Vandal Hearts is a strategy RPG that was originally released for the Sony Playstation back in 1996 in Japan, 1997 in North America, and then ported to and released a little later on in 1997 for the Sega Saturn. The Sega Saturn version came with some extra content and features.
I remember seeing Vandal Hearts on the shelves of Electronics Boutique when I was a kid and while the cover art of the PSX version immediately drew my attention I had ultimately chosen another game instead. I never did end up getting it back then, so I was excited to finally be playing it for the first time! Furthermore, I ended up choosing to play with the Sega Saturn version instead of the PSX version because of the extra content the Sega Saturn version comes with (like some bonus missions, extra blood?, more items and spells, etc).
The game starts off with a short introduction and then immediately places you into your first battle where you meet your main character Ash Lambert.
Right away you’ll notice all the big sprays of blood! It’s almost comical how much blood comes flying out of some of the enemies as you attack them but it’s an interesting touch and gives your hits some “oomph” to them in my opinion.
One of the main things that keeps Vandal Hearts interesting is the puzzle-like battles where you have certain winning conditions or obstacles (like bridges that fall apart turn by turn) that you have to watch out for. It really helps keep you on edge and there have definitely been times where I had to repeat battles just to figure out how to meet the win conditions or how to best approach a battle. In the battle photo shown below you have to protect totem pole like objects (supposed to be towers) from all being destroyed for 5 turns while enemies are repeatedly thrown at you.
During the battles you have to watch where you move your troops so as you carefully navigate levels of terrain and where to best place your troops which will give them an advantage over the enemy. Certain terrain tiles give bonuses and if you attack an enemy while being next to another of your characters you gain a Support bonus. Vandal Hearts also has sort of a rock, paper, scissors level of attack and defense where for example flying characters do really well against grounded sword enemies.
After each battle the battle results screen is shown and you gain a gold amount depending on how many enemies you have killed but you also lose gold when you let your characters die.
The time spent between battles is spent on advancing the story and you’re able to select areas on the map to move to (although it’s pretty bare and you’re not given THAT many choices to move to). When you enter a city you’re able to visit a shop, a dojo for promoting your characters, and a tavern to hear local gossip. Vandal Hearts keeps the focus mostly on the battles which in my opinions is it’s strong suit.
It took me around 20 hours or so to beat Vandal Hearts and I thought it was a pretty decent SRPG for it’s time. It’s no Final Fantasy Tactics but it’s a serviceable SRPG and it has a lot of cool things going for it like it’s puzzle like battles and great environments to fight on. I definitely believe it’s worth a play if you’re in to strategy RPGs. It kept my interest enough to check out it’s sequel Vandal Hearts 2 which I’m sure I will post about in the future.
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