![]() ![]() Particularly in the last third, if the player has managed to forge enough high quality gear and has at least three or four weapons with decent elemental and monster advantage stats, the final few areas are easy to beat. That being said, once you use a guide to peel back all the layers of obfuscation, the game isn’t actually all that difficult. As such, it becomes clear early on that Vagrant Story is not particularly interested in holding anyone’s hand. This isn’t even taking into account the armour forging and the amount of potential grinding and playthrough pre-planning required to get the best gear in the game during your first run. Unless you have a chart pulled up online, or are really paying attention to stats while forging, the likelihood you’ll accidentally forge a worse weapon than the one you currently possess is high. Plus, weapon forging itself is a horrifying ordeal that can be a nightmare to navigate. These stats are only visible when expanding information upon each weapon in the main menu, which you’ll frequently have to enter in order to swap between your various weapons, creating a clumsy stop-and-go combat flow. In addition to this, each weapon has various elemental stats, which arguably are even more important if you want to deal any kind of acceptable damage to bosses throughout the game. You see, you can’t just use one weapon for every enemy, you have to keep a rotation because certain blades are more effective against specific enemy types. In reality though, weapon management in this game is much more complicated than one could ever imagine. After all, that’s how most JRPGs work and the game introduces a forging workshop into the game fairly early on. For example, one may think going into the game that the best way to deal damage is to get weapons with higher stats. ![]() As such, without a guide to simplify it all, the process of playing the game is one that often feels aimless and confusing. Most of the game’s combat mechanics are explained by an ungodly amount of tutorial text that is hidden away in a Main Menu tutorial subsection. In a lot of ways, Vagrant Story is borderline hostile to modern players. I played the game earlier this year and my experience with it was a consistently frustrating, yet engaging one. From its real-time, yet tactics based combat system to its groundbreaking graphical work on a console not known for aesthetic excellence, Vagrant Story remains a strange artifact of its era. It’s DNA can be found somewhat in Final Fantasy XII’s gambit system, but aside from that the game is one of a kind. ![]() Vagrant Story, like many late PS1 JRPGs from Squaresoft, is incredibly unique and experimental. Final Fantasy XII still went on to be a massive commercial and critical success–one whose aesthetics, world, gameplay, and plot were clearly a product of Matsuno’s initial vision for the game–but in the years since he has failed to work on any major projects aside from some writing roles for Final Fantasy XIV online raids and subquests.Īnd that’s a shame, because Matsuno’s last full creative game project is quite possibly one of the most fascinating games ever made. The game went through development hell due to management changes caused by the recent Square Enix merger–changes which resulted in Matsuno ultimately leaving the project and the company that made him famous. Although Matsuno seemed destined for greater things, Final Fantasy XII is, at the time of writing, the last major mainstream game he had any role in as a creative director and even then only for part of its development. ![]() Yet, that same sentiment can be applied to Matsuno’s entire post-PS1 career. Most of this fandom was amassed with the release of Final Fantasy Tactics, a strategy RPG so popular and influential it’s kind of amazing how little attention it’s received as a franchise in the many years since. Over the course of a decade from the release of Tactics Ogre to the publication of Vagrant Story in 2000 as a one of Squaresoft’s final swan songs for the Playstation 1, Matsuno developed a cult following due to his particular brand of grand medieval fantasy storytelling that dabbled in grey morality and complex political machinations. Among the many exceptional developers working at Squaresoft in the late 90’s and early aughts, none were quite as critically beloved and niche as Yasumi Matsuno. ![]()
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