Genre: RPG
Developer: Falcom
Publisher: Bandai

When Falcom went about remaking their classic Legend of Heroes trilogy for the PSP (this game is the second in the series), they created a brand new 3d engine that supports high resolution textures, polygonal terrain and buildings, and texture-filtered sprites, along with some fancy fog, water, lens flare, and even stencil buffer effects (which should have been used more than they actually were). The engine comes through excellently here, and really brings the story into this decade technologically. Additionally, the character portrait art is some of the best I have ever seen in a video game.

The music isn't the stuff of Nobuo Uematsu by any stretch, and probably isn't even as good as the music from Falcom's Ys series, but for typical Japanese RPG fare it is memorable and fits every part of the adventure adequetely. The actual fidelity of the music is outstanding, as I've heard all the songs were taken from orchestrated "Best of LOH" collection audio cds available in Japan. Sound effects are clear and of high quality, basically what you would expect from a PSP title.

Legend of Heroes features the typical RPG "town -> dungeon -> field" cyclical structure, and only does it with some success; the dungeons are universally tiny and generic, and combat is not random, so it feels like the player can simply cop out of half of the game's content by running through most dungeons while still progressing through the game successfully. Fortunately, the town and field areas are well laid out and the game does feature a nice combat engine.

Tear of Vermillion is bailed out of total mediocrity by its character design and phenomenal story; from the expressive character portraits to wonderful dialogue to some shocking plot developments, I found myself gripped all the way through to this game's outstanding conclusion. If only the core gameplay dynamics, particularily the lackluster dungeons, were better implemented, this game could very well find itself into the A-range. Apparently, the first game in the trilogy is the best, and the remake of that title is coming to North America next, so Tear of Vermillion may be just the beginning for non-Japanese PSP owners!