Then there are uncommon and often unappreciated games that succeed by making the player into a terrible, terrible person.

That's what Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume does.

Forcibly depressing events are nothing new to Valkyrie Profile, as the original PlayStation game ran a gauntlet of tragic deaths, each of which swelled the ranks of a valkyrie heroine's private army. The second game, in contrast, was a more conventional tale staged in the same bleak world, with its cruelties hidden in backstories and late-stage plot twists. Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume, a DS strategy-RPG, obscures nothing. It's a morbid game from its first battle. It's also the first Valkyrie Profile that's not really about a valkyrie.

Instead of a soul-shepherding Norse goddess, Covenant of the Plume's lead is Wylfred, a bitter young man who's seen his father head off to battle and not return. After his sister dies of starvation and his mother loses her mind, Wylfred sets out to find the valkyrie who took his father and left only a feather token behind. Of course, valkyries supposedly take only the already deceased, but few people seem to know that in Wylfred's time. Besides, he clearly doesn't care for details. He needs someone to blame, so he throws himself into mercenary work with his jovial friend Ancel and promptly gets himself killed in battle. As Wylfred floats into oblivion, the underworld goddess Hel offers him a bargain: she'll bring him back to life if he agrees to slay Lenneth, the valkyrie that spirited away his father.

Wylfred's keepsake feather turns blood-red with this pact, and he's accompanied by Ailyth, a politely distant woman perceptible only to her human "master.” The feather grants Wylfred the ability to deliver souls unto Hel's dark realm, rarely by endearing means. Once cursed by this piece of pillow-stuffing, Wylfred's allies become nigh-unstoppable war machines for the duration of battle, and afterwards meet quick and unpleasant ends as their spirits depart. The game further twists the idea with an important catch: Wylfred can only sacrifice companions who trust him with their lives. As he wanders into a violent feud between two princes in the kingdom of Artolia, Wylfred finds plenty of mercenaries, assassins, and other misfits to unwittingly join his crusade.

Abandoning the side-scrolling RPG style of the first two Valkyrie Profiles, Covenant of the Plume plants itself in strategic camp, with grids and ranges and separate turns for Wylfred's party and the enemies. Fortunately, the button-flailing combos that elevated previous Valkyrie Profile games are still in effect. When a character attacks, he or she is joined by every capable ally within range, and each warrior's strikes are mapped to one of the four DS face buttons. Time everything right, and you'll fill up a power meter that enables a string of devastating, theatrical blows. Brutally overpowering enemies also racks up "sin" points that earn special items from Hel herself.

When not setting up heated melees, Covenant of the Plume's battle system expands the tactical edge of the typical strategy-RPG. Instead of merely arraying your characters so they can hit foes, you'll also consider just how they'll figure into the next move. Tactics arise at every turn: do you strike now with a lone character and let them take the enemy's counterblow, or do you delay that attack so you can kill that foe with a four-character pileup?

Wylfred's vindictive quest leads him down multiple paths, each offering a mostly different assortment of characters, conclusions, and nasty surprises. Unlike the obscure ending qualifications of the first Valkyrie Profile, Covenant of the Plume plays it straight by linking Wylfred's fate to how often he sends a comrade to Hel, and only by entirely refusing the feather can he find redemption. Each road has its own battles, and the game's fond of spiking up the difficulty without notice, leaving ill-prepared players desperate to survive.

Covenant of the Plume often forces you toward the feather, which will always let you coast to victory with an unholy berserker ally. Of course, there's a price: after battle, that ally dies, often with some tearful revelation. It's telling that the game's director, Shunsuke Katsumata, is a fan of Tactics Ogre, a 1995 strategy-RPG in which deaths were permanent and ugly. Covenant of the Plume allows in-battle revivals, but it still blames the player elsewhere. When a character falls to the feather, it's no one's fault but yours, and you're one step closer to the game's worst ending.

Sure, the other enemies could join in, but they never liked that demon-wolf much anyway.

Unfortunately, Covenant also shares Tactics Ogre's fondness for the occasional ill-conceived rescue battle, where you're forced to protect a new ally who immediately wanders up to the toughest enemy and gets killed, thus ending your game. It's an artificial way of pumping up the challenge, one that halfway compensates for the game's frequently brainless enemies, who'll sit and watch from a distance as you hack through their compatriots. That hacking can also grow repetitive when you're trying to be nice. Past Valkyrie Profiles avoided repetition by cycling in new characters, but Covenant of the Plume doesn't offer many new characters unless you kill off the old ones. If you're treading the noblest path, get used to having the same archer for the entire game.

As DS games fare, Covenant of the Plume reaches few visual heights. The character sprites and environments are unremarkable, with only the artwork by Kou and You Yoshinari catching the eye. Much of Motoi Sakuraba's soundtrack is recycled from the first Valkyrie Profile, and the new background tracks, apparently by composers Yasuhiro Kawagoe and Hideki Sakamoto, offer only one truly memorable tune. For a final shortcoming, the game doesn't use the DS stylus. At all.

Covenant of the Plume has rare panache, and it's not in appearances. It's in the troubling decisions placed before you. In every challenge there's the temptation to use the feather, to take the quick and callous route instead of the difficult one. Sacrifice an ally, and you'll not only lose them for all future conflicts; you'll also further corrupt Wylfred. It's up to you to determine whether he's just a surly, confused kid seeking misguided revenge or a heartless monster sacrificing those who value him most, and the game's written competently enough to suit either.

It helps that those sacrificed allies actually matter. While the supporting cast of Valkyrie Profile 2 was mostly superficial, Covenant of the Plume returns to the much more detailed characterizations of the first Valkyrie Profile. Wylfred starts off by meeting the cheerful ex-assassin Cheripha and her gloomy mage father Lockswell, and the cast expands well, drawing in the loathsome sellsword Gwendal, the overly noble rebel leader Natalia, a pair of downright creepy twins, the cautious lord Valmur, the scheming magician Fauxnel, and the battle-hungry heavy swordswoman Phiona, who's a welcome change from the sexistly regimented warrior classes of Valkyrie Profile 2. They're not extensively developed and sometimes cling to stereotypes (Rosea and Lieselotte start off as a distinct virgin/whore dichotomy), but even the lesser characters seem vital. It's hard to see them swept away, be it by your hand or their own harsh world. I often laugh cynically when games attempt tragedy, and yet killing off hopeful, free-spirited Cheripha left me genuinely sad. If a flawed game can do that, it's worth a thousand perfect games that can't.

By the way, Cheripha and other likable characters have to die if you want to see everything the game offers. Reaching all three increasingly downbeat endings unlocks the Seraphic Gate, the traditional Valkyrie Profile bonus dungeon. Covenant's seems disappointingly short at first, yet it repeats many times and houses all sorts of amusing frills. Faces from the other Valkyrie Profiles show up, as do playable versions of major names from the Covenant storyline, with none quite in character. Hrist Valkyrie demands her own game, warrior Arngrim gripes about always being someone's lackey, and Ailyth, once coolly detached, all but jumps atop Wylfred and breaks into a chorus of "I Wanna Be Your Dog." The mores of today's anime culture are lampooned, and even Ailyth's maid-based attacks are far more entertaining than maid-based things should ever be. It's a nice break from the main game's dour melodrama.

An exceptional translation certainly helps. As with Final Fantasy XII and the recent Final Fantasy Tactics PSP port, Square Enix seized on Covenant of the Plume's medieval-like setting and filled the script with semi-arcane terminology and crisp turns of phrase. The dialogue is carefully honed, adorable even when reaching too far in search of eloquence. Do we really need to say "the triennial of her passing draws near" instead of "she died nearly three years ago"? Probably not, but I love Covenant of the Plume's script for that.

Less appealing is the English version's lack of voices. Almost every line was acted in the Japanese release of Covenant of the Plume, but the North American one deletes all of it except for battle cries and the occasional exclamation. It was evidently done to keep down recording time (and perhaps the price of cartridges, though the translated game has the same size DS card as the Japanese one), and the game loses a certain air. The English voices, for their part, are respectable, ranging from cartoony to dramatically weighted, and it's a shame they're not heard more often.

Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume has its problems: dumb enemies, malicious challenges, a hokey subtitle, Wylfred's ridiculous ponytails, and so on. It's a great surprise to see the game shake off most of that. There's a visceral cast to the battles and undeniable bite to the story, and the package makes a compelling return to the best of Valkyrie Profile. Even in the face of technically better strategy-RPGs, Covenant of the Plume is a unique and harshly satisfying wonder.