Vagrant Story

"Uh oh, this typing is making my risk go up"

As you have undoubtedly heard Vagrnat Story's hero is traditional Square fare; a young man, with interesting hairstyle, who's stoic nature is simply a cover for all of his inner turmoil (a trait I don't think I'll ever tire of). This hero, named Ashley Riot delves into the depths of the deserted city Lea Monde, in order to recover the son of a powerful political figure who had been carted away while Ashley watched helplessly. Oh, if you are wondering this is a massive oversimplifacation of the story that involves a wacked out cult-leader, nightmares from the past, political manipulations, religious commentary, and more of the decidedly good stuff. Yep, the story that is told in something of a comic book style (word balloons and all with no voice acting, thank goodness) is a true gem. Can Square go wrong when dealing with such good source material? Unfortunately yes...

Lea Monde, being a deserted city, is not a bustling metropolitan centre, go figure. The city consists of a few above ground street areas, with little interaction (note that one, you'll hear it again) and a lot of underground areas with little interaction (told you so). Graphically these enviroments are rather dark but very pleasing. Beautiful details exist every where, from the corpse-slots in the walls, to the sarcofigi on the floors, to the shelves of who knows what that exist just to make navigation difficult. Bleak atmospheres call for creepy creatures and VS delivers them in spades with oodles of ghosts, zombies, fire-breathing dogs, religious zealot knights, etc. Thankfully all of these creatures, and Ashley, look just as good as the environments they inhabit, even if they would not look that great should they decide to venture into Soul Caliburs neighbourhood. What did I tell you to remeber now? Interactivity, yup, good job. Despite the fact that the world of VS is fully polygonal you will have to settle with the Final Fantasy 7&8 policy of having treasure chests, puzzle boxes, doors, and the odd trap being just about the only targets for your greedy little fingers. Wow, look at all those shelves with stuff clearly sitting on them... forget it. How about opening those coffins? Nuh uh. Remeber back in Final Fantasy 6 where you could interact with teapots, barrels, clocks, fireplaces, and a ton of other things? I thought so.

Battles take place in psuedo real-time in the same boxy and beautiful environments in which exploration occurs, which makes the game flow quite nicely. Wait a second, it would make the game flow nicely if you didn't have the lame-o risk system. I can see how you would want to keep people from abusing the game's relatively easy to master chain system and stringing together endless strings until the target is dead, but the risk system was implemented in a very bad way. This is combat and you might want to attack right? Well just attacking makes your risk go up faster than it goes down so you can't attack to often. Want to tack on a second hit after every attack? Is that the thermometer in August? Nope, it's just your risk meter. Forget about attacking, I'll just stick to an occasional poke and spend more time defending. Sorry, but defending raises your risk meter too. Oh boy, and once your risk meter gets above about 30/100 on any reasonably strong enemy your attacks will miss about half of the time. Speaking of tough enemies it can certainly be said that the early bosses in VS are very tough and will take a ton of time and items to kill if you have not seasoned and built your weapons appropriately. Of course you can expect to see the same ol Square problem on the later bosses where one strategy works no matter who they are as long as you have the right equipment.

I'm sure that you have heard about being able to construct different weapons in VS, along with being able to build their ''blades'' up to deal with certain enemy types. Weapon selection is not that large but there are quite a few different metals that you can make the weapons from, which opens up more of a tiered system than in most games. You will have to spend a lot ot time tinkering around in the workshops because there are a myriad of ways you can prepare for enemies (and, ultimately, still have weapons that can do more than 2 hp damage to the bosses) such as the prepping for a certain type like beast, undead, dragon, etc. but also prepping for edge weaknesses like edged, blunt, and piercing. Nope, you can't just run around stabbing everything with your sword.

For the most part Vagrant Story has some great ideas that are hampered by poor execution. Atmospherically this games beats every survival horror game since the demented police station in RE2 hands down with its stark yet beautiful soundtrack and the darkly realistic underground enviroments. Using a system such as the risk system to limit the chain attacks is good, but should have been thought out a lot more. Tinkering with weapons is fun but why couldn't there be a one screen system that incorporated the storage box, equipping, etc. so you wouldn't have to flip around so much and wait for the mem. card to load the storage box all the time. I loved the box puzzles though and, like it or not, the game does breathe some new life into the world of adventure games (can you say ''bye, bye Zelda''). Be sure to rent Vagrant Story before you buy it, you might be able to put up with the shortcomings but don't bet on it.


Gameplay: 7/10
Play: 5/10
Innovation: 8/10
Presentation: 9/10
Audio: 9/10
Visual: 9/10
Value: 7/10
Overall: 7/10

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 07/10/00, Updated 07/10/00