Norse mythology is the battlefield for PSP's Valkyrie Profile Lenneth

Considering the number of Final Fantasy games Square Enix has announced at E3 (over a dozen I make it), it's nice to get some information on a game from the company that isn't about Final Fantasy at all. A game exactly Valkyrie Profile Lenneth, in fact.

Instead of questing for elemental crystals and chasing Chocobos, the gritty world of Valkyrie Profile is based on Norse mythology.

In this release for PSP, which is based on the original PlayStation game but with updated graphics and cut-scenes, you take the role of Lenneth Valkyrie, an angelic being with the ability to hear the thoughts and feelings of men and women in their dying moments. Not a particularly fun job you might think, but in this context a significant one as you're tasked with recruiting an army of worthy warriors to fight in the final battle between good and evil.

So out in the world you go, recruiting the dying and training them up through dungeon-based battles.

In this sense, Valkyrie Profile Lenneth is very much your traditional Japanese action roleplaying game, with each side taking turns to make their battle moves. You can build battle groups of up to four from around 20 characters available, each of which is controlled with their own action button. As Lenneth herself, your speciality is ice attacks, but the key to success is stringing together combo attacks from all your characters, and so denying your opponents the time to recover from your assault.

Each character has their own special attacks, moves and spells of course, with mages proving particularly useful thanks to their great magic abilities that result in huge onscreen attacks targeting all the enemies. But it's won't all be one way traffic, and you'll have to be careful about using magic – the more powerful the spells, the more likely your mage's spectre will break.

Square Enix hasn't announced the release date for Valkyrie Profile Lenneth, but our powers of deduction suggest a late autumn release.