Achievement Walkthrough for Valkyria Chronicles. I will explain achievements in order so you wont accidentally miss one.
Introduction
This guide will walk you through getting all the achievements in Valkyria Chronicles. We need to play through the game two times and start the third playthrough for the last achievement. Your first playthrough will take somewhere around 40 hours and second one maybe 15 hours. All this is of course depending how you play and you might be slower or faster than what was mentioned.
Now make a mental decision: Do you want your first playthrough be casual or do you want to try to A-rank all missions (you can’t do this without a guide in all honesty at least in reasonable timeframe). Playing through the game casually and figuring stuff out is fun but you will most likely get less money and less experience which means you might need to grind missions later. If you immediately follow guides for A-ranks you get more experience and the game will become easier but you need to tab out from the game to read guides which is not fun. Ultimately at some point you need to A rank everything so keep that in mind.
In my playthrough I wanted to try to complete all missions (except the first tutorials which could not be replayed) on A rank and try to get the achievement on a single playthrough. That doesn’t work though – Hard skirmishes unlock after you complete the game and the first tutorial missions cannot be A ranked on a first go so I had to go to second playthrough. I didn’t know (or believe) that so I spent quite a lot of time reloading saves to try to beat those quite hard A rank turn limits. Steam had me at 58 hours played and the save file said my playtime was 37 hours and 40 minutes. That means I spent almost 20 hours reloading saves and looking at guides. Just a heads up for you.
I suggest you play through the game casually without trying to get the best ranks on your first playthrough. If you fall behind in exp you can grind class challenges (I will explain them later)
First Playthrough before Chapter 10
Our goal on this playthrough is to play through the story once, get 500 kills and get at least half of the royal weapons (explained more on the next section)
Second Chapter
On the second chapter operation try to find the enemy ace. Enemy aces are soldiers who are bit tougher than the rest and have a unique name. Once killed they drop a weapon you can use. We need to collect all weapons for an achievement so killing all aces on either first or second playthrough is a must. Here’s how to find him:He’s hiding in the area where Welkin comes from. Once you have killed him you will get your first achievement
The Lance of Gallia
Kill an enemy ace
Now continue playing the game. If you’re playing casually you will most likely get someone wounded but don’t worry about it. Just finish the operation within three turns or run your other character next to the wounded one and you won’t lose anyone. Actually make sure you never get ‘xx was killed during operation’ – it will void one of the achievements if you accidentally manage get someone killed at this point. So reload if that happens. Getting wounded is ok. You know if someone is killed when that character’s dying screen & voiceline comes out.
Now whether or not you’re playing casually or aiming for A ranks on the next chapters you might get the following achievement naturally or you might want to do it on purpose (grenade yourself before completing the operation if you have time left)
The Crimson Heart
Have a soldier who has fallen in combat survive either by calling a medic or clearing the battle before they die
Next we continue the story. After beating the third chapter a lot will unlock: headquarters, skirmishes and class challenges.
Headquarters
In the headquarters you are tasked to build your squad. Now who you pick isn’t actually that important. And you can change anyone at the headquarters anytime you visit. And the soldier skills don’t come into play this early and what you get for a recruit selection is random and after every chapter from here on you will find two new recruits each time you visit Command Room. So pick who you want while keeping in mind that scouts are the best, shocktroopers second most useful and the rest are just needed for special purposes. My suggestion is to have 5 scouts, 5 shocktroopers, 4 lancers, 2 engineers and 2 snipers. The rest is up to you.
I’m only telling this now because most likely you will see guides how to unlock hidden potentials or mentions from other guides about those and you wonder what they mean. You can safely ignore potentials now.
Each recruit has up to four character potentials, two of them visible and two (or one) hidden marked with a ‘-‘ sign. If the slot is crossed over that recruit only has three potentials, one hidden. It’s easiest to view the potentials in the Squad Barracks. You unlock hidden potentials via playing with the recruit like deploying them, killings stuff, capturing stuff etc. We will farm those later as one achievement requires us to unlock all potentials. The bottom four potentials come from classes. Once you train your class level higher you unlock those slots. Some characters have better potentials than others but don’t try to optimize them at this point. They come into play let’s say when your class levels are around level 15 (I’m trying to persuade you from optimizing the fun out of the recruits. Just pick & play the ones that look & sound most fun now).Once you have your squad done your next job is to go to the war cemetery. Do this every time you complete a chapter and start a new chapter. There’s a dude in the cemetery that sells orders for exp. We need to collect all orders so every time buy what he has first before you have spent your exp in the training fields.
After cemetery go to the Castlefront St news and chat with the journalist, Ellet, and see if she has a new report needing funding (this menu shows when exiting from the screen) and fund that report. These are called Ellet’s Reports and they pop up periodically when you advance the story. You find them in the episode select menu or flipping the book pages. They give extra depth to the main characters and unlocks their hidden potentials.
After Castlefront St go either R&D and buy whatever you want or Training field to spend your exp. Remember the most useful classes rule here. Train your scouts and shocktroopers first. Regarding the weapons you buy – at some point you need to decide which ‘tree’ you want to branch to. Like for example do you want more firepower or more accuracy. I always went with the accuracy. But the kicker was that I pretty much never used any weapons that were researched here. The challenge reward weapons are sooo much better (more on that in the section ‘Optional Challenges & DLC and leveling’)
Remember: Every time you complete a chapter come to headquarters and do Cemetery -> Castlefront st -> R&D + Training and optionally check and switch new recruits if someone looks cool.
So what about the skirmishes? We have to do them at one point eventually and get A ranks on them. It’s up to you if you want to do/try them once they open up or at a later point like on your second playthrough. You will get kills & exp from them so they are useful for leveling up.
I should point out that you can now play the story and your next achievement will come once you complete chapter 9. But I suggest that you complete a few challenges to get massive exp and money boost and great reward weapons. This will make the main game easier so those are very much optional. Go check what I wrote in the guide part ‘Optional Challenges & DLC and leveling’
Whether or not you want to do some challenges or DLC stuff continue the story, try to kill all the aces from each mission (you can do this on the second playthrough if it is too annoying) and come back to this guide after you have completed chapter 9. That’s when you will get the next achievement.
Gallian Medal of Honor
Complete the Chapter 9 battle
First Playthrough from Chapter 10
At this point you should be quite familiar how the game works. Starting from the chapter 10 you unlock access to the princess. She is important because after every battle from here on until the end of game you will get royal weapons as a reward for completing a operation. Since we need to collect all weapons we need to collect royal weapons too. It is possible to do this on your first playthrough but since it’s random what you get I only suggest that after every operation that you complete, but before entering the headquarters, make a save and before going to check cemetery go chat with the princess. Try to get always three different weapons. It doesn’t matter what you get, just try to get three different ones. If you get only two reload the save. I will make a royal weapon checklist for the second playthrough.
Now continue the story and try to do the Chapter 10 without getting anyone wounded.
Fouzen Service Medal
Complete the Chapter 10 battle “Liberation of Fouzen”
Order of the Holy Shield
Complete any chapter battle after Chapter 10 without any of your units being reduced to 0 HP
I got my 250 kills after completing Chapter 10. If you didn’t get it just remember that I have done all available skirmishes on easy and normal and some of the challenges (I think I repeated the scout challenge five times) so your kill count might be lower than mine but you will caught up once you do those skirmishes & challenges later.
The Bronze Arms of Gallia
Kill 250 enemy units
If you’re going for A ranks you got the next achievement at Chapter 10 but if you haven’t attempted those I suggest you try at Chapter 12.
For the next achievement we need to complete an operation with A rank. Chapter 12 operation is quite fast. You can complete it in one turn, and kill the enemy aces, if you really think about it.
About A ranks. The ONLY thing that matters for ranks is how fast you complete the operation. Yeah. It’s that stupid. Nothing about how many kills, how many leaders killed, zero wounded or damage etc. The only thing that matters is that ‘turns taken’ is a very small number. Which means you pretty much need to run past most enemies and focus the objective. That’s why scouts are the best units in the game as they have the longest movement.
I will give you a vague hint how to do Chapter 12 operation in one turn: Scout rush.
And a more detailed one if you want one: Arm Largo with a mortar. Deploy your three main characters: Rosie somewhere in the right side, Alicia on the top left corner with Largo right next to her side. You want another scout right behind Alicia and a sniper somewhere close. Use three actions to kill the enemy shocktrooper & scout, with Largo & sniper. Run Largo as far towards the ace tank as you can with two extra actions. You want to mortar back of the ace tank and kill the tank on your fifth action. You should have seven more actions and you only should need six to rush your two scouts from the left side to the camp and kill the enemies and capture it. If you have troubles skip killing the tank with Largo and focus on the scouts.
Order of the Holy Lance
Earn an A Rank on any chapter battle after Chapter 10
After you receive your A rank medal continue the story. Remember to try to buy from the cemetery guy, rewind the book to do Ellet’s Reports and grab three different weapons from the princess after each operation.
Next achievements will come after beating Chapters 14 and 15.
Naggiar Service Medal
Complete the Chapter 14 battle
Ghirlandaio Service Medal
Complete the Chapter 15 battle
Now around Chapter 16 or 17 I unlocked the second kill x achievement
The Silver Arms of Gallia
Kill 500 enemy units
Next achievement you will get is after beating the final boss and starting a new game, your second playthrough.
Savior of Gallia
Beat the game and begin a new game from the saved file
Congratulations for beating the game!There are some other achievements that could potentially be achieved on your first playthrough but for those, like killing 1000 imperials or getting level 20 on all your classes, you would need to grind same missions over and over. I think after my first playthrough I had somewhere close to 600 imperials killed. If you don’t have even the 500 kills achievement you most likely haven’t beaten all the class challenges or beaten the easy & normal skirmishes. No worries, you can do those in the next playthrough.
I can’t remember what level my recruits were at this point but I guess somewhere around level 16 or 17. Let’s load the save and head to the second playthrough! It will be much faster than the first.
ps. If you don’t want to continue playing through the game once more there’s one fast achievement that you could do and then reload a save. Go to first easy skirmish, deploy few people, use your own guys to kill one of your recruits and then wait three turns until you finish the skirmish. This will kill the character and void one achievement, but you can reload your save in case you continue to second playthrough later.
Second Playthrough before Chapter 10
Our goal for the second playthrough is to A rank every single operation, including Ellet’s Reports and Skirmishes on Easy, Normal and Hard. Whether or not you got any A ranks on those on your first playthrough will make the second playthrough faster. Other goals we have is to unlock all hidden potentials (skills) on the recruits and main characters, collect rest of the remaining royal weapons and ace weapons you missed and collect the remaining orders.
For A ranks either use a video or text guide, whatever you want, or try those yourselves. Remember also to kill each and every ace this time around. We want those weapons! For some operations the A rank requires you to go where enemies haven’t yet spawned, but you know they will spawn because you played the operation before, to be able to reach the turn limit. Turn timers are such a stupid rank requirement..
Good thing is that on second playthrough you automatically skip through all the episodes that don’t have combat. You also have access to Statistics menu where you can see your first playthrough stats and a kill counter. Really useful.
Continue playing through the game and after each chapter below 10 go to the headquarters and check the cemetery guy and Ellet for new stuff. Every time you A rank an operation check if there’s a skirmish on the same map. It’s much easier to do Easy and Normal skirmishes immediately after you A ranked the same story operation. I don’t suggest Hard skirmishes until the very end of the game – they are very different and brutal.
A bit before your recruits are level 20 you should get your last order. Lancer level 19 I think is the highest level you need.
Excellence in Leadership
Learn every order. You get these from the cemetery guy and training your recruits up to level 19
Second Playthrough from Chapter 10
Remember those royal weapons I talked about? Again starting from Chapter 10 you will get rewarded with royal weapons after each operation. Make a save and go talk with the princess. There are 25 royal weapons you need and what you get is random. Here is a table for you to check which weapons you are still missing and from which chapters you can get those from.
So if you are missing let’s say ‘Theimer M01R’ you can get it as a reward from either of the Chapter 15 operations. Make a save and reload until you get it – easy.
- Chapter 10 and 11 – Gallian-1R, Mags M1R, Lancaar M1R, GSR-1R
- Chapter 12, 13 and 14 – Gallian-3R, Mags M3R, Lancaar M3R, GSR-3R
- Chapter 15 – Gallian-S1R, Mags M10R, Theimer M01R, GSR-10R
- Chapter 16 and 17 – Gallian-S10R, Mags M20R, Theimer M10R, GSR-20R
- Chapter 18 – Gallian-S20R, Mags M30R, Theimer M20R, GSR-30R
When you finish Chapter 11 you should have all the recruits available to you. You probably have over 1 million money – that means hidden recruit Knute is available. Musaad is available because you’re on your second playthrough and Audrey should be visible too after you finish Chapter 10. We need two more hidden recruits and we’re going to start farming the hidden potentials now.
First go to Command Room and kick out every recruit from your current roster that have all the potentials visible. That means there are four (or three and a cross) potentials which have text in them. If a recruit has ‘-‘ in the potential slot keep them. Then fill your roster taking Oscar, Karl and all the recruits who still have some potentials hidden. We need to pick Oscar and Karl first to get their hidden potentials unlocked and then we need to get them fall in battle only to revive them. There should be two new recruits for doing this: Lynn and Emile. Those are the last two hidden recruits.
Once your roster is full go to first skirmish on Easy and fill the deployment with Alicia and the other recruits. Now on your first action use Alicia and kill one of your own recruits. Just aim for the head and hope they won’t evade. Once the recruit is downed end your action and pick another recruit (not Alicia). Use that recruit to call a medic on the downed recruit and then try to kill yourself for example throwing a grenade on the windmill wall while standing next to the wall.
Pick another recruit and call medic on the downed recruit and keep repeating this (and calling for reinforcements when you run out of recruits). Do this until you have gone through your full roster. We do this because you need five points for unlocking hidden potentials. You get one point if you are deployed and four points if you call a medic. So very easy five points with this method. After everyone is done killing and reviving each other, use Alicia to finish the skirmish. Then go chat with Ellet in Castlefront Street and she unlocks the potentials. Go back to Command Room and get a new roster with new hidden potential crew and keep doing this until every single recruit (not the main characters) have their potentials unlocked. Remember that Karl and Oscar need to fall after they get their hidden potentials so those two might get round two in the fun house.
See I told you don’t worry about the potentials back in the first playthrough section. You played with your favorite recruits and you gained enough points and unlocked their potentials when checking Ellet’s new reports automatically without you even noticing. Gotcha!
After you unlock all hidden potentials you won’t get the achievement yet. You get it after completing the game. It’s basically the last achievement.
After Chapter 11 you also unlock the last report from Ellet – ‘For Whom Destiny Unfolds’. After completing the report you will get the achievement
Gallian Front Commemorative
Complete all chapters and reports. You can check your current status in the Statistics page. Skirmishes do not count for this one.
Continue beating the Chapters – we’re very close now. I got my all classes at level 20 achievement around Chapter 12 or 13, you might get it earlier or later depending how much you have done those challenges.
Order of the Golden Wings
Train all character classes to level 20
Once you have collected all the royal weapons, all the ace weapons and tank parts go to the R&D and purchase
everything. Note that you need to buy all three Edelweiss final upgrades once even though they show as purchasable again. We do this late because you probably didn’t have money to do it earlier. You will get two achievements for this once you exit headquarters.
Excellence in Technology
Commission all tank upgrades (including all three level 3 Edelweiss upgrades) and collect all enemy ace tank parts
Excellence in Armament
Commission all weapon upgrades and collect all enemy ace and royal weapons
After beating the last boss a second time with A rank start doing the Hard skirmishes. Funnily enough you can beat all except the last two in just one turn. Alicia + Defense boost + Awaken Potential is such a insane combo that you can just run past everything in every skirmish except the first. Once you have all operations, reports and skirmishes on easy, normal and hard done with A rank you get the ‘hardest’ achievement.
Randgriz Crest of Honor
Earn an A Rank on every battle, including all reports and all ranks of all skirmish battles
You only have three more achievement to unlock. If you have the 1000 enemies killed not yet finished you need to grind a little bit. I had 939 killed before Hard Skirmishes and 983 after them. I just did the first skirmish on Hard few more times to get over 1000.
The Golden Arms of Gallia
Kill 1000 enemy units
Finish the game and start a new one and you will get
The Wings of Solidarity
Unlock the full personnel profiles for all recruits
If you the Wings of Solidarity didn’t unlock check that you have all the hidden potentials unlocked even on the hidden characters (Knute, Lynn, Emile, Audrey and Musaad) and main characters. I hope you didn’t allow anyone die like I said you shouldn’t?
The last achievement is to kill one of your recruits. Just load first easy skirmish and kill your least favorite recruit and wait for three turns and complete the skirmish. You get the dubious achievement for killing your own.
The Splintered Horn
Let a character who has unlocked his/her hidden potential die in combat
Optional Challenges & DLC and leveling
Once you complete chapter 3 and move to chapter 4 you might’ve noticed that you can now access DLC stuff. In the title screen extras menu you can do either ‘Enter the Edy Detachment’ and ‘Behind The Blue Flames’. The first DLC mission gives nothing but introduction to the main character of the second Valkyria Chronicles game but the second DLC mission will reward you a really good weapon for shocktroopers, a submachine gun ‘Ruhm’. Up to you if you want to do them. They don’t count towards achievements nor do the class challenges, outside of granting exp for level 20 achievement and kills for the 250,500a and 1000 kills achievements.
Then in the skirmish menu (you have to exit headquarters) you can select either skirmishes or class challenges. I strongly suggest that you do the scout challenge and kill the ace for the reward gun. The weapon is really really strong. I ended up using that gun the whole game for my scouts and never used any rifles from the R&D department. Then again if you don’t want the game to be easier you can skip doing these challenges until your second playthrough. The scout challenge is hard but you can watch guides how to do it and afterwards the exp and money and gun reward are definitely worth some save-loading. Note: to kill the ace at low levels you need to stand in a very exact spot to cheese him so that you can hurt him but he will shoot at the wall.
You could do all the challenges but they are quite tough for low level soldiers – doable but very tough. I suggest you do the scout challenge once or twice, play the game until your characters are close to lvl 11 (elite status) and then come back and do the scout challenge until you have completed it lets say six times. Now you have four weapons for your scouts, one for your engineer and one for Welkin. One completion of scout challenge with A rank gives you 60k exp and 120k money – that’s the equivalent of doing a chapter 17 operation. Chapter 18 is the last chapter. So at this point you could gain the rewards of a very late game mission which you can imagine will throw off the balance and make the game easier as you can just train your troops to much higher levels than the game expects. It’s up to you if that sounds fun. For me it made the game much more enjoyable because I was aiming for A ranks in every mission.
The other challenges give you also good gear but most of them pretty much require you to be around level 11 or higher. The scout challenge is the easiest and gives a really really good gun for scouts and engineers. The shocktrooper challenge is quite hard but gives a nice gun (note: you can only gain it once unlike the guns from engineer and scout challenge). Do the engineer challenge once you get access to smoke screens (I think after chapter 12) – otherwise killing the ace is pretty hard. The engineer rifle is a direct upgrade to the scout one but a very small upgrade. I did it once and left it there. The anti-armor sniper rifle from the Tank challenge is really good at the final battle but otherwise I can’t remember using it. Rewards from the lancer and the sniper missions were not that good – I used R&D gear over these.
Bragging rights
Now that’s finally done show your decorations!
Just kidding – I’m not gonna leave that one slot empty. Here you go!
