![]() Valhalla attracts an eclectic cast of future folks who help you to better understand the setting and its society. It’s not too hard to get to know the characters either, and the main appeal of the game is developing your relationships with them. Extra dialogue and even special endings open up based on getting to know the people who drop by your bar often, the drink you serve at pivotal moments showing that you have taken the time to get to know the customer as a friend rather than a source of income. More importantly, there are moment where drink choice is left up to you, with some patrons requesting things not by name, but by qualities like flavor or type, and there are even points where you are asked to guess what a character might desire or choose the best option to make them feel better. Some drinks have optional alcohol amounts you can add, and depending on how much you add to the drink, you can potentially influence how patrons treat you. The bartending is certainly not here to challenge the player much, so once you get a few hours into the game it can start feeling a bit like the job it actually is, but there is more purpose to drink mixing than just serving as a point where conversations can be interrupted to change subjects somewhat fluidly. Drink mixing is not very hard at all and there’s no pressure to do things in a timely manner, meaning you can do things quite deliberately to ensure you make no mistakes. Once you’ve got the right ingredients in the mixer and have either added ice, aged it properly, or added double the ingredients to make it big, you must mix it for a few seconds or let it blend for about twice as long as you’d let it mix, serving it up and continuing whatever conversation the character started on arrival. Once you’ve got the recipes open, you put them together in your drink mixer, the Vita’s touch screen making it fairly easy and quick to do, although there are other control options if you wish to use the control stick and buttons instead. Naturally, when people show up at a bar, they want something to drink, and the player has a menu of drinks they can make on request. It is, essentially, a visual novel, although some bartending gameplay has been added to make it more interactive. Jill’s bartender job is actually the game’s way of setting up it’s main purpose, that being to have the player interact with other residents of Glitch City and learn both more about this futuristic setting and the personalities of your patrons. Although our main character gives off an air of cool detachment at times, she isn’t a flat character, participating in conversations from behind the bar to lend heartfelt advice and even going through her own personal arc as unexpected elements of her life push her heart into dramatic new directions. She may live in a world where androids called Lilim have achieved human-level intelligence and cyborg enhancements are commonplace, but she’s trying to live her life and faces regular human issues like bills and interpersonal drama. Sure, the upper echelons of this society are corrupt and the streets aren’t always safe to walk, but regular people still try to live their lives here, and Jill is certainly a fairly typical young woman. Through Jill’s job at the bar, you get a street view of life in this futuristic city, the game not giving you some glorious quest of redeeming the city but showing the sort of life many of us would likely have if our future ever turned out this way. VA-11 HALL-A is the name of the game and the name of the bar in the game, although they quite reasonably call it Valhalla instead. Instead, you are simply Jill, a bartender trying to make sure she has the money needed to pay rent at the end of the month at a bar that is on the verge of closing. Crime is rampant and inflation is high, but in this cyberpunk dystopia, you do NOT play as some up-and-coming hero looking to put the city on the path to change. In the 2070s, this technological metropolis is controlled by huge corporations, the dominant one employing a special police force known as the White Knights to harshly enforce their understanding of the law on the populace.
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