A look back at: Vagrant Story

You know I still maintain my stance when I say that Vagrant Story stretched the PSX to its limits. I maintain that.

Wow, an extremely difficult action-RPG, you can pretty much lose yourself multiple times to this game due to how difficult it is. Almost all of it entirely due to the Risk system, which flat out limits Ashley's combat abilities. Bam, now you are missing multiple times, taking more damage than you should be. What good is increased critical hits when you can barely hit at all? Many bosses and even many random encounters are elongated because of this one mechanic alone.

And then you have the matter of everything else this game offers. So many weapon types! So many enemy types! Chaining attacks and defending via the action commands! Good lord. You almost have to micromanage everything in this game to even get past one area, picking this axe to kill beast enemies, then this sword to kill undead ones. And then you have the workshops, perhaps the one place to really utilize your equipment woes even though it's insanely complicated. Worth it if you really want to get either those high rankings after every boss or if you are just trying to get through things.

And that's not even scratching the surface. Block puzzles are super unique for this game and quite the puzzlers overall, with many kinds of blocks to push around. And then there's the matter of timed dungeons, which push the player back should the time expire. One of which is an entire dungeon in itself, with several optional rooms of treasure, and a boss at the very end bout ready to rip your head off. Not to mention a few enemies that somehow have instakill abilities, a big no-no when you only control one character the entire time. New Game + offers much more challenges with a few new dungeons.

And then you have this game's plot and its memorable characters. Man, action-RPGs do know how to do this, even getting the blood from the mouth across. Ashley's past is enough to haunt him, as well as whatever Sydney does in general. Despite being on the cover, Callo's role isn't really much at all, even Hardin, Sydney's henchman, has a more awesome role. I'll admit that Sydney's anti-hero role stands tall against Ashley's anti-hero role as well as other characters like Rosencrantz and the big bad, Guildenstern. Nothing in this story is happy at all, but it's worth the look and certainly worth the gameplay to see this vagrant story, hurr hurr.