As several reviews of this game have noted, the most important strategic element of this game is learning to anticipate enemy AI. The enemies (as far as I know) never try to anticipate what you will do; they make every move as if you’re going to pass your turn. So what you ideally want to do is head off their move, either by moving the character they are going to attack, or moving someone else into the spot they are going to move into. If two characters end up in the same square, whichever unit has the lesser Weight stat will be pushed out of the square, and they also lose their attack chance.

You do have to be careful moving a unit out of a square where they will be attacked though. Groups of enemies will tend to target the same unit, so you don’t want to move the targeted unit into a place that leaves them open for attacks from the other units in the group.

Ideally you can also attack the spot where you know the enemy character is going to end up, but this isn’t always possible.

I’m not sure if there is a way to 100% predict the AI; if so I haven’t gotten there yet. Sometimes it’s obvious — if one of your characters is at 20 HP they’ll almost certainly be targeted by the enemies. But if everyone is at full HP, I find things are less predictable. You might think they would go after the characters with lower max HP or lower defense, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. However, if you predict wrong, as long as the unit survived you then have a clear indication of who the other people are going to attack.

Another important concern is knowing which of the enemy forces are going to move first. It’s not necessarily constant from turn to turn; it seems like they do tend to move the same groups first unless they can get you with an area of effect spell.

The spellcasters and other AoE moves are the hardest to predict, I think. You can’t be sure exactly where they are going to move (in most cases) and the exact placement of the AoE effect is sometimes hard to read as well.

Finally, you want to be careful about leaving your units in bad positions for the next turn as well. If an enemy spellcaster is going to reach your range in the next turn, you would ideally want just one unit in their AoE.

All of this makes the strategy quite a bit different than what I’m used to for other games. From what I can tell, this is rather divisive among people who played the game, as to whether they like it or not. Most battles that I’ve fought are not hard to finish, although finishing them without losing any characters (for the double money bonus) can be more challenging, especially if there are bosses with nasty attacks.

Anyway, I’m still making it through this game pretty slowly. A few notable battles from chapter 2:

24

This is a stage design that they like to use, where your characters start at the bottom of a big hill. This allows archers to snipe you from the top of the hill (which increases their range a lot), and lowers your movement as you move up the hill. I find that usually the best way to do this is stay as far back as you can and let as many of the enemies come to you as possible; sometimes the archers will even come down the slope to a point where it’s much easier to get them. Those chests can only be gotten with flying armor.

25

Status effects can be pretty nasty in this game — as of mid-chapter 3 I don’t have any cure-all abilities, and you can only hold 2 items per stage. So unless you know in advance which status effects you’ll need to have heals for, you pretty much just have to avoid them as best you can. This stage has a boss, which more and more stages do. The basic strategy for these bosses for me is to try to wait as long as possible to fight them, and then quickly surround them and use the Support bonus to do big damage; even if they kill one or two characters you’ll still be able to eventually wear them down.

28

I had to restart this one because I went forward too quickly. Whenever you have an enemy group moving towards you with a spellcaster you have to be really careful, because you need to deal with the spellcaster before they can do huge damage to your force but if you just try to go past the rest of the enemies they will hurt you badly. One thing you can do is see what their attack range is (which the game makes easy) and move one character in there, especially if you do it at the end of a turn then you can move them out next turn — spellcasters often act first and then they can waste a spell.

30

I think this is the first battle with 2 bosses where you have to beat both of them. You cannot let them both reach your guys at the same time or you’re in trouble, so you have to stay back and let them move into your range individually. If you can beat one of them with most of your guys still left it should be OK.

31

After that I didn’t find the last battle that difficult, just stay back and let the enemies come to you — the only big dangers are the magician with the minimize spell, and the boss himself, but if he’s alone and most of your characters are still around it should be OK.

Two more chapters left. I am not going for the Vandal Hearts Sword or any particular ending because it looks like it would require too much work; I haven’t been revisiting any old maps to get the treasure chests, and I’m not going to do it as long as I can keep progressing through the game and beating the maps.

Chapter 1 picks up 8 years after the prologue. Kurisu has become the leader of a group of bandits who only attack military targets. He’s become completely disillusioned that anyone can fix the problems of the world. Fortunately two of his companions inherit all the equipment that the children had so you don’t lose anything due to the time skip.

The first battle is against a military train with some soldiers, it’s pretty easy.

After this we get a few new members. I think this early part of the stage was the hardest, because it’s the first time the difficulty is really anything. In order to not get beaten badly you need to get used to the AI of the enemies and how to avoid their attacks. It’s not immediately intuitive because the anticipation nature of the game is different enough from normal SRPG tactics that I found myself taking a lot of deaths. On the other hand, if you don’t obsess over getting the double money bonus on each stage you can just take one or two deaths to win the stage.

Stage 13 is especially difficult because you have two different groups on opposite sides of the map, and it can be hard to tell which group the enemies are going to go after first.

One change is that now you can buy flying-type armor. It’s helpful to have a few people with this so that you can reach inaccessible enemies (especially archers and mages who often get placed on higher ground).

After the first couple of battles it gets easier because the enemies are more spread out and you don’t have the height disadvantages.

Yuri reappears but we don’t learn anything this time about any of the other childhood friends.

After those more challenging battles there are some fights in a mine. They are relatively easy; there is one with some archers on a really high plateau but if you just stay away from them they will come down the slope into your range.

Finally you have to fight a large ant queen boss, but it’s pretty easy. Once you get your force in range, you can gang up on it and beat it in a couple of turns before it can really do much.

The hardest stage for me was the last one. It has 2 archers and a mage up on a high area, and the two boss-class enemies are also 2 levels high. You have to walk around the map in a spiral to actually get up to where the bosses are, and you have to deal with them using range attacks and spells.

The key is just to stay out of their range as much as possible. Once I reached the edge of the map where the bosses were, I sent flying units up on a rotation while also casting damage spells on them — I lost a couple of people but did win eventually.

I haven’t been getting a whole lot of the hidden items. I’m pretty sure you need some of them to get hidden maps or endings, but one advantage in this game is that you can go back to previous maps to fight free battles if you need to get the chests. So I can do that later if I want.

(I never understood why you can’t just get all the chests after the battle is over…)

Vandal Hearts II: The Gate of Heaven (ヴァンダルハーツ2〜天上の門〜), released 7/8/1999, developed and published by Konami

Konami’s Vandal Hearts series is back with the second installment. It’s not a direct sequel to the first. So far I have only played the prologue, which is about the main character’s childhood (who I named Kurisu). The opening gives a background to the situation (from Wikipedia):

“10 years ago, King Zekras left the Kingdom of Natra to his son Prince Julius. However, the younger Prince Lagore raised an army to contest the throne, causing his brother to flee the country. While Lagore proved to be a fair king, he was slowly poisoned by Queen Mother Agatha and her lover Cardinal Ladorak. Agatha placed her young son Franz as heir, while Ladorak was promoted to the rank of Premier. Now, Ladorak is oppressing the peasantry with his brutal secret police, the Blood Knights.”

Kurisu lives in a rural area that used to be ruled by a wise/kind man named Kosimo, who lost position because of his support of the wrong side in the war. However, Kosimo has had to retire due to illness, and the person who took over from him oppresses the farmers and townspeople and collects burdensome taxes. Kurisu is friends with the aristocratic girl (Adele) who lives in the mansion, but his dad discourages him from playing with her because their stations are too different.

The initiating incident is when Kurisu and his friends find a wounded swordsman fighting with slugs. We fight back with “salt clubs”.

The defining feature of the battle system is the simultaneous turns. Each round, you choose a character to move and then the computer will choose one, and they move at the same time. If you attack a character that moved, your attack misses. This is kind of a weird system and I’m not sure it quite works — there’s no way to tell who is going to move, which means that it’s often effective to just “waste” your first move and then have everyone else beat up on the enemy unit that moved first.

Other than that, it’s a fairly standard battle system.

When you win the battle, if nobody died, you get double the money (I took that screenshot while the number was counting up).

The other big system in this game is the way that equipment and skills work. Rather than having different people as different classes, you can basically customize your characters through equipment. Anyone can equip anything, but equipping staves and robes will increase your MP and intelligence at the cost of other attributes. Swords and heavy armor do the reverse.

Each weapon has a skill that you unlock by gaining SP in battle. Once you get it, you can then use the skill. You can also transfer skills to new weapons (generally of the same type) although there are some limitations. Some of the skills are passive (like regenerating HP or allowing you to dig up items).

Outside of battle the movement is on a FFT-style world map. You can go to previous areas to fight free battles, and I think you can also go back later to get treasure chests or hidden items you missed (some of them you can’t get until you unlock later skills allowing you to build rock steps and such).

In the prologue none of the battles present any real challenge, so it’s a good chance to get used to the battle system and learn some skills.

Oh you can also equip two weapons at once (as you can see with the guy on the right there).

The story of the prologue follows Kurisu and his friends as they deal with the fact that Graud (the new ruler of the area) can send his tax collectors to the villages and do things like sell the girls into slavery to get the money, and the villagers can’t do anything to resist or Graud will just destroy their town. Eventually he becomes disillusioned with the situation, and wants to run away Adele. But he’s falsely accused of killing Kosimo, and Adele turns on him. Kurisu flees the town and the prologue ends.

That’s as far as I played — so far this is a pretty good game, I think; different from the first one but enjoyable to play.