Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgment Review

Why stop at a bronze cleaver? Trade up for a gold one. Sheesh.

Back when the PS One was popular, Konami released its fair share of role-playing games for it, including Vandal Hearts.  While this series didn’t exactly catch fire like Final Fantasy did, it gained a decent amount of followers.  That’s probably who Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgment for Xbox Live and PlayStation Network is best suited for.  It’s a downloadable adventure game that’s faithful as far as its set-up goes, but has very little else for anyone not familiar with it.

The story takes place before the original Vandal Hearts adventure.  Two rival kingdoms are at each other’s throats in the continent of Sostegaria, while a small village sits on the border.  A young man named Tobias decides that enough is enough and sets out to settle the war, along with help from a few friends.  Little do they know that a savage warrior bearing the Flames of Judgment is about to meet them head on…

Really, this game couldn’t follow a more basic RPG premise if it tried.  Innocent boy learns he has a greater fate than he ever expected, enemy rises up to test boy’s strength, boy finds he has more talent than he bargained for, yadda yadda.  It’s not really told that well, and one of the bigger problems with the game is not being able to skip through it.  You have to sit through every single conversation, no matter how bland it is, and then proceed into battle.  It’s like sitting through a pointless Q & A session with the world’s blandest author and then forgetting what you were going to ask.

When it comes to gameplay, Vandal Hearts isn’t too bad.  It follows the same strategic principles as Final Fantasy Tactics, with grid-style gameplay and mildly satisfying turn-based combat.  There are plenty of attributes and special attacks to choose from between a variety of characters, along with a useful inventory system.  Furthermore, when you defeat enemies, they explode into little red bursts, a cooler part of the game.

However, while this system does click, it also has major flaws.  You can’t move the camera around freely, so you’re unable to see just how much room you have to work with in each area.  Furthermore, there are times that too many enemies fill up the screen, giving you no other option but to run away in a cowardly manner.  Seriously, it’s like Konami threw fairness out the window here.

Another problem is the weak presentation.  The graphics aren’t awful by any means, but they do appear slapped together in places.  Animations are cut short, most of the terrain you travel through looks the same, and the cut scenes are nothing more than anime models with text balloons.  There’s a lot of ground to cover, but you never really feel any motivation to see it all.  Furthermore, the music is nothing special, and the sound effects emulate stuff you’d hear out of an older SNES game.  (And we mean one of the weaker titles, not something like Final Fantasy.)

Worst of all, Konami wants you to indulge all this for $15 (or 1200 Microsoft points).  At the routine $10 (1000 point) price, we’d kind some value here.  At $15, though?  Only hardcore fans will really want to step up and save this world.

Vandal Hearts isn’t the worst role-playing game in existence, but obviously more could’ve been done here to make the price more reasonable.  The graphics and music are average, the gameplay system is just barely acceptable (especially with the high difficulty) and not being able to connect with characters is a real problem.  There’s just not enough love in these Hearts to go around, except maybe to the most dedicated of fans.