Beyond a doubt one of the most enjoyable games in existence.
The story takes off with a quick recap of the events of the original game. The first cutscene is splendidly done, the music immediately makes one think of military history, and explains enough to not make new players of the series lost. Gallia is a country often caught between the warring giants at its borders in the continent of Europa, a version of World War II-era Europe. Gallia is now facing civil war, with a rebel group trying to purge the country of Darcsens, an ethnic group often treated worse than others due to their invasion of Europa thousands of years ago. The protagonist, Avan Hardins, is contacted by a professor at a military academy and told that his brother died while on a special mission. Avan joins the academy to find out the details surrounding his brother's death, and is made the chair of Class G, the 'losers club' of Lanseal Academy. There he meets Zeri, Cosette and the rest of Class G. Using each of the characters in battle, besides the main ones, reveals that each of them has a dilemma, and after completing a Class Mission Avan helps them with it, from teaching one of them to dance to rescuing their family. Overall the story is excellent and the character development, including all the side characters, is even more so.
There are four types of missions: Free, Key, Class and Story. Free missions are those done to gain money and materials to develop weapons, Key missions are a certain number of missions that must be done to unlock Story missions, Story missions progress the story, and Class missions are those in which Avan helps each student with their problems.
The gameplay is the best part of the game. The player and the enemy are both given a certain number of Command Points, and they are given an overhead view of the battlefield where they choose characters and move them. Each character has an amount of Action Points which are used for moving, and after that they do not move. They can attack once during an action, and attack power differs depending on range and whether the enemy is facing the character, or away from them. Both the player and the enemy characters can evade attacks sometimes, and the chance of evading attacks increases with activated potentials. When all the CP is spent, it is the enemy's turn to move, and so on. Players may have to kill all enemies, capture the enemy base camp, kill the enemy leader, find hidden goods or get to a certain location to win. Tanks and APCs can also be used although they expend more CP than infantry units.
Then there are potentials. Under certain conditions, potentials may activate in characters, usually something to do with their past or nature, that can either be for better or for worse. Completing Class missions replaces negative potentials with positive ones in characters. Some positive potentials raise power against enemies, some refill health, and some raise defense while others may do the opposite.
The player can take cover behind sandbags or in tall grass which enables them to sneak up on enemies and do more damage. There are two sightlines, blue meaning that you can see the enemy but they can't see you, and yellow meaning they can see you and are firing at you. The game encourages you to use pincer attacks and circling around the enemy, but it doesn't force you into being all strategy. You have a fair amount of freedom to take on the enemy as you want (unless it's a Crimean War level of stupid, like running into enemies blindly).
The player is awarded medals for completing certain conditions in battle, such as killing a set number of enemies. Bonus characters can be unlocked by collecting a certain amount of medals. Some characters, such as those of the original game, can be unlocked by entering a code. There is lots of content such as characters, tank stickers, extra missions and medals to unlock.Each month, a new student joins the squad. In the main story, there are about 50 characters in total, while combined with the unlockable ones, there are even more.
There are two kinds of multiplayer: co-op and versus. In co-op, you can do missions with other players as your partner, while in versus you fight each other. The multiplayer is very enjoyable and can help to have another friend play in co-op if you're stuck on a mission.
The story is great and the characters are very likeable. The presentation is good, the anime cutscenes are usually short and only last for a minute at most while most of the cutscenes takes place in static images with dialogue - which actually seems good considering the long length of the cutscenes. The parts with character death, are well done especially towards the end of the game. Aliasse is my favourite Valkyria in the series and the Valkyrian-fight cutscenes are well done.
There are five basic class types: scouts, shocktroopers, lancers, engineers and armor techs. They can be ugraded to snipers, gunners, commandoes, mortarers, medics, anthem corps, maulers and fencers. Scouts are highly mobile but have low attack power, shocktroopers and lancers are useful against infantry and tanks respectively, engineers heal characters and are also highly mobile and armour techs are powerful, with high defense and can remove landmines. A tank or APC can also be used.
The graphics are great as well. The in-game aren't extremely are colourful and vibrant while the 2D graphics in cutscenes are brilliant. The music is superb, especially that in Story missions. The voice acting for every character is well done.
Lots of playtime and lasting appeal, lots of stuff to unlock, amazing gameplay, likeable characters and vibrant graphics. You can play this game a hundred times through, and it will turn out different each time.
After beating the game, the challenge to obtain all the medals and to A-rank all the missions (well over two hundred of them) makes this game easy to sink a hundred hours into. I've played it more than I have any other game and I still play it with the same enthusiasm. In simple words, it's my favourite game. You can play it a hundred times through and it will be different each time. This is recommended to anyone.