Virtual Adept

This long winded titled RPG called Legend of Heroes: A Tear of Vermillion for the PSP has been taking up a bunch of my portable gaming time lately. Developed by Japanese RPG developer Falcom, apparently this game is actually the third in a series of games that started on another platform. However, knowledge of anything from previous games is not required at all. Legend of Heroes is a story based RPG with a turn-based combat system. The graphics are kind of old school 2D top down view with very well drawn artwork and some nice 3D special effects for spell effects and such. The water effects look very nice and other environmental effects, but the overall graphical feel is somewhat retro. This is actually part of the game’s charm.

You play as a young man named Avin who was seperated from his sister at a young age when an evil wizard broke into the church where they were raised and tried to capture her. They were seperated during the fighting and Avin as taken away to be raised by a sage in a small village. After he grew older, the sage died and entrusted Avin with a quest to deliver a sacred artifact to another sage in another village. Avin met another young boy Miles and the two became good friends as they grew up together in the small village. Miles decided to go along with Avin on his quest. And so the two young men set out to find Avin’s sister, and along the way they had many adventures.

The combat system used in Legend of Heroes is a turn-based system where you select what you want each member of your party to do and then the action occurs in an order determined by each combatant’s speed rating. Movement and placement on the map is actually important, because for melee attacks you must be able to move within range of your target or you can’t hit them, and for spells you must be able to get within the spell’s range or area of effect for them to work. You kind of have to do a little guesswork there because you pick what you want to target at the beginning of the turn, but they are not guaranteed to be in the same place when that character’s turn actually comes up during the fighting. This gives the game a bit of strategy in choosing what targets you want to attack.

In addition to normal attacks with normal weapons like Avin’s swords or Miles’ boomerang, you can use spells. Avin knows black magic and Miles knows white magic, which is about what you’d expect. Black magic is more for offense and white is more for defense and healing. There are other types of magic too. You will meet one character early on who can do something called spirit magic which lets her bring forth elemental spirits who can attack all enemies at once. In addition to spells, which use magic points, you also have skills, which are kind of like spells or more like unique character-based powers, but these skills do not cost any magic points to use. Then there is also something called “deadly”, and that is a massive deadly attack that does a great deal of damage and is customized for each character. You can only use deadly when your deadly meter is full, and it gets full by doing regular attacks on enemies, each regular attack adding a bit to the meter until it eventually fills up. Knowing when to save and when to use your deadly attack is an important strategy.

The story so far after about 6 or 7 hours is very well developed. The characters actually feel more realistic than the typical kiddie type characters you get in most RPGs. Yes, you are playing a young man, Avin, but the characters do just feel more realistic in many ways. For example, the methods of speech used by the characters just seems more grown up and less contrived as you might expect in other Japanese console RPGs. The plot itself is actually pretty deep and it involves quite a bit of politics and deception, so it’s less childish in many ways than a lot of other RPGs I have played. This has drawn me further into the game world and keeps me wanting to play more of it.

I will report more about the story and any flaws I happen to find in the game as I play further. If I had to rate the game today I’d probably give it a A, it’s really entertaining so far.