Valkyrie Crusade: A CCG With Cute Anime Girls

Published: January 23, 2016 9:00 AM /

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Recently, there’ve been a lot of articles on here about a game called Valkyrie Crusade. But what is Valkyrie Crusade? Why should you, the reader, care about this game? It's a fun CCG with cute anime girls using city building and gacha elements alongside its card battle focus.

Valkyrie Crusade, originally developed by Nubee and recently sold to Mynet, is a digital CCG available for iOS and Android devices. The game uses gacha elements to allow players to roll for beautifully illustrated cards both for free and using jewels, which can be bought for real money. Players are also required to build a kingdom and gather resources a la Farmville in order to fund their army.

Valkyrie-Crusade-Battle

Despite these elements, Valkyrie Crusade’s main gameplay is a Card Battle system. Players set up decks of 5 cards and can advance through various campaign maps, duel other players, and more. Battles are turn-based and players select a card to attack with and tap the opposing card to attack and deal damage. Cards come equipped with skills, some of which can be activated during a battle. Each skill has a certain chance to proc each turn and a proc limit per battle. Any number of available skills can be activated per turn.

On event campaign maps, the player will encounter three types of bosses: Archwitches, Fantasy Archwitches, and Legendary Archwitches, which they, along with other players (often in the form of Alliances), will work to defeat. Defeating Archwitches will drop chests, two for the player who found the Archwitch and one for all other players involved. These chests can contain cards, including the card of the Archwitch herself, or items such as the Arcanas used to power up existing cards.

On top of card drops, defeating Archwitches earns a player subjugation points, which the player must accumulate to earn a high rank and receive the rank rewards (ranging from simple items to very strong cards).

 Valkyrie-Crusade-Kingdom

Outside of the card battle aspect is the more Farmville-esque city building part of the game. Players are responsible for building a kingdom. Buildings can be built using free resources but some require the player to use jewels in order to build them. Buildings can give resources (Farm, Ironworks, or Ether Furnace), “action point” bonuses (Great Temple, Barracks, etc.), or even bonuses directly to the player’s cards (Light Shrine, Pagan Hall, etc.). Not building these buildings will eventually harm the player as they will not have the resources to buy soldiers (Card Health Points) or will be lacking in action points (Campaign Vitality).

Aside from the free in-game currency, there is also the paid in-game currency, Jewels. Jewels can be accumulated without paying any money, but the accumulation is a crawl at best for free players who must also be very wise with how they ultimately spend those free Jewels. Players will receive 100 Jewels every 7 days, 200 (100 on day 6, and 100 on day 7) once per month. Jewels are also received when players complete the final area of any given zone, indicated on the map with a castle or a dragon. The Jewels gained in the event maps are by far easier to obtain as the event maps are shorter and more rewarding per zone (usually giving the player 50 per zone at least, compared to zone 6-5 in the regular chronicle which will net you just 5 jewels).

Players who do not wish to wait to accumulate free jewels can simply buy jewels. $0.99 will buy you 100 jewels but in terms of large quantities, the player can buy 10,000 jewels for $79.99 as well as various values in between. The player can use these to buy limited time summons, buildings, action point items, and even replenish the soldiers of their cards. Some cards bought from limited time summons also come with the skill "Great Damage" which gives bonus damage and subjugation points when battling current archwitches, allowing new players to get ahead and seasoned players to stay ahead.

It is worth mentioning, though, that the limited summon cards are not as "over powered" as one may first assume. While many of them may be "better" versions of free cards (Sorcerer Slayer and Ariton have almost the same skill as Ishikore-Dome, though Ariton and Sorcerer Slayer deal 150% more damage. A useful addition, but the crux of the skill is its four turn stun, really.), many of the unique limited cards are later released (Hiraga is Mochitsuki with a second skill, we also had Atalanta as well) or outright outdone (Halloween Hades and Heroic Gilgamesh) with cards available either through event currency to gather or archwitch drops.

Valkyrie-Crusade-Summons

Last but not least, the gacha aspect. Aside from rolling cards from drop chests, there is also the summoning page, which allows players to use either free in-game currency or microtransaction currency to summon cards out of a predetermined line-up. Summons with better cards in their line-ups cost real money or time to hoard free tickets for the summons but can yield impressive cards for players to use.

All of these aspects come together to create a game that has attracted a great number of players both in ranking and in casual play (likely due to it's gorgeous card art). One which can only be truly understood through experience.

Valkyrie Crusade is available for download on both the iTunes app store and the Google Play store and is free to download. Come fight some archwitches for (sometimes) sweet loot!

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I'm a gaymer whose life is controlled by eSports. I'm the singular western fan of the League of Legends VCS. Currently an Ahri main. Former Rakan… More about Silas