Valkyria Chronicles isn’t out for a week yet, but we’ve managed to get our hands on the finished game and we’re loving it.  It’s essentially a story-driven tactical RPG, much like Advance Wars on the GBA and DS, but obviously with a dash of next-gen visual bang.  We’ll have more on the actual game soon, but rest assured this is a competent title, with the gorgeous graphics shining through – we just wanted to update you with the technical specs:

The game comes with an optional 4GB install (but the load times off the disk are fine) if you want it, and it’s straight into the story, which is divided up into chapters and episodes, some of which are cut-scenes and some are the battle sequences.  There’s the option at the start to select the original Japanese voices (were are great) or the English dub, which is reasonable too.  There’s only English subtitles on the disk we got, other European countries (I presume) will get their own subtitles.

For the unfamiliar, Valkyria Chronicles is a cool mix between turn based combat and free flowing third person action:  you spend Command Points activating a character from the top-down view of the map, at which point the game zooms into the ground level where you can freely move your unit before tapping R1 to enter aim mode.  The best thing is to check out the demo on the European PSN Store, then come back when we’ve got more impressions early next week.