fall on the battlefield and the player fails to rescue them in time, it can permanently cost the character, giving the otherwise light visual style a more serious, tactical dimension as well.

The PC version didn't arrive until 2014, six years after the original PlayStation 3 release, making the game accessible to a much wider circle of players who didn't own a console - it thus became the first entry in the series that PC owners could also get their hands on. It brought support for higher resolutions and steadier frame rates than the original, and it could be played with keyboard and mouse as well as a gamepad, which made sense for a tactical game with cursor-based unit selection. Shortly after release, players complained about a stretched and hard-to-read user interface at widescreen aspect ratios, which the developers later fixed with an update. Content-wise, it's otherwise the same game with the same campaign, the same characters, and the same story as on PS3 - no major new content was added; it's purely a technical port to PC, thanks to which the series also reached players on Steam and expanded its fan base, which subsequently opened the way for further entries in the series to be released directly for PC alongside consoles.

Why play it: For players without a PlayStation 3, the 2014 PC version is the only way to this tactical RPG - with support for higher resolutions and smoother performance, albeit with initial widescreen interface problems the developers later fixed.