Feature
Valkyria Chronicles is a different kind of war story
We tell a lot of stories about war. The appeal is, in one sense, straightforward: war checks off nearly every box in the dramatist’s playbook, replete with high stakes, clear protagonists and antagonists, and themes of heroism and loss. But the pendulum swings the other way, as well: wars don’t just make for good stories, good stories also help us cope with war. In order to wrap our minds around these big, bloody catastrophes, fraught as they are with inscrutable ideological and economic motivations, we construct simple narratives to bring coherence to the incoherent. Videogames hold a particularly vested interest in…