>literally the most impressive intro on the hardware possible at the time>hands down the most amazing atmosphere & ambiance delving into an undead city lost to ancient wizardry>game has such an obtuse battle system with different weapon types & affinity nothing makes sense WTF is PP what's I/L/H?>absolutely no voice acting at all despite resident evil having itIt really was an amazing gem buried under mounts of weird design choices,why didn't Masuno make more?
So when a thread dies on /v/ with barely any replies, it just gets reposted here ?
>>3831560I hate it because I love it. It's amazing, but for me completely ruined by the inventory management "gameplay". Despite everything, I lost interest in 5 hours.Maybe a remake will correct it one day.
>>3831562We need a vrpg chan
>>3831566I must have dropped it at least 10 times after reaching snowfall forest, never could seem to get past the maze and my weapons never seemed to do more then 10 damage per hit
>>3831566Just having more shortcuts and ability to save equipment sets would improve VS so much. It was already making first steps in that direction.>game is 25 years oldJESUS.
I really liked this game but never finished it. I got stuck maybe 3/4 through on some boss and had no good weapon affinities to beat it, forgot which one though.I still don't understand how the affinity and leveling system works, honestly. I really loved the game setting and story and need to replay it. A remake of the game would be awesome to see.
>>3831872irc there weren't actually any shops to upgrade your weapons, everything had to either be combined together to form the next tier or be found in chest/random drops from mobs with around 50/50 chance that's partly why it's so obtuse nothing is really explained >two iron swords can be combined together to get hagane >leather armor for scale or iron>then the more complex damascus
>>3831560>sepia on sepia on sepia>worst menuing of any jrpg ever made>mc is a cockroachgross game
>Has a huge in-game guide available from the start.>Still, you need frequent trips to GameFAQs to really understand the game's mechanics.They don't make 'em like they used to.The saddest part is that Vagrant Story would have worked great as a PS2 game with more features and less handicaps from the PS1. It always felt to me like a missed opportunity.
O ivalice, we long for thee. They cut the vagrant story refrence out of ff14 beacuse it was a long pointless trip with a bottle of wine and no one got it but me, but you can still drink and mack on hoes at that bar
>>3832088Wait was 14 the MMO or the one square tried being medieval again?
>>3832539Yes.
>>383253914 was always mixed tech, but it was not always ivalice. It is now definitely ivalice
>>3831817If would be great if every time you enter & exit the inventory/storage screen you didn't have to save your game not like there were tons of weapons
>>3831816>Snowfall ForestI managed to get past that part, but then there was an underground city with enemies that had a 1-shot kill death spell. I dropped it at that point. Might pick it up again now that I'm slightly more familiar with the mechanics.>>3831872>I still don't understand how the affinity and leveling system works, honestly. I really loved the game setting and story and need to replay itThe mechanics aren't all equally important. I found out when posting on /vr/ that the affinity system isn't so important that you need to grind up weapons, even though the game gives you dummies to do that with. The PP/DP system is way more important. I think the weapon type also is more important too. You can use slot gems to buff affinity, and should try to keep it raised but shouldn't drop everything to prioritize affinity.You can't play this game blind, because none of this is obvious.
>>3833179Look for gems that boost your hit rates & increase your evasion. Shield up for the deth birdz.
>>3831560voice acting has only been a detriment to the hobby
>>3833255Next time I play I'm just going to write down all the stuff I have to backtrack to, because I'm pretty sure I forgot a lot of it.
>>3831560I'm playing this game and mostly loving it, but my god it can be obtuse at times. I think I'm missing half the combat and setup, but I'm getting by just fine. However, I'm stuck on the part right after you get the teleport spell, I have to backtrack through this giant map like some metroidvania and find how to progress, but wherever I go it seems like I run into something that nearly one shots me. I think the answer is going through the water elemental, but I can't fine a fire grimoire anywhere.
>>3833433That was literally the point where I quit the game when I played. I liked it, but I should've looked up a guide on the mechanics before I played.
>>3833433Remember: have gear dedicated to specific damage types, don't try to be a generalist. You're supposed to use the crafting systems.
>>3831560There's just something about how the game looks. I can't even begin to imagine how much planning and effort baking all the lighting into scenes must've taken.
this game filtered me 30 years ago or whatever, never touched it since
>>3831560voice acting is a net negative for RPGs. the development overhead it adds forces removing all the features that make rpgs fun
>>3833256>>3834383Tasteless retards. What's the point of making beautiful scenes>>3834208and I really can't praise them enough, but it's hard to enjoy it all when I'm getting distracted by fucking SPEECH BUBBLESIt is nice when you can observe the person as you LISTEN to their voice, something that can reveal just as much as a posture or an expression on a face
>>3831560>absolutely no voice acting at allFUCKING BASED. voice acting shills need to be hanged.
>>3834697Not only that, Vagrant Story is actually less than 100MBs.
>>3831560Man the PP systemIt's custom built to make you feel disappointed in shit you just crafted even though it really is better
>>3831960There's also the fact that if you truly want a perfect weapon blades combined only from Damascus and thus being pure will have higher stats than metals upgraded to Damascus through the crafting system. But in the end unless you're doing the NG+ dungeon the game is very lenient. You can easily deal with everything thrown at you by rotating three weapons.
>>3835390>You can easily deal with everything thrown at you by rotating three weapons.Honestly I believe (without proof) that the game was playtested by devs who knew everything about the game, and didn't realize how much trial-and-error-menu-management a newcomer goes through.Kinda like the story about Alien Resurrection's difficulty.
>>3835391I'd believe it. Vagrant Story can come across as really obtuse and confusing to someone just picking it up, since a lot of its systems are fairly unique to it. After all someone wouldn't expect the bulk of your damage to come from the enemy type affinities, where two affinities next to one another will cancel each other out. You'd think damage type or element would be more significant. But at the same time there are a good bunch of things that are really nice QoL features if you know about them, like the dummies. It being tested by a bunch of people already experienced with the title would make a lot of sense. In a way it makes it more unapproachable but at the same time it's given it a very distinct identity
I hope you all played Crimson Shroud too
>>3835496I did but it ended just like vagrant story,just when things were getting interesting the story just up & ends
>>3835496>Crimson Shroudit's sad there was so little confidence in the game it didn't even get a proper release
>>3835496That's the game with the tabletop figurines aesthetic, no? Man it sucks that Vagrant Story never got to become the trilogy it was planned to
>>3835496Is it good?What would VS be like with job classes?
>>3835728yes crimson shroud is good. Nice short and satisfying game that wants you to new game plus it. The crimson shroud was once worn by saint arjuna so despite it saying its unrelated to ivalice its definitely related to ivalice . You have a fighter, a ranger and a caster and combat emphasizes loadout ( like tac og) as well as buffs and debuffs like both VS and FF12
did he really kill them or was Sydney just messing with him?Do you think he even knows the answer himself?
>>3834440>i cant enjoy a story unless someone is voicing out the text aloud to meextremely low IQ
>>3836122I definitely think the most likely outcome is Ashley killed them. While Sydney is manipulating him to groom him into the next bearer of the Blood Sin he makes a very compelling case. Ashley is a cold man, at least at first, and it isn't hard to picture him as an assassin broken by killing the wrong person, with an entity as Machiavellian as the VKP turning trauma to opportunity. But at the same time, it is interesting how Ashley chooses the love of a family in the end. And not just as a foil to Guildenstern, who choose power over love. I don't think Ashley was too weak to face the truth and needed the comfort of a lie. But maybe I want to believe it was real myself.It's a pity we never got the planned Merlose as a companion, I bet interacting with her regularly would have fleshed out Ashley a lot.
>>3836310Something I don't get is that Ashley was shocked to the point of losing consciousness. Given Sidney's talk of how Ashley is remembering his old techniques as chains and break arts he has to be a fairly veteran blade. Rosencrantz speaks very nonchalantly about how disposing of witnesses is standard procedure, maybe it was particularly traumatic due to there being a child as well but in that line of work it seems really unlikely that this would be the first time Ashley's blade tastes the blood of an innocent.
daily reminder that this game was meant to show how a matsuno tactics game could look in full 3-d and we never got that tactics game
>>3836433Huh really never heard that before but did hear the main character was supposed to have another two guys join him for dungeon delving?I don't think adding in multiplayer would have made much difference though the game was simply too different from the usual action RPGs of the time
>>3836623FF12 would have really benefited from multiplayerwe got the '3 people in the dungeon' game in crimson shroud at least
>>3835397>After all someone wouldn't expect the bulk of your damage to come from the enemy type affinities, where two affinities next to one another will cancel each other out. You'd think damage type or element would be more significant.I thought it was the opposite. I remember being explicitly told not to focus on enemy types and to focus on weapon type and PP + DP
>>3835620Crimson Shroud was really good. Even the little story we got made me want for more.
This is one of those games where I loved everything about it outside of the actual game part.The weapon system was so overly complex that every few hours I would realize I fucked something up and have to go back and tediously figure out what.>>3834440I liked the speech bubbles. They went well with the style.
>>3836691affinity type and PP/DP can be completely ignored. weapon type, stat buff/debuff spells, and elemental weakness when applicable are way more important. just use gems for affinity if you want an extra boost.
>>3836771>PP/DPI don't ignore these two. For bosses all you really have to do is max PP, then use that one break art so you just use all PP as damage.
>>3836885I mean vagrant story can be broken in multiple ways. my playthrough I completely ignored PP, break arts and barely used combo hits cause I sucked at it. just used stat buffs, debuffs, elemental weakness and gems for affinity (and using the right weapon type) and that was enough to trample everything.
>>3836885>>3836887I was wrong, it's not a break art, it was Chain Ability. Instill to raise your PP and Phantom Pain to use your PP
>>3831560>my cousin had it when I was a babby>would play it sometimes when visiting>had fun>tfw looking it up years later and realizing the bad lady with the knife fingers I low key had a crush on was a dudePretty good game imo
There's something I find odd about the ending.Throughout the game Ashley's model is shown wearing Tia's necklace, something that persists in the brief moment he's seen shirtless with the Blood-Sin on his back when he's carrying Sidney while escaping the crumbling Leá Monde. However, during the last scene where he's wearing the black trenchcoat he no longer has it. Seems odd that he'd stop wearing it when he's made the deliberate choice to embrace his memory of them as his family. Is it meant to show that he's finally come to terms with what happened?
>>3836889you don't even really need to do that, the main thing is just to realize that weapons do shit damage until the PP meter is full.
>>3836122Obviously it's intended to be ambiguous but I always thought yes. Sydney fabricating him being an assassin from nothing doesn't make sense for his character.I thought Sydney came to like Ashley as the inheritor of the dark because he had both the experience of the person sinned against and the person that sinned and wanted forgiveness. And I also always thought he was intending to use Hardin as the inheritor initially before Ashley seemed like a better one.
>>3835620>it's sad there was so little confidence in the game it didn't even get a proper releaseI think it's less that and more being aware it was a limited game that knew exactly what it wanted to do.
>>3831562qrd?
>>3833433Alright, I beat the fire spirit, but now there's another grimoire blocking my path and I don't know where to go. Are those challenge block puzzles a hint? I did one where I had to go to get the fire spirit item, and I'm doing another one to do an area of the map I was rushed into completing.
>>3836383It happens in real life, albeit not as exaggerated. Otherwise the cliche would not even exist.
>>3831560>>game has such an obtuse battle system with different weapon types & affinity nothing makes sense WTF is PP what's I/L/H?There's a whole tutorial section in the menu.
>>3834440on one hand, I understandon the other hand, I just read the text and skip the voice dialog. all the voice acting might as well be mood setting hums and sighs, maybe an "oh" or even an "I see..." here an there. it would probably be better than the "Gr--" "You mus--" "Please find t--" I end up experiencing.cutscenes are a different storybut I also don't like cutscenes. so.
>>3841741>it would probably be better than the "Gr--" "You mus--" "Please find t--" I end up experiencing.Try disabling subtitles sometime
>>3841598I don't think it ever explained what weapons types do or that you can't recharge PP
>>3836122His family was killed by bandits like he remembers. Ashley then becomes a Riskbreaker to symbolically avenge them but one day kills an innocent family on a mission like Rosencrantz recounts, but the family was unrelated to him. The reason they appear as Marco and Tia in his vision is because his repressed memory is filling in the blanks with their faces after what Sydney tried convince Ashley of. Ashley couldnt cope with having become the perpetrator of the same tragedy he lost his family to, and represses the memory under the influence of the VKP, the day on which his family was killed and the day on which he killed another become one in his mind so that he only remembers being the victim and not the aggressor. Of course, it might also be that the faces of Marco and Tia belong to the family he killed, and their figures took the place of Ashleys original family in his mind instead.>>3836383Like above, my theory is that he was shocked at having become the perpetrator of the same crime he lost his family to. The guilt was so great it began to fracture his mind. Ashley is said to be a veteran, but also a top Riskbreaker, so perhaps that really was his first time doing a dirty clean up mission because an elite like him would be more often used for dangerous ones where he would be mostly killing armed soldiers or politicians, not random civilian witnesses which lesser grunts can do.>>3837252Never noticed that detail. It could be interpreted either way, he has either moved on or the truth about his family is in his heart so that he doesnt need mementos to prove it to himself.
>>3831560If menu navigation was quicker/less annoying the game would be exactly one trillion times better.
>>3845715It's not just the menus though that is around 40% of the problem, it's the dungeon themselves starting to all look the sameright around the halfway point you start to realize all areas start blending together
>>3846854welcome to megadungeon enjoy your stay
>>3846854It's not just the sameyness, it's that Playstation 1/2 era dungeons made up of very small connected 3D rooms with disc loads in between just plain suck in every game and reliably sap away any enjoyment you get from exploration. It's the kind of thing that doesn't seem like a big sacrifice at first but it's just sanding away at your sense of the game being its own continuous reality. And even if they did an "enhanced remaster" with new item swap hotkeys and such that fundamental problem definitely wouldn't get changed.
>>3835397>youd think damage type or element would be more significantthey are. I completely ignored affinity and steamrolled the entire game.
>>3847099decompile the game and remove the loading screens from the dungeons
