Valkyrie Elysium was revealed on March 9, 2022, developed by Soleil — not tri-Ace, the studio behind the original Valkyrie Profile. It released September 29, 2022 for PS4/PS5 and later on Steam. That developer swap is the single most important fact about this game, because everything that makes Valkyrie Profile special — the side-scrolling exploration, the Einherjar recruitment through dying warriors' stories, the multi-ending complexity — came from tri-Ace's specific design sensibilities. Soleil makes competent action games. They do not make Valkyrie Profile games. And Elysium proves it.
Combat: Functional Combos, Missing Weight
The Valkyrie wields melee weapons with light and heavy combos, summons Einherjar as AI-controlled assists, and uses divine arts for elemental damage. The Einherjar can be assigned to directional buttons and called mid-combo, creating a system where timing your summons to extend combos and exploit elemental weaknesses provides the game's mechanical depth. On paper, it works. In practice, the hits feel floaty — there's no impact feedback, no controller rumble that sells the connection between weapon and enemy. Compare this to NieR: Automata's combat, where every slash has weight and every dodge has purpose, and Elysium feels like it's running at half intensity. The enemy variety doesn't help: most encounters boil down to "summon Einherjar with correct element, combo until dead, repeat." Boss fights occasionally demand more strategy, but the window between "too easy" and "unfairly spammy" is narrow.
The Einherjar System: Potential Buried in Menus
In the original Valkyrie Profile, recruiting Einherjar was the game's emotional centerpiece. You witnessed a warrior's death — a soldier's last stand, a mother's sacrifice, a thief's redemption — and then claimed their soul for Odin's army. Each recruitment was a self-contained tragedy that gave your party members weight and history. Elysium reduces Einherjar to combat tools. You unlock them through progression, assign them to buttons, and call them during fights. Their backstories exist in text menus that most players will skip. The emotional core of the Valkyrie series — the idea that your power comes from the dead, and that their stories matter — is replaced with a skill tree. It's functional. It's forgettable. It's the opposite of what made Valkyrie Profile unforgettable.
The Valkyrie Profile Question: Reimagining vs. Replacing
The original Valkyrie Profile (1999) was a side-scrolling RPG with unique party combat, Einherjar recruitment from dying warriors' stories, and a Norse mythology framework that treated death with genuine reverence. Elysium keeps the Norse setting and Einherjar concept but discards the side-scrolling exploration, the recruitment-through-death storytelling, and the multi-ending complexity. It's not a remake or a sequel — it's a reimagining that removes everything distinctive about the source material. The Valkyrie protagonist has a tenuous relationship to Lenneth from the original, which is either respectful distance or a missed opportunity depending on your attachment. The Norse environments are pretty — crumbling temples, storm-lit battlefields, Asgardian halls — but they serve as linear corridors rather than explorable spaces.
What the Original Did That Elysium Doesn't
Valkyrie Profile's combat had four party members mapped to four buttons — each press triggered that character's attack, and chaining them together built a combo meter that unleashed devastating finishing moves. The timing, the sequencing, the rhythm of pressing four buttons in the right order to maximize damage — nothing else felt like it. It was a fighting game disguised as an RPG. Elysium replaces this with standard action-RPG combos that feel like every other character-action game on the market. The side-scrolling dungeon exploration — platforming, finding hidden items, solving environmental puzzles — is replaced with third-person hallways. The chapter structure that alternated between dungeon runs and Einherjar recruitment stories is replaced with a linear mission list. Every unique element has been smoothed into genre convention.
The Environments: Beautiful Corridors to Nowhere
Elysium's Norse-inspired environments are genuinely pretty — crumbling temples with shafts of golden light, storm-torn battlefields with lightning splitting the sky, Asgardian halls where pillars stretch into darkness. The art direction carries the series' visual identity even when the game design doesn't. But every environment is a corridor. There's no branching path, no secret room hidden behind a destructible wall, no reason to explore beyond following the minimap marker to the next fight. The original Valkyrie Profile had side-scrolling dungeons with platforming challenges, hidden treasures, and environmental puzzles that required specific abilities to solve. Elysium replaces this with "walk forward, fight group of enemies, walk forward, fight another group." The scenery changes. The structure doesn't. It's the PS5's processing power rendering the same level design philosophy as a PS2 game, and that gap between visual fidelity and structural ambition defines the entire Elysium experience.
The soundtrack, composed by Motoi Sakuraba (who scored the original Valkyrie Profile and the Tales series), provides the strongest connection to the series' identity. His battle themes carry the same intensity as Valkyrie Profile's combat music — aggressive strings, dramatic percussion, choir vocals that surge during boss encounters. If you close your eyes during a boss fight and just listen, Elysium sounds like a Valkyrie game. It's everything else that falls short.
The Verdict: A 6/10 Action RPG, a 4/10 Valkyrie Game
Valkyrie Elysium is a competent action RPG that would be perfectly acceptable if it didn't carry the Valkyrie name. The combat works. The Einherjar system has potential. The environments are pretty. But it lacks the mechanical originality, the emotional storytelling, and the structural ambition that made Valkyrie Profile one of the most distinctive RPGs on the PS1. If you've never played a Valkyrie game, Elysium is a fine entry point — it just doesn't represent what the series is capable of. If you have played Valkyrie Profile, prepare for disappointment tempered by competent execution. The best thing Elysium does is remind you that the original exists, and that Valkyrie Profile deserves a proper revival, not a diluted one. See the 2025 calendar for other releases.
If a proper Valkyrie Profile sequel ever materializes — one built by tri-Ace with side-scrolling dungeons, Einherjar death stories, and the four-button combo system — Elysium will be remembered as the compromise that proved the demand exists. The fanbase wants Valkyrie Profile back. They just want the real thing, not an action-RPG approximation wearing its armor.
All images are official screenshots from their respective publishers. Updated March 31, 2026.