If you like traditional RPG gameplay and storyline then you'll be right at home with The Legend of Heroes.
The game starts out pretty simply. You're Avin and your sister and your have been orphaned at a young age and raised at Cathedral the heart of the Church of Bardus. Sadly, Cathedral is destroyed and your sister is seperated from you, years later you and your friend Mile decide it's time to explore the world and save your sister.
The game has a decent story and likeable characters. It's one of the few games however, where the story is actually better than the characters. Japanese storytelling usually makes characters and then writes a story and world around them accordingly. A Tear of Vermillion feels more western in this aspect, as the story and world come first and it seems like the characters were made according to the story. This isn't really a bad thing, but the characters aren't quite as interesting as in other RPGs because of it.
Gameplay is pretty straight forward although it lacks any tutorial or explanation. You'll encounter enemies on the field by making contact with them, so random encounters are nonexistent, I prefer this as the random encounter thing can often be more annoying than useful to leveling up. The sad thing is, you level up so S L O W L Y. Seriously, if you and a party of three go out and kill a slug-monster for instance...you'll get around 1pt each. Now, if you kill a stronger bunch of monsters who could kill you if you arent't careful...you may get 6pts each. That's about as high as you go for the first few hours or so. 6pts. I didn't reach level ten until hours into the game, and I like to level up often. (Level 70 by the time I got to Halloween Town revisited in Kingdom Hearts 2. So...many...heartless...)
The game's battle system is very simple. It's turn based with a very vague type of area-attack system, meaning you have to be a certain distance from an enemy to attack. You have magic and even summon-type spells after a while, but the real savior are attacks you can use when your 'power' gauge fills up from giving/taking damage. These are called Deadly attacks and they certainly are, especially early on. You can easily go from doing 10 on a normal hit, to 200 with a Deadly attack. Obviously, these are most like limit breaks or overdrives from games like Final Fantasy...although much more linear.
Exploration and whatnot is pretty linear too. You basically follow the story without much other crap on the side. This isn't too bad as the actual game is pretty long, especially for a portable game.
The game has some issues with it besides it's simplicity however. It has some translation problems. Even the title The Legend of Heroes sounds a bit odd, but you'll notice strange typos/mistranslations in playing as well. The most common is when you level up and gain a new ability. Avin was mastered Fireball. Avin was? Avin has. Other easily made mistakes like that are pretty commonplace in the game.
Another problem is that the game doesn't explain too much. Why is there a bunny following me the whole damn game? Because. What does it do? Well it gives me stuff and gets mad and happy and I can feed it, but why? Because. Things like that are not explained in-game so it feels a bit like they figure you know everything already.
Graphically, Heroes is pretty ok. the environments and locales are well done and pretty in 3D. The water is glistening and has ripples, the towns are built nicely and are garnished with trees and plants. It's all nicely made and looks great on the PSP's screen. The only problem I had was with the game's character models. They're sprites basically, but they aren't the best made...nor are they varied. Many of your main character models looks like one another, and many of the NPCs are flat-out copies. Is it really that hard to make some extra NPC folk for variety? Not only that, but the characters aren't very detailed and they look odd next to the detailed, lush environments. Other than the sprites, the game looks fine.
Sound-wise...Vermillion is very much traditional RPG. We have midi-esque music and lack of voice acting, we have quirky sound effects and mildly-bad battle music. It's decent, but like the game in general...it could be better.
Legend of Heroes: A Tear of Vermillion fails to bring anything new to the RPG genre at all, but it does succeed at bring the PSP a solid RPG. If you like traditional RPG gameplay and storyline then you'll be right at home with The Legend of Heroes.