I don't much care for Vagrant Story
Mar 23, 2007 15:52:35 GMT -5
Post by Discoalucard on Mar 23, 2007 15:52:35 GMT -5
It's Friday, it's rainy, and I'm bored at work. So here are my (tired) feelings on Vagrant Story.
---
I bought Vagrant Story when it came out in 2000, and after rave reviews from a lot of outlets, I was expecting a lot. But in reality? People proclaim that Famitsu’s reviewing record is a total joke (which I’m not contesting), and then point to the straight 10s given to Nintendogs. Vagrant Story, similarly, got 40/40 back then, for reasons no one understands.
But I’ve kept the game on my shelf since then, in hopes that one day I’d be smart enough to play it. A similar thing happened with Final Fantasy Tactics – I bought it just after Final Fantasy VII had hit the States, and hadn’t quite learned the ins and outs of the game. I got to the third chapter, roughly twenty hours in, and quit. It seemed like a cool game, but it was far too difficult, with every major battle turning into a frustrating struggle, and I wasn’t enjoying it.
Four years later, in college, I put it in again, and, having the experience of several more RPGs under my belt (including Final Fantasy V, which I’d also struggled with at the time) played Final Fantasy Tactics through from scratch, and later decided it was one of the best video games ever made.
A few years have passed since then, and now, with a bachelors degree in computer science on the wall, I thought that, perhaps, that time had come to revisit Vagrant Story
Then I realized that I wasn’t too stupid to play Vagrant Story before.
It’s just a really bad game.
When creating Vagrant Story, it looked like someone on the development team was a bit fan of Diablo, or any other rogue-style game, but had come to the conclusion that, at their core, they were really awful. The appeal in many of these games lies mostly on the sense of dread that comes with the exploring the unknown, and the obsessive desire to collect, collect, collect. But outside of a few major decisions during gameplay, usually involving the risk/rewards of delving deeper while managing your health, you can play most of these games on auto-pilot. I admire the concept behind these games, but I, too, find them obnoxious and boring, but when they’re redone sticking actual gameplay in there, it becomes significantly more involving. Many of the Metrovania titles, which continue to be some of my favorite games, fan reaction be damned, are basically derived from rogue-likes, except you can actually jump and swing your sword, which is significantly more satisfying than the endless clicking of a mouse. So, I can agree with the concept of Vagrant Story.
The problem is that the gameplay they tried to stick in there just wasn’t very good.
The first problem had to do with timing based attacks. You can strike an enemy by simply walking up to them, but in order to get more attacks in, as well obtaining additional bonuses, you’d need to pay attention to a red exclamation point on the screen and hit the button at the exact moment that it popped up. It appears for roughly half of a second, so even those with the quickest reflexes might have some issues hitting this, so the best way – again, in theory – would be to watch the animation of your character and try to get the rhythm down. This didn’t exactly work, because the animations make no sense. Whenever you first hit a foe, it’s a nice, clean, smooth strike. Depending on which attacking you use next, Ashley will swing his sword, jerk in place for a second, then finish the attack. Who the hell uses a weapon like that, especially when it only really serves to throw off the timing. As aggravating as it is, you can eventually get used to it – but each weapon has its own set of awkward, animations, required differently timed button presses. Which is, you know, intimidating, because you can learn how to time your attacks with a sword and then completely flounder when you equip a spear, or a crossbow. Then there are defense abilities! Which are almost worse, because each enemy, again, has their own crazy attack animations, and good freaking luck getting the rhythm down on these.
At first look, I thought, there’s no way this isn’t some kind of massive bug passed off as a feature – it doesn’t look right, it doesn’t feel right, and all it does is cause frustration. Then I realized it probably was completely intentional. The rationalization is that, in RPGs, you only get “better” because your numbers has increased – the only effort you put into getting there was shear persistence. Taking after action games, Vagrant Story forces you to learn and actually get better at wielding each of the weapons, or fighting any of the bad guys, so that when you can execute huge chains and kill enemies without getting hit, the result of your practice and not simply because you randomly stumbled upon the right equipment, or because you ran in a circle for a few hours farming for EXP.
I admire that they put some effort into putting an actual game in here. I don’t admire that the game they tried to put in there isn’t fun at all.
I’d like to reference Sony’s Legend of Dragoon, which came out a year or two after Vagrant Story, but is good to illustrate a point. The only good thing to come out of Legend of Dragoon was Nich Maragos’ scathing review for sadly departed Gaming Intelligence Agency, which resulted in a legion of angry fan boys attacking the whole site. This is not abnormal of gaming culture, but Legend of Dragoon was, objectively, really awful – the fact that it had fans to begin with was baffling, and any critic who had given it a decent review obviously had never played an RPG in their entire life. I only ever played Legend of Dragoon because I had a friend in college who loved the game, who worked at a video store, and who checked the game out on his own account to show me the light. Later, he was kicked out of school for smoking entirely too much pot, which, I think, explains a lot of things.
ANYWAY.
Legend of Dragoon had this really bad idea that, every time you’d attack, you’d need to time by hitting a button at the right moment. It wasn’t even like all of those Mario RPGs where you could press buttons to do extra damage – you needed to time it right, or you’d miss. This was an attempt to involve the player in the combat, but it got tiresome, quick. The point is, it just wasn’t a fun game mechanic in Legend of Dragoon, and it’s not a fun game mechanic with Vagrant Story, even though the Shadow Hearts games later aped it to a somewhat better effect (and allowed you to turn them off anyway.)
So the first attempt to introduce an actual game into the dungeon crawling formula? Pretty much a failure.
The second attempt involved the weapon crafting system, where each weapon had its own elemental affinity, its own creature alignment, and own blade type. The best way to describe this would be you tell you about a game I had wanted to create around this time.
My game was going to be a satirical RPGs filled with all of the clichés and archetypes that the genre had unfortunately become known for, along with jabs at particular titles for extra comedic effect. One of the characters I created was named Britney Havoc (a not-quite-clever parody of Ashley Riot, hero of Vagrant Story), an assassin from an elite group of warriors called the Bottomkickers. He was to be quite manly, except he only kinda half sorta wore pants. His special ability was that all of his attacks were governed by an impossibly overwhelming number of statistics. He had varying affinities in dozens of different fields, including Good, Evil, Blunt, Edged, Piercing, Light, Dark, Red, Black, White, Cyan, Light Yellow, Half-Sorta Good, Mostly Bad, Chaotic, Neutral, Lawful, Harmless, Mostly Harmless, Wind, Heart, Upper Middle-Class, and all kinds of other alignments, none of which made any real sense. The result was that attacking practically any enemy in the game would only result in one HP damage.
The only statistic that had any real effect was the Ham statistic, which, if properly aligned, would result in huge damage against pork-based enemies. There would only be one pig-type enemy in the entire game, and he would be off in the corner of the world, on some useless subquest, and if you defeated it, you’d maybe get 100G and a potion.
At the time, I was pretty sure that anyone like me – who played and absolutely hated Vagrant Story – would find this to be extremely hilarious.
Now, I’ve heard people disparage Final Fantasy VII, not because they particularly hated the game, but because the fan base was so obnoxious. I won’t debate this, but I always found this kind of a silly assertation – why should a few morons poison a gaming experience? They should be entirely unrelated. Then I remember the time I tried to head into different message boards looking for help.
“So I’m trying to figure out how the weapon creation system works.” I’d post. “When I try to combine two blades, it seems to keep the strong affinities of one blade but always reverts to the strength of the weaker one. Is this right?” The common responses were “You don’t understand this? You must be an idiot.” And “Go back to playing Final Fantasy! Or should I say, watching! Enjoy your FMVs!”
I’ve found the same attitude amongst Tactics Ogre fans – walk up to them and suggest that you may like Final Fantasy Tactics, and you’ll get reamed for (A) liking a more popular game, (B) not being around for its predecessor, (C) being stupid and (D) having poor taste. On many levels, Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre are the same game – it just happens that the latter is pretty much unplayable. To the normal person, anyway. For the kind of people that LIKE having their units, who have been trained in many skills over the course of several hours, be permanently killed in two hits, Tactics Ogre may indeed seem preferable. For the kind of people that don’t like to be infuriated every time they play a game, Tactics Ogre deserves a bit of respect for the influence they’ve had on the SRPG genre, but is ultimately little more than a historic footnote, since most games have done it much better since. To put all of this in less esoteric terms, it’s like punching someone who likes Super Mario Bros because they obviously can’t comprehend the genius of Pitfall.
Anyway, it wasn’t until several years later that I actually met sensible people who liked Vagrant Story and Tactics Ogre. Until then, I’d been working on the assumption that all fans of Yasumi Matsuno games were simply huge pricks. This caused me a bit of dissonance at the time, considering I loved the hell out of Final Fantasy Tactics, and years down the line, would love the hell out of Final Fantasy XII. I desperately wanted to love these other games, since they were cut from the same cloth, but apparently just wasn’t worthy for the club. So this also put a bad taste in my mouth.
The third major problem with the Vagrant Story is the existence of box puzzles. There’s nothing to expound upon – when you’ve resorted to remaking Sokobon in your RPG, then you have simply failed at game design.
But, again, just recently, I played it again recently, and for all of the classy cinemas, and awesome atmosphere, and amazing writing, and gloomy music, it’s just still as bland a dungeon crawl as the games it tried to get away from, except with layers and layers of unnecessary confusion and complexity in the place of decent gameplay. To anyone like me that may have admired the concept of Vagrant Story, but felt the execution was lacking, check out Capcom’s 2003 release Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, which does many of the same things, but replaces “stupid timed attacks” with “awesome strategic battle system”, “moronic alignment system” with “tons of cool skills”, and “asinine box puzzles” with “no box puzzles at all”. As a bonus, it even has a (superior) soundtrack by the same composer, Hitoshi Sakimoto.
So, every week or so, I see some visionary on a message board start a thread about the downfall of video game journalism, and how the scoring system in reviews are biased and opinionated and quite useless. Therefore, I have come up with a foolproof system to objectively and scientifically judge the worth of a game. According to most players, Vagrant Story takes approximately 20 hours to complete. Multiply 20 by the money I paid when the game came out, $40, for a sum of 80. Combined with the time I sunk in during my initial attempt with playing the game and my recent review, I’ve played it maybe 12 hours, so initially I figured the score would be 12/80. However, I honestly didn’t enjoy any of those hours, resulting in fresh 0/80, which results in an unbiased score of absolutely nothing. And if you divide 0 by 0 in a calculator, you get a “Cannot divide by zero” error. Therefore, Vagrant Story is a game so bad that not even the ultimate power of mathematics can completely express how the magnitude of this tragedy.
---
I bought Vagrant Story when it came out in 2000, and after rave reviews from a lot of outlets, I was expecting a lot. But in reality? People proclaim that Famitsu’s reviewing record is a total joke (which I’m not contesting), and then point to the straight 10s given to Nintendogs. Vagrant Story, similarly, got 40/40 back then, for reasons no one understands.
But I’ve kept the game on my shelf since then, in hopes that one day I’d be smart enough to play it. A similar thing happened with Final Fantasy Tactics – I bought it just after Final Fantasy VII had hit the States, and hadn’t quite learned the ins and outs of the game. I got to the third chapter, roughly twenty hours in, and quit. It seemed like a cool game, but it was far too difficult, with every major battle turning into a frustrating struggle, and I wasn’t enjoying it.
Four years later, in college, I put it in again, and, having the experience of several more RPGs under my belt (including Final Fantasy V, which I’d also struggled with at the time) played Final Fantasy Tactics through from scratch, and later decided it was one of the best video games ever made.
A few years have passed since then, and now, with a bachelors degree in computer science on the wall, I thought that, perhaps, that time had come to revisit Vagrant Story
Then I realized that I wasn’t too stupid to play Vagrant Story before.
It’s just a really bad game.
When creating Vagrant Story, it looked like someone on the development team was a bit fan of Diablo, or any other rogue-style game, but had come to the conclusion that, at their core, they were really awful. The appeal in many of these games lies mostly on the sense of dread that comes with the exploring the unknown, and the obsessive desire to collect, collect, collect. But outside of a few major decisions during gameplay, usually involving the risk/rewards of delving deeper while managing your health, you can play most of these games on auto-pilot. I admire the concept behind these games, but I, too, find them obnoxious and boring, but when they’re redone sticking actual gameplay in there, it becomes significantly more involving. Many of the Metrovania titles, which continue to be some of my favorite games, fan reaction be damned, are basically derived from rogue-likes, except you can actually jump and swing your sword, which is significantly more satisfying than the endless clicking of a mouse. So, I can agree with the concept of Vagrant Story.
The problem is that the gameplay they tried to stick in there just wasn’t very good.
The first problem had to do with timing based attacks. You can strike an enemy by simply walking up to them, but in order to get more attacks in, as well obtaining additional bonuses, you’d need to pay attention to a red exclamation point on the screen and hit the button at the exact moment that it popped up. It appears for roughly half of a second, so even those with the quickest reflexes might have some issues hitting this, so the best way – again, in theory – would be to watch the animation of your character and try to get the rhythm down. This didn’t exactly work, because the animations make no sense. Whenever you first hit a foe, it’s a nice, clean, smooth strike. Depending on which attacking you use next, Ashley will swing his sword, jerk in place for a second, then finish the attack. Who the hell uses a weapon like that, especially when it only really serves to throw off the timing. As aggravating as it is, you can eventually get used to it – but each weapon has its own set of awkward, animations, required differently timed button presses. Which is, you know, intimidating, because you can learn how to time your attacks with a sword and then completely flounder when you equip a spear, or a crossbow. Then there are defense abilities! Which are almost worse, because each enemy, again, has their own crazy attack animations, and good freaking luck getting the rhythm down on these.
At first look, I thought, there’s no way this isn’t some kind of massive bug passed off as a feature – it doesn’t look right, it doesn’t feel right, and all it does is cause frustration. Then I realized it probably was completely intentional. The rationalization is that, in RPGs, you only get “better” because your numbers has increased – the only effort you put into getting there was shear persistence. Taking after action games, Vagrant Story forces you to learn and actually get better at wielding each of the weapons, or fighting any of the bad guys, so that when you can execute huge chains and kill enemies without getting hit, the result of your practice and not simply because you randomly stumbled upon the right equipment, or because you ran in a circle for a few hours farming for EXP.
I admire that they put some effort into putting an actual game in here. I don’t admire that the game they tried to put in there isn’t fun at all.
I’d like to reference Sony’s Legend of Dragoon, which came out a year or two after Vagrant Story, but is good to illustrate a point. The only good thing to come out of Legend of Dragoon was Nich Maragos’ scathing review for sadly departed Gaming Intelligence Agency, which resulted in a legion of angry fan boys attacking the whole site. This is not abnormal of gaming culture, but Legend of Dragoon was, objectively, really awful – the fact that it had fans to begin with was baffling, and any critic who had given it a decent review obviously had never played an RPG in their entire life. I only ever played Legend of Dragoon because I had a friend in college who loved the game, who worked at a video store, and who checked the game out on his own account to show me the light. Later, he was kicked out of school for smoking entirely too much pot, which, I think, explains a lot of things.
ANYWAY.
Legend of Dragoon had this really bad idea that, every time you’d attack, you’d need to time by hitting a button at the right moment. It wasn’t even like all of those Mario RPGs where you could press buttons to do extra damage – you needed to time it right, or you’d miss. This was an attempt to involve the player in the combat, but it got tiresome, quick. The point is, it just wasn’t a fun game mechanic in Legend of Dragoon, and it’s not a fun game mechanic with Vagrant Story, even though the Shadow Hearts games later aped it to a somewhat better effect (and allowed you to turn them off anyway.)
So the first attempt to introduce an actual game into the dungeon crawling formula? Pretty much a failure.
The second attempt involved the weapon crafting system, where each weapon had its own elemental affinity, its own creature alignment, and own blade type. The best way to describe this would be you tell you about a game I had wanted to create around this time.
My game was going to be a satirical RPGs filled with all of the clichés and archetypes that the genre had unfortunately become known for, along with jabs at particular titles for extra comedic effect. One of the characters I created was named Britney Havoc (a not-quite-clever parody of Ashley Riot, hero of Vagrant Story), an assassin from an elite group of warriors called the Bottomkickers. He was to be quite manly, except he only kinda half sorta wore pants. His special ability was that all of his attacks were governed by an impossibly overwhelming number of statistics. He had varying affinities in dozens of different fields, including Good, Evil, Blunt, Edged, Piercing, Light, Dark, Red, Black, White, Cyan, Light Yellow, Half-Sorta Good, Mostly Bad, Chaotic, Neutral, Lawful, Harmless, Mostly Harmless, Wind, Heart, Upper Middle-Class, and all kinds of other alignments, none of which made any real sense. The result was that attacking practically any enemy in the game would only result in one HP damage.
The only statistic that had any real effect was the Ham statistic, which, if properly aligned, would result in huge damage against pork-based enemies. There would only be one pig-type enemy in the entire game, and he would be off in the corner of the world, on some useless subquest, and if you defeated it, you’d maybe get 100G and a potion.
At the time, I was pretty sure that anyone like me – who played and absolutely hated Vagrant Story – would find this to be extremely hilarious.
Now, I’ve heard people disparage Final Fantasy VII, not because they particularly hated the game, but because the fan base was so obnoxious. I won’t debate this, but I always found this kind of a silly assertation – why should a few morons poison a gaming experience? They should be entirely unrelated. Then I remember the time I tried to head into different message boards looking for help.
“So I’m trying to figure out how the weapon creation system works.” I’d post. “When I try to combine two blades, it seems to keep the strong affinities of one blade but always reverts to the strength of the weaker one. Is this right?” The common responses were “You don’t understand this? You must be an idiot.” And “Go back to playing Final Fantasy! Or should I say, watching! Enjoy your FMVs!”
I’ve found the same attitude amongst Tactics Ogre fans – walk up to them and suggest that you may like Final Fantasy Tactics, and you’ll get reamed for (A) liking a more popular game, (B) not being around for its predecessor, (C) being stupid and (D) having poor taste. On many levels, Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre are the same game – it just happens that the latter is pretty much unplayable. To the normal person, anyway. For the kind of people that LIKE having their units, who have been trained in many skills over the course of several hours, be permanently killed in two hits, Tactics Ogre may indeed seem preferable. For the kind of people that don’t like to be infuriated every time they play a game, Tactics Ogre deserves a bit of respect for the influence they’ve had on the SRPG genre, but is ultimately little more than a historic footnote, since most games have done it much better since. To put all of this in less esoteric terms, it’s like punching someone who likes Super Mario Bros because they obviously can’t comprehend the genius of Pitfall.
Anyway, it wasn’t until several years later that I actually met sensible people who liked Vagrant Story and Tactics Ogre. Until then, I’d been working on the assumption that all fans of Yasumi Matsuno games were simply huge pricks. This caused me a bit of dissonance at the time, considering I loved the hell out of Final Fantasy Tactics, and years down the line, would love the hell out of Final Fantasy XII. I desperately wanted to love these other games, since they were cut from the same cloth, but apparently just wasn’t worthy for the club. So this also put a bad taste in my mouth.
The third major problem with the Vagrant Story is the existence of box puzzles. There’s nothing to expound upon – when you’ve resorted to remaking Sokobon in your RPG, then you have simply failed at game design.
But, again, just recently, I played it again recently, and for all of the classy cinemas, and awesome atmosphere, and amazing writing, and gloomy music, it’s just still as bland a dungeon crawl as the games it tried to get away from, except with layers and layers of unnecessary confusion and complexity in the place of decent gameplay. To anyone like me that may have admired the concept of Vagrant Story, but felt the execution was lacking, check out Capcom’s 2003 release Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, which does many of the same things, but replaces “stupid timed attacks” with “awesome strategic battle system”, “moronic alignment system” with “tons of cool skills”, and “asinine box puzzles” with “no box puzzles at all”. As a bonus, it even has a (superior) soundtrack by the same composer, Hitoshi Sakimoto.
So, every week or so, I see some visionary on a message board start a thread about the downfall of video game journalism, and how the scoring system in reviews are biased and opinionated and quite useless. Therefore, I have come up with a foolproof system to objectively and scientifically judge the worth of a game. According to most players, Vagrant Story takes approximately 20 hours to complete. Multiply 20 by the money I paid when the game came out, $40, for a sum of 80. Combined with the time I sunk in during my initial attempt with playing the game and my recent review, I’ve played it maybe 12 hours, so initially I figured the score would be 12/80. However, I honestly didn’t enjoy any of those hours, resulting in fresh 0/80, which results in an unbiased score of absolutely nothing. And if you divide 0 by 0 in a calculator, you get a “Cannot divide by zero” error. Therefore, Vagrant Story is a game so bad that not even the ultimate power of mathematics can completely express how the magnitude of this tragedy.
)
