Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Amazing"

Vagrant Story is the kind of game that is either love it or hate it. There really isn't too much in between. It features great characters and one of the greatest stories in any game released to date, but the amount of attention that must be paid to weapons and stats (along with some redundancy in battles) can really turn a lot of people off.

Let me start with a bit of the story. In the game you play the role of Ashley Riot. A man who is entrusted with the duty of being a Riskbreaker (essentially a one man army) who is entrusted to enter the lost city of Lea Monde to try and figure out an assassination plot that he has been framed for. At the start of the game this is all you know. You know that Ashley went to Lea Monde and was never seen again. Three days after he left, they declared him the murderer. Now you have to find out what happened in the city of Lea Monde and uncover the truth. With a supporting cast of characters lead by the wonderfully evil Sidney Lostarrot, Vagrant Story weaves an amazing tale of lost pasts and hidden truths (with some black magic and whatnot thrown in). Be aware though, the story isn't all happy like you will be apt to find in the Final Fantasy series, it goes much deeper into human emotion and psyche.

As for the gameplay, well, this is where it is either won or lost. Essentially the game is a dungeon crawler that has you wandering the dungeons of Lea Monde until you find a neccesary item to continue traversing through. There is a lot of backtracking but luckily half way through you learn a teleport ability that cuts down on that. You can think of it as similar to the backtracking in Resident Evil games for those familiar (find a locked door, need such and such key/item, find item/key elsewhere, go back and proceed).

All the while you will be encountering various monsters of different classes. While it may not seem like much, monster class is critical to how effective you are at the game. You have the ability to craft your own weapons and armor, each one can have special affinities to different classes. Essentially this means you will want a weapon that is effective against each different enemy class. This is where all the in depth stat management comes in (as well as a lot of use of the EQUIP function....). Attacking enemies is done in real time and allows you to pretty much attack indefinately as long as your timing is good for chaining attacks together. On top of that you can target individual body parts on every monster to weaken different stats (legs = movement, head = intelligence, and so on and so forth). By doing this and inflicting enough damage to one body part you can effectively nullify your enemies strength. Although it can be apt to take quite a while.

Graphically, the game is fairly bland even for PS1 standards. It is made almost with a sketch visual, where there are multiple lines to every section of the characters (similar to what you would see in preproduction sketch books). Although it does work extremely well and seems perfectly natural in the twisted reality that is Lea Monde. All scenes are done in the same graphics engine (no CG) and there is no voice acting so all words are said in speech bubbles. Again, odd, but it works.

The game is definately quirky and is definately a bit of a niche game. It is pretty long and requires the player to really get in depth into what they are doing to truly appreciate all the work and the amazing world that has been imbedded into Vagrant Story. If you can do that, it is one of the most rewarding gaming experiences you can have. If not, then consider your self one of the masses, because that seems to be the general view of the game.