Here's my thing: I'm the Rick Astley of JRPGs. I never give them up no matter how much they may be letting me down. My 'played' page has its share of RPGs that I absolutely detested but soldiered through anyway, through a mix of Fear Of Missing Out and feeling like I need to have experienced the entirety of an experience to judge it properly, with a bit of Plain Old Fashioned Stubbornness thrown in.
I started playing Vagrant Story on the back of my fifth playthrough of Final Fantasy Tactics (gotta set it up with the Ivalice connection), and was immediately awestruck by the gorgeous graphics that pushed the PSX to its absolute limits, the stellar translation that was sorely lacking from FFT, and the near-perfect cinematic quality that seemed to be the platonic ideal that earlier Square titles like FF6 were striving for. Never would I have imagined that this was the game that would break me!
This game has mechanics on top of systems on top of subsystems; I've played games with obtuse mechanics before, but Vagrant Story is particularly bad at teaching you how to play it. I'm aware that there is an in-game manual, but it's way too much information and the game's early stages don't push you to learn the mechanics in an organic way. The idea of a pure dungeon-crawler with no shops and the only tools at your disposal being what you find and what you craft is sound, but again the crafting mechanics are so obtuse and so irreversible that you can so easily hose yourself at any point with poor crafting decisions and end up in a situation where none of your tools work. And equipment is so influential to the point that it stifles strategy - you either have the right equipment and steamroll the enemy or don't have the right equipment and get stuck poking at a mook for ten minutes.
But the aspect of this game that really made me bounce off it was how soul-crushingly tedious it was. Yes, the load times and spell animations are inexcusably long, and yes, there is endless menu-hopping to be done to change your setup every time you meet a new enemy. But it goes a lot deeper than that: the totally-unnecessary limited inventory necessitated an storage box system which is of course extremely tedious to navigate and which you also inexplicably have to save every time you use. Even something as simple as getting your bearings takes way too much time to do because you need to enter the map menu in order to see the compass directions! This tedium bled over into the bread and butter of the combat as well, with the Risk Bar increasing whenever you attacked, forcing you to either use consumable items to bring it down (which remember, you can't buy because there are no shops), or.... to wait until it goes down on its own.
I really wanted to love this game, but in the space of a week I dropped it three times, talked myself into giving it another chance three times, and realized on my fourth attempt that I was at 20% map completion and completely burnt out, and I just brought out the white flag.
There is absolutely plenty to love in here. Depending on what you value in your RPG experience and your level of tolerance for specific types of bullshit, this game could very well be one of the best games you play, and justifiably so. As such, this is probably the only 1.5-rated game on my list that I would recommend every RPG fan at least give a fair shot!
I started playing Vagrant Story on the back of my fifth playthrough of Final Fantasy Tactics (gotta set it up with the Ivalice connection), and was immediately awestruck by the gorgeous graphics that pushed the PSX to its absolute limits, the stellar translation that was sorely lacking from FFT, and the near-perfect cinematic quality that seemed to be the platonic ideal that earlier Square titles like FF6 were striving for. Never would I have imagined that this was the game that would break me!
This game has mechanics on top of systems on top of subsystems; I've played games with obtuse mechanics before, but Vagrant Story is particularly bad at teaching you how to play it. I'm aware that there is an in-game manual, but it's way too much information and the game's early stages don't push you to learn the mechanics in an organic way. The idea of a pure dungeon-crawler with no shops and the only tools at your disposal being what you find and what you craft is sound, but again the crafting mechanics are so obtuse and so irreversible that you can so easily hose yourself at any point with poor crafting decisions and end up in a situation where none of your tools work. And equipment is so influential to the point that it stifles strategy - you either have the right equipment and steamroll the enemy or don't have the right equipment and get stuck poking at a mook for ten minutes.
But the aspect of this game that really made me bounce off it was how soul-crushingly tedious it was. Yes, the load times and spell animations are inexcusably long, and yes, there is endless menu-hopping to be done to change your setup every time you meet a new enemy. But it goes a lot deeper than that: the totally-unnecessary limited inventory necessitated an storage box system which is of course extremely tedious to navigate and which you also inexplicably have to save every time you use. Even something as simple as getting your bearings takes way too much time to do because you need to enter the map menu in order to see the compass directions! This tedium bled over into the bread and butter of the combat as well, with the Risk Bar increasing whenever you attacked, forcing you to either use consumable items to bring it down (which remember, you can't buy because there are no shops), or.... to wait until it goes down on its own.
I really wanted to love this game, but in the space of a week I dropped it three times, talked myself into giving it another chance three times, and realized on my fourth attempt that I was at 20% map completion and completely burnt out, and I just brought out the white flag.
There is absolutely plenty to love in here. Depending on what you value in your RPG experience and your level of tolerance for specific types of bullshit, this game could very well be one of the best games you play, and justifiably so. As such, this is probably the only 1.5-rated game on my list that I would recommend every RPG fan at least give a fair shot!
5 Comments
I finished this game 12 times with about 1500 hours in playtime. Its one of my all time favorite games and I disagree with your view on it, but not necessarily the words you wrote as you're not wrong. It does teach you to play it badly, it is very obtuse, but despite that I love everything about it.
I beat the hardest boss in the game in two punches with nothing equipped by the end due to my ng+ runs lmao.
I beat the hardest boss in the game in two punches with nothing equipped by the end due to my ng+ runs lmao.
Yeah I can definitely see that this game experience would get better and better the more about its mechanics I learn (and the more bonuses I pick up on successive runs). I'm just not feeling it right now but I might still come back to it later!
Legit filtered
This is a good review, but it's the Rick Astley reference that cements it as a great one.
Shenobi
2 years ago