Suikoden Tactics -- Vandal Hearts 2 Was Here.

I'm about twelve hours into Suikoden Tactics and to me it's clearly borrowing from Konami's own Vandal Hearts 2. The game has an overworld, town, and battle flow. The overworld is just a map with hot spots and connecting dots between them. You just point and click and your icon moves to where you want it to go. The towns are just as they were in Vandal Hearts 2. They're menu screens. When you click on an area on the map, you'll go to a screen that will offer you a few choices. You can go to the outfitter, blacksmith, rune master, quest guild, or gossip. The outfitter is the shop. There you can buy and sell armor and items. As this is a Suikoden game of sorts, the blacksmith is where you can sharpen and therefore strengthen your weapons. You never get new weapons, you can only make the one you have stronger throughout the game. Again, being a Suikoden game, you can buy and attach runes to your characters with the rune master option. The runes provide you with magic and other abilities. The quest guild is an option available in Middleport. It allows you to earn extra potch and skill points by doing various jobs for people. There are two kinds of quests. Ones where you'll go out and do whatever needs to be done yourself. The other type are dispatch quests where you'll select a member of your group to handle the job while you go about the business of playing the game. Moving around the map causes time to pass in the game. The dispatch quests will require the character you selected to be unavailable to your group for the duration of the job.  The quests also require some conditions to be met to be successful. You'll need to select a character that will have certain levels high enough whether they be power, speed, magic, defense, or the like. Gossip is a menu option that will allow you to talk to the various people in the location for you to pick up on rumors and other information. Suikoden Tactics employs the exact same system style as Vandal Hearts 2 as far as the towns and overworld are concerned. I for one really like this system. It's very much to the point. The menus for the towns and the like are filled with nice art. The music is a collection of various Suikoden themes. The quest guild aspect allows for you to flesh out the world if you so want to. It's entirely optional. If you so wanted you could just go from battle to battle to battle. It's the best of both worlds in a how you want it package. Next time I'll cover the combat system, which of course is the actual heart of the game.