Vandal Hearts II's character-development system is limited when compared with that of the original, keeping things nicely framed and manageable. Unlike Final Fantasy Tactics' sprawling and unfocused job system, you can customize your characters with the game's wide assortment of weapons. Each weapon has one or more spells or abilities locked inside it. While initially inactive, a spell opens up after you've carried it in battle for several turns. Once a spell has been unlocked, it can be transferred to another weapon of the same type, making it beneficial to you to have characters that specialize in one type of weapon. While it is a little frustrating that you must stomp around the battlefield for a while to activate a weapon's abilities, you can enter any battlefield from the overworld map at any time to quickly enable whatever new spells your party may have before it fights any story-critical battles.
Vandal Hearts II's visuals are just above average. The battlefield graphics are a few notches below Final Fantasy Tactics', but the battlefields themselves are much larger, making this an acceptable sacrifice. However, the squatty sprite-based characters that frolic on the maps are poorly animated and drawn. Worse still are the character portraits, all of which have awkward facial expressions and eight-bit-quality color depth. The orchestral soundtrack, however, is grandiose and epic, helping greatly to enhance the mood where the graphics don't.
While Vandal Hearts II lacks the grand feel of Final Fantasy Tactics, it is a solid and rewarding strategy-RPG. It has flaws of its own, but it doesn't fall into the pitfalls that frustrated many of Final Fantasy Tactics' players, making it well suited for both veterans and newcomers to the genre.
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