Vagrant Story

"What an Incredible Game"

Square scores again with another incredible game. Vagrant Story, receiving a perfect score from the highly respected magazine of Famitsu, became the first Playstation game to get a perfect score. I couldn’t wait for this game to come out, and when it did, I couldn’t believe how great this game can be.

Graphics: 9.5/10- Although not a prefect score, the graphics are great. Just sit back and watch the intro. FMV of this game. Just incredible. The characters even have facial expressions when they talk (well they don’t talk, they got those bubbles like cartoon characters). Almost looks too real.

Audio: 9.5/10- Again, not perfect, but still the music is wonderful. The sound effects of this game are great too. You can hear echoing moans of monsters lurking in the background. You can hear your footsteps touch the ground step by step. Your weapon slashing threw your enemy. One little thing that I figured out is that when you get to a room with a boss, the music stops and that’s when you know something is wrong. The music also changes when you go in-between levels. The boss music is great also. Nothing is wrong with the music and sound effects here.

Gameplay: 10/10-Perfect. Using a little bit of Parasite Eve’s gameplay, Vagrant Story tweaks it up, and makes it better than ever. Although very complicated at first, Vagrant Story uses more than just Strength for their weapons and Defense for their Armor. The weapons system is based on a lot of things. First off, every weapon has something called DP, or damage points. As long as your weapon has DP, you’re fine. But DP lowers when you use your weapon in battle. If DP goes to 0, you might as well be fighting with your hands because your weapons dramatically drop in all stats. Although you lose DP when you use your weapon, you gain PP, or Phantom Points, when you use your weapon. When PP reaches its max, your weapon dramatically grows in all stats. So in other words, if you have your DP and PP high, you have a great weapon. That’s not all. Weapons can increase their strength on a separate class (human, dragon, beast, undead, phantom, evil), and affinity (physical, earth, air, fire, water, light, dark). But it all depends on what you attack and what attacks you. It sounds very confusing at first, but you will get the hang of it when you start playing the game. I suggest reading the manual the game left for you; it’s a lifesaver on everything the game has. It’s a great guide for very confusing things like weapon/armor building. I’m not going to talk about weapon building because it will take forever, and probably will be too confusing. It took me a while to figure it out.
So with this very detailed weapon/armor system, what else can Vagrant story do? Well when you draw your weapon and get ready for battle, it’s up to you on what to do. You can specifically attack a body part for you enemy’s body. An enemy can attack a specific part of your body and when that specific part gets wounded bad, you can get status changes. You can do chain combos, which is probably the coolest thing in the game. My record is 18, so if you think it’s hard, it’s not really that hard. Just keep practicing. Chains bring up the topic of Risk, which is when you have high Risk, your chances of hitting your enemy are low, but raises your chances for a critical hit. See for yourself. Try scanning a character with 0 risk and you can see the chances you have to hit him (80-100%). Now try it with 50 or more risk. You’ll see what I mean. You can also do something-called Break Arts, where you sacrifice your own HP to do a devastating attack to blow your enemy away. You can parry enemy attacks to either reflect, reduce, or absorb damage. Physical and Elemental. You can choose who to battle, and when to attack. No more ATB (active time battle) from the Final Fantasy series. So you see, from what I said, this is perfect gameplay.

Control: 10/10- Great control. All the controls easily responsive. Pressing the button for a chain or a parry is perfect if you get it in the right time. Nothing bad here.

Replay: 8/10: Too bad this game doesn’t last that long. I just finished the game the first time, and it took me 20 hours, and I took my time. Now all I’m trying to do is find the rest of the map. After finding the rest of the map, you pretty much did everything in this game. So enjoy this game while it lasts.

This game is definitely a game that you should buy. This isn’t a game where you can rent and beat. This is a game that you should take your time on. I personally think that this is my favorite non-traditional RPG of all time. Mixing everything into one game was just a wonderful idea. The only problem that this game has is that the magic/item casting was a little slow, but then not too slow. The game was also short, and the game was a little too linear. But all the other good things about this game cancel it out, making it one of the best. I want to see if the rest of Square’s line up would be just as good as this game was. In fact in probably would. Buy it now. It’s going to get sold out.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 05/22/00, Updated 05/22/00