YMMV / Valis: The Fantasm Soldier

• Awesome Music: While the game itself is rather mediocre, Valis II has a pretty epic title theme.
• Complete Monster (Mugen Senshi Valis II): Cruel King Megas is the even eviler brother of the first game's villain, Lord Rogles. An uncontrollable nightmare who lives "solely to unleash mayhem, destruction, and death on everyone and everything", Megas started off his lifelong killing spree by massacring his entire family. Sparing neither the women nor the children, Megas tore his siblings apart, cannibalised his own mother, and was only stopped when his father sacrificed himself to seal Megas away. Unsealed later by a group of demons who wish to use his power to defeat Rogles' loyalists, Megas repays these demons with slavery and death; in a single night, the Cruel King conquers the realm of Vecanti and turns it into a living hell, gruesomely executing all of Rogles' loyalists. Even sycophancy isn't enough to keep Megas from killing his subjects. Megas seeks to conquer the other two realms to reduce all reality to a hellscape he will rule over, and to break the will of the heroine Yuuko Asou, Megas kidnaps her mother Valia and tortures her, promising to spare her life only if Yuuko strips and submits to him. When Yuuko surrenders, Megas murders Valia anyway.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Few fans like to acknowledge Valis X, as it's an adult Visual Novel where the vast majority of the sexual content is eroticized rape (Reiko's chapter is particularly hard to stomach). It only came into existence because the new owners of Telenet sold the rights to a developer of adult visual novels for a quick buck.
• Game-Breaker: Valna's ice spell in Valis III. First, like all spells, it gives Valna invincibility frames. The real kicker, however, is that it's an insane cheap set of four tracking ice particles that freeze enemies, including bosses, for several seconds. If the invincibility frames aren't enough to deal with all enemies in the vicinity, the sheer volume of icy death fluttering around will. Since frozen enemies have no defense to getting attacked, and Valna hits pretty hard, this effectively removes all challenge from the levels themselves and makes Valna the boss killer of the game.
• I Am Not Shazam: The heroine's name is Yuko, not Valis, in case you did not know. And it definitely isn't Syd.
• Nintendo Hard:
  • The third game after Yuko's deadly upgrade, arguably. Especially the Slippy-Slidey Ice World, which requires you, at one point, to jump on a moving platform (still slippery), quickly duck to avoid the suddenly low ceiling, and then use a well timed slide maneuver to get over a Bottomless Pit. And then you have to fight the boss.
  • Also, the fourth game (which is fairly rare).
• Polished Port: The TurboGrafx-CD version of Valis I, released in 1992, is pretty much a Reformulated Game that removed the infamous poor jump physics and health system of the 1986 original, streamlined the maze-like levels, added voiced cutscenes, and introduced mechanics from the sequels into the game, such as sliding, sword upgrades, and a Castlevania-style magic system.
• Porting Disaster:
  • The Sega Genesis version of Valis III is a watered down version of the original, with several levels missing and cinematic cutscenes being reduced to dialogue boxes. The only thing going for it is an exclusive level and improved boss fights.
  • Super Valis IV is a slimmed-down port of the original Valis IV, which never made it outside of Japan. This version only has one playable character as opposed to three and fewer levels, but then again it makes sense with the reduced storage capacity of an SNES cartridge as opposed to the CD format for the TurboGrafx-CD that the original version had.
• That One Boss:
  • The third game, the boss of the first level after finding Nazetti. Raining boulders, an attack that goes across the whole screen, and, of course, an absurd amount of health.
  • In the first game, the Twin-headed lightning dragon boss called Voldes, the Lord of Thunder. Naturally, Voldes gets annoying really fast due to the lightning spell. And then you fight Reiko, who can take away 48% of your health in a single spell cast (said spell is considerably weaker in your hands). The only way to dodge it is with a frame-perfect spell casting. The Final Boss is much easier due to not having a spell that hits the entire screen.
• Uncertain Audience: A major reason why Valis X failed. Longterm Valis fans found the notion of turning an action platformer franchise into a hentai Visual Novel insulting, while VN fans found the storytelling and artwork to be rather basic, and the eroticized rape scenes disturbing.

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