First, there was a Twitter account. Then, Super Valis IV was listed for release on the Switch Online service. Now, there is an official site. Whatever is happening with Valis after so, so long, it's clearly a going concern for the powers that be. And you might be rightfully concerned; after all, the last time the Dream Soldier wakened and was immediately put to sleep again was with 2006's unfortunate Valis X, a pornographic visual novel that took the series's uneasy iconography of schoolgirls in battle bikinis and turned that from the suggestive to the explicit. It's hard not to see that as the just desserts and logical culmination of a series that wielded the zeitgeist of its era in pop culture so brazenly in terms of normalized titillation, but this was always a series that worked in compromises to its core to define itself. They were storytelling pioneers in a genre that would not have suffered such beforehand, and they were action games and platformers that struggled to break out of the realm of serviceable to the genuinely thrilling, and within that dichotomy a unique concoction of presentational allure and just-good-enough play made the series what it was. It was a serialized saga for a time that had its sense of continuity and escalating stakes and interpersonal relationships within the cast, and for that it was worthwhile, as a problematic favourite or not.
A lot of video game properties mark and celebrate seemingly arbitrary milestone anniversaries, but in this industry it's also often an actualizing force that makes rights-holders and publishers dig into their repertoires and bring back something old or something new relating to the properties they have at hand. The Valis site up above seems to be in the general mode of most long-absent legacy series returns: reintroducing and contextualizing why you might want to care about this thing you're being talked at about. There's a basic synopsis of the series, what its core appeal is, and a chronology of the games... and of course the promise of a 35th anniversary revival project starting right now, right here. Who knows what this will materialize into, and going by the series in question, I'd sooner expect it to be wielded for ill, but it's fun to contemplate a reality where the Dream Soldier awakes to something other than a nightmare.
As per usual, even if this amounts to little, talk about Valis here as you'd like. I haven't gotten to it myself yet but at some point I really want to play through the series more comprehensively, because I will play literally anything that's about women doing things, whatever the harrowing context.
