This review contains spoilers
Vagrant Story's gameplay took a lot of getting used to... and by that I mean looking up online guides to figure out what was going on. It is comically overdesigned: every single weapon has like six different statistical categories for a total of like, 30+ statistics and you are not allowed to ignore any of that, or you will see your strongest one deal 0 damage to an enemy it doesn't match up against, and I am not even getting into the rest of the mechanics you have to figure out. It might be fine with a tutorial but there is absolutely none, only an in-game "short manual" that's over 160 (NOT HYPERBOLE) pages of barely understandable babble. I highly recommend anyone playing this game to look up a Youtube guide to the basics of its mechanics because it is just way too much.
There is some good fun to be had when everything does click into place- while I came out of Vagrant Story disappointed I don't want to give the impression I didn't at least enjoy most of my playthrough, once you get how it works it's a nice little dungeon crawler with outstanding presentation and pretty satisfying map design. Besides the aforementioned issues, though, the biggest one holding the gameplay back is the sheer amount of pausing and menuing you have to do to adapt to just about any situation, made even more frustrating by the fact that the menu is so dang slow and clunky. A lot of the game is slow and clunky, in fact, making me wonder whether they couldn't get enough playtesting done. For example, the Risk (more like exhaustion) meter that builds up when you attack forces you to down consumables for no reason if a fight drags on too long, the limited inventory is a huge pain for little gain, and generally doing things is very slow. Still, I would say that once you figure it out, the gameplay is overall more than passable.
The takeaway from most people who play Vagrant Story seems to be some variation of "the gameplay's rough, but the story is great". I... disagree. It starts out great, with a super cinematic and stylish prologue that promises a dense, politically charged story, and I was hooked. But then... nothing? The cutscenes are all great in a vacuum, the expertise in their presentation is apparent and effective, but they're few and far apart and mostly just vaguely hint at some big reveals in the future.
I was still looking forward to said reveals and they were good, but they happen like, halfway into the game, and then there's just ten more hours of faffing about (Honestly I realize just how much of the game is just characters moving around, meeting and interacting with nothing actually coming of these scenes) before the final showdown, where Ashley fights a guy he has absolutely no personal stakes in defeating beyond "he is evil", has a bafflingly stupid conclusion to his arc (To provide a comparison, imagine if after learning of his past, Cloud Strife decided to dye his hair black and start calling himself Zack, and this was portrayed as a positive conclusion to his arc), fights some more, and then the game ends with a bunch of ends kinda loose but not really in a cliffhanger way, more in the sense that they're kept vague on purpose and that is arguably done well enough but it does not really work for me.
I was genuinely baffled at how much Vagrant Story dropped the ball- most of that setup either does not conclude into anything worthwhile or does not conclude at all. The arcs of characters that actually are good (like Sydney's) are spaced out and obscure enough that they don't really prompt an emotional reaction, more like a "huh, i guess that was pretty good." which I appreciate but doesn't actually carry the story. There are good bits and good themes but they are just that, "organized religion is often a means of holding on to power" is a thing that is true but it's not conveyed in a particularly interesting way or used to reach further conclusions, it's just an element of the worldbuilding that receives a lot of focus without further purpose, it doesn't relate to Ashley's personal journey and neither it nor said journey actually matter in the final conflict, which is just killing some guy going mad with power. I could resort to further criticisms such as "every female character in this game is a damsel in distress or just orbits around a male one" but the truth is that there's just nothing there.
So, I dunno. I guess I kind of enjoyed my time with the game, despite it ending on a complete wet fart, but between the incredibly steep learning curve and general... eh of the story, I don't really think it was worth playing. It sure as hell is pretty though.
There is some good fun to be had when everything does click into place- while I came out of Vagrant Story disappointed I don't want to give the impression I didn't at least enjoy most of my playthrough, once you get how it works it's a nice little dungeon crawler with outstanding presentation and pretty satisfying map design. Besides the aforementioned issues, though, the biggest one holding the gameplay back is the sheer amount of pausing and menuing you have to do to adapt to just about any situation, made even more frustrating by the fact that the menu is so dang slow and clunky. A lot of the game is slow and clunky, in fact, making me wonder whether they couldn't get enough playtesting done. For example, the Risk (more like exhaustion) meter that builds up when you attack forces you to down consumables for no reason if a fight drags on too long, the limited inventory is a huge pain for little gain, and generally doing things is very slow. Still, I would say that once you figure it out, the gameplay is overall more than passable.
The takeaway from most people who play Vagrant Story seems to be some variation of "the gameplay's rough, but the story is great". I... disagree. It starts out great, with a super cinematic and stylish prologue that promises a dense, politically charged story, and I was hooked. But then... nothing? The cutscenes are all great in a vacuum, the expertise in their presentation is apparent and effective, but they're few and far apart and mostly just vaguely hint at some big reveals in the future.
I was still looking forward to said reveals and they were good, but they happen like, halfway into the game, and then there's just ten more hours of faffing about (Honestly I realize just how much of the game is just characters moving around, meeting and interacting with nothing actually coming of these scenes) before the final showdown, where Ashley fights a guy he has absolutely no personal stakes in defeating beyond "he is evil", has a bafflingly stupid conclusion to his arc (To provide a comparison, imagine if after learning of his past, Cloud Strife decided to dye his hair black and start calling himself Zack, and this was portrayed as a positive conclusion to his arc), fights some more, and then the game ends with a bunch of ends kinda loose but not really in a cliffhanger way, more in the sense that they're kept vague on purpose and that is arguably done well enough but it does not really work for me.
I was genuinely baffled at how much Vagrant Story dropped the ball- most of that setup either does not conclude into anything worthwhile or does not conclude at all. The arcs of characters that actually are good (like Sydney's) are spaced out and obscure enough that they don't really prompt an emotional reaction, more like a "huh, i guess that was pretty good." which I appreciate but doesn't actually carry the story. There are good bits and good themes but they are just that, "organized religion is often a means of holding on to power" is a thing that is true but it's not conveyed in a particularly interesting way or used to reach further conclusions, it's just an element of the worldbuilding that receives a lot of focus without further purpose, it doesn't relate to Ashley's personal journey and neither it nor said journey actually matter in the final conflict, which is just killing some guy going mad with power. I could resort to further criticisms such as "every female character in this game is a damsel in distress or just orbits around a male one" but the truth is that there's just nothing there.
So, I dunno. I guess I kind of enjoyed my time with the game, despite it ending on a complete wet fart, but between the incredibly steep learning curve and general... eh of the story, I don't really think it was worth playing. It sure as hell is pretty though.