I did what I often do and gave the game a test run using wine to see how well it works or doesn't.

The game installs, loads, and appears to work quite well. It was a very brief test so mileage may vary. That's the good part, the bad part is the increasingly obnoxious xinput barrier that keeps perfectly functional games from being playable if they rely upon the xbox 360 controller is quite present. So controller support is more or less off the table. That particular issue doesn't seem to have any serious hope of being addressed anytime soon.

Keyboard does seem to work as long as you don't have a controller plugged in. Not that this is the sort of game one would want to play via keyboard.

I was using wine 1.7.something I believe.

I can't talk much about Linux/WINE, but in regards to playing with the keyboard, I wouldn't fret much, the game is absolutely playable and enjoyable playing with a keyboard.

I understand most people out there need their overrated Xbox 360 controllers, but to anyone who played 2D games on PC back in the day gamepads weren't much of an option, playing Valdis Story with keyboard shouldn't be a problem. Just make sure to assign movement keys to a set of keys similarly arranged as the arrow ones, to avoid multitap problems, and you are good to go.

So, if controller support is the only issue when running the game on WINE, then, yes, it's a minimal annoyance that can easily be overlooked.

Anyone have success playing the latest version of this game in Wine?

I get nothing but crashes on startup. Overriding with d3dx9_36 I can get the game to start, sometimes, but the screen is just black with the audio playing. From what i've researched it seems the initial version of this game worked great in Wine, but was broken with patches.