Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria

The prequel to Valkyrie Profile, Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria deals with the fate of Silmeria, who appeared trapped in a crystal in Brahms' castle in the first game.

Silmeria, it turns out, was sealed by Odin well before Ragnarok into Princess Alicia, sole heir to the grand kingdom of Dipan. However, the sealing process was incomplete, and Silmeria was still able to communicate with Alicia. This is particularly problematic as Silmeria became aware of certain plans Odin had, and was out to stop them before they could come to fruition. Meanwhile, both Odin and Alicia's father, King Barbarossa, are proceeding with plans concerning both the mortal realm and Asgard, which could potentially accelerate the timetable for Ragnarok.

Tropes used in Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria include:

• A God Am I:
  • Lezard after killing Odin and stealing Gungnir. Additionally, Rufus techically counts as well, as he takes Odin's place in Asgard at the end of the game.
  • The hypocrisy of Lezard invoking this trope in spite of his hatred of the gods is lampshaded.
• All There in the Manual: The various einherjar's biography screens tell of dramatic wars and doings that many of them were caught up in, giving much of the game's backstory. However, you need to go through a New Game+ multiple times to get the whole story.
  • Or just read this.
• Another Dimension: Creating one of these turns out to be the goal of a couple big players in the game.
• Becoming the Mask: Happens to Hrist, who's disguised as Leone. She's only in disguise to spy on them and steal the Dragon Orb, but she gains an empathy for Alicia she didn't have before and tries to spare her life.
• BFS:
  • Sword: Arngrim and Dylan. Most of the other Heavy Warrior type Einherjar follow suit.
  • Spear: The Nibelung Valesti's (except Alicia's first one, which instead uses the crystals she normally uses to aid her platforming for combat purposes).
• Bonus Dungeon: The Seraphic Gate, though unlike the other games in the series this one's located on the world map instead of through the start menu.
• Boom! Headshot!: The game's battle system, as mentioned below, gives each enemy different body parts you can destroy as you attack. If the destroyed part happens to be the head, it's an instant kill no matter how many hitpoints the enemy had left. This doesn't work with most bosses and some endgame monsters though.
• Broken Bridge
• The Cameo: Early in the game, you meet a young, talented mage named Lezard Valeth, who's a reference to the character of the same name in the previous game, only this time he's a kind, courteous and chivalrous ally of the party. Except he's not. He really is the same as the previous game, and it's all an act he's keeping up as part of his Time Travel evil plan.
• Captain Ersatz: Arngrim, for Guts, as before.
• Casual Danger Dialog: In addition to the standard battle quotes, if you put Einherjar into your party that knew each other in life, they might have a brief conversation at the start of a battle. Some are heartwarming bits where sisters reunite, and others are more amusing as enemies who killed each other basically go, "Er, no hard feelings, right?"
• Chewing the Scenery: Hrist when she performs Nibelung Valesti.

"It shall be engraved on your very soul!

• • Lezard, once he shows his true colors.
• Continuity Nod: When you visit Dipan in Chapter 4, Hrist notes that she can sense Lenneth there. In truth, she is not sensing Lenneth from that time, but Lenneth from the first game who was sent back in time by the three wizards while exploring the ruins of Dipan.
• Cosmic Keystone:
  • The Dragon Orb and it's revealed that the reason Brahms had taken Silmeria and was holding on to her in the first game is because Odin stole said Orb, and Brahms used Silmeria's soul as a replacement to prevent Midgard from collapsing.
  • Odin's spear Gungnir is also supposed to be one; Lezard uses it to help make his own World Tree.
• Critical Existence Failure: Semi-averted for enemies -- you can target pieces of an enemy, and you can break off their body parts with enough damage. In addition to producing more items, this can result in enemies being unable to move or attack (and thus easy prey). Played straight with the player characters and humanoid enemies, except Lezard, who can be dismembered like any other enemy, but he just regenerates any missing pieces at the end of the combo.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Turns out that Brahms is mostly interested in keeping Midgard in one piece... he just became King of the Vampires to do so.
• Despair Event Horizon: The bulk of Chapter 4 is dedicated to pushing Alicia closer and closer to this, until she crosses it when her father is executed, her childhood friend is turned into a demon, and her mother takes her own life. She bounces back, though, but is driven clearly over it later on when Rufus apparently dies, and she's a hair's breadth from just ending it all.
• Disc One Nuke: If Dylan, Leone, Arngrim and Lezard leave the party at a certain level, it's possible to get some extremely powerful weapons.
  • To elaborate; you can get a bunch of game-breaking weapons that will last you all the way to the endgame if you manage to get the above-mentioned characters to absurdly high levels (40-50 depending on character, around twice as high as you'd normally excepted to be at that point in the game, although the accessories you get by grinding Lezard are hardly useful). These weapons are so hideously broken that you can one-shot every storyline boss with a single combo without even trying.
• Driven to Suicide: Alicia's mother after Dipan falls. And then Alicia at the top of Yggdrasil, when Rufus seems to have died. Only Rufus letting her know he's alive prevents it.
• Eleventh-Hour Superpower: Alicia merging with the other valkyries and getting the Glance Reviver.
• Enemy Mine: Alicia manages to get Hrist and Brahms to work together to keep Lezard from destabilizing both Midgard and Asgard and get Lenneth's soul back from him.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Rufus's aversion in regards to the valkyries is a rather nice piece of Foreshadowing.
• Expy: Arngrim appears to be an Expy of himself from the previous game. According to the the third game, this Arngrim is a previous incarnation of the original.
• Face Heel Turn: Lezard Valeth... It's not like he did anything obscene or disturbing in any Tri-Ace game he's ever appeared in.
  • Also, Arngrim is forced into this; Hrist kills him and transforms him into her einherjar, thereby forcing him to fight Alicia. This is reversed later on, though.
• Finishing Move: The Soul Crush maneuvers. Each storyline important character gets a unique one which evolves into a higher form after a key moment of Character Development usually their death . Einherjar of a given type all have the same, and Sorcerors have one of the Great Magics.
• Flat Earth Atheist: One NPC mentions early on that she only believes what she sees with her own eyes, and this apparently does not include the gods, despite the supernatural being fairly commonplace in the setting. She changes her tune, however after the gods flatten Dipan, after which she decides she's definitely going to the chapel from now on.
• Foreshadowing: The first half of the game is filled with Leone, Lezard, and Rufus giving each other looks that get a lot more significant once you know what the twists in the plot are.
• Fusion Dance:
  • Alicia merges with the three Valkyrie sisters at the end of the game to form an incredibly powerful, if short lived, being.
  • The original plan was for Brahms to do it, what would that have looked like? A gorilla in a skirt and breastplate?
• Gambit Pileup: Half the cast has its own plans involving the MacGuffin focused on in the first half of the game, and they collide quite a bit:
  • Odin: Trick Silmeria into recovering the Dragon Orb for use to fight him, use Hrist to destroy Dipan to lure out both Silmeria and Brahms to take them both out, and use the power of two Cosmic Keystones to win Ragnarok immediately.
  • Barbarossa: Search out the Dragon Orb to lure Odin and the gods out from hiding, and use the Sovereign Rite to imprison them, thereby allowing him to take over the heavens.
  • Brahms: Disguise himself as Alicia's retainer, Dylan, to get close enough to the gods to kill them and prevent them from taking the Dragon Orb and thus preventing the world's destabilization.
  • Lezard: Build himself a new body after he transcended his old one, go back in time, kill Odin, steal two Cosmic Keystones, and create an alternate reality in an attempt to destabilize all of existence to force Lenneth the Creator to jump back in time, weakening her power so that he could capture her and marry her.
  • Alicia: Take a deadly poison that could transform her into a hideous monster, storm Asgard, kill Odin and shunt his power but not his consciousness into his spare body, and put all the proper Cosmic Keystones in the right place.
• Gotterdammerung: By the end of the game, Alicia and her party have just about wiped out the Aesir, though Rufus takes Odin's place in Asgard afterward.
• Glass Cannon: The best way to do signficant damage post-game is to use a setup so that there's only one living character in your party with only 1 hp, thanks to the various skills and sealstone effects that give cumulative damage boosts the lower your HP is and the less party members are alive. You'll do shit-tons of damage but one hit will be game over.
• Grand Theft Me: Silmeria does this every so often to Alicia. You can tell who's in control by looking at her eyes or by listening to her voice; they sound rather distinct from each other.
  • Additionally, this is what Odin plans to do to Rufus if his body gives out.
• Half-Human Hybrid: As in the first game, the secret to ultimate power is having human blood mix with the divine. Quite specifically, it turns out that Rufus is one and is in fact Odin's spare body.
• Heel Face Turn: Eventually, Hrist comes around. It's that or an Enemy Mine, depending on your viewpoint.
• Karmic Death: Karma finally catches up to Lezard Valeth.
• Lighter and Softer:
  • Compared to its predecessor, the first half or so of the game is much more colorful and cheerful, with bright colors all around, and generally cheery music in towns as opposed to the drab colors and depressing score of the original game. Things take a nosedive in the latter parts of the game, of course.
  • Interestingly, the Lighter and Softer feel is justified in-game. Odin's theft of the Dragon Orb is directly responsible for the world becoming crappier by the time the first game happens.
• Load-Bearing Boss: When Anarchic Entity (the final boss) is defeated, the Tower Of Lezard Valeth collapses.
• Magikarp Power: Dylan in the Seraphic Gate. He rejoins at the same level he was at when he left the party when you defeat Gabriel Celeste while everyone else is hovering around the 40s and 50s, making him pathetically weak. He eventually learns an attack with one of the highest damage multipliers in the game, however, can use the Tyrfing to boost his damage even further, and with the right Sealstones and Skills he can start doing ridiculous amounts of damage.
• Memento MacGuffin: Rufus gives the ring that is initially used to keep Rufus as a host for Odin to Alicia to keep her alive as a Ghoul during their journey to Yggdrasil. It becomes Alicia's "good luck charm," and it soon becomes a trinket of their relationship, especially when Alicia (as the Valkyrie) kisses the ring to show Rufus that she's still there. Alicia also uses it as the conduit to manifest Rufus as an Einherjar after Lezard displaces his soul from his body.
• My Significance Sense Is Tingling: Valkyries are good at this.
• Nerf:
  • Inverted, as Tri-Ace took a look at how lousy archers were in the first game and seriously built up the class. Now, they're much more accurate to go with their more-hits-per-attack, so the fact that their hits do less damage than others' strikes is quickly mitigated. And as the game is heavily Combo-based, and their Soul Crushes do the most hits, they basically went from "Why would anyone ever use an archer?" in the first to "Why doesn't everyone use multiple archers?" in the second. Using them is also necessary if you want to perform an infinite combo, thanks to one of their attacks that hits large enemies repeatedly and recovers more AP than it costs to use.
  • Played straight with the mages, however. In the first game, magic was very powerful, likely to make up for the fact that mages had to recharge after each cast. Their Soul Crush finishing moves in particular went from the most powerful attacks you could do for the vast majority of the game to about the same strength as anyone else's Soul Crush or, in some cases, weaker.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Alicia. Starts as Princess Soul Jar with traces of Valkyrie becomes Princess Undead Demon Goddess. And its awesome!
• Non-Linear Sequel: The game's location in the timeline is complicated at best.
• Our Vampires Are Different
• Preexisting Encounters
• Rain of Arrows: All archers are capable of this for their Soul Crush
• Rage Against the Heavens: The start of Barbarossa's plan. Also, one chapter of the game has Alicia and Rufus storming into Asgard and just about wiping out the Aesir that try to stop them.
• Randomly Drops: Most annoyingly, the recruitable characters are completely random, which can be annoying if you're hoping to get a particular mage (and thus a particular Great Magic spell).
• Scenery Porn: This is a very pretty game. It really shines at Bifrost, Valhalla, and Yggdrasil, and it's one of the few PlayStation 2 games to be Progressive Scan capable.
• Sealed Evil in a Can
• Sealed Good in a Can
• Slouch of Villainy: Odin's standard pose.
• Soul Jar: Alicia's old einherjar are trapped in their weapons, and can be recruited by letting them out.
  • Actually they are trapped in Silmeria, who is trapped in Alicia (russian doll Soul Jars?) The weapons they once owned act as physical conduits to release them.
• Spam Attack: The game's combo system encourages you to carefully time your attacks to conserve AP and the number of attacks, and to make sure they all land. But when Break Mode activates, you have infinite AP and attacks for about 10 seconds, which will result in this.
• Stalker with a Crush: Lezard.
• Surprisingly Easy Mini Quest: In Yggdrasil, at one point, Alicia is left as the only available story-centric party member, and has to backtrack through the place to retrieve something. Probably just in case you dismissed all your Einherjar, all the monsters and bosses are significantly nerfed. But chances are you'll have at least a full party's worth of Einherjar, meaning you're going to Curb Stomp Battle anything up to and including the area's boss.
• Tear Jerker
• Temporal Paradox: In the ending, Asgard is decimated, Odin is dead, and the spirits of the three Valkyries have dispersed. Several of the characters from the first game are dead or in another dimension, and the Cosmic Keystone that was removed and caused the first game's Ragnarok is back in place. Timeline-wise, the first game can't happen now.
  • The epilogue implies that these events resulted in an Alternate Timeline.
• Timed Mission: Reaching the Rainbow Bridge before Rufus' body fades away.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: Lezard tries to go back in time and take possession of Silmeria, so he can make his own World Tree, and thereby force Lenneth to become his bride. Lenneth the Creator, from after the first game, goes back to try and stop him... it only gets more confusing from there.
• Took a Level in Badass: You know Alicia has stopped being the weepy and cowardly princess when her solution to Odin's theft of the Dragon Orb and Silmeria's soul is to become undead and storm Asgard to get both back.
  • Complete with an upgrade to her Limit Break a few gameplay hours later and generally more Badass battle-quotes.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension: Alicia and Rufus. Will They or Won't They? They never will, unless Rufus waits for the reincarnated Alicia in the epilogue until She's All Grown Up.
• Vendor Trash: Certain items are available only if you sell the right amounts of this to vendors. Plus, what trash you get depends on what you break off of enemies. While the "trash" items do give stat boosts when equipped, they tend to be non-runic (and thus don't contribute to the linked-equipment boosts), and the items you can get by selling them tend to be powerful weapons and accessories, although some of them are still worth using as accessories since they give large stat multipliers.
• Weapon of X-Slaying: They're still around, but rather than the One Hit KO weapons they were in the first game, this time they just allow critical hits.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The ending promises that Lenneth has a new destiny to go to, but so far the series hasn't followed up on that.
  • It probably refers to her returning to her own timeline.
  • Also, the game confirms that the original game's Golden Ending is canon, so what happened to Lucian?
    • While he doesn't appear, some of Lenneth's lines when she first appears (e.g."fight for the ones I love") clearly refer to him so it's highly likely she just didn't bring him along this time.
    • Possibly he's simply staying at home to watch the kids (and judging from the above line, this isn't too far-fetched at all). Still, his complete absence -- he's not even mentioned by name -- is kind of a let-down for people who liked him in the first game. But well, that's what happens when you're not as Badass as Arngrim.
• Wham! Episode: The end of Chapter 3 and all of Chapter 4, which may as well be subtitled "Shit Gets Real." First, at the end of Chapter 3, Leone turns out to be Hrist. Then Hrist leads an attack on Dipan which wipes the place out, the Three Mages show their true colors, Barbarossa gets his head chopped off, and Dylan turns out to be Brahms.
  • Then later on, this kind and friendly version of Lezard turns out to be the same sick bastard from the original game, he steals Silmeria, and eats Odin.
• The Worf Effect: This is the second time in the series that Odin, father of the gods and ruler of the heavens is killed to show powerful the real Big Bad is.
• Wrecked Weapon: In Chapter 5, Alicia's sword is broken during the cutscene when Lezard reveals his villainous intentions. Of course, the sword is just fine by the time you get to the next battle.
• Yandere: Lezard. It should be obvious to the people who played the first game.
• You Kill It, You Bought It: Hrist kills Arngrim specifically to force him to help her instead of Alicia and Silmeria.