After being on my backburner for several years, I finally finished Vagrant Story with a solid 30 hours. At the time of writing, I currently have 216 games rated on Gamespot, with an average score of 7.3. I think I am fairly justified in saying that this is not a reactionary review at a grade of 1, but a fair assessment of the game's flaws.
I'll start off with what I liked:
Graphics:
While most of the areas were very mundanely designed, the 3D engine was pretty impressive for the time. Character animations are fluid, Dragons and boss battles look awesome. Good attention to detail in some of the smaller terrain doodads (fountains, candles)
Plot:
I had a hard time following what was going on in the story, though that might have been because I played it in bursts over the span of a year. There were a lot of characters whose names and motivations were completely lost to me. Nevertheless, the cutscenes were generally impressive. Nothing amazing, but decent writing/action scenes, even though I didn't know what was going on.
Music:
There were definitely a handful of good tracks in this game. Boss battle, cutscene, and workshop music come to mind. However, most of the game's dungeon sections have minimalist/atmospheric tracks which are pretty boring, so the bad tracks far outweigh the good ones. Nothing awful but not amazing, especially by Square standards.
All in all the game did start to grow on me towards the end. The biggest problem is that the combat is very hard to learn, and so at least 50% of the game feels like a chore. Here's what I didn't like:
Combat:
The fundamental mechanics of the game are pretty good. I don't mind chain attacks, and I like the 3D radius sphere. The main problem is the multitude of secondary mechanics that they added, which only detract from the fun:
- Each weapon has Durability Points (DP) and Phantom Points (PP). Each attack you do lowers DP and raises PP. If you have full DP or PP, your weapon is more effective; if either bar is empty, it's less effective. DP can be restored at a workshop in exchange for PP. What is the hell is the point of this? Each attack makes your weapon more AND less effective, and you can exchange one effectiveness for another. There are chain attacks (Temper and Instill) which can increase on gauge independently, which I ended up using quite a bit. DP and PP could have been removed entirely from the game without anyone complaining or noticing.
- Each chain attack costs RISK, which lowers your accuracy, among other things. Because chains costs exponentially more risk as you do more hits, it's basically a mechanic to ensure you don't spam infinite chain attacks. Of course, there are items which restore risk anyway, so it doesn't really impede you if you save them for boss battles. I don't think risk is a very good solution to the problem of infinite chains, because the effects of high risk persist after your chain. It doesn't really discourage you from making ridiculous chains, it discourages you from making chains at all. Just make chains cost MP, or make the timing get exponentially harder. I would have removed RISK from the game entirely; having stupidly low accuracy is not fun.
- When attacking, you can target different specific body parts (head, body, arm, etc.), which have different hit/miss chances, and different weaknesses when targeted (slow, blind, - strength). This doesn't really matter when you're attacking, since an enemy will almost always die before you cripple a body part.
- The biggest factor on your effectiveness in combat is your weapon affinity. There are 6 different enemy types, 6 different elements, and 3 different weapon types. Each weapon, each piece of armour, and each enemy have different creature type/element/weapon type strengths and weaknesses. Defeating an enemy increases your weapon's affinity towards that type and decreases affinity towards another type. There exist different strategies for how to optimize your weapon load, but I ended up carrying 6 weapons, one for each creature type, and swapping weapons whenever I encountered a different creature.
Unfortunately, the in-game manual doesn't mention that killing an enemy increases affinity, so it took me a long time to optimize my setup. Before that, I was regularly doing 0-1 damage with 0-10% accuracy, with no idea why. Many people who play this game don't finish it because they don't optimize their weapons, and they don't understand why they're not doing any damage.
The other problem with optimization is that there's no perfect way to do it. Since I had one weapon for each creature type, I ignored damage type. My beast-type weapon did edged damage; even though it had +50 against beast, it still did less damage to a blunt-vulnerable beast than a non-beast, blunt weapon. In order to have a dedicated weapon against each creature and weapon type, you would need 6x3 = 18 different weapons - but in that case, you wouldn't use any of them frequently enough to level up the affinity.
OK, so not every weapon has to be perfectly optimized... the fact that there's no one-size-fits-all means that you get to try out different strategies (which is probably the reason why some people like this game). Even with only 6 weapons, I managed to do pretty good damage 75% of the time towards the end of the game. The main complaints against the affinity optimization is that
1. It's not explained
2. It's all done via boring menus
3. It takes a good 10 seconds to swap weapons (makes Secret of Mana look great by comparison)
4. The base strength in the weapon is more important than either creature type or weapon type, rendering it less useful
TLDR:
Four core mechanics of the combat make it unnecessarily complicated and less fun:
- DP/PP
- RISK
- Body parts
- Weapon affinity
Before adding any of these ideas, the programmers should have asked themselves "does this make the game more fun or less fun?", and if the answer is "less", then it should not be in the game.
Levels
After gameplay, the second biggest problem is the crappy levels. I mentioned that the engine/animation is impressive - but the graphic design as a whole is by no means good. You travel from dungeons, to cellars, to crypts, to catacombs, to sewers, to basements. - all the while staring and ugly, muted grey and brown textures and fighting bats, dogs, bats, zombies, bats, phantoms, and bats.
Eventually you get to the surface, but this happens to rarely and too late in the game. There are churches, cities, and (the best level) the Snowfly Forest. Why couldn't they put more outdoor levels? They're much more fun. Why didn't they put them earlier in the game?
The dungeons are full of box puzzles, where you have to life and push boxes to reach higher locations. Again these start off awful, and don't get challenging until the last ~2 hours of the game.
Conclusion
Awful combat and awful levels make it an awful game.
It's all the more disappointing because it's a Square action-RPG on the ps1 with good reviews. It's clear that they put in a lot of effort, which just raises my hopes high enough to be all the more let down.
I like to finish any game that I start, so I managed to power through it, but to anyone with less patience/tolerance, stay away. Average plot and average music aren't enough to make this one enjoyable.