Busting Busty Stereotypes: The Role of Gender and Culture in "Valkyria Chronicles"

Valkyria Chronicles is a tactical RPG that was released in 2008 for the PlayStation 3. Critics considered it to be unique in its genre because of its innovative battle system that had the player switching between an overhead map view of the action and third-person control of each unit on the field. It was unique among all games for its clever integration of gender and culture into its gameplay mechanics.

The player assembles a squad of 20 units from a large pool of recruits before going to battle. The characters have “potentials” that can affect their performance on the battlefield in various ways. Some male units get a boost to performance when there are female units near them. In one particularly interesting scenario, a gay character gets a huge performance boost when around other male units, but some male units lose performance when he’s around.

Making each character’s back story relevant in gameplay is a logical mechanic that ends up being a missed opportunity in most games, but Valkyria Chronicles embraces it. Characters who grew up in rural areas are more effective in deserts or forests than those who grew up in urban areas, and those who grew up with each other are more powerful when working together. The player can choose to keep the same squad throughout the game, or mix it up between each battle. The game seems to encourage players to do the former by placing the experience system on the squad rather than individual characters – a character that has fought in one battle is considered to be just as powerful as a character that has fought in ten.

Switching between characters forces hardcore players to read their back stories and become familiar with their likes and dislikes if they want the biggest tactical advantage in selecting their squads. Apart from reading about characters in the in-game encyclopedia, players are introduced to all of them in the game’s many cutscenes. Every chapter in the game features one battle and roughly eight cinematics that develop the plot around it. They can be skipped, but doing so often means the player will miss valuable insight into the characters that could be useful in the next battle.

According to a Ludica article on gender and space, research into games and gender has found that “women and girls resonate with games that have storylines and character development, and they might even stray from the game’s goals to explore a secondary plotline.” (Fullerton et. al 6) The emphasis on back story in Valkyria Chronicles hardly suggests that it was designed for women, but it is a noteworthy implementation of an element associated with feminine space for a masculine audience. The cast’s diversity and relevance to the plot and gameplay was highly praised by the gaming press as well. The developers could have easily drawn up an arbitrary set of attributes for each character, but instead chose to support them with plotlines and relationships for players who want it.

The PlayStation 3 JRPG market is dominated by white and Asian males. Valkyria Chronicles was largely restricted to that audience before it was even released because of genre association and a lack of marketing. It’s interesting, then, that most of the characters are not over-sexualized. Henry Jenkins notes that "girls who play boys games find the games' constructions of female sexuality and power are designed to gratify preadolescent males, not to empower girls. Girl gamers are aggressively campaigning to have their tastes and interests factored into the development of action games." (Jenkins 358) Although it occasionally falls to stereotypes, Valkyria Chronicles stands out by doing a decent job of factoring in the relevant tastes and interests of the female gamer. The majority of the male characters are average-looking because they were drafted into the military from humble backgrounds. Most of the female characters are able to maintain a proper center of gravity because they don’t have oversized breasts.  In a twist, the game gives some villains the opposite treatment: they are heavily over-sexualized with bulging muscles or bouncing boobs, yet the plot’s few instances of romance never include them, instead focusing on the average protagonists.

Fron et. al asks: “Is it possible that the difficulty in producing 'games for girls' or games for adults, or games for ‘everyone’ lies in the inherent properties of the technology of digital games themselves? Or are [hegemonic practices] tied more to the marketing and production process that has developed over the past three decades?” (Fron et. al 3) It’s not entirely clear what the developers intended with this characterization, but it flies in the face of the traditional bikini-clad Final Fantasy girls and testosterone-pumped heroes that players have come to expect from the JRPG genre. The game’s success among hardcore gamers supports the notion that the hegemonic stereotypes in question are less a product of the medium and more a product of marketing.

This brings us to one of the “four tricks” for design research presented by Brenda Laurel: “Pay attention to what you learned, even if it doesn’t match your personal taste or the prevailing truisms about your audience.” (Laurel 42) Valkyria Chronicles was a modest success, selling through about 600,000 units worldwide. It spawned an anime in Japan, and a full sequel is in the works for PSP. This game created a lot of buzz when it was released because of its unique battle system, but it would not have been nearly as memorable (or capable of supporting an anime) without a cast of characters that players could care about and even relate to. In many JRPGs, it’s a difficult task to remember the five or six party members the game offers. Valkryia Chronicles features a cast well over 50 without being overwhelming. There aren’t enough games that put story on the same level as action in development, and this game stands out as a result. Hopefully more developers will pay attention to it and throw archaic stereotypes of JRPG enthusiasts out the window.

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Works Cited

Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (aka Ludica) (2007). "A Game Of Ones Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Game Space." In Proceedings, Digital Arts & Culture 2007, Perth, Australia, September 2007.

Fron, J., Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (aka Ludica) "The Hegemony of Play." In Situated Play: Proceedings of Digital Games Research Association 2007 Conference. Tokyo, Japan, September 2007.

Jenkins, Henry. "Complete Freedom of Movement: Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces" The Game Design Reader, ed. Salen, Katie and Eric Zimmerman.MIT Press:Cambridge, MA, 2006. 330-363.

Laurel, Brenda. (2001). Utopian Entrepreneur. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.