The Valkyrie in Video Games

In the magnificently barbaric world of Norse mythology, valkyries didn't rank very high. If they were goddesses, they were still Odin's servants, searching the mortal realm of Midgard for the most valiant departed and lugging them back to Valhalla to become einherjar, soldiers in the Aesir army. By some accounts, these war goddesses even had to serve mead and mutton in the gods' feasting halls when they weren't making einherjar runs. Somewhere between the Prose Edda and Wagner's bombastic overtures, the valkyrie's mundane duties faded and she became the consummate Norse warrior, a proud, armor-clad woman sweeping across the battlefield with sword and spear. Unsurprisingly, it's this image that video games have exploited in everything from arcade shooters to convoluted RPGs.

Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume is the latest game to employ this Norse icon, but it's hardly the first. Valkyries have shown up in video games for well over twenty years. Some are superficial soldiers, some are instruments of rebirth, and some even approach ruminations on the divide between gods and humans. Some also fly and shoot lasers.

Thyra

Thyra the Valkyrie is perhaps no more inventive than Gauntlet's three other archetypal heroes, but her name is farther from mainstream recognition. The barbarian is Thor, the wizard is Merlin, and the elf archer is the mythically unconnected Questor, whose title requires no elaboration. By contrast, “Thyra” is Norse in origin, and the most famous Thyra on record is an influential queen of tenth-century Denmark. Of course, that doesn't matter in Gauntlet's world of dungeon exploration, rapacious enemy hordes, and synthesized voices telling you that food can be ruined by an elf's arrow. Nor do Thyra's possible valkyrie roots come into play; she's the most well-rounded of the four characters, but she doesn't fly or carry with her the souls of doughty Vikings.

In the original arcade game and its console ports, Thyra looked every bit the stereotypical Nordic warrior-woman, with ice-blond tresses, tellingly limited armor, and the stance that Brigitte Nielsen might take on the poster for a middling 1985 barbarian movie. Subsequent Gauntlets have wavered between making Thyra a recurring character and simply casting a valkyrie as a player-named avatar. Some of the valkyrie designs, such as the heroine from Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows, stick with the traditional look.

Then again, the Thyra seen on Gauntlet II's title screen makes one wonder what part of the valkyrie myth could possibly mention enraged, sunburned, sword-waving, snaggle-toothed meth addicts.

Valkyrie

About a year after Thyra first traipsed the tiled floors of Gauntlet's labyrinth, Namco decided to make a valkyrie the star of an early action-RPG. The Adventure of Valkyrie: The Legend of the Key of Time arrived on the Famicom nearly six months after Nintendo's groundbreaking The Legend of Zelda, a gap just wide enough to classify Valkyrie as a rather obvious imitation. Descending from on high to confront an evil overlord and restore a magical clock, the heroine, who's simply named Valkyrie, treads around simple-looking continents dotted with houses, dungeons, and some magical artifacts. She's forced to fight off enemies constantly, as hawk-knights and cavemen hatch from white blobs just like the ones that birthed Zelda's overworld enemies.

The Adventure of Valkyrie displays many of the design flaws common to early Famicom RPGs: it's brutally hard, offers few clues as to the player's direction, and rarely makes exploring worth the trouble. While it's not as fascinatingly bad as Bokosuka Wars, it's nearly as tepid and unbalanced. Valkyrie, bless her little pagan heart, is poorly equipped to defend herself, and it's not long before the game starts blaring the irksome siren that denotes a low health meter. This is usually followed by Valkyrie taking one hit too many and turning into an angel that leaves behind a cross-shaped grave marker (an odd exit for a figure of the Norse faith). The Famicom's hardware also gave Valkyrie's hair a color-changing disorder. It's blonde on the box and in all subsequent appearances, but it's black in the Famicom game. The same malady struck Metroid's Samus Aran, Phantasy Star's Alis, and The Guardian Legend's multi-named heroine.

Despite the indignities of her first game, Valkyrie would return. In fact, she'd become a recurring character in many unrelated Namco games, from Mach Breakers to Namco X Capcom, Soul Calibur III, and at least four games in the Tales series. If Namco didn't already have the Pac-Man family, a big-headed Valkyrie would look nice on the company's logos.

Someone at Namco clearly thought that the idea behind The Adventure of Valkyrie was too good to waste on a pathetic Famicom action-RPG. Released in 1989, The Legend of Valkyrie (right) is technically an arcade sequel, but it stands on its own just fine. Now a chipper, heaven-sent heroine with wings on her helmet, Valkyrie flutters down to earth to save both humans and lizard-people. It's styled much like an overhead shooter, but The Legend of Valkyrie enjoys far more freedom than the typical Ikari Warriors potboiler. Valkyrie gracefully jumps about and stumbles across beleaguered villagers and traveling salesmen, upgrading her weapons and learning new abilities, including a spell that creates tiny minions who imitate her movements. There's even a partner for her: the lizard-folk's champion, Krino Sandra, shows up when a second player joins the game.

A nice apology to anyone who sat through the first Valkyrie game, Legend is surprisingly complex for something that ran on quarters. Its levels offer multiple paths and quite a bit of platform-leaping, and the graphics engine frequently shows off scaling effects and other things that looked pretty impressive in 1989. It's also a remarkably cheerful game, with bright colors, cutscenes describing each of Valkyrie's level-ending triumphs, and a fantastic soundtrack. The opening stage's theme is perhaps the most relentlessly joyful music ever heard in any of Namco's well-scored arcade games.

Like its Famicom sire, the arcade The Legend of Valkyrie never came to North America, and neither did a respectable PC Engine port that Namco released in 1990. Slightly different from the arcade game, it rearranges the stages and adds a new ending, sacrificing the two-player mode and some visual detail. An accurate port of The Legend of Valkyrie didn't show up until the fifth volume of Namco Museum hit the PlayStation in 1996, and it marked the first time the game was translated and offered to North America. Europe and Japan fared better, seeing the release of Whirlo, a 1992 Super NES platformer starring Sandra. He apparently demanded his own game after being cut from the PC Engine version.

Valkyrie returned again in 1998 thanks to Namco Anthology. A lesser-seen supplement to the Namco Museum series, the two-part Anthology line took the idea of classic game compilations one step further. While the Museum collections strove to emulate older arcade games perfectly, the Anthologies remade other titles entirely. The second volume includes Pac-Attack, some golf game, and the strategy title King of Kings, which is, disappointingly, not a Famicom game about the life of Jesus. The highlight, however, is a completely re-imagined version of The Adventure of Valkyrie.

Technically, this new Valkyrie game is based on the clumsy 1986 Famicom title, but Namco wasn't fooling anyone. Namco Anthology's remade The Adventure of Valkyrie draws much more from the arcade game, and rightly so. The expanded story reflects the Famicom game, but the vibrant graphics, eight-way shooting, and enemy designs are all patterned after The Legend of Valkyrie. In case you're not convinced of its true inspirations, this remake even starts off with the arcade game's adventurous first-stage music.

It was unfortunate that the second Namco Anthology stayed in Japan, as the new version of The Adventure of Valkyrie alone makes it worth a look. While not as complex as The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past or Terranigma, Adventure captures the same endearing style as the best Super NES action-RPGs. Valkyrie's quite the agile warrior, with jumping, shooting, crawling, swimming, and dashing at her disposal. She's also able to collect numerous spells and weapons, and she's frequently joined by partners, including Sabine, the purple-suited thief briefly seen in The Legend of Valkyrie. Once again, it's all infectiously happy; the music is bouncing, catchy stuff, and Valkyrie herself smiles every time she jumps.

The Adventure of Valkyrie remake may be the best of Valkyrie's three titles, though it's not without annoyances. Backtracking often isn't allowed, and Valkyrie is effectively screwed if she misses an important healing spell in the second stage's dragon-infested caverns. That aside, it's an enjoyable, rampantly cheerful journey for one of Namco's underused characters. And “cheerful” is something that rarely applies to valkyrie-based games.

Selye Foriner and Others

Yasumi Matsuno's Tactics Ogre has few direct ties to Norse myth, though it would fit right into the world of Odin worshippers and berserkers. The chronicle of one young man trying to survive a medieval-fantasy civil war, Tactics Ogre is surprisingly harsh for a game where every character is a squat little 16-bit sprite. Nobles backstab each other, entire villages are put to the sword for political ploys, and all but the most careful players must watch their treasured, carefully built-up party members die in despair, with no hope of magical resurrection.

Tactics Ogre also has valkyries. Aside from their winged helms, there's nothing godlike about them, as they're just another class of warrior; usefully mobile guerrillas that can use weapons and low-level magic. They offer no escort to Valhalla and die just as easily as any other combatant in the game, but they are, like spear-women of legend, adept at wielding long, pointy weapons. Like other grunt-level characters, each valkyrie gets a name randomly chosen from the game's oddly translated library, with the exception of the embittered revolutionary leader Selye Foriner (left), who joins the player's group as a valkyrie. Naturally, she can switch jobs and, like the rest of the Foriner sisters, upgrade to the “shaman” class late in the game. It's an improvement in tactical terms, but not in mythic imagery.

If Tactics Ogre's run-of-the-mill valkyries aren't the most prominent in video games, they're easily the most haughty, as the default portrait for the valkyrie (right) has her regarding all before her with frigid, regal disdain. This unwittingly cleared a path for the next great leap in creating snobbish video-game valkyries.

Lenneth Valkyrie

The original Valkyire Profile was a surprise, considering its developer's history up to 1999. For some reason, tri-Ace decided to rise above unimaginative anime-influenced fantasies like Star Ocean and create a game rooted in Norse mythology's grander sense of melodrama. Valkyrie Profile is stunning in its first impression, full of gentle, elegiac music and gorgeous, hand-drawn scenery. That funereal air never really leaves it, as the game plods from one grim death to another. Lenneth, a detached valkyrie summoned by Odin, roams the skies of a world scarred by medieval warfare and misery, watching as mortals meet their fates and become conscripts in Valhalla's forces. Valkyrie Profile's many stories are often brief introductions, but they hit with surprising force. After all, characters can say more about themselves by facing death than they do by facing life.

Lenneth herself isn't immune to the bleakness, as her own story is a mire of buried memories and divided loyalty. As she ferrets out tragedy and sends mortals off to Valhalla, she learns more about her former life among the humans, and she re-forges her connection to a young man named Lucian. It's a romance perhaps fueled by the myth of Sigurd and the valkyrie Brunhilde, though tri-Ace never admitted it. That would be a bit pretentious.

If Lenneth's image is that of a rare dignified RPG heroine, her design owes a little to Namco's iconic Valkyrie in the dress, the plumed headgear, the well-animated braid, and the carefully detailed character sprite. Lenneth doesn't get a froglike sidekick, though, so she settles for the miserable souls of self-sacrificing 10th-century anime Scandinavians and fantasy-Japan denizens, all beautifully crafted by animators Kou and You Yoshinari.

With all of Valkyrie Profile's despondent vignettes about death and sacrifice, it helps that the game's battle system revolves around energetic combos and carefully-timed button presses, much like an action game. The battles all occur in side-scrolling labyrinths similar to latter-day Castlevania levels, as Lenneth runs and jumps with only slightly less precision than the usual Mario-like character. Beyond recruiting einherjar and dealing angelic attacks in battle, Lenneth's also able to create ice crystals and freeze monsters in dungeons. It's entirely apt for a Norse-based game, and it's very much the opposite of Namco's perky The Legend of Valkyrie. With its bleak, gray world and solemn score, Valkyrie Profile is as cold and despairing as a game can get.

Valkyrie Profile creates its own versions of the Aesir gods, and one need not strain to spot tri-Ace's many changes to the Norse canon. In an alteration validated by some ancient stories, Lenneth is one of only three valkyries in Odin's service, corresponding to the three Norns of legend. Less supported is the game's casting of the Vanir and the Aesir as enemies, when most Norse tales set their war long ago and portrayed the two groups as allies. What's more, Valkyrie Profile's Odin has both of his eyes and gains a godly advantage by being a half-elf and therefore partly mortal (step one in making a fantasy tale more cliché: add elves). Yet we'll give the game some credit; considering how Japanese RPGs usually interpret mythologies and religions, Valkyrie Profile is slavishly faithful to its source. Even if it breaks some traditions, it's still the most accurate use of a valkyrie among video games.

Lenneth takes her time arriving in Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria, showing up in the game's last stage to clean up a plot-knotting mess. The ending offers a number of puzzling developments, and tri-Ace hasn't sorted any out yet. Continuing the franchise's tradition of making Valkyrie Profiles where you don't play a valkyrie, the DS-based Covenant of the Plume casts Lenneth as the player's unwitting antagonist. A none-too-swift soldier named Wylfred blames Lenneth for taking away his father, apparently never having heard that valkyries only abscond with the souls of people who are already dead. Wylfred's quest for revenge leads him down several branches story, depending on which towns he visits and how often he uses a feather bearing a hellish enchantment from the underworld goddess Hel. If he's ruthless enough in sacrificing comrades to the plume, Wylfred faces Lenneth, who's her usual melancholically distant self. She'll certainly be back in another Valkyrie Profile game, though it's hard to say what road the series might take from this point.

Silmeria Valkyrie

Silmeria made the briefest of appearances during the original Valkyrie Profile, in which she was shown trapped inside a crystal by the undead lord Brahms. Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria, the 2006 sequel, would presumably be her chance to shine, but the game makes a daring choice: don't let the player control a valkyrie. It runs contrary to the first's game strengths, but Valkyrie Profile 2 starts players off as Alicia, a meek, disowned princess who's been cursed since birth to carry the soul of Silmeria. Kicked out of Valhalla for her renegade ways, Silmeria refuses to stay imprisoned. As she's able to mentally converse with Alicia and occasionally take control of her, Silmeria marches her timid mortal frame off on a quest to prevent Alicia's royal family from rebelling against the Norse gods and, consequently, getting mankind wiped from the earth. Along the way, she meets the half-elf Rufus and more than a few gods, including her humorless valkyrie sister Hrist, who is none too happy with Silmeria's plotting.

Many questions were raised by Silmeria's imprisoned bit-part in the first Valkyrie Profile, and Valkyrie Profile 2 answers them slowly. The games are tied together shortly before the final dungeon, where it's revealed that the entire world of Silmeria is an alternate dimension. This is also when the game finally grants some playable valkyries. Hrist, Silmeria, and an even more godlike version of Lenneth join, plus a later appearance by a three-in-one “Valkyrie” who wields a wide-blade sword much like Namco's Valkyrie.

In the final tally, Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria may have more valkyries than its predecessor, but they don't fuse with the gameplay quite as well. Instead of recruiting einherjar by flying high above and watching their morbid lives drain away, Silmeria draws her party members out of artifacts found in dungeons, with little dramatic introduction. Their personalities and histories emerge only when you've picked through their status screens and stuck them in battles together. It's far less satisfying than the first Valkyrie Profile, though playing a valkyrie's polar opposite gives things some weight. Instead of gathering up souls for heavenly wars, Silmeria takes her recruited warriors into battle so they can eventually break free of her and return to mortal lives.

Compared to her sisters, Silmeria is dealt a lousy hand. Lenneth accomplishes much as a valkyrie and Hrist, while never a main character, at least isn't stuck inside a less interesting heroine for the better part of a game. Silmeria is also ignored by most of the DS-based Covenant of the Plume, which makes Lenneth the prime antagonist and even gives Hrist a moment or two. At least you're not stuck in a crystal anymore, Silmeria. Or are you? Thanks to the rambling story, we're not sure.

Hrist Valkyrie

Of the three battle-goddesses in the Valkyrie Profile series, Hrist seems the most straightforward. While the blonde Silmeria is rebellious and the silver-haired Lenneth is dutiful yet subtly independent, the dark-haired Hrist (Ahly in Japan) obeys Odin to the point of cruelty, staying completely unsympathetic to the humans beneath her. She appears as a simple enforcer of Odin's will in the original Valkyrie Profile, taking over Lenneth's role for a bit and then dropping out of the spotlight just in time for the game's final battle.

Hrist does a bit more in Valkyrie Profile 2. After Silmeria is booted down to Midgard to live within a fragile princess, Hrist becomes the current valkyrie, as only one of the goddesses can be incarnated as a deity at any given time (don't bother checking old Norse myths for that particular rule). Dispatched to bring Silmeria back to Valhalla, Hrist pursues her wayward sister for most of the game, even going to so far as to disguise herself and join Alicia's band of adventurers. Here we see a slightly more human side of Hrist, who just might resent how her unwavering loyalty to Odin keeps her estranged from her valkyrie sisters. Yet when it comes time to enforce Valhalla's dictates, Hrist steps up and does what she's told, no matter how it hurts Alicia. Only when the game's true villain is revealed does Hrist join up with her former adversaries.

In her defense, we've only seen Hrist in other valkyries' stories. She may have her own hidden tale to tell, just as Lenneth carried a wealth of repressed mortal desires. However, these are matters for a third proper Valkyrie Profile, and tri-Ace seems more inclined to make spin-offs like Covenant of the Plume instead of Valkyrie Profile 3: Hrist. Perhaps someone at tri-Ace sympathizes with her; Hrist shows up in Covenant's self-mocking bonus dungeon, where she carps about her lack of a leading role. Other characters observe her tirade and predict that she won't get a game to herself for a long, long time.

Kelly O'Lenmey

Gunvalkyrie may be the toughest lesson modern games have to offer. It's a challenging game, one that won't let you master it until you've made the controls second nature. That's a deceptively hard task, as Gunvalkyrie works every button on the Xbox pad, and the art of flying and shooting requires a frenzy of trigger-pulling, button-jabbing, and thumbstick-clicking if you want to do it properly. Such demanding gameplay drives many players away from Gunvalkyrie, but there's a strange satisfaction to finally figuring out the game and pulling off a masterful mid-air backflip as you rain energized bullets down upon a swarm of bug-monsters.

The valkyrie thing? Pure window dressing. The story concerns the demented, once-brilliant scientist Dr. Hebbel and his influence on the alternate-history steampunk (or “elec-punk”) world of 1906. We see precious little of this world's civilized reaches over the course of the game, but the instruction manual drops plenty of hints about a technological revolution that allowed the British Empire to overrun the globe and fill it with Internet-capable analytical engines and Victorian spaceships. Yet the player is usually stuck fighting through vast canyons, cybernetic labs, and rock formations floating above acid lakes. There's not much to construe as Norse-influenced. Even the logo of Gunvalkyrie, the squad sent to stop the off-track Hebbel, has a winged orca instead of some elec-punk warrior.

One could say that Kelly, Hebbel's daughter and the more graceful half of the Gunvalkyrie team, is some pale, blonde, elec-punk version of a valkyrie, but her last name is O'Lenmey and she has few valkyrie-like duties. After a short introduction, she and the futuristic samurai Saburouta are there just to grind up Starship Troopers bugs, with none of these insect victims proving worthy of Valhalla.

Gwendolyn

Making Valkyrie Profile look like a particularly stodgy textbook by comparison, Odin Sphere's version of Norse mythology has a Valhalla-like kingdom at the center of a world filled with fairies, demons, underworld zombies, transmogrified princes, and apocalypses. In Ragnanival, the gigantic Demon Lord Odin oversees an army of valkyries, including his own daughter, Gwendolyn. After her sister Griselda dies on the battlefield, Gwendolyn finds herself both the leader of the valkyries and a pawn in her father's many plans for conquest. No matter, though, because she's a warrior, even though she looks like some ballerina version of a valkyrie with armored leggings and a feathered earmuff-tiara. At least she's a valkyrie in combat, floating through the air and swooping down for a spear-strike. More often than not, this gets her pelted by enemies thanks to Odin Sphere's awkward game engine and habit of sacrificing cohesive movement for large, exceptionally pretty characters.

Valkyries, it would seem, get a raw deal in Odin Sphere. Upon serving their tours of duty, they're forced to retire and live as the obedient wives of mortal men. Gwendolyn doesn't escape this, either. After hacking through enemies and Odin Sphere's maddening, repetitive combat, she's married off to Oswald, a shadow knight and a veritable geyser of angst. Initially miserable at this turn of events, Gwendolyn learns that Oswald was in love with her and even arranged for their marriage through some pact with Odin. She's drawn to her new husband, because women just love it when men they've never met conspire to marry them.

Gwendolyn secretly follows Oswald on his various quests, most of which he's carrying out for her sake. His sacrifices and brooding ways only endear him to Gwendolyn more, because women also love it when men do really stupid things just to please them. Eventually Oswald gets in over his head, and Gwendolyn has to rescue him from the goddess of the underworld. Having found true happiness in each other's idiocy, Gwendolyn and Oswald declare that theirs is a love to last for all time. Odin Sphere then moves on to another character's quest, unraveling even more conspiracies and ultimately bringing about the end of everything. But then, Norse myth pitched the cataclysm of Ragnarok as the birth of a new world.

Selvaria Bles

Valkyria Chronicles doesn't drift too far in creating an alternate version of World War II. The map shown at the game's beginning is a jagged, slightly rearranged version of Europe, where one huge empire invades both its federated western rival and a small, neutral nation that's roughly half Switzerland, half Denmark. For an account of an allegedly horrible conflict, the game is often light in tone, with clean-faced anime heroes learning all about the evils of racism while fighting in a war that's tearing a continent in two. It's one thing to sidestep the political and ethical baggage of the real World Wars, but dressing it up in the same syrupy veneer as Sega's own Skies of Arcadia doesn't do a war story any favors.

One finds no 20th-century historical analogue for the Valkyria, an ancient race of magically gifted beings that, despite being nearly extinct, play a large role in the game's pocket war. One of them is Selvaria Bles, a pale-haired, red-eyed woman genetically enhanced by the invading empire. Hefting a certainly-not-phallic lance and shield, she strides into combat before ranks of imperial troops and destroys foes with her glowing, hair-floating powers, thus striking some undeniably valkyrie-esque poses.

As Valkyria Chronicles has it, the Valkyria were fearsome people of the north, but they're now rare due to centuries of genetically mixing with the mundane folk of clearly-not-Europe. This could be commentary on the dilution of Nordic tribes and their often recessive blond-hair genes, but we can't give Valkyria Chronicles that much credit, good or bad. However, the game reveals that one other Valkyrian descendant is hiding in the player's squad of controllable soldiers. She's the only one who can match the prideful Selvaria, and it builds to a battlefield slugfest between a humble, all-natural Valkyrian and one that's been artificially pumped up by an evil empire. No guesses as to who wins.

Some Valkyries

If nothing else, Too Human proved the game industry is an unforgiving place: it spent nearly ten years in development, and was then thoroughly savaged by just about everyone who tried it. At least Silicon Knights tried to set Too Human apart from other grim science-fiction shooters by basing it on Norse myth. Still, this simply means that the hero, Baldur, has mechanized armor and glowing face tattoos, and the world of the Norse deities is a bright, cyber-futurist version of Valhalla, with squads of clichéd space marines to dispatch on monster-hunting missions. Of course, valkyries play a role in all of this. Metallic caretakers with enough wings to outfit an Old Testament angel, Too Human's valkyries float wordlessly down from the sky, assuming dead comrades and Baldur himself into Norse heaven.

This makes the valkyries of Too Human a problem. Their first appearance is carried out in cinematic tones, with a soldier gasping “She's beautiful!” as the Norse scavenger carries off his departed teammate. Yet the game insists on playing up a valkyrie's arrival every time Baldur dies in the game. Instead of reviving him quickly, there's a minute or so of unskippable, valkyrie-centric footage following each of his deaths. And since this is a violent action game, Baldur dies often. Too Human's winged war-maidens aren't that prominent in the storyline, but their interference throughout it makes them the least appealing valkyries in the whole of video games.

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