This Vandal-Hearts write-up by Jake Alley is the single most compelling case I’ve ever seen for the game, and that’s before I saw the screenshot above. But I gotta say, you know how long it takes to mask out a spray of arterial blood? No one else is ever allowed to write about this game for this site again. I spent too many hours of my life on that title graphic.
Can we at least comment on how great it is?
Because Vandal Hearts is SO GREAT.
Honestly, it took profound strength of will not to explain the gimmicks of half a dozen more maps in that sucker.
My only quibble… Daggers? Flying units use spears~
But yes! Vandal Hearts is still one of my favorite games.
It amuses me that I actually finally got my hands on it by buying it from the esteemed mr. Parish… And then used alcohol to get the permanent marker off of it.
Pleather is a real thing!
I don’t think he suggested it wasn’t. It’s just that pleather isn’t really the kind of material you make armor out of unless you’re working in an amusement park’s costume crafting shop.
I’ve always been intrigued by the sequel. The story seems good but when it ramps up the difficulty after the prologue and the fact that the battle system is stupid it just puts me right off.
As for Vandal Hearts, it’s awesome. It’s the closest thing to Shining Force for me, which is the series that introduced me to RPGs, but puts a nice spin on each of its levels.
how weird is it that I randomly listened to the Retronauts episode about Vandal Hearts on my commute this morning?
Vandal Hearts is my pick for most underrated strategy RPG on the PS1. It’s too bad the box art had that weird, misleading Westernized thing going on, and I recall the sequel being mauled by critics, not least of which for the god awful character art.
I remember thinking the blood geysers were absolutely absurd. Who put Mortal Kombat in my SRPG?
Anyway, reading the writeup almost makes me want to dig it out and see what I missed. It certainly sounds like it avoids many of the pitfalls inherent in the SRPG genre.