Vagrant Story

• 1. A Game Without Shops

  ›

  Vagrant Story arrived on the PlayStation on the 10th of February 2000 in Japan, and it came with a peculiar design decision: no shops. In a medium where buying potions and swords from a merchant was as expected as a health bar, Square's new action role-playing game stripped that convention away entirely. The player controls Ashley Riot, an elite agent called a Riskbreaker, alone in a ruined city with no vendor to bail him out. The questions the game plants from its opening minutes are also the ones worth asking about the people who made it: why design something this strange, and who was willing to take that risk?

• 2. Ivalice and Leá Monde

  ›

  Leá Monde is a fictitious city on an island surrounded by reefs, and its walls have been, in the game's own words, "the witness of many battles" and "stronger than the mightiest forts of Valendia". An earthquake struck the town 25 years before the events of the game, killing the population and leaving the ground unstable. The game's scenery draws from real-life landscapes of the southwest of France, particularly the city of Saint-Émilion in the Bordeaux region. One of director Yasumi Matsuno's colleagues, a wine enthusiast, had visited Saint-Émilion and was struck by its architecture. Matsuno sent a team of five people, formed in September 1998, to France to absorb those styles into the game's visual design. The world Leá Monde inhabits, Ivalice, was a setting Matsuno created when he joined Square in 1995. He later clarified that the original plan was not to place Vagrant Story in the Ivalice universe at all, and that its connections to Final Fantasy Tactics were meant as intertextual "fan service" for players of that earlier game.

• 3. Building the Combat System

  ›

  Development of Vagrant Story began in January 1998 and ran for two years, with a team that grew from 20 people to a peak of 50. The battle system Matsuno's team built is pausable real-time combat, similar in structure to Square's Parasite Eve from 1998. When Ashley enters Battle Mode, a spherical grid appears around him; individual body parts on enemies can be targeted within that sphere. Players chain different attacks called Chain Abilities to build large combos, pressing buttons in timed succession in a way that resembles a rhythm game. A Risk bar sits below the health and magic bars. The longer Ashley attacks without pause, the more Risk accumulates, lowering his accuracy and defenses while raising his chance for critical hits. Matsuno said the gameplay was designed for hardcore players who do not "ask for hints and read through strategy guides". The team faced a serious technical constraint: memory issues were considered the most challenging aspect of development. To compensate, they removed AI-controlled supporting characters that would have joined Ashley mid-game, and had to adjust interface elements, texture mapping, and polygon mesh to stay within limits.

• 4. Crafting Weapons and Managing Affinities

  ›

  Vagrant Story features no shops, so players build their own equipment in designated workshop areas scattered through Leá Monde. Weapons fall into three damage types: blunt, piercing, and edged. Each weapon and piece of armor carries affinities tied to enemy classes and elements. Gaining one affinity can cause a weapon to lose another, so the system rewards careful planning. Two pieces of equipment can be combined, merging their affinities and sometimes producing a new type of blade or armor. 1UP.com noted in its review that the game's inventory was too limited for the vast number of customizations possible, a problem made worse because some boss enemies are only vulnerable to specific weapon types. Matsuno also revealed that over half of the game's intended story was cut due to capacity and development time constraints, suggesting the crafting system may have expanded to fill the space left behind.

• 5. Hitoshi Sakimoto's Score

  ›

  Hitoshi Sakimoto composed, arranged, and produced the original score for Vagrant Story. His prior video game work included the soundtracks to Radiant Silvergun and Final Fantasy Tactics. Sakimoto began by writing "bright and cheerful" tunes similar to Final Fantasy Tactics, but Matsuno pushed him toward music that was "more deep and heavy". Matsuno also advised him to listen to music from The X-Files as a reference for ambient scores. Sakimoto cited influences from composers James Horner and Hans Zimmer. He created individual themes for each character and monster, adjusting their melodies to reflect relationships and antagonistic tensions. The soundtrack was first released on two compact discs by DigiCube on the 8th of March 2000, under catalog number SSCX-10042. It contains 57 tracks, including two remixes and tracks that were not used in the game. A re-release by Square Enix on the 24th of March 2006 removed some of the original PlayStation synth reverb, producing a slightly different version. Sakimoto later cited the Vagrant Story soundtrack as one of his favorite compositions.

• 6. Critical Reception and Awards

  ›

  In May 2000, Vagrant Story was the fifth best-selling PlayStation title of the month, selling 100,000 units in its first 20 days despite competition from Final Fantasy IX and Chrono Cross. Vagrant Story became the third of thirty games, and the only PlayStation game, to receive a perfect score of 40 from Famitsu magazine. Review aggregator Metacritic recorded "universal acclaim", while GameRankings ranked it as the 15th best PlayStation game. IGN described the story as "so deep and intuitive that it'll likely please fans" and said the battle system maintains "a needed element of strategy and balance". GameSpot called the battle system too complex for beginners, requiring even experienced players to develop a comprehensive understanding of weapon customization. The English localization by Alexander O. Smith used archaic English, which IGN quoted translator Andrew Vestal describing as "an unparalleled-and unprecedented-work" of Japanese to English video game translation. Vagrant Story won "Best PlayStation Game" at the E3 2000 IGN Awards and received nominations at the 4th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards held by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences.

• 7. Legacy in Ivalice

  ›

  Three years after release, Vagrant Story was selected as one of Sony's Greatest Hits, a designation that lowered its retail price and typically increased sales. In 2004, Matsuno told French gaming magazine Joypad that the stories of Vagrant Story, Final Fantasy Tactics, and Final Fantasy XII unfold close to each other on the Ivalice map. Final Fantasy XII, released in 2006, carried forward terms from Vagrant Story including Riskbreaker, Leámonde, and Kildea. Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood, in 2017, went further with the Return to Ivalice raid series, including an alternate version of Valnain and Leá Monde. The follow-up story in Shadowbringers, titled Save the Queen, drew on concepts from an unused Vagrant Story sequel. In October 2007, executive producer Akitoshi Kawazu called Vagrant Story the "next natural candidate" for a PSP update, though he noted the difficulty of porting a title that had already pushed the original PlayStation to its technical limits. Kawazu added that bringing Ashley Riot into other Ivalice games would be difficult because even in Vagrant Story, in his words, "there's really not that much learn(ed) about Ashley Riot".