Review By

Sigmund Shen 8.0 RATING

You think its annoying when youre playing a fighting game at the neighborhood arcade and some 10-year old steps right up, doesnt even dignify you with a word, drops in his milk money, and pulls off a machine-gun succession of acrobatic wonders that basically kicks your ass off the machine in about eleven seconds? Well, try playing CHESS against that same 10-year old, like I did once. I still remember how he sat there, analyzing my every move with his infrared T-1000-vision. After each turn, it was simply a matter of waiting for him to squash the spongeholes in my inferior intellect like the Sledgehammer of Charles Darwin.

But chess is merciful—you only make one nerve-wracking move at a time. Imagine if you had to conceive of a multi-faceted strategy for deploying all your pieces at once, and then had to sit back and wait for the little brainiac to send his plastic mercenaries running amuck across the board, each one of em on a mission to find and exploit the one flaw in your grand plan? All while listening to a music track so mischievous that it seems to mock your helplessness?

That, my friends, is almost how it feels playing Vandal Hearts, the earliest Strategy Role-Playing Game (SRPG) released for the Playstation. The difference, thankfully, is that between strategic gameplay thats accessible enough for even an English major to get the hang of, and a plot thatll storm up your living room with grim, even nihilist overtones, this game will grant you bloodthirsty vengeance against every little punk kid you ever met and let you massacre your way back to some semblance of self-esteem. Committed tactical blunders on that last turn and got one of your characters surrounded by nightmare demons? All is not lost—just uncork a bottle of that vintage magic spell you were saving for a special occasion, and watch the demons get cleansed away in a sheet of rolling flames.

To sweeten things, you can even bask smugly in the knowledge that, tactically brilliant as that little Kasparov might be, he still lacks the intellectual maturity to truly grasp the philosophical and political intrigues of this game. Thats right: unlike such childish pursuits as world-class tournament chess, Vandal Hearts tells a tale that will actually justify the considerable load of debt you amassed in college. After all, by now you have read Herodotus, Machiavelli, maybe even a little bit of the Sun Tzu. You dont need to go around proving your mental might to Encyclopedia Brown. The worlds of the SRPG genre typically reflect all the shameful stories youve read, reread, gotten tested on, and written term papers about: history is largely set in motion by people with fair intentions, too much power, and tragically poor judgment.

Vandal Hearts, with its medieval fantasy world of corrupt governments, ineffectual bureaucrats, and desperate commoners, is no exception. In a smooth merging of story and gameplay, some of the mission objectives even seem to express this bleak worldview. In one particularly dismaying battle, youre set against a band of brainwashed townspeople. Your objective is to avoid killing them while eliminating their brainwashers. The gruesome catch lies in the games automatic counterattack system: youll end up unwillingly cutting down a few women and children as they come shambling after you like deaths head moths to the flame.

At the start of another grim battle, you are hiding in the woods when an Imperial patrol marches by. If this were a Hollywood movie, you would lay low, but somebody in your group would sneeze, "forcing" you to butcher your way out of the resulting mess. There is no such hypocrisy here. You crouch quietly at the patrols approach only so you can surprise and massacre it. Even once you leap out from the trees, your victims do not organize a counterattack; its every target for himself as they split up and flee. Kill them all or the game ends.

In other SRPGs, there is some catharsis to counterbalance the mayhem, in the form of a life-affirming story scene, or a triumphant ending. Vandal Hearts, though, serves a different kind of dish. One villain, as he contemplates the magical artifact that corrupted a national war hero, says:

"Each man is always at war with the side of his nature that seeks death. Those who pretend to seek glory are merely trying to run from this. Have you ever thought about this? To save the people from pain and suffering I must have power. I learned much from the chaos that followed the revolution."

For a tale of rebellion, these are pretty sobering words. They evoke Trent Reznors "Screaming Slave": "He's gonna cause the system to fall... but he's glad to be chained to that wall." The analysis here is that all those who "pretend to seek glory" are really fighting back against the part of them that just wants to be completely dehumanized and broken, "saved" from the "pain and suffering" of freedom. The same sentiment would be echoed five years later, in a less harsh form, at the end of Final Fantasy IX. But in that game, the nameless entity and its nihilistic words feel contrived, just to give a different villain some eleventh-hour redemption. In Vandal Hearts, the nihilist is a real person rationalizing real emotions.

This nihilism makes for an unsettling experience. At one point somebody tells your party: "You people have the blood of many on your hands." One of your characters is even forced to slay his own brother. And the most memorable (and amusing) element of bile is that every time you defeat an enemy, the fatal blow is accompanied by a horrific crashing noise, followed by a geyser of blood that spouts high above the playfield. The attention to detail is quite charming. In a showdown atop a hurtling train, the camera is constantly panning around, but whatever angle you have on the action, the blood consistently spurts downwind.

That should be ample evidence that all this darkness is being presented lovingly, with an artistic flourish. The battles you win trigger political story events, which are described in atmospheric, documentary-style cinemas. These are done with a pretty imaginative combination of moody sound effects and mostly static images. For example, as a narrator describes the decadence of the upper class, the camera pans over a garish banquet table covered with empty wine glasses and a single sword, accompanied by sounds of clinking crystal and the soporific buzz of conversation.

Overall, Vandal Hearts is grim and smooth and sweet, like having your rich parents buy you a chocolate cone at a war atrocities exhibition. At the end of the story, you are flatly told, amidst images of trash-filled streets and crumbling walls, that all your work has done nothing to improve the life of the common people. Yet the sheer darkness of the plot and gallons of blood you get to spill could tempt you to do it all over again. And if Kasparov Jr. tries to get in on this game, just tousle his hair fondly, point at the ESRB rating on the case, and say, "Sorry, this one isnt for kids. Why dont you go find your little friends and play chess or something?" Then go back to your grown-up game, knowing that you kept him away from it for his own good.

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