You mustnt let fear or regret have the better of you, master.
It is through sin that your desires shall be fulfilled.
- Ailyth, Servant of Hel
The story of Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume has a darkness of tone long absent from Japanese RPGs. This is not a cute fun-filled tale of "high adventure" set in green grasslands that just happen to be beset by a few evil individuals who are easily spotted and slain. There is a morally disquieting level of maturity in Covenant. The protagonists are not heroes in the modern sense of the term; they are humans beset by tragedy and driven to evil by desperation.
Odin, lord and father of the Aesir, delights in war, and his valkyries target the best warriors for recruitment after their earthly death, thus setting the stage for mortal men and women to display a great amount of bravery in war. A simple enough setup. In Covenant, our protagonist Wylfred lost his father to Valkyrie Lenneth (hero of the first game, Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth), then his younger sister died without her fathers support, which caused Wylfreds mother to have a psychotic break and see Wylfred as her lost husband. Wylfred, unable to stop her descent into madness, ends up playing along with his mother and acts as his father in a horrible game of make-believe.
But instead of giving in to despair, Wylfred swears vengeance on Valkyrie Lenneth. Hel, a goddess allied with the enemies of the Aesir, gives Wylfred a cursed feather that must be "stained black by sin" in a binding covenant that will eventually give him enough power to kill the valkyrie. Thats right, in this game you play as someone whose goal is to kill the hero you played as in an earlier Valkyrie Profile game.
So how does he stain the plume with sin and increase his power? Two ways. One: By completely slaughtering his enemies in battle. Not just overcoming them, but completely crushing them, by mutilating them even beyond the point of death and far beyond the limits of good taste. And two: By betraying those closest to him. By getting people to join him, then using them and causing their own untimely death. Shocking, yes?
Its this dark and solid story that slam-dunked my head into the DS and kept me playing. Im very, very tired of JRPG protagonists who are easily outraged by their empire-running enemies but who are themselves little more than boring simpletons. Finally, we have a hero in the ancient sense of the word: Someone driven by a goal, who sets himself against the gods, and is willing to walk over anyone who gets in his way. Dont get me wrong, Wylfred is not completely amoral. He is in a morally complicated situation. He saw his family destroyed by a god that popular culture says is "good". He wants revenge and, while he knows that what he is doing is wrong, the ghosts of his past drive him on.
This is the kind of balls that can save JRPG storytelling, which has become so hackneyed and cliched of late that I thought the genre was beyond saving. Thanks go to Miho Akabane for writing a script whose dialogue rivals the newest translation of Final Fantasy Tactics and even surpasses it in terms of darkness of tone.
And to think that I would have been happy with just a straight Valkyrie Profile sequel.
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