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.