Vandal Hearts 2 is so underrated

[Humanity has risen!]

I decided to play it again because there's nothing quite like it. It was one of the first dark fantasy games more than ten years before Dragon Age and one of the earliest attempts at a mature story on a game form.

I was always sad that no one tried to evolve the fighting system, where there is always an enemy moving alongside you and you have to try to anticipate what the enemy will do. Sure the enemy AI was a bit too predictable, but nevertheless it totally changed his you approached these encounters.

I also quite liked how you could develop the characters however you wanted depending on the equipment you used.

 

[Crooked Bee]

I seem to remember it being pretty good indeed.

Would need to replay to confirm it, though.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

It was also one of the only Japanese games with good portraits featuring realistic art. We need to add those portraits to the avatar gallery somehow.

 

[Siveon]

I think it was because the second game was quite a bit different from the first one. I don't exactly remember, it's been quite a while.

I know there was some reason why I liked Vandal Hearts 1 better. Though Vandal Hearts 2 portraits did look way better I'll give you that.

 

[Rahdulan]

Yes it is, although quite a few people shit on it for the simultaneous turn system because it's different, but in my opinion it's one of those additions that make it really difficult to go back to traditional SRPG approach. On the other hand that bitching is somewhat justified due to incredibly exploitable AI which will literally always go for a back attack and you can manipulate that to the utmost. And I'm a sucker for time skip stories, especially when they're, for the most part, very maturely presented. This ain't your teenage nephew's JRPG about spikey haired anime heroes saving the world with so annoying you want to strangle them funny sidekicks.

 

[Damned Registrations]

To be fair most AI in games is incredibly exploitable once you know it's favourite course of action. I think what made VH2 combat kinda dull was that it was only exploitable in one way really- you predict the enemy movement and make his attacks whiff. In better games you have more options, you can exploit AoE effects, spellcasting delays, counterattacks/overwatch, turn orders, fields of view or cover, etc.

I played about 90% of the game and then quit because the story had never really grabbed me and the battles had long since become rote repetition of the same moves over and over again.

 

[Athelas]

The A.I. was unbelievably dumb. It behaved like it would in a regular turnbased game. Because of the element of simultaneous action, instead of enemies meeting each other on the battle field, it led to the enemy going to attack the spot you just left while you did the same to the enemy's former spot, and other dumb stuff.

The Grandia games did a great job with simultaneous turn-based combat (which is a system I'd like to see in more and better RPG's).

 

[eric__s]

I don't remember a lot of specific details about the plot, but I like that it was about the dynamics of power and social caste. You're just a peasant boy so it's not okay for you to be friends with Adiele (was that her name??). Relationships between people are framed in the context of their social status and not their qualities as an individual. It's cool that at least the beginning of the game was about the lives of common people in war. I also like that the prince guy you meet at the beginning of the game (Nicolai?) whom Joshua patterns himself after ends up being this depraved drunkard years on down the road. That's probably my favorite thing about the game, that the character you most expect to be this heroic swordsman saving the day against all odds is actually this tremendous disappointment.

I'm kind of conflicted about the combat system and AI. From what I remember, enemies always attacked in the same order so once you learned the order you could never be hit. This eliminated all strategy; I remember before learning how the AI worked, I'd set up these great traps hoping that the enemy would fall for them and they'd end up doing something completely unrelated on the other side of the maps. It was so, so easy to end up wasting turns because the enemy AI didn't prioritize targets or act out of order. It ended up being very easy to exploit and tiresome to play. At the same time, it was still a pretty cool concept that should be taken further.

I wish Konami made more RPGs.

Also, one of the songs was a rip off of Solveig's Song from Peer Gynt -

 

[Humanity has risen!]

I wish Konami made more RPGs.

Also, one of the songs was a rip off of Solveig's Song from Peer Gynt -

Every single Japanese game music composer did the same thing.

 

[DragoFireheart]

Looks like a FFT mod that uses downgraded BoF3 graphics.

 

[eric__s]

I wish Konami made more RPGs.

Also, one of the songs was a rip off of Solveig's Song from Peer Gynt -

Every single Japanese game music composer did the same thing.

Why do you think that?

 

[Humanity has risen!]

I mean even you posted about this, it's not like this stuff isn't extremely common, especially in a place like Japan where there used to be very little respect for foreign copyright. Yuzo Koshiro ripping off 90s euro dance hits, people like Kenji Eno and Uematsu imitating seventies progressive rock, etc...

Just an example:

 

[eric__s]

I mean even you posted about this, it's not like this stuff isn't extremely common, especially in a place like Japan where there used to be very little respect for foreign copyright. Yuzo Koshiro ripping off 90s euro dance hits, people like Kenji Eno and Uematsu imitating seventies progressive rock, etc...

What's the difference between Yuzo Koshiro doing it and Chris Huelsbeck doing it (like he did here with Flirts - Passion, or when he stole directly from Yuzo Koshiro in Jim Power)? What's the difference when Nobuo Uematsu makes progressive rock and Tim Follin does it? Why can Rob Hubbard use Rick James basslines but nobody else can? Music is an iterative thing. No matter what kind of music you make, everyone draws from the same well and it's as legitimate for a Japanese person who grew up with the Beatles to draw from it as it is a British person.

But way back in the early days of Japanese game music, there was only one group that mattered and that was Yellow Magic Orchestra. Listen to that song Rydeen and tell me it's not the same as Yuzo Koshiro's First Step Towards Wars. The song was even in Super Locomotive. Yellow Magic Orchestra was important for game music for two reasons - game music was rooted in popular music and Yellow Magic Orchestra was the biggest and most important Japanese band at the time, but it was also made using the same instruments. Companies needed people with the same skillset required to program YMO's complex synth songs because they both used the latest and most complicated technology. Synth pop dominated game music until the mid 90s because of YMO.

So to say that Japanese composers steal exclusively from Western sources, or to even frame their work in the context of theft and not as any other form of music creation is completely wrong.

 

[Niektory]

But way back in the early days of Japanese game music, there was only one group that mattered and that was Yellow Magic Orchestra. Listen to that song Rydeen and tell me it's not the same as Yuzo Koshiro's First Step Towards Wars. The song was even in Super Locomotive.

Heh, cool. One of the songs from the first Touhou also sounds like it's based on it.