While it's difficult to provide a more accurate look at the game than someone who's played the entirety of the game, like our import reviewer James Q. Clark, I had a chance to sit down with Sega at E3 and have a glimpse at the in-house developed Valkyria Chronicles.

I had a chance to play through the initial tutorial mission on the show floor, and the interesting mix of RPG, strategy, and shooter elements is particularly intriguing. While it's impossible to classify the game as anything but a Strategy-RPG, Sega has added quite a few elements to make players of shooters feel a bit more at home. Rather than limiting players to a grid, players are given a number of action points that can be spent either on movement or attack. Players will expend their movement AP in real time, as they move around, any enemies in range will toss potshots at them. As well, once an attack has commenced, the enemy will retaliate, similar to Front Mission. This doesn't just affect the enemy, either, as player characters will function in a similar fashion.

Characters in Valkyria Chronicles are assigned to one type of class, and rather than set the skills and powers of individual characters, players instead will level up the different classes. Have an entire team of snipers? You'll just have to worry about leveling the sniper class. Of course, this'll leave you with a group incapable of killing anything that's not infantry, but you can deal with that, right? When attacking, players will actually put the reticule over enemies once they've elected to attack. This isn't twitch-oriented, though, as the game pauses as the player places the reticule.

We didn't get a chance to explore much of the story behind Valkyria Chronicles, but the world is shaped to be similar to World War II Europe, but with some variations thrown in. Players follow the story of a man who shares a striking resemblance to the reader of a rebellion and ends up in some sticky situations because of it.

Valkyria Chronicles is a PlayStation 3 exclusive that should be available before the end of the year.