Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgment review

  

Vandal Hearts: Flames if Judgment is a sequel of sorts (it is set before the first game on the Vandal Hearts timeline) to a pair of PS1-era strategy role playing games (SRPGs), Vandal Hearts and the imaginatively titled Vandal Hearts II.

I was a huge fan of the first Vandal Hearts game on PS1, playing it through several times.  It was the first game of its type that I had played (I don't think that Japanese SRPGs were released that often in the West back then) and it is one of my favourite games of all time (I must get around to posting a top ten). Vandal Hearts's first sequel was poor in comparison but even so I started looking forward to Flames of Judgment from when I first heard that Konami were making a downloadable update. 


For the uninitiated, the Vandal Hearts series (and SRPGs generally)   entail you controlling a small band of characters in a series of one-screen, varied terrain, grid-based battles. Battles are turn-based, with the player moving their characters within its movement allowance for that turn and then attacking, healing, waiting etc.

A grid-based battle, yesterday.  And that's not a black border  - that's my telly

The character types conform  to usual RPG conventions - fighters, archers and magic users -  and the narrative they travel through is played out in the cut scenes that take place between the battles .

Ah yes, the narrative. The story centres around two nations, Balastrade, where the game is predominantly based and most of the characters come from and Urdu. There was a war fought between the two many years before, in which they'd fought each other to a standstill and which was then followed by an uneasy peace.  Fortunately for the game's story arc (if not the inhabitants of the countries), that peace breaks down very early on in the game and you then follow the story of Tobias, the game's main character  (a war orphan).


Like I said, it's an RPG - don't expect high literature.  The story arc is Lord of the Rings lite - a quest, an ultimate weapon, betrayals, friendship, evil, rogues.  And so on and so on.  But no-one plays RPGs for the story (do they?) and for SRPGs read that doubly so - the story is there to fill in the gaps taking you from one battle to the next. No-one needs an Metal Gear Solid style cut scene in a SRPG.  Or in Metal Gear Solid, for the that matter.

You'd be surprised how many cut-scenes end in a fight.  Or maybe not. 

Unlike the earlier games, you are limited to the same six characters throughout the game, all of whom are selected for each battle (if a character 'dies' in battle, they 'retreat' and are back on the roster for the next battle). There are no character classes as such but different characters are better at some things than others, so the player tends to make them perform that  function. For example, a character might be good at casting magic, so you tend to load him/her up with spells and they take on the role of a wizard, even though they are not referred to as such. 


Similarly, there is no promotion in levels - the characters have numerous stats, showing how well they do a certain action or perform a certain task and, during battles, those individual stats level up. As with most things in life, continual performance of an action makes you better at it, so the more arrow-flinging an archer does, the better he or she is at archery.

The game is not particularly long - Raptr says I took 16 hours 40 minutes hours to complete  - but you could probably do it quicker than that. I tend to micromanage my party a lot between battles and also like to plan my moves on the battlefield to the nth degree, like in  chess (which it resembles but like the chess from the first  Star Wars film). However, it was only 1200 MS points and I would sooner pay that for 16 hours of great SRPG action than play £30 for a full price game that gives me 16 hours of fun and 14 hours of slog.

The art style is different from the first games and other SRPGs, particularly in relation to the character models, which quite 'cartoony'.  The biggest problem visually, though, is with the pallete used. The landscapes, other than those battles that take place in towns, are too close in hue to that used for the character models and you can find that your best laid defensive lines have an inadvertently camouflaged enemy soldier lurking within them. This is probably the only aspect of the game that I didn't like. Vandal Hearts avoided this by having the character models 'pulse', like a  Roobarb & Custard cartoon, so you could always pick them out from their surroundings. I have my doubts that that technique would have worked with the new art style but it would have avoided the 'shit, didn't see that ninja' scenario. Though I suppose that is the point of ninjas.

The loading screens display concept art.  Pretty, aren't they?

One final point on the art style - the cut scenes. They have a strange, shaky-movement,   Captain Pugwash feel and the characters don't seem to have any necks, like a world populated by the genetic offspring of Gladstone Small. And yes, I am aware of of the irony of trying to raise the profile of a niche-genre, download-only title by referencing two 70s Britsh kids' programmes and an 80s English cricketer.

I loved Flames of Judgment but then I love SRPGs - I put 160 hours into Final Fantasy Tactics Advance on GBA - and I greatly enjoyed its gently cerebral change of pace from that shown by most other 360 games.  I don't think that it's going to change anybody's mind about SRPGs, though. There is nothing that the game does that wasn't done by similar games 10 years ago but what it does, it does very well. If you want an updated SRPG, pick Valkyria Chronicles  on PS3 (my favourite PS3 game); if you want an enjoyable, if not epic, example of the genre, go for Flames of Judgment.  


Better still, get both.

Charity Shop Gaming

You know that a console has well and truly gone retro when you see its games turning up in Oxfam. Mega Drive and SNES games have been in such shops for years but PS1 and PS2 games have started turning up, in my local Oxfam at least, at pretty much the same time.

My local Oxfam only sells books/music/DVDs/games and the type of knick-knacks that you get for Christmas and before you've got the wrapping off you're wondering what the charity store holiday opening times are. No clothes are sold, meaning it is sorely lacking in the fusty 'old clothes and cabbage' smell that you often get in charity stores (and pre-GAME takeover branches of Gamestation).

I often pop in there to have a look at the books and I generally also cast my eyes over the games. Most of the games for  sale are PC games, which do not interest me (I 'only' have a Mac) but earlier this year I did pick up an unboxed (but with instructions) copy of Starwing on SNES for a couple of quid.  I'd seen a couple of 'supermarket' PS2 games in there in the past  - the type of low-cost shovelware that never gets coverage from magazines and websites but are heavily featured in your local Budgen's (or similar store), for kids to pester their (non-gaming, presumably) parents into buying.  I often wonder if there are any hidden gems in these types of games and wish a magazine or website would  get a batch of them to playtest.  After all, Global Defense Force/Earth Defense Force 2017 were both ultra low budget games in Japan and they are both excellent.  I have a sneaking suspicion that the UK supermarket games are irretrievably crap though.  Anyway, I digress.


I popped into my local Oxfam while on a turkey hunt on 23 December.  We'd not been  able to get out to the shops before then due to the snow  and were facing the possibility of Turkey Twizzlers (with all the trimmings) for Christmas lunch, so I'd ventured out in snow shoes to bag me a bird.  Before tackling the horrors of Waitrose two days before Christmas I thought I'd have a browse in Oxfam and found that they'd had a game donation.  I picked up mint copies of Rollcage  and Anna Kournikova's Smash Court Tennis on PS1, both well-received back in the day, for £1.99 and 99p respectively.  I probably had GAME's policy of not accepting part-exchange on imported games to thank for also picking up a US copy of Wipeout Pure on PSP for a fiver. 


They had other decent games there too, including the superb Sniper Elite on PS2 for a couple of quid (I have it on Xbox).


So, it seems that the charity-store-donation definition of  'retro' (as good a definition as I can think of)  currently has retro starting at least at PS1 and possibly at PS2.  Cheap gaming and charitable works - what's not to like?