I finally finished Valkyria Chronicles!
Lemme tell you there are some ubber hard battles in this game, so I am actually surprised to learn that the final boss is not that tough, though in this case if you screw up, at least half of your squad is as good as dead.
I've played a ton of JRPGs this generation: Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, Eternal Sonata, Enchanted Arms, Tales of Vesperia, Final Fantasy XIII, Final Fantasy XIII-2, Star Ocean: The Last Hope, Phantasy Star Universe and Resonance of Fate.
I even took the time to get busy with Final Fantasy XII. I would put this PS2 games over quite a few current gens JRPGs. But man, Valkyria Chronicles is something special.
SEGA had a handfull of titles this generation that were pretty good and I'm happy to have played a lot of them with the more recent one being Alien: Isolation. Out of all of them, I had singled out Resonance of Fate as my own personal favorite this gen. I actually hated this game when I got it for my birthday in 2010. Sold it, bought a copy a few years later and kept going. Hard, but rewarding and refresing.
It's everything I wanted out of a JRPG, it was fast, they've cut corners on all the right places, the action was exciting even if it was just a one-trick pony. Plus, new game plus with stuff that I could carry over? F***ing sold.
But man, Valkyria Chronicles has got it all and so much more. At it's core, it's a JRPG, or more specifically a SRPG that doesn't feel like one. Where you station your troops and how you can use the terrain to take out your foes. One thing that puts VC over RoF is definately the story. The story in RoF isn't bad, more like a collection of loosely connected stories that build into a final confrontation. VC's story is rich and detailed, particulatly since it's heavily inspired by World War II. Like RoF, there's no real, OMG Massive Doomsday / World Ending scenario (a just a little, since for the most part, it's about soldiers and war drama).
I love this game.