Vagrant Story

"A hard and rewarding challenge"

I found this game to be an incredibly challenging, immensely rewarding experience. While at some times it may seem too hard, patience and practice while soon have you advancing to the next area.

The basic story is that you, Ashley Riot, are a VKP, a member of an order of knights. Since the death of your family you have joined the Riskbreaker section of the VKP, a high-mortality group that only works on the most difficult and dangerous of missions. Your current mission is to investigate the death of the Baron...of course that is only the beginning. From there you will come across undead monsters, haunted cities and temples, corrupt church officials seeking 'True Immortality' and more...

The story is very in depth, and many times I found myself shrieking 'Oh my God!' really loudly (I do this when I get surprised by a game twist), which is certainly a good thing. A nice touch is that the game has no true hero-character. Ashley Riot is not a happy person, and is plagued by dark dreams and darker deeds. The other 5 or 6 main characters are just as unhappy and not very nice at all. While the main bad guy is Sydney, the other 'good guys' are really not very good at all...

Ashley Riot is the only playable character in this game, and as such has quite an arsenal of special attacks and moves. The most common of these is 'chains'. Basically, you assign certain chain abilities - such as healing abilities, extra damage, elemental-damage etc - to a button on your controller and when you attack and your weapon connects with the enemy, if you press the button correctly, you follow it up with the chain ability. You can theoretically chain attacks forever, but so far my best score has been 27. The chain attacks get progressively more effective as you continue chaining.

The game has no experience points as such, rather as you do more chain attacks you learn more chain abilities, and after you kill a set number of enemies, you learn more special attacks, which cost a certain number of health points to use.

Magic is learnt from grimoires, and encompass the standard healing, elemental-attack, elemental-defence and so forth.

The graphics are nice, though primarily brown, even in the forest area. The camera is fully rotatable on 8 degrees of view, though sometimes the camera gets a little tricky in narrow rooms. There are quite a few puzzles present in the game, though thankfully there is an option to turn them on or off if you have already completed them once. Most of them are not too difficult, though there are a couple of doozies.

The game has a few little hidden areas, and is quite rewarding for those who like to spend their time finding every little secret. It is quite fun checking the Title section to see just how many nifty little things you have accomplished.

For the most part the game is solid. The storyline is awesome and full of surprises, but the often drab engine and somewhat short quest make it not quite as good as it could have been. Still quite an enjoyable romp however, and I recommend it to anyone who is a fan of Squaresoft's game (everybody right??) though it is quite different from Final Fantasy

7/10

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 05/10/01, Updated 07/31/02