Vandal Hearts II

"This is like the game you play on the rebound after Final Fantasy Tactics dumps you."

There's always been something kind of...I dunno, anti-septic about the tactical strategy RPG to me. I love it on its own terms, but whenever I try to explain it to my friends, I find even myself getting a little bit bored. "Yeah, uh, so you have this army of characters and you move them across a grid and attack your opponents. Then they get to attack you. You can change your equipment and stuff too...what?" See what I mean? When I put it into this perspective, it was hard for me to find an objective sense of appeal, and I decided that an appreciation for the genre has to be ingrained in you at an early age...most likely by the Shining Force games, which are fast-paced and user friendly.

Playing Vandal Hearts 2 has changed that notion completely for me. It may be tempting to write off the genre as samey, but there are definitely fundamental differences between a successful SRPG and, well, this. That's not to say that this game is completely without merit; it has a few really good ideas, many of which cannot escape its limitations, and if you're really hurting for some tactical action on your Playstation then it might work in a pinch.

Vandal Hearts 2 is an ambitious game, but it soon becomes obvious that its ambitions were patterned pretty blatantly after Final Fantasy Tactics. There are some direct lifts from the forefather of tactical combat to be found in this title, the most obvious of which is the plot. I couldn't tell you anything about the first Vandal Hearts, having never played it, but I doubt it was the rollicking political chestnut that this game attempts to be. Final Fantasy Tactics had one of the most elaborate plots of its generation, weaving the government, religion, family, betrayal, and even Zodiac-themed monsters into its narrative. It was a little confusing due to the butchered translation, but captivating nonetheless. Vandal Hearts 2 saw how well this worked out for the former title and tries to spin a pared-down version of this tale, but the results are pretty painful.

The characters bandy around a lot of obscure political jargon; it's noticeably devoid of context, however, because the game expects you to read its damn glossary to catch up on the back story. If you put a glossary in your game, I will never read it, so stop it. You can understand a couple of specific peoples' personal motivations, but only because they're painted in such broad brush-strokes, almost to the point of caricature. Why does Evil Uncle want to rule the Empire? Because he's Evil Uncle, of course! You can stuff your game with the densest plot in the world, but bad writing bubbles to the top almost immediately. Ultimately, what it all breaks down to is a pretty dull competition for control of the kingdom or the world or whatever.

To add a personal element to it, Konami gives your main character a romantic interest who JUST SO HAPPENS to be a child of the nobility. A Romeo-and-Juliet style love between castes begins to bloom, when all of a sudden your hero is accused of a crime he didn't commit and she's uprooted and taken to the Empire by none other than her Evil Uncle. All of it is such a blatantly shameless bid at involving the main character, and by proxy the player, in this deeply uninteresting story of warring polities and royal espionage. It reads like a Fire Emblem plot. That's not a compliment.

But just like Fire Emblem, a game doesn't necessarily need a strong storyline to be successful - otherwise, the gaming industry would be flat on its ass in the middle of a bunch of Mass Effect clones. Vandal Hearts doesn't quite read or involve like its forebearer, but it at least plays decently, using a hodgepodge of material both cribbed from the SRPG gene pool and its own twisted ideas. The results are mixed, but generally positive...at least at first.

The first thing you're bound to notice about combat in Vandal Hearts 2 is something odd: your characters and your opponents move at the exact same time. As soon as you tell one of your little fighters to move somewhere or do something, the screen mysteriously freezes up for a few seconds and like magic, both you and an enemy have moved to their destinations. This can be unbelievably jarring at first, and I thought it was a bizarre glitch, but no, it's the game's idea of innovation. Apparently it adds a bit of challenge if you can't predict where your enemy's going to be as you try to attack them, and I've gotta admit, it is. There are some general guidelines to determining what move an enemy will make (hint: they like to target the ones that are about to die), but these aren't always reliable and you're gonna take a few hits. This system is unusual and most certainly divisive, but against all odds I kind of appreciated it. You start developing interesting strategies to get around it.

Less impressive is the character designing system. You basically play the game with a handful of blank slates that are completely influenced by their equipment. No classes or anything; no irregular stat-growths. These people are defined based on what you buy from the store and strap them with. (Hey, just like real life!) The root of your character's development takes shape based on what armor you give them, of which there are four types to select. There's heavy armor, which confers plenty of HP but predictably little movement. Mage robes give you a lot of MP, but your HP suffer for it. Light armor falls somewhere in between. But then there's also Wing Armor, a neat little spin on the system that doesn't give you much HP or MP but lets you fly around the battlefield like a crazy man. I gave two characters on my team wing armor, and they were always the most fun to use. Once you've selected an armor, you then must find an appropriate weapon, and that plays out basically the same way. The concept accomplishes all it's supposed to, but what you end up with is seven perfectly interchangeable tools for defeating your opponents. They don't really feel like vital, working parts of a team. It's kind of detached, really.

The broken skill system compounds this. Your weapons and shields allow characters to gradually learn new techniques, which they equip to said weapons. It's an interesting device because you're only allowed three or four techniques per weapon, and to begin with, the selection process is a challenging one. You have to pick which techniques will help the party the most, and which elements the enemies will be weak to on that map; with such limited space, the mixing and matching is a surprisingly meticulous process. Sadly, the luster wears off after the tenth or so hour when you realize that nearly all these skills are useless, and the ones that are worth a damn are just power-increased versions or elemental palette swaps of each other.

Other parts of Final Fantasy Tactics that Vandal Hearts 2 violently reappropriates include the world map system, though it actually improves upon the original in this case. No more of those infernal random battles! Every area you've visited previously instead asks you if you want to engage in a fight, which is an incredible boon. It also includes optional areas by scattering maps throughout the levels; once you discover those maps, you can visit new lands and take more treasures from there. But strangely, the most accomplished rip-off Vandal Hearts 2 pulls off is its music. It is thoughtfully composed, interesting, and catchy in an inoffensive way. Exactly the type of music you want to hear in an SRPG.

Vandal Hearts 2 was obviously made on the cheap, and for that, you can't hate it too intensely. The bizarre-looking, cartoony graphics are probably the most telling reflection of this; it is less a style, so much as the uninspired doodlings of a moderately talented high schooler. For its heritage, though, it's really more successful than it had any right to be, even though those successes are sporadic at best. Its desperate attempts to emulate Final Fantasy Tactics, if not any superior SRPG, generally go unrewarded and unnoticed. Though the game's tedium becomes impossible to ignore at about the halfway point, those who enjoy its flawed gameplay more than I did will find thirty to forty hours of decent tactical fun.

Just remember that you have a ton of better alternatives.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 02/04/08

Game Release: Vandal Hearts II (US, 11/30/99)