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Its a Game You May Want to Like, but Can't

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: March 23, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This is one of those games Square released that seems promising, but falls short in one or many of ways.

The bulk of the game takes place in a dungeon. You guide Ashley through a series of rooms all while battling bats and cave-dwelling creatures you come across.

The battles take place in a real time fashion; however, fights run on a chain system. When you attack an enemy, an exclamation point appears above Ashley's head as an indication to press another attack button to continue your onslaught. Ashley has a variety of weapons he can equip which changes the way he attacks his oppoenent.

Instead of HP, Ashley has an "indicator" (starts out green to indicate full health) that determines his health. It is divided by his arms, body, etc. When the health of a part of his body is depleted, it is safe to say that that part of his body no longer functions until his health is restored. While the idea sounds cool, he is only character under the player's control. The game CAN be difficult.

Exploration takes place in a dungeon. The player will reach a room where a spell is necessary to get through the door. Sometimes the spells are easy to locate, and other times the player must backtrack through many rooms to obtain the necessary spell.

The graphics were among the best. The game had somewhat of a comic book feel to it--the character nicely animated and bore many details. The detail really brings a certain feel to the game and the dungeon, despite being a dungeon, actually looks quite nice.

This is one of the few games I will say is completed for or less for its story and gratification, not fun. There isn't much fun to be had as there is a lot of backtracking and scouting to be done with little or no deviation. The spells do add to the game, but not much.

Pros:
-Graphics
-Interesting Story
-Intriguing Battle System
-Interesting Villain
-Chilling atmosphere

Cons:
-Too much backtracking
-Entire game takes place in a dungeon
-How Many bats must I fight?
-Where do I have to go next?
-I forgot which way I was going/came from

If you must try the game out, I recommend renting it first. If you're a die hard Square fanatic, love games with a dark feel, or love dungeon crawlers, you will like it.

Eh

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: July 12, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I dont know about this one. I didn't really enjoy it too much. The beginnings got to catch me for me to continue and it just wasn't doing it for me.

Difficult

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 5
Date: March 23, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I never got to far playing this game. Up to the first save and after that I'm stuck and can't proceed in the game. So I really didn't like this game.

Final Fantasy Who?

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 8
Date: November 27, 2006
Author: Amazon User

First of all, I have to say that I am a BIG fan of the Final Fantasy frenchise, I especially find the SNES and PS1 games to be some of the best Rpg's period (if only we could erase FFX2 the world would be a better place) I will not go on detail about the story itself, but I have to tell you that I find this game to be superior in every way.

As soon as I saw the cover of this game I fell in love with it. I didn't know what it was about, but I knew I had to have it.
My first impresion was WOW! When I saw that intro, the movie like experiece gripped my soul, I thought... well, I'll be spending quite a few hours in front of my TV. As it turned out, I didn't, I found the game to be hard, beautiful, but hard. The fighting system was completelly different to anything I'd seen before, and I was not getting it.
This was five years ago. Regardless of that, I kept starting it over and over again telling myself 'This time I'll finish it!'The story just grips you that much, and the characters personalities leave you wanting to know more. Sure enough, I became a pro in the 'arts' ,weapon affinities and such, and I finished my game... again and again, and again. In short, this is in my opinion one of the greatest RPG's, if not game, of all times. But it is a bit hard to get used to it, or even become good at it (unless I'm just an idiot...which is entirely possible) but once you get the flow of the fighting system, you will not be able to stop. So please do not cast it aside! just keep trying, and your reward will be gratifying.

Ashley Riot needs to be reprisal role on next gen systems!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: November 12, 2006
Author: Amazon User

To avoid writing a 15 page in-depth review, I'll keep it super simple. If you like RPGs with and excellent story line, tons of weapon combinations, a fun & ground-breaking combat system, dark humor and programming that actually rewards you for playing through several times..... get this game. Don't have a PS1? PS2? Doggone it, Square! Let's have a Vagrant Story for PS3.

An amazing game that is certainly not for everyone

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: September 06, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Vagrant Story is the kind of game that is either love it or hate it. There really isn't too much in between. It features great characters and one of the greatest stories in any game released to date, but the amount of attention that must be paid to weapons and stats (along with some redundancy in battles) can really turn a lot of people off.

Let me start with a bit of the story. In the game you play the role of Ashley Riot. A man who is entrusted with the duty of being a Riskbreaker (essentially a one man army) who is entrusted to enter the lost city of Lea Monde to try and figure out an assassination plot that he has been framed for. At the start of the game this is all you know. You know that Ashley went to Lea Monde and was never seen again. Three days after he left, they declared him the murderer. Now you have to find out what happened in the city of Lea Monde and uncover the truth. With a supporting cast of characters lead by the wonderfully evil Sidney Lostarrot, Vagrant Story weaves an amazing tale of lost pasts and hidden truths (with some black magic and whatnot thrown in). Be aware though, the story isn't all happy like you will be apt to find in the Final Fantasy series, it goes much deeper into human emotion and psyche.

As for the gameplay, well, this is where it is either won or lost. Essentially the game is a dungeon crawler that has you wandering the dungeons of Lea Monde until you find a neccesary item to continue traversing through. There is a lot of backtracking but luckily half way through you learn a teleport ability that cuts down on that. You can think of it as similar to the backtracking in Resident Evil games for those familiar (find a locked door, need such and such key/item, find item/key elsewhere, go back and proceed).

All the while you will be encountering various monsters of different classes. While it may not seem like much, monster class is critical to how effective you are at the game. You have the ability to craft your own weapons and armor, each one can have special affinities to different classes. Essentially this means you will want a weapon that is effective against each different enemy class. This is where all the in depth stat management comes in (as well as a lot of use of the EQUIP function....). Attacking enemies is done in real time and allows you to pretty much attack indefinately as long as your timing is good for chaining attacks together. On top of that you can target individual body parts on every monster to weaken different stats (legs = movement, head = intelligence, and so on and so forth). By doing this and inflicting enough damage to one body part you can effectively nullify your enemies strength. Although it can be apt to take quite a while.

Graphically, the game is fairly bland even for PS1 standards. It is made almost with a sketch visual, where there are multiple lines to every section of the characters (similar to what you would see in preproduction sketch books). Although it does work extremely well and seems perfectly natural in the twisted reality that is Lea Monde. All scenes are done in the same graphics engine (no CG) and there is no voice acting so all words are said in speech bubbles. Again, odd, but it works.

The game is definately quirky and is definately a bit of a niche game. It is pretty long and requires the player to really get in depth into what they are doing to truly appreciate all the work and the amazing world that has been imbedded into Vagrant Story. If you can do that, it is one of the most rewarding gaming experiences you can have. If not, then consider your self one of the masses, because that seems to be the general view of the game.

%__% My MY mY... this game --- WooopieeeWooopwoopWoOo....

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 28
Date: February 04, 2006
Author: Amazon User

A GoTh iNJected, maTHEeMaticaLy MoRPpheiWooRFFY deCENT into fUn. Grin and chew... CHOMP CHOMP CHOMP.

Perfect? Not quite...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 10 / 14
Date: January 24, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game is not perfect as the Famitsu review would lead you to believe. Famitsu has only given like 5 games a perfect score... this being one of them.

The characters, design, music, story, atmosphere, and presentation are all top notch and beautiful. The story is sursprisingly mature and the characters are all memorable, especially that mystery man Sydney.
So if all of those things are so good and put together, why did this game 'ultimately' fail when it was released? Because of its gameplay.

The gameplay 'could have' been fun and classic but the makers decided to bog it down with a tremendously confusing, tedious, and unintuitive menu and weapon system.

The base of this game, its weapon system, is beyond complicated. Each weapon can be either piercing, blunt, or edged like a edged sword or a blunt hammer. Then each weapon has about 20 'affinities' such as light, water, physical, undead, etc. Then throw in the fact that each weapon must be made from seperate parts such as a blade, a grip or hilt, plus 1-3 gems. Lost yet? You should be.

But thats not all. Each weapon has damage points, kind of like health for weapons, and phantom points which inscrease special attacks. Throw in the fact that the longer you fight the more tired or excited your character gets, which leads you to miss more often and take more damage as the battle goes on.

This game does have an awesome quick menu that can be used with the L2 button. This menu lets you do anything from find items to use magic with one push of a button. However, for some reason there is no weapon quick menu in a game almost totally based around your weapons! To change weapons, and you will often, you have to make about 5 clicks through slow menus which can take anywhere from 10 secs to a minute.

This games difficult learning curve has turned away so many players without the patience to learn this games ridiculous systems. After all, hitting a boss for 1 damage, when he has 500 health, can be very frustrating, and i dont blame them.

In the end, this game is both brilliant and ridiculous. It has been voted one of the greatest games of all time and for good reason. But it also failed on a commercial and gameplay level by not selling enough copies. And thats for a good reason too...

Love / Hate relationship

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: January 19, 2006
Author: Amazon User

While I would have agreed with most negative / melancholy reviews about this game when I originally recieved it, I must say that many years later with nothing to do I picked this game back up and inserted it. Having beat the game the first time and now on my second playthrough (tragically my save file from the first game is long gone) I'm going to have to say that this is trully a great game. Though I could agree that a quick menu to changing weapons would have been a nice addition, I spend sooooo much time in the menu just to customize my hero to my specs I never noticed. This is not the standared RPG that FF7 presents nor is it anything like that of Diablo. Born from the mistakes of Chocobo's Dungeon, Parasite eve (1&2) and ofcoarse the infamously terrible Eheirgiez Dungeon (I spelled it wrong and I don't care) This game has managed to take what was good from all those games and build off it. While Customization abounds in this game, if you lack either the intelligence or the patience to play this game then I suggest you go back to a conventional RPG and forget you ever heard about this. While what may seem like nothing but tedious gameplay, try putting this on par of a beginers experience of D&D your first play through. (because I can gaurantee that after your first run, you'll know exactly what to expect on any upcomming situation.)

legend of the dragoon

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 17
Date: January 13, 2006
Author: Amazon User

i played it it is the most exellent game i have played I like shana she is cool. and awesome I think darts cool.

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