QueenBrahne

Vagrant Story is a painful and clunky attempt at an action RPG, with barebones story The level design is almost non-existent because every area is a generic dungeon of some sort, and enemies are all generic monsters. There are few characters you interact with at all outside of cutscenes and the story is pretty drab, relying heavily on obfuscated, contrived plot twists that the player could never possibly have predicted but are absurd. I can understand liking the story but this again lacks the depth you'd expect out of a Square-Enix RPG of this era, it's just so desperately trying to be different but comes up short in every respect compared to the turn-based games of its time. I'm not sure an action RPG on the PS1 was truly possible considering the console's limitations, but I would not be surprised if one existed far better executed than Vagrant Story. As you roam around the empty and vacant world of Vagrant Story, enemies will chase you down if you come within their scope - think Metal Gear Solid - and then you or they can initiate the battle. Once the fight starts, both the player and the enemies are frozen in place for the duration of either's attack, a weird, clunky hybrid of turn based and action. You can move around the stages but once either you or the enemy tries to attack, then everything comes to a grinding halt. This is very frustrating when you're trying to get away from an enemy then because they got in range of an attack, they freeze and attack you. The way the combo system works is pretty asinine too. You simply string together combos by timing them right like a QTE one after another, but there's a meter that goes up every time you do this. This punishes you heavily for the longer combos you do, and means your attacks do no damage. What to do to bring down this negative mechanic meter? You have to wander around the stage hiding from the enemy for a ridiculous amount of time until the meter goes down. This meter has an absolutely ridiculous cap that makes all your attacks do 0 damage, and combos are an absolute necessity to ever win the more challenging fights of the game. From every standpoint, the combo system is flawed: overly simplistic, aggravating when you do it successfully and hopelessly shallow. I wish I could say the art or the design was particularly inspired, or the music stood out as many of Square-Enix's games do in this era. Instead the main characters looks like a rejected concept for Edward Scissorhands with his idiotic costume and hair, while the other characters are about what you'd expect from the average anime-flavored JRPG. Nothing remotely original besides the plot's attempt at cheap plot twists. The level design as mentioned is incredibly generic, flat and lifeless, while the enemies are your stock wolves and bats at the beginning, evolving to generic RPG fare as the game progresses like lizardmen and skeletons. Nothing as inspired as the enemies in your typical Final Fantasy, SMT or Dragon Quest game, that's for damn sure. Ultimately what made me get this game in the first place and why it annoyed me enough to make me write this scathing review is that it has an obnoxious fanbase who sings its praises for being so different from the other Square-Enix games of the time. Guess what, this game and its "action" hybrid gameplay is now all the rage at Square-Enix in recent years, and it ****. This game is meant to be super difficult, but this is not a good thing because the combat in this game is awful. It's not like it's a proper action game where player skill is involved, it's a weird kind of waiting game where you vaguely want to position yourself, but not exactly because once you're in range it becomes a pure numbers game. It's not like it's Dark Souls and you can outwit the AI or other players, you're still locked in a rigid JRPG system, but with the pain in the ass of having to navigate a boxed in dungeon at all times. I think what actually pisses me off the most about this game is the lack of towns, NPCs and other characters to interact with. It's positively soul crushing to wander around in this dreary and boring game world with no one to talk to or interact off, just waiting to get past the next generic enemy so maybe you can see a cutscene or any semblance of the charm you'd expect out of this era of Squaresoft. Instead you get the slow drip drip drip of a very boring story travelling at a snail's pace. There's nothing to interpret from your surrounding, it's just dull. I feel absolutely robbed paying just £10 for this game. I feel sorry for any poor saps who picked up this game in the 90s new and couldn't get a refund. Take my advice, do not buy this game and do not assume it gets any better after the start, it's just like this throughout the entire game and there is never any pay off for all the busy work and pain involved. Do not feel bad for failing to overcome the "difficulty" of this game's poor design.

Combat: Shallower than other 3D Zeldas like Twilight Princess which introduced some fancier attacks, or Skyward Sword that let you have full 1:1 control of the sword. This plays like a dumbed down version of Dark Souls. Very few combo or attack strings per weapon, very little enemy variety, mostly recolors. All the weapons breaking is a pain in the ass and means you constantly have to switch weapons, as all loot in the game is rewarded for side quests you're essentially doing these quests only to get consumable items that make no long term impact on the game. Story: Non-existent, you get cutscenes of Zelda giving expository dialogue and everything else is indirect and/or unexplained because it's too deep for you I guess. The Zelda game could not boast to have the best of storylines, but they at least tried, this game is well below the mark for the series. It's very disappointing how they handled Ganon in this game. The ancient evil has awakened! For what is meant to be a "modernizing" game in the series, they reduce the story back to the basic level it was in Zelda 1. World: It's very big yes, but in terms of what there is to do, this game has essentially 3 or 4 dungeons depending on how you count them, compared to 7-8 at bare minimum for all the other 3D Zelda games. Besides these disappointing dungeons, the game spams shrines. Shrines are very very short versions of a dungeon that all look the same but have different physics puzzles where you throw balls into cups or make balls go around a bend or maze suspended in the air. You also can go open world "seed" side quests where you have to run up a hill really fast, throw boulders/balls into cups in the ground/ocean, the kind of thing you'd do in Assassin's Creed. Music: Indefensibly bad compared to previous 3D Zeldas. There is mostly no music for the majority of the game, and what music there is just isn't very good. While not as bad as the New LA theme in Xenoblade X, this is not outright bad music, it's not going to be anything that people listen to for years like the themes from previous Zelda games. I can't say it's too surprising given the general design of the game when there's very little to really get inspiration from for a theme, there's barely any character or boss themes. Of special note is the terrible voice acting in this game that may as well fall under the music banner. The voice acting is horrendously bad and this is the first time they have tried to do voice acting in a Zelda game. Zelda herself sounds like a stereotypical British woman and her delivery is extremely wooden. Most characters/NPCs still don't talk anyway, and a Zelda game with random, bad voice acting frankly breaks the immersion, if everything else not feeling like Zelda didn't do that already. Graphics: It looks nice but does it really compare to other recent open world games that it is obviously heavily inspired by? Compare it to FFXV or MGS5, two other recent Japanese attempts at doing an open world Elder Scrolls type game, they look much better. This may be because Nintendo is working on Wii U development at the same time and the Switch hardware is new, but do not expect to be blown away by the graphics in this game. The art style is different but can't help but feel it looks a lot more bloom-y and oversaturated than even Skyward Sword, I have a personal preference for the N64/TP's art style but this style honestly doesn't even do the style as many favors as Wind Waker or Skyward Sword. The frame rate drops constantly to the point of being unplayable. In conclusion I am not a hater of this game and I do not care about whatever console wars are going on with the user score here, this game is offensively bad to me as a fan of the series since for decades. This is no longer Zelda, it's just Nintendo trying to cash in on the latest trends of open world Western games. Didn't work for Final Fantasy or Metal Gear Solid either and this game will lose its shiny critical acclaim soon enough when people look beyond the shallow "big open world" that clearly got all the focus in development.