Time to mix drinks and click through pages and pages of dialog

Maybe the worst thing about VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action is its title. I really don't want to type out that whole mess again. ... that's my glib way of saying that Valhalla is not a bad game, though I did find it extremely tepid.

At first, its bartending mechanics are more than a little bewildering - the ingredients don't map to real ones at all, and the controls for "aging" and "blending" a drink are pretty counterintuitive - so it takes a few rounds to get the hang of. But, before you know it, you'll be slinging Brandtinis and Grizzly Temples with the best of them.

And for the rest of the game, which is to say the vast majority of it, the gameplay doesn't evolve any further. That's it.

You'll shortly come to find that the bartending mechanics aren't really Valhalla's focus -- they're just an engagement tool, a way to make sure you're awake, as you click through screen after screen of dialog with your virtual bar patrons. It'd be a misrepresentation to call Valhalla anything other than a Visual Novel.

And in that regard, Valhalla isn't bad. Its characters have well-written personalities, and some of their stories are kinda interesting. But... it doesn't feel like quite enough.

Despite the "cyberpunk" adjective in its title, Valhalla rarely delves into its techno-futuristic setting. Other than the fact that some patrons are AI androids called Lilim, and characters will occasionally muse about Lilims' social and sexual interactions with humans, the story is very much about the day-to-day lives of its bartenders and patrons -- which aren't that far removed from present-day routines.

On the one hand, Valhalla's writing does a good job of bridging that gap, of making its events relatable despite being set decades in the future. But on the other hand, by so frequently glossing over the technological and cultural aspects of the cyberpunk theme, those events ultimately don't feel very distinctive from the stories that any other visual novel (or any other work of fiction) could tell.

For all the times I was curious to hear more about a character's backstory, actually reading that story was invariably dull. Even during the "let's talk about boob sizes" conversation that seems to be an inevitable thing in visual novels.

Valhalla's got a great sense of personality, but no real gameplay and no central plot. (The protagonist does have a character-defining story toward the end; but it doesn't feel much more impactful than any other character's story.) I don't want to say that Valhalla is all style and no substance -- because there is quite a lot of substance, in its reams of written dialog. It just ... isn't very interesting substance.

Better than: Hate Plus
Not as good as: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (NDS)
Perhaps slightly not-as-good-as: Analogue: A Hate Story, which at least had a core mystery to solve.