Valkyrie Drive started off as an Anime with Valkyrie Drive Mermaid with the soon followed PSVita Title Valkyrie Drive Bhikkhuni back in 2015. After nearly 2 years of being exclusive to the PSVita, Meteorise and HONEY∞PARADE GAMES have given it a nice little polish and ported it to the PC. What got me interest though was that the game was advertised as being from the creators of Senran Kagura and over the course of the Game that can be noticed quite a lot.
Developer: Meteorise, HONEY∞PARADE GAMES
Publisher: Marvelous
Genre: Action, Brawler, Hack’n’Slash
Platforms: PC
Price: $29,99
Official Website: https://marvelousgames.com/
So before we begin with the review here is the official launch trailer for the PC version as well as a short description by the Developers themselves.
In VALKYRIE DRIVE -BHIKKHUNI- a mysterious virus known as the A-Virus infects young women, transforming them into weapons known as ‘Extars’ or those that control them, ‘Liberators’. However, the voluptuous Valkyries are infected with a unique strain, the VR-Virus, allowing them to take on either role at will. Proving incredibly difficult to cure, they are sent for quarantine to the sun-soaked island of Bhikkhuni where a treatment is put into place: the Valkyries engage in combat against one another to strengthen both mind and body and allow them greater control of the Virus. Who runs the island? What is the secret of the Virus? Will you choose Order or Chaos? This and more will be answered throughout your time with VALKYRIE DRIVE -BHIKKHUNI-.
- Fully remastered in 1080p, 60FPS with native support for even higher resolutions!
- Choose between 7 unique playable characters to learn and master, each with their own playstyle!
- Battle your way through 24 Story Missions and crank up the difficulty or change your character for even more replayability!
- Print the underwear of your wildest and sexiest dreams by earning Bhikkhuni Points through combat prowess to spend on Echigoya’s revolutionary Lingerie Printer!
- Engage in fast-paced arena based online multiplayer with up to four players!
- Full-featured dressing room for deep customization of all playable characters — from hair to accessories, clothing and more!
- Support for both Steam cloud saving, achievements, and exclusive trading cards, plus backgrounds, emoticons and badges to unlock!
Gameplay:
If you ever played one of the Senran Kagura Games you’ll easily get accustomed to this game but even when you never played one you will still get accustomed fast. You hack and slash through the hordes of enemies coming at you, sometimes with the help of some health items scattered throughout the Map and that’s the main thing. The big difference compared to Senran Kagura is that each Character plays differently so you’ll have to learn each Girls own Style to beat your enemies before they beat you. The Story itself consists of 24 chapters that tell you a quite humorous story with lots of sexual allusions, ambiguity and of course nice Girls. The Story is straight forward with no way to influence it. Some may not like this too much while others will like this approach more. There is also the Survival Mode and Challenge Mode which get’s unlocked when you’re done with the Story which provides further fun when you’re done with the Story.
The story is great and tells a nice story about everything that’s happening on Bhikkhuni Island, what’s happening with the girls and how they have to choose between battling and becoming friends. You get to learn Rinka and Ranka the two loving sisters, Mana the cute, shy and friendly girl that just wants to be friends and Momo the Tsundere girls which want to be alone. There are some more but I don’t wanna spoil them all. This all sounds deep and emotional, right? That’s one of the problems of the story. It tries to tell you the Story of the girls with all the Hardships they have to go through while still making many sexual jokes, being humorous and doing fan service. In my opinion, that just doesn’t do well together but that’s nothing which will ruin the Storfeelng. The second thing which annoyed me a bit is that the Dialogues between the fights are a bit long sometimes and I managed to catch me spamming the “A” Button more than just a few times to skip through it to continue fighting.
With all this Speaking about the Story let’s switch to the Fighting. This is pretty straightforward and easy going since it pretty much only relies on 3 Buttons that you can use with a few combos. They aren’t as many as from Games like Street Fighter but I want to play just for fun not grind many hours to learn all the powerful combos to fully destroy my enemies. Something you should really learn are the “Phantom” Moves. These can, if used correctly, deal a lot of damage and keep the enemy from attacking you for quite some time since the AI doesn’t really understand how to defend itself against such an attack.
Where the Senran Kagura Games have the “Frantic Mode” Valkyrie Drive has the “Drive Mode”. At first, you start off with just one Drive but you unlock more the further you progress. Just like with Sneran Kagura the fights are full of bouncing breasts and when fighting enemies you simply shred their clothes until only the underwear is left (and sometimes you even shred that to pieces and if you have a nude mod it gets even better). The fights aren’t really hard since the AI isn’t the brightest. So most of the time you just have to Dash around a bit, knock the enemy down or in the air, punch a lot and then dodge when she’s about to attack. There is a nice little thing after every victory though for the pervert in you. You can adjust the camera to look under the girl’s skirts 😉
To unlock more lingerie and clothing you can spend your Earned Valkyrie Drive Points at XXX’s Shop at either the Lingerie Printer or for items in the Shop. The further you are in the Story and the more Secrets you find the more will be unlocked in the Shop. The Lingerie Printer is something else. You can change the amount of money you want to pay and get a random Underwear printed. The more Underwear you unlock the more decreases the chance to get Underwear you don’t already have. If this happens you can either hope to get lucky or get more money to increase the Chance again. This is bundled with a simple tiny mini game where you have to hit the Button at the right time.
Audio:
The Audio of the game is well done. The Voices are clearly recorded (If you understand Japanese) and the Soundtrack, as well as the other game sounds, are decent. The Game doesn’t feature true 5.1 Surround audio but rather uses 2.0 Stereo Sound. This isn’t a problem though in this game since there is no real big use for 5.1 Surround sound anyway.
Soundtrack:
The Soundtrack consists of nice mostly fast paced songs which are perfect when beating up some enemies but also manages to catch the atmosphere when the mood is rather dark, something surprising happens or the mood is extremely cheerful. I wouldn’t hear this Soundtrack outside of the game but while playing the Game I didn’t think of the Soundtrack as overly repetitive and felt that it mixed really well with the overall feeling of the game.
Visuals:
Since this Game is a port from the Vita to PC I actually didn’t think it would look too great but it actually does and the textures are nicely made for 1080p and 60FPS. The game even supports native 4k which is pretty damn great and sure ups the Texture quality even more combined with 8x Antialiasing. There’s a pretty annoying thing with 4k though which I encountered very early in testing the game. At first, the game ran pretty great in 4k on my PC with a GTX760 but after around an hour, the Game crashed on me while I was recording and after that had horrible frame-drops and performance which made it unplayable on 4k. Switching to 1080p I had no problems with the performance anymore so I continued the testing in 1080p. I later tried switching to 4k again but just like before the Framerate was horrible and the game unplayable. I recommend using 4k only if you have a more recent or powerful card than a GTX760. Else I really can’t complain about the Games Visuals and Graphic Performance. It keeps stable 60FPS when VSYNC is enabled and isn’t too performance hungry.
Mod Support:
None. But when did anyone ever stop that in the Senran Kagura Series to create Nude mods, Player Modell variations, new Clothing and more? By now the game has a complete nude mod that disables every censoring in the game (Which if I remember correctly are 3 layers of censoring: White Light, Flowers, Unfinished PlayerModell). There are also 3 player model mods so far which look pretty cool.
Original Character Modells as well as clothing of Ranka(Left) and Mana(Right)
Changed Playermodell and clothing of Ranka and Mana. Mana has Elf ears now with cute blond hair. Ranka has new colored clothing, Red Eyes and well… Let’s just say she’s been a bad girl 😉
Sadly the nude mod only really works if you manage to beat an enemy and strip her of her clothes. There are no really good working nude mods which make the girls fight fully nude, to begin with but hey…. the guys over at LoversLab are still actively working on modding this game so we’ll probably see even more in the Future 😉
Here are a few things to get you started in the wonderful world of Valkyrie Drive Bhikkhuni Modding. You’ll have to register to download the files though.
- Ranka Crimson Pack:
- Koharu Shana Pack:
- Mana Elf Pack:
- Uncensoring Full Pack + Guide:
- (Only use effect_resident_texture, the other things there are experimental)
Uncensored Body Models: - Subtitle Uncensor (Recommended):
Replayability:
Even after you finished the Story you can prove yourself in Challenges or try to survive as long as you can in the Survival Mode, play the Game online against other players to get your ass beaten or beat other players ass and collect all the Secrets, Hidden Items, and of course… the Underwear. This should make the Game pretty much worthwhile the 30$. If you collected all of these you can still buy the DLC for 14.99$ which introduces 2 more Characters from the Anime and adds 150 Lingeries to the Game which you can get.
