The Valkyrie Profile series has always hidden its quiet inventiveness under a muted colour palette and melancholic ambiance. In part that’s due to the subject matter. The eponymous Valkyrie is, after all, the Norse personification of Death, scythe replaced by silver saber, black hooded cloak dress-changed for the blue and white gold-trimmed armour of a Scandinavian goddess.

Developer tri-Ace has traditionally cast the player in her role, tasked with ushering mortals into the afterlife, taking them into a new supernatural existence while their loved ones crumple in mourning on earth. But for this, the first DS game in the series, the roles are reversed. Players assume the role of Wylfred, a young man whose father perished on the battlefield, carried off by the Valkyrie, and whose sister died of starvation from the subsequent poverty the tragedy brought upon the family.

Wylfred is fueled by existential rage, a bloodlust that will be satisfied only with the death of Death herself. With murder in his heart he is taken under the wing of another nefarious supernatural being, who grants him control of a deadly feather, a tool that can be used to end the life of any of his comrades, each execution carrying the boy one step closer to his improbable quarry. So begins one of the darkest and most remarkable revenge tales told by a videogame.

The systems that underpin this cheerless drama are based on the Tactical RPG model, but as with the previous entries to the series, the framework is reconstructed in a way that often defies genre. Play takes place on small, gridded environments, player and AI taking turns to move their soldiers around the chess-like battlefield. However, when two warring units engage in battle, a separate combat screen is triggered, as in a conventional JRPG, where the warriors fight till their action points are depleted. The workings of the skirmish system here will be familiar to players of the earlier Valkyrie profile games. Each unit involved is mapped to a separate DS face button and, by hitting these in time you can unleash a string of attacks on your enemy. If you manage to instigate enough attacks to fill a gauge then an impressive Soul Crush move will finish off any foes still clinging to life.

You can read the rest of this review at Eurogamer here