Mmm.
Vagrant Story takes all the best parts of the games that you've played -- the real time battling of
Parasite Eve, the deep plot of
Final Fantasy Tactics, the localization skill of Working Designs and Atlus -- and takes them one step further. Truly, this game is the pinnacle of console role-playing (at least for now).
First, let's take the battle system. You can walk around in two modes -- weapon sheathed, which means you have both hands usable for such things as picking up boxes, climbing ledges, and whatnot, and weapon out, which lets you attack your opponents. There is no meter that tells you when you can attack again -- you can generally attack mere moments after your last onslaught. When you choose to attack, the sphere that first appeared in Parasite Eve pops up, showing the range of the weapon that you have selected, and you get to pick body parts of the enemy that you want to hit. The game shows you your chances of hitting and how much damage you can do. Once you've done this, if you've gotten to the point of the game that you can chain attacks, you can start tapping buttons and do massive damage, heal yourself, repair your weapon, and more. The battle system has more depth than most wargames, and that's saying a whole lot. As you do chain attacks and block enemy attacks, a meter called 'Risk' goes up. Higher Risk means that you hit less often (but do critical hits more often), take more damage, and spells work better on you (both damaging and curative). When you're not fighting, Risk drops slowly, and you can also use items to reduce it. Along with all this, you can put weapons together at workshops and combine weapons and weapon parts to try to make better ones. This may all sound terribly complicated, and it is, but the game eases you into it (with the now defacto Square standard -- amnesia -- as the explanation), and you'll be in the game fiddling with your weapons in no time.
Then there's the plot. Your name is Ashley Riot (a seeming homage to that big, bad Ash in Housewares, of Evil Dead and Army of Darkness fame), and you're a Riskbreaker, one of an elite group of, well, butt-kickers. The game takes place in the city of Lea Monde, which starts out seeming like a bunch of crypts and opens up majestically later in the game. The plot itself is convoluted as hell, on par with Tactics for the sheer possibility of confusion, but it has a major leg up on Final Fantasy Tactics -- the best translation of a Japanese game, ever. Every single word seems to make sense, as the characters speak true Middle English instead of Dragon Warrior-ese, with phrases to laugh at, be scared by, and just damn cool stuff. Square has finally redeemed themselves for the poor past few translations. It even tops Working Designs -- something that takes a whole lot of work.
I could go on and on about this game, about the crazy room names for every location in the game, about its excellent auto-map reminiscent of Descent, of the Break Arts that let you beat the crap out of the bosses, out of the bosses that can and will beat the crap out of you the first few times until you figure out their weaknesses, about the four schools of spells and their usefulness -- but this review would be pages and pages long. So I'll stop here, and just say that this
game has Gameplay, with a capital G.