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Valorant's latest skin collection, Valiant Hero, dropped with the start of the game's Episode 7 Act 3. Inspired by the legendary Monkey King of Chinese myth, the bundle dropped on August 31, 2023, and is currently available in the shop. Being one of the signature Act bundles, it had high hopes riding on it, and the trailers kept up the hype.
When I tried the skins the first time, they felt alright, but that was it. After what the game managed to deliver over the three years it has been around, this feels like a loud whimper.
Everything right with Valorant's Valiant Hero skin collection, and the things that are just not
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Valorant's Valiant Hero skin covers the Vandal, Operator, Ares, and Ghost. Three of these are guns that players purchase at every opportunity, given their preferences and the condition of their economy. This makes the collection solid in terms of usability.
The Ruyi Staff is a unique innovation on the melee. After a long line of knives, daggers, karambits, swords, axes, and claws, it breathes fresh life into melee animations in Valorant, making the act of stabbing enemies in the back more pleasurable than ever.
It is clear that the Staff is the hero of this collection as it is present as the central building block of each of the four gun skins. This helps distinguish them from the other half-a-dozen Valorant skins inspired by myths from across Asia. What is unfortunate is that this aspect feels undercooked. More on that in a bit.
One of the most fascinating aspects of premium Valorant skins is the animations and the sound effects they offer. While the Valiant Hero gets them right to a great degree, some of it feels slightly stale. The variants are meant to reflect different times of the day. The finisher makes remarkable use of space and light and is a solid tribute to the Monkey King.
The sounds have the deep bass-boosted effect that is familiar from the Oni or, more recently, the Imperium. What struck me harder was that parts of the design felt incomplete. Take, for example, the difference between the reload animations of the Ghost skins and the Vandal skins.
In the former, while the nozzle makes a full in-and-out movement when reloading the pistol to indicate the completion of the process, the rifle merely starts glowing. This feels like a gross oversight on the part of the design team since the in-and-out animation itself is present when equipping the Vandal.
It is little things like this that left me wanting more. For a company that delivered collections like the Radiant Entertainment System and Neo Frontier in previous Acts, the Valiant Hero feels just short of what could have been a fantastic skin.
Valorant's latest collection is part of the Premium tier of skins and costs 7,100 VP for the entire bundle, with each weapon skin costing 1,775 VP. The Ruyi Staff costs 4,350 VP. It will be available in the in-game shop from October 31 till November 14, 2023.
