This was a game I started up knowing it had a good reputation, and expecting it to be good since I enjoyed Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics, but little else beyond that. I ended up of two minds after beating it: one astonished its a niche favorite because of how much it does well, one not surprised at that from how it handles what it goes for.
The previous games that the team helmed by Yasumi Matsuno made were all large scale war stories with big casts and a lot of theatrical flair. Here they switch to a smaller scope mystery while retaining the same worldview as before, and pull it off amazingly well. The proud Final Fantasy tradition of dangling plot elements that stick out as vestiges of removed story threads is present here—over half of the scenario had to be cut due to capacity and development time, and it shows—but the subject matter and the open to interpretation writing make most of the missing elements work to its favor. For some time now, I've been craving stories that deal with the malleable nature of truth and memory, so this game was like catnip to me.
It'd been a long while since I played a game I just couldn't wait to get through more of; I kept thinking about Vagrant Story constantly when I wasn't playing it.
The writing was the key factor there, but the rest of the game immediately enraptured me as well. It feels like a bunch of big name PS1 games rolled together into one (FFT, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night), but instead of coming off like a victory lap, its instead like a giant stride towards the future. The cutscenes are one of the most praised elements of this game, and its still breathtaking to see the PS1 get pushed to its limits to render in real-time what became the bread and butter of Square's PS2 output. The gameplay is also a large factor in this: Square's modern attempts to make turn-based RPG combat more engaging start here. Its also where Vagrant Story is hardest to defend.
Ashley (the sole playable character) and his enemies roam freely across rooms, but when primed to attack, everything stops for the resulting animations, with the player having some leeway to block or do combos by timing button presses. For someone accustomed to later refinements of these concepts in Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy XIV,1 its slow and smoothless style took quite a bit of time to get accustomed to, but has its charm.
All of Matsuno & co.'s games I've played, I ended up resorting to cheats. There's a slowness inherent to their design, which is fine, but my desire to experience the rest of the stories far outweighs my patience for the sudden difficulty spikes that come with incredibly annoying to beat bosses, which are present in all of them. Around a third of the way into Vagrant Story, you have to fight a giant dragon whose weak point is difficult to reach, with an absurdly high amount of HP for that part of the game, using weapons that are only strong enough to remove small amounts of health with each hit. A nagging sense of regret over giving myself max stats persisted in the back of my head as I played through the game, but completely disappeared every time another variant on that dragon showed up, or when I was under a time limit to reach a closing door and had to fight an elemental that actively ran away from me.
The unavoidable platforming puzzles (done w smoothless jumping controls) and sokoban rooms also were annoyances, but relatively tolerable. The in-depth crafting/synthesis system seemed interesting, but I did not want to engage with it. "Sidequest fatigue" deflated much of my experience with Final Fantasy IX and Tactics Ogre (a game I only played through 1 of its 3 story branches, but intend to truly finish later), so I refused to sink much time beyond the main story. This game has no actual side stories, which could have drastically improved it: as-is the story centres on four dudes; Matsuno & co.'s games in general have issues spotlighting the women in their casts, and of the 3 I've played to the end, this is the absolute nadir.
I did spend time beyond the main story to fill out as much of the map as I could since I enjoy exploration, but Leá Monde can be an annoying town to traverse: multiple room layouts are repeated throughout, the map is split in multiple sections which makes a holistic view of the place not possible with the game's own systems, and having to pause every time I wanted to know which direction is north proved incredibly cumbersome. While the art direction of Vagrant Story is overall good, it was a touch dispiriting to see so much of the game take place underground and that most regions are overwhelmingly beige-yellow. Persona 4 does not even hold a candle when it comes to yellowest video game compared to this.
While I used more words to describe the flaws of Vagrant Story, overall I'm incredibly glad I played it. Part of me sincerely thinks its the best Final Fantasy I've ever played, but bestowing that title to it doesn't feel right. Despite all the similarities to past games from the same team, big hits that came out on the same console, and future games by the same company, Vagrant Story truly feels one of a kind, a work occupying a space all its own, one that might never see anything else close to it.
This game, more than any other, is one I want to see get the same treatment as the Final Fantasy IX remaster: just easily toggleable cheats would make this a far smoother experience. Its easy to just point someone to a cutscene compilation, but there's still a lot interesting to its gameplay that I think should also be experienced.
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Of note, among this game's planners are Tai Yasue and Kazutoyo Maehiro. The former—seemingly on his first ever development job—has been co-director of almost every Kingdom Hearts since Re:Chain of Memories, while the latter—another carry-over from the Tactics team who then stuck around for PlayOnline and Final Fantasy XII—became lead writer of A Realm Reborn, Heavensward and Final Fantasy XVI, all of which had multiple Vagrant Story veterans in lead positions. I'm waiting for a PC port to experience XVI, but I feel there'll be quite a bit of overlap with this game, whose team did not want to come off as Japanese. An attempt they failed miserably at: I seriously doubt a western team could've pulled off the kind of ambiguousness that makes Vagrant Story work.