Vandal Hearts II

"Building a game on a weak foundation, WILL PRODUCE A WEAK GAME!"

Game Play:

A mixed bag of shoddy programming with a dash of tactics, Vandal Hearts 2 builds itself on a turn based 3-d moving grid which at times, loses much of lackluster due to sheer abuse of a weak battle system. In VH2 the turned based system works like this, you move and an enemy moves with you. But it fails to impress when you find your characters are targeting monsters that had moved the same turn, thus causing them to swing at nothing. Not to mention in most battles you’ll find yourself outnumbered 2:1 which, wouldn’t be bad per say but many of the melee enemies over zealously run to there deaths while distracting you from the mass of mage classes that unload round after round of spells upon your unsuspecting party. Battles tend to fall into three categories.

Annoying – These battles are based exclusively on hills, but seeing how the advantage is brought to anyone who sits on top of the hill; don’t expect your archers to simply aim upwards to attack an enemy that would MAKE TO MUCH SENSE! You’ll start out in a valley or the very bottom of the hill, your cramped party of seven having only a few spaces to move hindering any sort of advancement. This becomes frustrating while one of your allies (the only one that can actually move forward) becomes a meat shield absorbing hits while a hail of arrows and magic are pummeling the rest of your unmovable party. The worst part is when progress seems to be made, when the mages on top of the hill begin to duel healing anyone that happens to be damaged from the previous rounds. Though these battles were tedious to say the least, they simply stole time and extended battles far longer than they should have.

Simple – These battles place you and the rest of your cannon fodder on top of a hill, where you now have the advantage against 11-13 enemies(that may seems like a lot against 7-9 allies, but its actually light resistance compared to other battles). Enemies slowly move up the hill only to be blasted by arrows and elemental goodness. Most simple battles involve enemies that are far too foolish to bring along a healer, or at least have healing abilities transferred on armor. These situations seem to pop-up more towards the end of the game where the better transfer abilities become apparent. Another thing to mention is that the opponents usually wear armor and carry weapons a few levels below what you’re currently wearing, creating genocide of pathetic monsters that simply never stood a chance. Easy money, but again they appear far too frequently towards the end the game. Most of these battles are mere fillers to make the game seem as though it has more depth when you come to realize that 95% of these filler battles have nothing to do with the story. You’ll always know when a filler battle is coming, these battles quite easily noticed depending on the area that they’re started in, any sort of bog, plains, marsh, forest, desert, dune, or hill usually wields these battles against legions of faceless bandits, soldiers, and monsters.

Impossible – I’ve ran the gauntlet and I have to say; most of the time when I encountered a difficult battle it was only due to computer taking advantage of key positioning. Now unlike other Sub-Boss battles, the powerful NPC usually stays his/her distance while you kill of enough peons to bring him/her forward. In these epic battles you’ll again, start at the bottom of a hill or valley forcing you to slowly trudge upwards in an attempt begin some sort of combat with the assailants. Now these battles take place in smaller areas, making so everyone is constantly in battle. Now, what makes this excessively difficult is that the special NPCs (yes, that’s plural) usually boast powerful area attacks (hitting up to 4 people for around 80 damage each) with acrimonious amounts of hit points. These battles tend to be few and far between, and that’s a good thing btw.

I completely fail to see why some weapons are of any use, the spears for example don’t have increased range, take up both the left and right hand slot, and the damage is equal to that of most one handed axes and swords. Don’t even get me started on archers, VH2’s grid system is so MUCH of a grid you can’t possibly shoot an enemy that stands only diagonal from you, SIMPLY MAGNIFICENT! The throwing objects is well…a pathetic idea to add more depth to the weapons. The transfer system is a nice touch, but it is abused towards the end of the game when you simply use the most powerful skills of each item type. i.e. The staffs are build in a way that you can have several elements on them, eliminating any chance the enemy has of being resistant. Overall it wasn’t a BAD combat system; there was just massive room for improvement. It seems apparent to me the programmers took the easy way out and made a simplified system instead of programming a real AI, this in-turn destroyed the potential that VH2 possessed.

Graphics:
Honestly I found some of the terrain to be rather boring and lacking anything colorful. Some of the player models look quite nice (wearing certain types of weapons/armor), but the animator needs to take a lesson in anatomy seeing as how the characters are disproportionate. Another gripe of mine was that the battle terrain seems to float in a blue void, you may not notice this at first but when you come to smaller story maps, and it’ll become more apparent. Battle magic is nothing amazing, same for animation in attacking. The characters portraits are something quite different, I’m guessing that they were taken from what looks like an NES game.

Sound/SFX:

A few select tracks are worthy of noting the battle theme and a random battle in a forested area are decent, still nothing to write home about. The SFX are decent and match well with the striking, though I wished spells had a bit of twinking I’m satisfied with what I saw.

Story:

Like FFT, TO, and to a lesser degree FM3 they all seem to suffer from the poor ideals of attempting to create a deep war story while in turn they create a lackluster of confusing people and ideals that bring forth a rather dull experience while trying to remember whose related to who and gobs of other meaningless information. VH2 blasts you a huge cast of characters, it seemed to me that within the exception of a few party members the rest of your allies seem to just mindlessly follow (including the protagonist). Many of them are taken straight from the cliché handbook, while the villains play the role of “were just giving you a reason to continue playing” syndrome. Most of the specials villain NPCs you have to beat thirty different times before they finally stop running, “YOU’VE BEATEN MY THIS TIME, BUT I’LL BE BACK…AGAIN! MAHAHA” Plot twists are non-existent and you’ll basically have the plot written within the first 5 hours which never seems to stray off course; IF YOU’RE EXPECTING ANYTHING FANCY OR CREATIVE, YOU’RE THINKING TO MUCH!

Conclusion:

Not the greatest follow up, but it’s worth at least a rent. I didn’t find anything amazing in VH2 to make me want to start a new game. At times I became rather bored of the endless fighting and simply turned the game off for a few days. If you’re really dying for a strategy game purchase a copy of FFT or TO, as for VH2, well…nice effort…sort of.

Game play - 3
Graphics - 4
Sound/SFX - 4
Story - 3
My curve - 2

Final Score – 3

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 03/11/03, Updated 03/11/03