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
Samus is the Batman of Nintendo
A funny thing’s been happening to me. For the last year, I’ve been working pretty hard, every single night, on an art project. I also have a full time job and a commute that takes me 90 minutes, one way. I don’t have much time at all for anything else, from seeing friends to playing videogames. So in this last 12 months, I’ve only played 3 games for more than an hour or two. These games are Super Mario Galaxy, Super Mario Galaxy 2, and the new Metroid: Other M. And the differences couldn’t be more profound.
Bear with me for a minute. When I was younger, I read lots and lots of comic books. Comics of all kinds, really. X-Men. The Fantastic Four. Hellboy. Batman. I loved ‘em. But after years of this (I won’t say “after I grew up” because I was reading these as a child, teenager, and an adult) I just got bored. I felt like I was reading the same stories, over and over and over and over again. Wow, Batman is fighting the Joker! For the 815th time! Only this time there’s a new artist and digital coloring! Yay! It seemed to me that the problem was not that the possibilities had been exhausted. There were lots and lots of great Batman stories that could have been written. The issue was the status quo. Nothing changed. Nothing COULD change. Despite minor changes here and there, Batman would always be Bruce Wayne, millionaire playboy whose parents were murdered in front of his eyes when he was a child and who had sworn vengeance on the criminal underworld. From the safety of his Batcave he would use his riches, his vast intelligence, and his array of gadgets to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. Blah blah blah. By now, the only people reading Batman comics are those hardcore comic geeks, generally a steadily shrinking audience of white men in their 30s and 40s with far too much disposable income and presumably little desire to have meaningful conversations with women. And because that’s the audience for Batman, that is who the comics cater to.
Batman doesn’t change. Batman can’t change. Today’s Batman story is the same as a Batman story from 1999 and it will be same in 2019. And I’m starting to notice the same thing in some videogames. Metroid is a depressing example.
See, we now know that in every single Metroid game, Samus will lose the full capabilities of her suit and spend most of the game steadily finding / unlocking things like the morph ball, the power bomb, the grapple beam, or whatever. She’ll also explore a vast alien environment, endlessly revisiting the same areas to go through that door that needed missiles to open, but she didn’t have them yet. In the end, she’ll face off against some dire alien menace, beat it just barely, escape into space, and ponder the mysteries of what just happened. The only things that change are the graphics, the point of view, and to a very slight degree, the game mechanics. Only those don’t even ever change all that much because Samus will always shoot, always curl up in a morph ball, always drop bombs, and so on. It just looks different with each game. Slightly different.
It’s been a while since the designers at Nintendo created a Metroid game of their own, and it shows. The Metroid games don’t change. The Metroid games CAN’T change. They have to keep rewarding the same buyers over and over again by giving them exactly what they want. But where is the innovation? Where are the risks? Is there truly nothing more that can be done with Samus?
The Super Mario games, particularly Super Mario Galaxy, are a fantastic example of a design team willing to break with continuity and truly innovate. Admittedly, Super Mario Galaxy 2 is nearly identical to Super Mario Galaxy 1, but compare the Galaxy games to Super Mario Sunshine, or Super Mario 64, or Super Mario Bros. 2. Each one of those games utilizes the capabilities of their respective consoles in exciting ways, yes. But what makes the Mario games so delightful, for regular gamers and newer players, is that the designers refuse to follow the slavish dictates of the continuity of the “in-game universe.” It seems like each and every Mario game is a brand new start. Sure, he’s going to rescue the Princess but characters appear and re-appear in different configurations each time. In Super Mario Galaxy, Bowser wants to make his own universe and he doesn’t care if he destroys the old one to do so. In Super Paper Mario, Bowser fights alongside Mario, Luigi and the Princess against Count Bleck. It doesn’t matter that this would seem to be at odds with what has happened in other Mario games. The emphasis is on the game play, and more importantly, on fun rather than on making sure that the events of the game can somehow be squeezed into the chronology of the pre-existing games. I don’t know how many articles I’ve read about Metroid: Other M that begin with some variation of “Taking place shortly after the events of Super Metroid…” What does that really matter? Why is it such an important selling point? Who is that information really targeted at, the hardcore gamer or the average person?
As you can guess, Metroid: Other M has been a disappointment. I am finding myself thinking some of the same thoughts about most videogames, especially the big franchises like Final Fantasy and Zelda, as I was about comics several years when I basically stopped buying and reading them entirely. Console games are boring now. The big franchises are such important intellectual properties that nothing will ever again change. Think about it. What’s REALLY next for Samus? What will the Metroid game of 2020 bring us? Incredibly innovative story and game play? Fun? Entertainment? Or…Samus exploring a vast alien environment steadily unlocking abilities such as the morph ball, the power beam and the grappling beam, on her way to a brutal duel with a huge and terrifying alien entity that she will barely survive? And the answer is probably much the same for Final Fantasy, for Zelda, for Castlevania, for Halo, and on and on and on…
It’s disappointing really. But at least I have Mario. And for that I am thankful.
Hello my name is…
It’s hard for some gamers to remember a time when every shred of information about a video game and all of its secrets wasn’t easily available online. I’m kind of an old guy though, having been given an Atari 2600 right around the time they were new, in 1978, so I remember when information about a game was as precious as gold.
My brothers and I spent a ton of time with our Nintendo Entertainment System and even though we kept all of our game cartridges (ha!) in more or less good condition, the boxes they came and any instruction booklets were generally lost within minutes. Because of that, unless there were names given in text on the screen while playing the game, we forget or never even knew the names of just about every character in every game we ever played.
So we did what lots of kids do and made them up.
“Metroid” won the lion’s share of made-up names, but here are five of my favorites from those long ago years of gaming fun.
5. “Mac Gargan”
Years later I discovered that this guy, from the probably totally forgotten game “Trojan,” was really named Armadillon. Which I guess makes sense in retrospect because he curled up in a ball and rolled around the room trying to kill you. But we thought he looked a lot like the Spider-Man villain Scorpion, whose real name was Mac Gargan, which was much cooler AND much dumber sounding than Scorpion. So that’s what we called him. A lot, actually, since Armadillon was a pain in the ass to beat.
4. “Creampuff”
I actually don’t know precisely why we came up with this name for the boss Eruga from the first “Rygar.” For some reason, the upside-down cone shaped body and creamy white heads made us think of sweet treats. I think this boss’s name was actually on screen at some point in the game, but that didn’t matter, we called him Creampuff anyway. In a related note, we had a friend who constantly called him “The Hideous Eruga Monster” which never made much sense either.
3. “Pinguins”
No one ever knew what ANYTHING in “Kid Icarus” was called, other than the Eggplant Wizards and Medusa, so we made up all sorts of names. I think these things are actually supposed to be snakes, or winged snakes, or something, but we thought they looked like penguins and we pronounced it the way our grandmother did, which was “PINguins.” But man, “Kid Icarus” really ruled!
2. “Devil Dinosaur”
Kind of obvious, I know, but that’s what we called this tyrannosaurus boss from “Karnov,” again because of the Marvel Comics character of the same name. What? You didn’t know Marvel had a comic in the 1970s about a giant red dinosaur and his hairy little friend Moon Boy?
However, this one is notable for another reason. I am the oldest of my brothers, and my middle brother, who was quite a decent gamer despite his young years, sometimes had problems remembering longer titles and names. “Karnov” was subtitled “Karnov, the Fire Breathing Russian” or something like that. It must have appeared on the title screen or in the one glimpse we got of the instruction book or something. Only my brother could never remember that, or even the name Karnov, so he constantly called this game “Conan the Russian Eater.” Awesomeness.
1. “Sand Ass”
Nowadays, I know the names of just about everything in every game I play. And even though I made up all sorts of names for these classic NES games as a kid, today I call them by their real names. Armadillon. Eruga. You get it.
But this one here, even today, I still call by the name Sand Ass. I am speaking of the Yellow Devil from the very first “Mega Man.” Why Sand Ass? Because of the way he would stream like sand across the screen, from right to left, over and over and over again, killing you every time while you were fighting him. And why, today, is he still Sand Ass? Because I fought this thing, honestly, about 8 million times as a kid. And beat him maybe three or four times. So I have had A LOT of time think about old Sand Ass here. And he will forever be Sand Ass to me.
- Matt
Good Game Get! Grappling Hook
Any gamer that has spent some time with Nintendo’s fabled “Metroid” franchise will be quite familiar with the illustrious grappling hook. SpeedRun Games has taken the concept of first-person puzzle-solving using this device in some intriguing new directions with their new game “Grappling Hook.”
A quick and easy purchase via download, currently available only for PC users but with Mac and Linux versions promised for the near future, “Grappling Hook” is a bit of a rarity in that it is an action-packed first person puzzler, combining elements of platforming, shooting, and exploration in a slick decidedly science fiction-heavy arena. The graphics are clean, attractive and exceptionally well done, and after a short introductory “message” from the supposed creators of the strange puzzle arena, the feeling of being imprisoned in some strange other-dimensional space fortress seems very real. The presence of a subtle and nearly ambient but well-executed electronic soundtrack certainly adds to the experience.
“Grappling Hook” rather gently ushers the new player into an escalating series of challenges with a few simple challenges and check points designed to convey all of the necessary information on how to move, jump, explore, find, and most importantly, escape. These tutorials are a necessary evil in most games, especially those that come without the benefit of a print booklet, but the way these tutorials are integrated into the environment is often tricky. The artificial nature of the “Grappling Hook” world, a series of puzzle arenas in outer space, lends itself well to the conceit of being provided hints and guidance from an invisible technological benefactor, but the execution is another matter and unfortunately the simple floating exclamation marks that the player moves through to trigger, and the basic, almost pop-up windows of text did seem a bit rushed. Occasionally, the actual text itself was strangely hard to understand, such as the line “Stop hooking in flight and fly far” which actually means to release the grappling hook beam while you are being pulled and to let your momentum carry you farther. While this may seem a small point to the casual player, the attention to even these smallest of details can do a great deal to enhance the overall gaming experience.
Aesthetics aside, the vast majority of the puzzle environments are incredibly well done and the challenges ramp up to an almost fiendishly difficult level relatively quickly. Intuitive clues and game mechanics allow even the most novice player to quickly grasp the nature of the goal (escape!) and how to do this. Combining simple keyboard commands that any computer gamer knows well – arrows to move, spacebar to jump, etc. – the player is soon moving through the maze with ease. Looking around is accomplished rather seamlessly through the motion of the mouse, although adapting to using the spacebar and 4 arrow keys with the left hand and a mouse with the right can take some getting used to. This became especially difficult during the platform jumping sequences, requiring me to actually switch hands or leave the mouse and use the keyboard with both. While I was desperately wishing for some better alternative to looking and moving, I’m really not sure what SpeedRun could have done differently here for computer users, most of whom do not have the luxury of playing with a controller or joystick. While movement, jumping, and looking got easier with practice, I was left wondering whetherSpeedRun had tried to fit too much into the control scheme and whether the learning curve might put off some gamers with less time to devote to simply learning how to get through the game areas.
For those with the time and patience to master the control scheme, “Grappling Hook” offers a series of 22 puzzles full of cold silver metal walls, electrified grids, moving blocks, glowing orange bits of code that must be found and “assembled” to activate the escape teleporter, bright green grappling hook targets, towering shafts, dizzying vistas, dazzling starscapes, and vertigo-inducing spaces. It is easy, and wonderfully so, to become almost completely disoriented at times within the game, and this only adds to the maddeningly difficult puzzles the player must try to navigate through. “Grappling Hook” is definitely not a game for the easily discouraged gamer, but like the best of challenges, once the player finally figures out how to work their way through some particularly gnarly sequence of disappearing platforms, electric floors, and cunningly spaced grappling hook targets, the thrill is its own reward.
Perhaps the only real downside to the game is how challenging some of the puzzles can be. A few of the platform jumps require almost impossible timing, and given the nature of the player’s movement – by pressing the arrows on the keyboard – it can be quite frustrating to keep falling from a ledge the player means to jump from instead. Again, the use of a joystick or controller would have mitigated this somewhat, but in a game titled “Grappling Hook,” perhaps there should have been more emphasis on that kind of movement over the kind of precision jumping usually reserved for strict platformers.
All told, “Grappling Hook” is a nicely done, beautiful, and incredibly difficult puzzler that will definitely sate the cravings of the hardcore gaming crowd but may prove a bit too frustrating for the less active gamer. The few rough edges are easily overlooked by those hungry for new challenges and with a little more time and polish, I expect even bigger and better things from future SpeedRun Games releases.
- Matt
Why We Just Might Be On To Something Here At GGG!
Before you read this piece, go here and read that one by Dave McCarthy. It’s important. I’ll wait.
Back? Good. That was a pretty great piece, wasn’t it? He makes an awful lot of really good points, some of which I will repeat here.
Kyle was ragging on Joystiq a bit ago and after looking at that site I couldn’t agree more. There’s an awful lot of tremendously exciting stuff going on the world of games, and so much of what’s truly new, innovative, unique, and exciting is completely ignored by what passes for “game journalism” these days. Sadly, a lot of this kind of writing is driven by that double-edged sword so common on web sites…chasing hits and advertising revenue.
For sites like Joystiq and I suppose many others, it’s important to attract as many hits as possible so that the site can earn more and more advertising revenue and, theoretically, develop into a better and better site. But the problem, the really huge problem, is that when you’re just chasing site hits, you’re catering to the lowest common denominator of what the average internet surfer really wants. And, as McCarthy fearlessly put it in his piece, “…most people are interested in bad things.”
So in order to generate as many hits as possible, earn as much advertising revenue as possible, and become the “best” or the “biggest” game site or blog out there, you basically have to fill your site with content about “bad things.”
Like what, you ask? Well, do a Google search for articles about any of the Halo games. Or Call Of Duty. Or God Of War. Or Gears Of War. Fuck, even those two titles are almost identical. Anyway, after you do that, then do some Google searches for games like PixelJunk: Monsters. Or Everyday Shooter. Or The Majesty Of Color. Or I Made This, You Play This, We Are Enemies. The numbers will be much much much smaller.
I know, it’s dangerous to equate popularity with quality one way or the other. Just because a game sells a lot of copies doesn’t mean it’s good. Nor does that mean that it’s bad. But again, McCarthy puts it best when he writes “I don’t think I’ve ever read anything interesting about God of War, or the Halo sequels, and what has Resistance ever contributed to the sum of humanity? I would rather read about why a bad game is interesting than another sixteen-page mind-numbing epic about how many different ways you can shoot someone in one of these bland, by-the-numbers borefests.” And THAT is what makes games like Halo or Gears Of War or Call Of Duty so excruciatingly bad. They are clumsy, indistinguishable, “by-the-numbers borefests” with little to offer beyond new weapons and minor enhancements on the type of nauseatingly dull gameplay that’s been done to death for years now. And yet…and yet…that is what generates hits.
We here at GGG might not get the most hits or the most attention and we don’t get any advertising revenue at all (thank God) but that keeps us honest. It keeps us writing about the kinds of games and art and stuff that we really truly like and enjoy. It’s a small slice of honesty and reality in an internet landscape dominated more and more by slickness, ulterior motives, astroturfing, marketing, branding, co-opting, hipsterism, hits and dollars but here we are and there are lots and lots and LOTS of other little gems out there too. You just have to know where to look. Although if you’re reading this post you probably already know that, and both Kyle and I are really thankful you’re here!
- Matt