Did you know the subtitle of Vagrant Story was The Phantom Pain and it was a prevalent theme of the game 🤔
And we know Kojima knew about Vagrant Story (ignore his superior genes spiel)
Was Kojima inspired by VS so many years later?? 🤔 🤔 🤔
Anyway, I've been replaying Vagrant Story because I am in a retro mood this summer. I haven't replayed this game seriously in a long time because well, it's a very involving game and I end up playing this game for longer than most RPGs I play (I always clock 40 hours on it). I'm mid-way through the replay but I wanted to get a lot of my thoughts out.
First of all, the game is still as beautiful as it gets, everything is absurdly detailed and filled with shapes of all kinds. You can see what they're conveying through immediately, which is even more awesome considering the FFT team did this, all people who were more familiar with 2D than 3D even years into the PS1. I dare say it's the most beautiful game on the PS1, maybe not the most technically impressive, but at least it is from Japan and it has the art direction to match.
The game is still surprising. You spend your first hours in a cave with no music, then you hear some creepy atmospheric music inside the sanctum, you would think the whole game is like that but then you get to the surface and you see a lovely french-styled town that is very bright. That town is FFT if it was fully modeled in 3D. Not only that but you reach areas that are even more surprising, such as the undercity filled with this blue-ish light. It's just constantly amazing and the ability to go into a first-person camera mode to admire everything makes me able to admire all the finer details. What impresses me the most is the lighting, they had to do this by hand and it's incredible how you can see several lights reflecting off the textures. A torch will reflect its light even when there is sunlight, which also reflects off of walls. You end up a mixture of different lights even on the same wall !
The amount of work required must have been staggering but it pays off greatly. One single room can give two wildly different vibes from where you're looking. That's the power of a strong art director like Hiroshi Minagawa, who is now the art director of FFXIV: Shadowbringers, so you know he is still at the top of his class even today.
The cinematography of this game is also equally incredible. Jun Akiyama (who ended up doing the cinematography of KH1, FFXII, and even Versus XIII before it became XV) really outdid himself in this game. The framing, the camera cuts is like an expertly crafted movie. Every shot has meaning and conveys something to the viewer, it's not just there, it has purpose.
Shots like this really makes me speechless of how the scene is constructed. My mind explodes and I end up spending 5 minutes looking at every shot 🤯
Not only that, but speech bubbles becomes an integral part of the cinematography too, they're placed in clever ways to complement the shot. On top of that, EVERY speech bubble is shaped differently. They don't use preset templates, even the bubbles are carefully crafted in terms of size, shape, and to represent the tone and state of mind of the character. Compare the soft shapes of some bubble speeches with some that has hard edges, it conveys a lot of meaning.
The 20-minutes long intro is also a huge feat in itself. The best thign about it is that the music in this intro is dynamic, as in it would seamlessly go to the next phase only when the player decides it. Everything is so well-crafted, and something I especially amazed about is the seamlessness between gameplay and cutscene. In many cutscenes, you will have control of Ashley without a camera cut or a fade to black. It's especially immersive during boss fights, where you get a boss intro and are thrown directly into the fight. By the way, Vagrant Story kinda popularized boss intros and outros in the series. FFXII obviously had it as a successor, and now FFXIV also features boss intros and outros (I don't think FFXI did). Brilliant stuff anyway.
The music of Sakimoto is fantastic. His sounds are VERY similar to Final Fantasy Tactics but the way he uses it is so starkly different. My favourite boss theme (that I linked) is this percussion-heavy daze that is so ominous but also so entrancing. You really get into the fight with this one.
You can't help but notice the music when it is playing. A very dark, brooding atmosphere that has a stronger focus on dissonance rather than harmonious sounds, but still manages to create compelling tracks. It's a bit of the Sakimoto special at this point, but I especially adore how he creates different leitmotivs and they reappear in surprising ways later on. The intro music actually features much of the themes that you get to hear in your journey as an appetizer, and then the ending music just brings closure to everything in a special way.
That's something I like a lot about Sakimoto, he has a very focused vision of the soundtrack and you get to feel the closure and finality of his music in a way that wraps up everything. Very few composers pulls it off in a way that is as powerful as he does. And again the way they do the ending credits always gets at me. They always do this powerful orchestral piece with artworks of characters at different points in their lives and also art of the world they inhabit in this crumpled paper style that also happens in FFT and FF12. Always makes me teary-eyed. Probably Sakimoto's strongest soundtrack for me.
It's pretty much universally agreed upon but it must be reiterated that the story of Vagrant Story is fantastic. All these things that I have mentioned previously wouldn't work as well if the writing of this game wasn't as good as all the other elements of this game. Not only it is well-written, helped by Alexander O. Smith' localization, but the story says a LOT with few words. Instead of explaining and over-explaining things, everything flows naturally and the viewer isn't held by the hand. A big component of the story is that it directly asks the player to piece things together in order to have the complete picture. It doesn't mean you cannot understand it in a regular playthrough, it means the element of mystery complements the strong writing at play. There isn't a universal truth in the world of Vagrant Story, half the enjoyment is about figuring out what kind of truth do you believe in the most.
On top of immediately framing the world of VS inside political ramifications between the Duke, the Church and the Parliament, you also get to plunge deep into the occult and the mystical. Reality begins to lose ground the further you dive into Leà Monde and it is something that is reflected into Ashley as well, as his whole identity loses ground too. One of Sidney's soldiers says to one of the Crimson Blades to "go to Hell", but Leà Monde is already its own kind of hell. The supernatural has always been Matsuno's trademark, and it is very well integrated this time, especially since it allows for the surreal to offer something new on every aspect of the game: story, cutscene, enemies, locations. Everything becomes a surprise the further you dive into the game.
Characters are also some of Square's strongest offering. It's hard to compete with characters as fascinating as Ashley Riot and Sydney Losstarot Ashley is the supersoldier, no-nonsense guy bereft of emotions and is there to get shit done, except that he wasn't like that and Leà Monde exposes his past to him. Sydney Losstarot is the imposing, charming antagonist whose motivations becomes even less clear by the minute. He's one of my favourite antagonists ever, he's just so good in the way he presents himself and his overall design with the Rood tattoo. In reality, it's two men in various states of undress duking it out in an abandoned city but for some reason it is incredibly compelling. All the characters that you meet along the way are very interesting too, such as Guildenstern and Rosencrantz.
The gameplay is its own beast, two books wouldn't be enough to cover the intricacies of the battle system. What I know is that it is a trial by fire for beginners but with a tremendous progression system the further you get into the game. The main issue is that your options are limited in the early games in ways that makes it "adapt or die" and the answer is you doing 0 damage against a boss. It's harsh and doesn't allow for much leeway because of the tons of variables at play, and you can only act on a few of them early into the game.
However, the further you get into the game, so much opens up to you in a rapid amount of time that you can do everything you want and you can account for any situation you might have to face. The progression from early game to end game is staggering, it's like an entirely new game by that point. Early on, you need the right type of weapon, maybe you can farm enemies of a certain type to increase your weapon's affinity but there isn't much more to do.
Now end game, let's say you have a dragon.
Vagrant Story is not about attacking left and right, it's about attacking once, but hard. It's about having all the cards at your disposal and having a tangible effects on all the variables. You can't do that early in the game, but you have so much you can do later on. Boss fights becomes enthralling, I can spend 10 minutes on it thinking what my next move should be. It's an action-RPG with even more depth than a strategy RPG, you don't just attack, you plan moves. Mindless strategies will get you nowhere, your brain cells will have to do some legwork at many points in the game, and the treasure trove of bosses present will constantly remind you to keep guessing. It's a puzzle game, really. Every boss is like: "Hello? Guess how you can beat me!😈"
It takes a lot of trial and error to get to that point. You have to understand a lot of things to get through it, but the reward is a deep gameplay system that gives out great moments that feels satisfying as a player.
Satisfaction is the key word for Vagrant Story, because you are the one who crafts Ashley Riot into a powerful warrior. You don't buy weapons, nor armors. There is no currency, and there is no level. Ashley Riot is the Do-It-Yourself man from top to bottom. You want something? You go and get it. A boss punishes you? No merchant out here in this hellscape, you have to think harder with what you have.
You can't beat a powerful enemy and get the impression you didn't do it all by yourself. You know that you did it with no help from anybody. Even if you run over a boss, you know you did it because you made correct decisions all the way through your adventure. And it's a huge interconnected world, so you can always go back and find things you've missed, open previously locked doors, find new loot, farm more stuff, craft more things. You have to see everything as an opportunity in order to survive. The enemies that carries weapon and armor can't be seen as just enemies, but as carrying loot that can be useful. You can only get everything on-site.
This sense of progression is fantastic for me because it gives a huge sense of satisfaction. There is no break in this grind and it enhances the story too because you can feel you are going through the challenge that Leà Monde promised to be. This is a dark city of many secrets, and unraveling them requires a special kind of inner strength.
It works well for my sensibilities because I have pushed on to become familiar with the systems of the game, but I can understanding someone jumping into the game getting utterly clubbed. There's just too much stuff going on, the weapon combination system is almost as deep as the demon fusion system of Shin Megami Tensei, except it isn't the core of Vagrant Story, it's literally just a submenu. Then you can disassemble weapons? And attach new weapons with a blade and a grip? Yeah...it's Do-It-Yourself taken to the extreme. It has the depth of two or three Final Fantasy stashed into one game. It's frightening...but obviously very rewarding.
One huge grievance is that you have to get into the menu to change weapon, and you change weapons often in this game. Had this game gotten a weapon wheel, it would have been fantastic.
At the very least navigation in this game is super easy, and the map is genuinely one of the best maps I've seen. Everything is clear and easy to grasp, it even shows you doors that can be unlocked when you get new keys. You can't ever get lost. Each room have their own name too, and sometimes they have VERY dramatic names for no reason, something that also found its way in FF12.
I'm guessing I really need to conclude this.
Vagrant Story is a 30 hours-long Action RPG with a depth that rivals actual strategy RPG. There is more stuff in this game than RPGs that touts themselves to be 80 or 100 hours. Vagrant Story is an inch wide but miles deep for me. As a result, the investment needed is HUGE, and far more involving than any JRPGs I've played in my life. If VS were to exist in 2019, this game would probably get slaughtered considering what it asks from the player. Even I consider that it is too much sometimes.
At the same time, this game is the perfect example of a game with no filler, everything it throws at you is actual, tangible content that matters at every step of the way, in which every aspect has been carefully crafted. Heck, even the sound design in areas with no music is super intricate. There is a world of things to do in the small world of Vagrant Story.
If you push on and complete the game, you feel like you have climbed a mountain. Every encounter is its own boss fight, hell some regular enemies made me have more trouble than actual boss fights. But when I first completed the game many years ago, I felt a kind of satisfaction I hardly ever felt in video games. I felt like I did something incredible and that it was all worth it. It's not the same kind of satisfaction as finishing a game that is stupidly punishing or too hard, it's the satisfaction of a game where it is hard, but you know you can bend it to your will with work. Hell, even New Game+ is one of the best that Square has offered, giving tons of replay value when you know that one playthrough is far from enough to grasp the whole depth of the game.
Vagrant Story is an adventure that is worthy of the challenge it asked from me. And that's why it's such a great game for me. The Final Fantasy Tactics team outdid themselves and to me they remain the most talented people within Square. Everything they touch turns into a diamond. One of my favs of all time.
And we know Kojima knew about Vagrant Story (ignore his superior genes spiel)
Was Kojima inspired by VS so many years later?? 🤔 🤔 🤔
Anyway, I've been replaying Vagrant Story because I am in a retro mood this summer. I haven't replayed this game seriously in a long time because well, it's a very involving game and I end up playing this game for longer than most RPGs I play (I always clock 40 hours on it). I'm mid-way through the replay but I wanted to get a lot of my thoughts out.
First of all, the game is still as beautiful as it gets, everything is absurdly detailed and filled with shapes of all kinds. You can see what they're conveying through immediately, which is even more awesome considering the FFT team did this, all people who were more familiar with 2D than 3D even years into the PS1. I dare say it's the most beautiful game on the PS1, maybe not the most technically impressive, but at least it is from Japan and it has the art direction to match.
The game is still surprising. You spend your first hours in a cave with no music, then you hear some creepy atmospheric music inside the sanctum, you would think the whole game is like that but then you get to the surface and you see a lovely french-styled town that is very bright. That town is FFT if it was fully modeled in 3D. Not only that but you reach areas that are even more surprising, such as the undercity filled with this blue-ish light. It's just constantly amazing and the ability to go into a first-person camera mode to admire everything makes me able to admire all the finer details. What impresses me the most is the lighting, they had to do this by hand and it's incredible how you can see several lights reflecting off the textures. A torch will reflect its light even when there is sunlight, which also reflects off of walls. You end up a mixture of different lights even on the same wall !
The amount of work required must have been staggering but it pays off greatly. One single room can give two wildly different vibes from where you're looking. That's the power of a strong art director like Hiroshi Minagawa, who is now the art director of FFXIV: Shadowbringers, so you know he is still at the top of his class even today.
The cinematography of this game is also equally incredible. Jun Akiyama (who ended up doing the cinematography of KH1, FFXII, and even Versus XIII before it became XV) really outdid himself in this game. The framing, the camera cuts is like an expertly crafted movie. Every shot has meaning and conveys something to the viewer, it's not just there, it has purpose.
Shots like this really makes me speechless of how the scene is constructed. My mind explodes and I end up spending 5 minutes looking at every shot 🤯
Not only that, but speech bubbles becomes an integral part of the cinematography too, they're placed in clever ways to complement the shot. On top of that, EVERY speech bubble is shaped differently. They don't use preset templates, even the bubbles are carefully crafted in terms of size, shape, and to represent the tone and state of mind of the character. Compare the soft shapes of some bubble speeches with some that has hard edges, it conveys a lot of meaning.
The 20-minutes long intro is also a huge feat in itself. The best thign about it is that the music in this intro is dynamic, as in it would seamlessly go to the next phase only when the player decides it. Everything is so well-crafted, and something I especially amazed about is the seamlessness between gameplay and cutscene. In many cutscenes, you will have control of Ashley without a camera cut or a fade to black. It's especially immersive during boss fights, where you get a boss intro and are thrown directly into the fight. By the way, Vagrant Story kinda popularized boss intros and outros in the series. FFXII obviously had it as a successor, and now FFXIV also features boss intros and outros (I don't think FFXI did). Brilliant stuff anyway.
The music of Sakimoto is fantastic. His sounds are VERY similar to Final Fantasy Tactics but the way he uses it is so starkly different. My favourite boss theme (that I linked) is this percussion-heavy daze that is so ominous but also so entrancing. You really get into the fight with this one.
You can't help but notice the music when it is playing. A very dark, brooding atmosphere that has a stronger focus on dissonance rather than harmonious sounds, but still manages to create compelling tracks. It's a bit of the Sakimoto special at this point, but I especially adore how he creates different leitmotivs and they reappear in surprising ways later on. The intro music actually features much of the themes that you get to hear in your journey as an appetizer, and then the ending music just brings closure to everything in a special way.
That's something I like a lot about Sakimoto, he has a very focused vision of the soundtrack and you get to feel the closure and finality of his music in a way that wraps up everything. Very few composers pulls it off in a way that is as powerful as he does. And again the way they do the ending credits always gets at me. They always do this powerful orchestral piece with artworks of characters at different points in their lives and also art of the world they inhabit in this crumpled paper style that also happens in FFT and FF12. Always makes me teary-eyed. Probably Sakimoto's strongest soundtrack for me.
It's pretty much universally agreed upon but it must be reiterated that the story of Vagrant Story is fantastic. All these things that I have mentioned previously wouldn't work as well if the writing of this game wasn't as good as all the other elements of this game. Not only it is well-written, helped by Alexander O. Smith' localization, but the story says a LOT with few words. Instead of explaining and over-explaining things, everything flows naturally and the viewer isn't held by the hand. A big component of the story is that it directly asks the player to piece things together in order to have the complete picture. It doesn't mean you cannot understand it in a regular playthrough, it means the element of mystery complements the strong writing at play. There isn't a universal truth in the world of Vagrant Story, half the enjoyment is about figuring out what kind of truth do you believe in the most.
On top of immediately framing the world of VS inside political ramifications between the Duke, the Church and the Parliament, you also get to plunge deep into the occult and the mystical. Reality begins to lose ground the further you dive into Leà Monde and it is something that is reflected into Ashley as well, as his whole identity loses ground too. One of Sidney's soldiers says to one of the Crimson Blades to "go to Hell", but Leà Monde is already its own kind of hell. The supernatural has always been Matsuno's trademark, and it is very well integrated this time, especially since it allows for the surreal to offer something new on every aspect of the game: story, cutscene, enemies, locations. Everything becomes a surprise the further you dive into the game.
Characters are also some of Square's strongest offering. It's hard to compete with characters as fascinating as Ashley Riot and Sydney Losstarot Ashley is the supersoldier, no-nonsense guy bereft of emotions and is there to get shit done, except that he wasn't like that and Leà Monde exposes his past to him. Sydney Losstarot is the imposing, charming antagonist whose motivations becomes even less clear by the minute. He's one of my favourite antagonists ever, he's just so good in the way he presents himself and his overall design with the Rood tattoo. In reality, it's two men in various states of undress duking it out in an abandoned city but for some reason it is incredibly compelling. All the characters that you meet along the way are very interesting too, such as Guildenstern and Rosencrantz.
The gameplay is its own beast, two books wouldn't be enough to cover the intricacies of the battle system. What I know is that it is a trial by fire for beginners but with a tremendous progression system the further you get into the game. The main issue is that your options are limited in the early games in ways that makes it "adapt or die" and the answer is you doing 0 damage against a boss. It's harsh and doesn't allow for much leeway because of the tons of variables at play, and you can only act on a few of them early into the game.
However, the further you get into the game, so much opens up to you in a rapid amount of time that you can do everything you want and you can account for any situation you might have to face. The progression from early game to end game is staggering, it's like an entirely new game by that point. Early on, you need the right type of weapon, maybe you can farm enemies of a certain type to increase your weapon's affinity but there isn't much more to do.
Now end game, let's say you have a dragon.
- You analyze him and then find out he's weak to piercing and weak to air on its left wing (it doesn't work exactly that way but it's a common scenario)
- You pick your piercing weapon, you attach air-boosting gems on it, you pick an accessory that also does that
- Then you buff yourself with either an stat buff spell or an air-buff spell
- Then you debuff the dragon by decreasing their strength or their overall stats.
- Then you choose the attack chains you need, let's say he's not immune to paralysis, then you put it into your chain formation, but you also use a chain that allows you to deal 40% of the initial damage, and maybe even a chain that saps the MP of the dragon because his breath is powerful
- And then you get to attacking,
- BUT you still check the hit percentage
- And then you also have to weigh the pros and cons of having a higher RISK (basically a fatigue system), trading more damage for less accuracy.
- Now you are ready to fight.
Vagrant Story is not about attacking left and right, it's about attacking once, but hard. It's about having all the cards at your disposal and having a tangible effects on all the variables. You can't do that early in the game, but you have so much you can do later on. Boss fights becomes enthralling, I can spend 10 minutes on it thinking what my next move should be. It's an action-RPG with even more depth than a strategy RPG, you don't just attack, you plan moves. Mindless strategies will get you nowhere, your brain cells will have to do some legwork at many points in the game, and the treasure trove of bosses present will constantly remind you to keep guessing. It's a puzzle game, really. Every boss is like: "Hello? Guess how you can beat me!😈"
It takes a lot of trial and error to get to that point. You have to understand a lot of things to get through it, but the reward is a deep gameplay system that gives out great moments that feels satisfying as a player.
Satisfaction is the key word for Vagrant Story, because you are the one who crafts Ashley Riot into a powerful warrior. You don't buy weapons, nor armors. There is no currency, and there is no level. Ashley Riot is the Do-It-Yourself man from top to bottom. You want something? You go and get it. A boss punishes you? No merchant out here in this hellscape, you have to think harder with what you have.
You can't beat a powerful enemy and get the impression you didn't do it all by yourself. You know that you did it with no help from anybody. Even if you run over a boss, you know you did it because you made correct decisions all the way through your adventure. And it's a huge interconnected world, so you can always go back and find things you've missed, open previously locked doors, find new loot, farm more stuff, craft more things. You have to see everything as an opportunity in order to survive. The enemies that carries weapon and armor can't be seen as just enemies, but as carrying loot that can be useful. You can only get everything on-site.
This sense of progression is fantastic for me because it gives a huge sense of satisfaction. There is no break in this grind and it enhances the story too because you can feel you are going through the challenge that Leà Monde promised to be. This is a dark city of many secrets, and unraveling them requires a special kind of inner strength.
It works well for my sensibilities because I have pushed on to become familiar with the systems of the game, but I can understanding someone jumping into the game getting utterly clubbed. There's just too much stuff going on, the weapon combination system is almost as deep as the demon fusion system of Shin Megami Tensei, except it isn't the core of Vagrant Story, it's literally just a submenu. Then you can disassemble weapons? And attach new weapons with a blade and a grip? Yeah...it's Do-It-Yourself taken to the extreme. It has the depth of two or three Final Fantasy stashed into one game. It's frightening...but obviously very rewarding.
One huge grievance is that you have to get into the menu to change weapon, and you change weapons often in this game. Had this game gotten a weapon wheel, it would have been fantastic.
At the very least navigation in this game is super easy, and the map is genuinely one of the best maps I've seen. Everything is clear and easy to grasp, it even shows you doors that can be unlocked when you get new keys. You can't ever get lost. Each room have their own name too, and sometimes they have VERY dramatic names for no reason, something that also found its way in FF12.
I'm guessing I really need to conclude this.
Vagrant Story is a 30 hours-long Action RPG with a depth that rivals actual strategy RPG. There is more stuff in this game than RPGs that touts themselves to be 80 or 100 hours. Vagrant Story is an inch wide but miles deep for me. As a result, the investment needed is HUGE, and far more involving than any JRPGs I've played in my life. If VS were to exist in 2019, this game would probably get slaughtered considering what it asks from the player. Even I consider that it is too much sometimes.
At the same time, this game is the perfect example of a game with no filler, everything it throws at you is actual, tangible content that matters at every step of the way, in which every aspect has been carefully crafted. Heck, even the sound design in areas with no music is super intricate. There is a world of things to do in the small world of Vagrant Story.
If you push on and complete the game, you feel like you have climbed a mountain. Every encounter is its own boss fight, hell some regular enemies made me have more trouble than actual boss fights. But when I first completed the game many years ago, I felt a kind of satisfaction I hardly ever felt in video games. I felt like I did something incredible and that it was all worth it. It's not the same kind of satisfaction as finishing a game that is stupidly punishing or too hard, it's the satisfaction of a game where it is hard, but you know you can bend it to your will with work. Hell, even New Game+ is one of the best that Square has offered, giving tons of replay value when you know that one playthrough is far from enough to grasp the whole depth of the game.
Vagrant Story is an adventure that is worthy of the challenge it asked from me. And that's why it's such a great game for me. The Final Fantasy Tactics team outdid themselves and to me they remain the most talented people within Square. Everything they touch turns into a diamond. One of my favs of all time.
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![37760-Vagrant_Story_[U]-18.png](https://r.mprd.se/media/images/37760-Vagrant_Story_[U]-18.png)
