Vagrant Story 21 years later | Review… kind of

Vagrant Story is one of those games that I wanted to play only because it said Squaresoft on the cover. I didn’t even buy it, I just borrowed it off someone else back then. While I didn’t have any major negative thoughts in my head thinking about Vagrant Story today, in fact it actually stirred up quite positive emotions, I couldn’t really recall much about Vagrant Story itself. I remembered that optional bosses existed, that the final area’s music was sick and the final boss’ weapon, but that was about it. For a game that I had invested quite a significant amount of time into even though it was like 21 years ago at this point, my memories of it were almost non-existent. So 21 years later, or rather a couple of weekends ago I decided to play through the game again.

 

Presentation

Vagrant Story hasn’t aged well, let’s get that out of the way immediately. It’s honestly pretty damn hard for a 3D PS1 game to stand the test of time in terms of visuals right. Not only were the devs hampered by the technology of their time, the whole process was still in its infancy. Having said all that, there still is a certain charm to the game’s visuals that I actually really like as dated as that pixelated mess is at times. Thinking back, meaning 21 years ago, Vagrant Story did look pretty damn amazing. While the rooms within a locale can feel a bit samey at times, the locales themselves do differ quite a bit from one another and I never really got bored of the environment itself. Another thing to take note of is that the game is set in Ivalice and I absolutely love Final Fantasy Tactics and Final Fantasy XII… the two Tactics Advance games… not so much. As this was a good five to six years before Final Fantasy XII though, this was the first time to get a proper look at how an Ivalice setting could be represented in 3D. So in terms of presentation the game does hold a special little place in my heart.

To summarise this; if you were to look objectively at the game and just judge the graphics by themselves, then yes it’s not pretty. For me with all the stylistic choices the game takes into account plus my nostalgia I guess, I think it looks pretty damn cool, even today.

 

Combat

I am not going too deep into this, especially as I forgot to even use one of the main mechanics during my first playthrough. Combat is really fun, especially the chain mechanic, having different weapons with different timings, animations and use case scenarios, it’s fun and engaging. Chaining attacks is how you will primarily be dealing damage to enemies in Lea Mondé. Quick aside, I am not sure if that’s the correct way to pronounce it or not, but that’s at least the tonation of the Katakana. To keep it balanced and deter you from chaining endlessly, your RISK gauge is directly tied to your chain attacks. The higher the chains, the more RISK you accumulate, the more RISK you have the higher the likelihood that your attacks will miss. This isn’t just a minor convenience, your accuracy will plummet to become an actual issue. The other downside to having high RISK is that you are also susceptible to increased damage. On the plus side your healing spell will regenerate more health as well, it swings and roundabouts.

To start chaining you actually need chain abilities first. These abilities are unlocked as you accumulate points from fighting and specifically using chains. It’s essentially this game’s equivalent of a level up. You hit the required threshold of points and you get to choose another chain ability. There are chain abilities for all kinds of things like regenerating HP, MP, dealing plain damage, debuffs and so on. Level ups also allow you to unlock defensive abilities. Same as with chain abilities you have to hit them during a very tight window to activate. At first it might seem almost unfair how precise you have to be when defending, but as you get accustomed to attack timings, you quickly realise that if you were to really master this 100% you would actually be immortal. That’s because defensive abilities work on 0 HP, which means that if you have 20 HP and the enemy is hitting your for 80 HP, and you successfully hit your Impact Guard defensive ability for instance, which reduces physical damage by 50% AFTER the damage has happened, you will go from down 20 to 0 HP and be refunded 50% of the damage that was displayed, so in this case 40 HP. You just made a net gain of 20 HP in a scenario where you should have died.

So technically as long as you have perfect timing, balance would take its leave here. I do not have perfect timing. I’ve played the majority of Vagrant Story with what is essentially an enmity focused setup, I’ll go into detail why exactly a little bit later, but between the defensive skills Absorb Damage and Absorb Magic you literally cover every attack in the game, physical and magic respectively without fail. The only downside is that they only refund you 20% of the damage, which is ok though, because my main damage dealing chain attack was the chain ability Raging Ache which hits for 10% of the damage Ashley has sustained in total. This leaves you in a constant position to deal a fixed amount of damage regardless of affinities, proficiencies, weapon or enemy types. This obviously comes with downsides, especially in Vagrant Story as save points aren’t all too frequent and I died frequently trying to make this work.

You also have magic and Break Arts. The former I didn’t use too often as I didn’t really invest too much time into building up a Staff and shield to make the most out of it. Magic is very powerful though, as it hits pretty hard and several times as long as you get enough body parts into the magic’s target area. Break Arts on the other hand I haven’t used even once in my initial playthrough, that’s in part due to me running on low HP for the majority of the game and Break Arts using HP as a resource, but also because I kind of forgot about them. Break Arts cost HP and can be really powerful, but for the most part you will be sticking with chain abilities either way.

All in all combat is really fun in Vagrant Story in my opinion, at least as long as you’re willing to learn the mechanics of it.

 

Bosses

Let’s not beat around the bush, fighting bosses is what I enjoy the most in single player games. Souls Like, Metroidvanias, whatever you wanna call them, Bossploration is the term I am going to use to group all of these games together I think. While Vagrant Story isn’t exactly short on Boss Encounters, most of them die very quickly. That’s in part due to how the chain system works, you want to get in there and dispatch everything in as few broken chains as possible, but also because of the game’s rather low HP pools. As far as I am aware 999 HP is the highest any enemy in Vagrant Story has. Every so often you will come across a boss that will infuriate you, but mainly because it’s a pain to backtrack if it kills you, which again, due to my own insistence on low HP I saw a lot of Game Overs. But again the fights themselves are over rather quickly. There are a few optional bosses in NG+, but only Time Attack Asura is really worth mentioning.

 

Time Attack Asura

Outside of the final dungeon in NG+ which acts as a labyrinth, you have to clear and beat Asura in it anyway, to unlock Asura’s Time Attack; this is pretty much the only challenge the game has to throw at you. The final boss is a joke all things considered and while Time Attack Asura is a little bit annoying I never even bothered to do… whatever you are supposed to do. Lower your HP by as much as possible, which Asura will gladly assist you with and then just hit her with Raging Ache. It doesn’t even matter which weapon you are using. She isn’t all that granted and I don’t make her sound like great payoff, but it’s still a nice way to be able to close out the game. A few more challenges and optional unique monsters at the tail end of the game would have been nice though.

 

Exploration

Traversing the Town and dungeons of Vagrant Story, fighting bosses, looting chests, solving simple puzzles and upgrading your equipment, it’s all good fun. It’s nothing out of the ordinary and not all that different from other games that would loosely fit into this category. Nonetheless it’s fun. It has issues though, as rooms for the most part don’t look all that different from one another and the fact that you don’t have a mini map, you are pretty much required to go into your menu and check the map there. As you will most likely do this and I know I did hundreds of times, it gets rather cumbersome. Not only is it annoying, but it also takes you out of the exploratory nature of the game. This is also where we get to what I see as the biggest drawback of the game, which is menuing.

 

Menuing

Now let me reiterate what we have just been through. I still had fun playing the game and combat is pretty fun even today. Menuing though, mhmm, it’s a nightmare. It’s not that it’s difficult, it’s just so damn long and tedious and technically you are required to do it frequently. This was one of the first instances where seemingly suppressed memories came rushing back to me. Even for the time it’s actually inexcusable how badly this was setup.

 

Changing Weapons

Let’s start with changing weapons, you go into the menu, you navigate to equip, you click your weapon, you choose the weapon you want to use and then get back out again. Not too bad, but that’s not all there is to it. In Vagrant Story you can set gems into your hilts and shields. That is not in the equip menu though, it’s in the setup menu, where you have to select your weapon and choose the gems per slot 1 by 1, also making sure that the gems you want to use are not slotted into another weapon, because then you would have to go choose that weapon first and remove the gems from that weapon, before you can slot them into the weapon you actually want to be using. Now imagine going through an area where there’s a monster that’s weak to water and piercing, one that’s weak to blunt and wind and in the next room there is one that’s weak to edge and water. You constantly have to go back into your menu and keep juggling weapons and gems… technically. Pretty much all of this is the reason why I decided to mainly run through with low health. Yes it gets frustrating when you keep dying, but at the same I simply couldn’t get over the archaic menuing, and that’s archaic for the time. Once you get to the end of the game you should have enough stuff to get out of this constant switching anyway and by the very end of the game if you want to farm out ultimate weapons, you really don’t have to care about that anymore, but that still doesn’t change anything about your first playthrough, where you don’t know anything about the game yet and it seems to be deliberately tedious for no reason whatsoever.

 

Inventory Limits

Ok so this one just boggles my mind and it did back then as well. I get that there technically should be a limit in regards to how much Ashley can carry, but there simply isn’t any reason to limit the amount of equipment you can carry in this type of a game. As long as you keep learning the magic spells from your grimoires and use the permanent stat boosting items from your items, you will never run out of space on your usable items, but for some reason you can only carry a certain amount of Weapons, Armor and Gems with you. Considering that you don’t know what you’re going to expect, what you are going to fight, you would think that you want to bring as many options with you as possible and just accept the nightmarish menuing manoeuvres that you will have to go through anyway. No, instead there are chests littered around the place that work the same as the chests from Resident Evil. In Resident Evil however, you open the chest, you put your stuff in or take something out and you are on your merry way. Works the same in Vagrant Story, apart from that you have to double confirm everything and save the changes to your memory card, which also takes forever. So pray that whenever you access those chests, that you don’t make a mistake, because it will cost you a lot of time to go back in and out again. 

 

Am I Nitpicking?

I can see my complaints being misconstrued as nitpicking and to a certain degree I am not going to argue against that. The game is old and as I said myself you can technically get around those issues with certain playstyles or if you look at speedruns, ignoring most normal encounters, as you don’t really level up stats for fighting monsters and you are not really ever required to depend on a monster’s dropped items. This would still all come with having this knowledge beforehand. Jumping in blind you are most definitely going to get frustrated by these so called nitpicks. What makes it even worse for me, the game actually has a shortcut menu, which allows you to select your magics, items, break arts and even set your defense and chain abilities on the fly— which is amazing even more so for the time. But here is the thing, they thought of that and still left all those other issues in? Why?

 

Closing Words

I wanted to go through a few more older games and look at some of the optional stuff from today’s perspective. Be it item farming or beating that optional boss in post game or NG+. As for Vagrant Story beating Time Attack Asura and getting Excalibur Holy Win, was fun enough for me, but to be truly satisfied I would have liked more.

If you were to ask me if I would recommend Vagrant Story today, I honestly think it would be a no. I like the game, but it seriously needs an overhaul. Loading times, item management and menuing as a whole are just too cumbersome. I still think the game is enjoyable, but I partially knew what I was getting into. Someone who does go in completely blind, is likely going to give up before they even make it to Town Centre West, the first outside area.

Have you played Vagrant Story, either way back in the day or more recently? What are your thoughts on the game? Would you play it again? Let me know in the comments either here or on YouTube! See you next time.