Rhayader Goes to Town (Day 323)

 I finished Vandal Hearts right in at around 14 hours, making it one of the shortest strategy RPGs I've ever played. The only other game in the genre that I can think of that's shorter is Arc the Lad, which serves as sort of a prologue to Arc the Lad II, which is reportedly about a 60 hour long game, so I'm not sure how much it counts. Anyway, Vandal Hearts is a short and fun SRPG that is nonetheless riddled with flaws.

Unlike most SRPGs, Vandal Hearts is very easy. Most missions require very little planning beforehand and can be conquered in just a few minutes. Many enemies can be one-shotted, especially if their weaknesses are exploited. Archers deal heavy damage to flying enemies, whereas melee combatants are strong against archers. Magic users also deal heavy damage to heavily armored enemies--as well as just about everything else, it must be noted. The Sorcerer class in Vandal Hearts is undoubtedly the strongest unit available with powerful spells like Phase Shift and Salamander that hit very close to the entire map.

Pretty cool spell

 By contrast, the defensive Guardsman class is close to useless. In close combat they are competent, but their low range of movement makes it unlikely they'll actually ever get to an enemy to attack them. I'll admit that because I was rushing through this game I frequently used these units as little more than fodder. The game does penalize you for losing allied units, but never at any point did I not have enough money to buy all the equipment and items that I needed, so it barely affected me.

Archbishops promote from Bishops which promote from Healers. I had only one on my team and it was pretty much all the healing I needed--especially once I'd acquird the powerful Perfect Healing spell. At the hefty price of 40 MP, it was capable of healing every ally on the entire map for their entire health bar. Although these flashy spells trivialized the game's difficulty, I have to admit they were pretty fun to use.

Evidently what the game is named for

Although Vandal Hearts posed no real difficulty, it was still reasonably fun to play through and had a few interesting mechanics. I enjoyed casting the Sorcerer's massive AoE spells even if they were overtuned--and I also liked the class-branching system even though I would have really preferred the classes to branch a second time for the sake of variety. I have to wonder if Vandal Hearts: Flame of Judgment, the recent revival to the series, features many of these elements.

Always the adventurer

 I recall playing Vandal Hearts II briefly, but I don't remember it very well. What I do remember is that I thought it was pretty bad and possibly even broken in some pretty important ways. I don't imagine I'll be tracking it down to play it anytime soon, but I most likely will do some research on it. Instead, I'll be moving on to another PlayStation game in my backlog, which will be Vagrant Story, Tales of Destiny, or Front Mission 3. I'm hesitant to play Front Mission 3 because I've recently learned there's a fan translation available for Front Mission 2 and I'd like to play that first--but at the same time it's not really part of my backlog. The idea of clearing out my backlog entirely is pretty appealing to me so I'm conflicted. We'll see what happens.