Good Game Get! Vagrant Story
Vagrant Story releases on the Playstation Network today, and I thought this would be a perfect time to re-post Matt Kish’s fantastic piece from his Best Games of All Time Series on the magnificence of Vagrant Story.
I for one am excited to finally play this gem.
- Kyle
Remember Vagrant Story? No? Well, you’re not alone. To me, it always seemed like hardly anyone remembers this gem and even fewer people played it. In fact, other than some guy I used to work with named Justin, I can’t recall ever talking to another gamer who had played Vagrant Story. Which is a shame actually, because it’s a remarkably deep, complex, challenging, and unique RPG.
I will admit, I came to videogames rather late in life and played my first RPG, Final Fantasy VII, well after its initial debut on the PlayStation. I was actually such a novice to the concept of a videogame RPG that the first time I attempted FFVII, I played for around 90 minutes and gave up in disgust, turned off by the complexity of the game and what I perceived as the scarcity of save points. Fortunately, I had a change of heart later on, approached the game with a new mindset, and found myself emotionally affected by the world of “Gaia” and its people in a way that no videogame had ever done before.
Playing FFVII was a powerful and extremely challenging thing for me. Due to my profound lack of experience and skill with the RPG genre, I actually clocked in nearly 100 hours playing the game, and that was just me sort of fumbling my way through trying to figure things out, not me trying to breed every color of chocobo and find every last piece of material. After it was over, I felt like I couldn’t touch a PlayStation for a little while, simply to let the experience settle in. But like any good addiction, within a few months I found myself hungering for the same kind of immersive narrative experience I had with FFVII.
I really didn’t know much at all about games or the companies that made them, I just new that the maker of FFVII was a company called (at the time) Squaresoft and that they seemed to have a pretty good reputation. This was around 2000 or so and I was working in a bookstore at this time, so I started looking through some of the videogame magazines to see if I could find something similar to FFVII. I noticed that something called Vagrant Story was the next RPG offering from Squaresoft and the reviews were good so I headed off to Toys R Us to pick up a copy of my second RPG ever.
Well, I was in for a shock. I knew from the article I read in the magazine that Vagrant Story would look quite a bit different from FFVII, but I wasn’t at all prepared for just how different the game would be from top to bottom. Strangely though, in spite of my initially poor first impressions of FFVII I found myself almost instantly intrigued by and drawn into Vagrant Story.
The most immediately noticeable difference was the overall design of the game. Gone were Squaresoft’s cutesy superdeformed big-headed little sprites, and in their place were fairly realistic looking men and women. The graphics were definitely a bit jaggy, but given the technological limitations of the PlayStation, this wasn’t an issue at the time. Interestingly, instead of “speaking” in those generic instant-messenger type text boxes that appeared in just about every videogame on the planet, the characters in Vagrant Story spoke in what looked very much like comic book speech bubbles. It’s a small detail, but one which right away sets the aesthetic of the game apart from previous RPGs and somehow makes the action, even in the cut scenes, seem more immediate.
The second huge difference, and one that made a profound impact on me as a novice gamer, was that in spite of Vagrant Story being a fantasy RPG, you play as a single character for almost the entire game. Other than a few occasions, there is no party system at all and the player can’t rely on anything but his own skill and wits to survive the horrors of Lea Monde. The entire game is pervaded by this sense of isolation and, at times, loneliness. Combined with a stunningly beautiful soundtrack which, other than a few pieces of almost ambient music, is comprised primarily of dripping water, the sounds of crumbling stones, the skittering of rats, and the occasional ghostly groan, the game was at times deliciously creepy.
While games like Final Fantasy VII, among others, took place in visually dazzling and far-fetched fantasy worlds, the Kingdom of Valendia and the haunted city of Lea Monde, the settings of Vagrant Story, seemed as if they were drawn straight from the history of Medieval Europe. There was such a sense of realism to the game that again I almost felt like I was re-living an episode of history and not playing through some completely imaginary saga.
Instead of relying on unbelievable and fantastic designs for set-pieces and environments, the designers filled the city of Lea Monde with shadows, dusty wooden crates, crumbling brick walls, rusty gates, and all the trappings you would expect to find in a disintegrating European castle. Rather than being strangely lit with bizarre tones and glows, something I could never quite understand in games like FFVII, you could almost smell the mold and sneeze on the dust implied by the dank cellars, dripping underground tunnels, and damp subterranean riverbanks of Lea Monde. Even now, almost a decade later, Vagrant Story, in spite of the graphics limitations, stands out as one of the most powerful videogame environments I have ever experienced.
Even the bestiary seemed almost real. While I love chocobos, flan, malboros, cactuars, and tonberries as much as the next gamer, they are all pretty preposterous creatures and stretch believability a bit. I mean, a cactus with a mustache? A living dessert with an attack called “fat press?” Hmmmm. But in Vagrant Story, the creatures are again drawn straight from the folk takes and ghost stories of Europe. You fight through catacombs filled with shuffling skeletal warriors clad in rotting armor swinging rusty swords. You square off against decaying ghouls rising from half-buried coffins in decrepit crypts and mausoleums. One of my favorite creatures is the dullahan, a monster which has appeared in scores of videogames but rarely been as realistic of frightening as it is in Vagrant Story. A huge shambling figure covered with armor, headless and helmetless, stalking the player slowly but terrifyingly through the underground passages of the haunted city. The real dullahan is a creature from Irish fairy tales, a type of headless horseman and a harbinger of death.
Even the dragons, obviously some of the largest and most challenging creatures and bosses in the game, eschew the theatrics of Squaresoft’s Bahamuts and look for all the world like something drawn from a child’s book of myths and ghost stories. They look so real, so familiar, that the player has no problem feeling as if they truly are real, and this can of course make for some real thrills when fighting these colossal beasts. You really do worry, just for a second, about your own scorched flesh.
Since this was truly the second RPG I had ever played, I had no idea at the time of how important game mechanics such as combat systems could be. My only experience to this point was the turn-based battle systems and material of Final Fantasy VII and that seemed to work out just fine. Vagrant Story, in spite of only dealing with a single character, adds a level of depth and complexity that every combat, even with the lowliest ghoul, becomes interesting. The main character, named Ashley Riot, is what is called a Riskbreaker or a sort of super-soldier for the Kingdom of Valendia. Upon encountering an enemy, the game shifts to battle mode and a wire-sphere opens allowing the player to decide where to hit the enemy. Each part of the enemy’s body is assigned a different percentage of success and damage rate based on the player’s skill and distance from the character. For example, hitting an enemy in the head does greater damage but is more difficult to succeed at since the head is smaller and may be farther from the player’s sword than say the enemy’s chest or leg. It sounds pretty basic, and I believe other games have used something similar since, but at the time this kind of combat really blew me away.
The most intriguing aspect of combat is Risk and chaining. By pressing certain buttons at just the right times during combat, the player can effectively chain multiple attacks together doing greater and greater damage. The downside to this though is that as more and more attacks are chained, the players Risk percentage rises. A startlingly realistic idea, Risks represents all the natural things that would happen to any of us in combat. Rising heartbeat, greater fatigue, surge of adrenaline, fragmented concentration, spikes in stress…as these increase, Risk increases and the characters attacks are adversely affected. Combat becomes less accurate, the player is more likely to miss, damage is sometimes lessened. Every fight becomes a balancing act between chaining attacks together for damage and managing the level of Risk and stress that the character is enduring.
I could go on and on about this game, but I’ll stop here and encourage you all to go out and play it. Nine years after its debut, the graphics in Vagrant Story certainly appear dated and at times crude, but the design of the game, the aesthetics of the game experience, and above all the storyline, which is amazingly deep, complex, and full of the twists and turns that Squaresoft has become so well known for, simply astound. Vagrant Story is a criminally underappreciated classic of early RPGs and well worth the investment of time and money.
- Matt