Baker Street Muse (Day 330)

I finally finished Vagrant Story last night. I say "finally" but it actually only took me a few days after resuming to get through it. What that doesn't account for is all the times I've started it over the years and gave up out of frustration. This tells you a lot about the game, in fact. I can think of at least two separate times where I progressed through the game all the way to the Snowfly Forest and then promptly decided the game wasn't for me. I think that might still be true, but that doesn't mean I don't respect a lot of aspects of the game.

Bosses frequently cast debuffs on you

As I have discussed previously on this blog, Vagrant Story has a very complex battle system. If you don't understand it completely, combat will often be unsatisfying and tedious. When you have a firm understanding of how it works, it becomes very simple. This dynamic reminds me a lot of Final Fantasy Tactics, a game that is considered very difficult for new players but almost trivially easy for veterans. I think the same is probably true for Vagrant Story, but rarely is the combat what I'd call satisfying regardless. What is satisfying is the strategy that goes into preparing for combat.

This spell made life a lot easier for me

Forging weapons and outfitting them with various elemental gems so that you might exploit enemies' weaknesses is fun. Stopping to analyze every enemy to determine these weaknesses is not, however. The Analyze spell also only infrequently works on bosses, so determining their weaknesses essentially amounts to guesswork. This kind of thing isn't a big issue in a game like Persona because after you try about three different elements of spells, you'll know what your enemy is immune or weak to. In Vagrant Story it's more complicated, because not only do elements factor into the equation, but you also have to worry about the enemy's affinity for blunt, piercing, and edged weapons, as well as your own weapon's affinities for beasts, humans, phantoms, etc. This makes guessing a boss's weakness quite the ordeal.

Good point, I guess

Once you do figure out that weakness, it feels like you've solved some kind of puzzle. You can outfit your weapon with gems of that element and cast a spell to boost the weapon's elemental affinity. Cast Herakles to raise your strength and Leadbones to decrease your opponent's agility and you'll likely kill the boss in four to five hits. When weaknesses are properly exploited, the game actually becomes quite easy, although still not exactly what I'd call satisfying.

I feel like Vagrant Story's combat system shows an insane amount of promise--and don't get me wrong, I do still like it in some ways--but its execution is lacking severely in a lot of ways. I grew to enjoy it more when I came to understand it better. When I was first getting used to the system, I concentrated pretty heavily on trying to chain together as many attacks as possible. I assumed this was the best way to take out tougher enemies, but I feel now that I was wrong. Long combo chains will build up a lot of Risk, which increases the damage you take and lowers your accuracy. Shorter combos seem to be much more efficient. Break Arts are also very useful because they don't build Risk and generally have good range--at the expense of costing a small amount of HP.

The final confrontation

I think I can still safely call Vagrant Story a good game--but it's a frustrating one. Because of my ignorance, I often faced incredibly difficult fights with the most mundane of opponents. If you're stuck with only weapons that your opponents resist, you'll find that you deal little to no damage and must spend a considerable amount of time chipping through their HP totals. In the final dungeon, each boss ended up being a complete joke however, because I had the tools to exploit all of their weaknesses. Even though I relied exclusively on an edged weapon for the entirety of that dungeon, it ended up not mattering because I could boost my elemental affinities to such ridiculous heights.

If I played Vagrant Story again, I'd most likely have a much smoother experience. I might do that one day, especially if it gets an enhanced remake. I'm not holding my breath on that one, though.