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Why Everyone Hates It: Vanguard Bandits was largely ignored by the public at large, coming out alongside a surprisingly large number of similarly named games (Vagrant Story Vandal Hearts 2 and Valkyrie Profile), and also in direct competition with Front Mission 3, the OTHER PlayStation TRPG with mecha. One can easily assume they aren't missing anything by skipping such a game.
Legitimate Issues With the Game: Vanguard Bandits has no real problems it needs defending against, but on the other hand, it was released more or less the same day as Square's Front Mission 3, which was indeed similar in a lot of ways, and also a solid game. Just bad timing there.
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Why I Like It Anyway: As this is the first game featured here released by Working Designs, let me just start off by singing their praises for a moment. Working Designs has a pretty impressive track record when it comes to finding obscure-but-excellent games and bringing them to the U.S. These games are however released in small production runs with very little fanfare. Further driving home how often you can expect to see the publisher mentioned in future articles in this series, they are rather infamous for localizations which replace unimportant NPC dialog with various jokes and pop-cultural references. The reality of the situation is that they're either localizing jokes and pop-cultural references that are already in there but make no sense with a literal translation, or punching things up at the expense of a dozen instances of "Welcome to Smalltown," or "Flowers are pretty." They're also prone to throwing in tons of extras like hardbound instructions, toys, and soundtrack CDs, and taking time out to fix slowdown issues, improve control schemes, and sometimes even make some improvements on the gameplay. So in short, theirs is a logo it pays off to look for on used games.
Moving on to what specifically is enjoyable about Vanguard Bandits, one really should begin with the obvious aesthetic appeal. Moving characters around the map gives us the same low-rent isometric viewpoint common to most TRPGs. Upon selecting an attack however, players are treated to a fighting game style viewpoint while they watch the attack (and sometimes counterattack) play out with highly detailed animation, and the two pilots exchanging often-amusing little quips back and forth. This could easily become an annoyance, but the exchanges are sufficiently brief and varied for the ratio of entertainment value to time to stay a fair deal higher than watching a tiny sprite quickly swing a sword.
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This brings us to another feature. Vanguard Bandits has a rather fun little weapon and armor customization system. Each piece of equipment has, on top of its base stats (damage, range, ammo, which can each be upgraded by spending improvement points gained from combat), some number of slots often containing special little extras. Using special one-shot items scattered throughout the game, you can move these from weapon to weapon, eventually building up to, for instance, a pistol that lets you act twice per round, does splash damage to nearby targets, can fire 50 shots without needing to reload, and do the same damage as, say, a rocket launcher. Always fun that.
Mechanically, things stay rather interesting as well. Every mech on the battlefield has a heat gauge that increases by various amounts as a result of using various forms of attacks, as well as various defensive options, such as counterattacks, and attempts at dodging. If a heat gauge becomes maxed out, the mech shuts down for a fair length of time, leaving it extremely vulnerable to any high damage-low accuracy attacks it could otherwise defend against. It becomes a rather vital strategy late in the game to start ganging up on the toughest enemies, using weaker characters to poke and prod them into overheating before delivering the really deadly attacks.
Angle of attack is also profoundly important. While many games in this genre will make attacks from behind a character more effective, here we have a system where attacks from the side are only half as effective as those from behind, and those from the front give the defender a choice of either a more or less perfect defense, or a nasty counterattack. Making sure a character's back isn't left open is so important that it often pays off to stuff weaker characters into natural alcoves, or have them stand back to back, relying mostly on counterattacks and the occasional opportunistic strike.
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In addition to the nice solid combat engine, Vanguard Bandits does a very impressive job of integrating the plot and gameplay. In addition to a few minor deviations based on dialog choices between battles, the game features 3 major plot branches, leading to 5 different endings, with things playing out depending on your play style more than anything. The first potential plot branching for instance is triggered by the main character's level at the end of a particular early battle in the game, which features the storyline death of a particular NPC. Normally, the rest of your party will restrain the main character and calm him down. If, however, you've been making sure he personally gets nearly every kill in order to meet the aforementioned level requirement, he will shrug them off, and charge after the enemy by himself, eventually ending up on the other side of the major war that dominates the game's plot. The endings themselves meanwhile depend on how much various characters like the main character by game's end, derived from a combination of dialog choices, keeping them alive in battle, and making sure nobody just ends up sitting on the sidelines falling behind in level.
On the other side of the coin, we have the gameplay bowing to the plot. Early on, the plot is driven by the search for a particular giant robot alleged to be as good as ten of the more standard variety. Upon actually acquiring it, this is indeed the case. The main character (who, it really must be noted, is sufficiently short, orange skinned, and green haired to resemble some sort of bloodthirsty Oompa Loompa) more or less becomes an unstoppable force at this point, and the next several battles become entirely a question of protecting the rest of your party and ensuring they don't fall too far behind.
Recently, there's been a bit of a glut of TRPGs. Nippon Ichi alone would keep fans of the genre busy even if you only pick up every other game of theirs. Even so, Vanguard Bandits is very much worth playing on the off chance one can find it.
