Vagrant Story

Is this a Tactics sequel or some shit? I don't remember.

It's great game, unconventional JRPG. Worst part of the game are very slow menu and weapon change/spell selection.
Also before playing the game look up how weapons works and how to "level" them up. You level up weapons so you have specific weapon for types of enemies you encounter. You use one weapon for ghosts and undeads, and other one for dragons and beasts etc. In this game weapons are everything, leveling character is secondary.

when i first played it i got the feeling it was set in France, but the creator late (much later) declared in an ultimania somewhere that it is indeed part of the Ivalice continuity

Imagine if Tactics became the staple for Final Fantasy progression, art-style, and atmosphere.

no, it didnt age well. it wasnt even good when it game out. pretty shitty gameplay.

Yes it is Ivalice continuity and yes level design was inspired by french architecture, I read somewhere that dev team (or just the main guy) went on trip to Europe for inspiration, where they visited french cathedrals and catacombs. Can't find story now.

I love Vagrant Story.
You might have to stick to it for a while, I didn't get the game until half way through.
You're required to use buffs and debuffs, or you're going to deal 0 to 1 damage every time.
Weapon crafting may seem complicated at first but if you stick to it it's rewarding.
The story is great. It's not in your face like most jrpg's, it's told in a sort of film noire way.

That would be fantastic. Why haven't they taken a page from Tactics is beyond me.

Go for it. I'll pretend it's his. Unless you're a cutie too.

Never played it back then, I'm not a fan of RPGs, but I recently started playing and I really enjoy it so far. Graphics and design are incredible for the PS1.

I'm more of a buff guy actually, do you still want it?

Well, we already got this far. Let's see some dicks.

I have this as a physical copy. I remember this being praised on niggertits' Holla Forums a long while back. As with all Square games, it's full of cryptic shit that no one can even guess at. I've read through guides, and none of it makes a lick of sense or is just poorly designed.

Alright, your weapon gain affinities to certain enemy types as long as you kill them, but killing certain other enemy types with it can LOWER your other affinity. This, of course, isn't mentioned anywhere, even in the fucking manual! You have your fists as weapons well, but whoop-de-doo, you can't gain affinites for your fists for some reason. For example: This weapon has an affinity to creature type A. Killing creature type B with it will lower your affinity to A. This isn't even indicated anywhere, you can only guess as to what is causing the fucking negative stat changes.

The game mechanic is centered around chaining your attacks together by pressing the right buttons at the right time. Except the timing has to be P E R F E C T and nothing less, otherwise fuck you faggot, you lost your chain attack and your turn. With practice you can get around this, but your fucking timing changes with your weapons and there is a truck-load of weapons.

If you get a chain started, your 'risk' meter is raised. Every attack raises risk The higher the risk, the more critical damage you do. Seems fun, right? Well, you'll also miss a shitload more often, meaning you will have to CONSTANTLY keep risk at a manageable level to deal any sort of reliable damage. You have items for that, but you can also just wait it out, but waiting for risk to lower in an enemy filled room is not a smart move. Needless to say, you're gonna be downing those items a whole fucking lot.

You can also target enemy limbs! Well isn't that great, except it only translates to how weak they are in a limb. They don't fall off, they don't give you any neat bonuses, the limbs aren't even hard to target. Just target the most weakest part and keep wailing at it until dead.

There is more menu-diving in this game than fucking MGS3, or at least it feels that way. Everything else but the most essential, namely switching weapons, is conveniently put on your hotkeys. What this means is that if you want to change your weapon in mid-battle so that you don't fucking waste your grinded affinities for your weapons, you're going to have to navigate a very clunky menu EVERY DAMNED TIME.

There are traps hidden aroud maps, but there is literally no indication of where they could be, you just have to fucking stumble into them to find them. Once you change from this room to another, and change back, the trap has dissappeared, but it's still there, meaning that if you don't autistically remember every trapped square, you are risking stepping into tons of damage.

This whole game feels like it's designed to be a big 'fuck you.' It's like someone said "Hey, these ideas are pretty cool! How do we suck the most fun out of these ideas and leave the bad parts in?" Maybe there's something i'm doing wrong, but I've been at this game for a good while now and it is the most frustrating game I've had to play. The graphics are fucking GORGEOUS for a PS1 game, but that's pretty much it. I do not see the appeal in this game. Someone help me out here.

You couldn't even master the risk system?

I'm pretty sure it is mentioned, and for that matter its only the affinities directly below the one you raise that drop, it is very possible to handle all enemy types with just 3-4 weapons specialized for two different enemy types throughout the entire game.

Weapons work like this: you can level up weapon for two types of enemy if they adjacent to each other in this menu (pic related). So you can level up weapon for humans and beasts, or humans and evil, or beasts and undead or undead and phantom. If you use it on any other type you lose affinity.
I think most of the weapons of same type use same animations, just with the different looks. So if you use 5 spears they should all have same animation so they should have same timing. Kinda like in Monster Hunter, and not in Dark souls where every weapons is unique.
That shit is fucking stupid. Agreed
I never understood this. Game was released at the end of PS1 life cycle and pretty much everyone (this game was allegedly made for hardcore gamers as said by devs) had analogs at that time. Why didn't they let us bind shit to analogs. It would make this game jump from 8/10 to 9/10 for me just if it had just that feature.
You forgot this bullshit.

...

I remember being very impressed with the visuals and the combat system, but the game getting more and more frustrating and cryptic as it progresses, sometimes I would do zero damage and have no idea why because none of the enemy parameters should be lowering my damage to zero. I remember at some point I had to use some trick that would gradually increase the damage of chained attacks from zero to something minimally useful because of this.

I also hit an extremely annoying forest maze filled with some kind of mosquito enemy that almost made me quit the game. After a long time I managed to beat it but I also had to use another cheap trick on the last boss becaue he would always kill me in one hit so I had to use some timing trick to automatically recover half my health AFTER being killed, it was pretty bullshit.

In the end it felt like an extremely long and frustrating journey and I didn't understand the story at all, it was only worth it for bragging rights because it was so complicated. Sadly the other kids at school thought the characters looked gay and mocked me for playing the game instead of praising my great accomplishment.

Overall it's a 6/10, maybe a 7 if you don't mind being called gay.

I recall a brief mention at the start of the game, but fuck me, it certainly didn't go into detail what leveling lowers which level. Fuck that noise, nigga.

Now that makes a lot more sense. Thanks you for clarifying.

The difficult timing I can kind of understand, but it feels very finicky for some reason. I can't precisely predict when my weapons are going to hit. It's also frustrating since the attack animations are so damned long and the fights get so drawn-out because of it.

Fuck risk, it does the exact opposite of what I suspect it was supposed to do; rewarding dangerous plays. Instead, you're going to have to watch the damned meter so it doesn't get too high, otherwise some monster is going to one-shot you instantly.

I don't understand this either. This game went from 'just bearable' to 'pain in the ass' as soon as I figured it out you're going to go menudiving for weapons all the time.

They're going to get worse, aren't they?

Oh yes, before I forget; Trying to anticipate and block magic attacks is impossible, since these very elaborate and flashy attacks cause unbelievable strain on the hardware. The moment the magic attack hits might not be at the moment you're even seeing it, making the precise timing due to the immense lag/fps drop FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE. And that brings me to the point of magic attacks; why are they so damned flashy, why do they take so long to activate and why the fuck do they cause considerable lag/ fps drop?

This game is designed so fucking badly it makes me want to scream. This is like a case study on what NOT to do when designing a game. This is the height of ass-backwardsness. Not even the turboest of turbo-autists can play this and then say with a straight face that they enjoyed this crap. Square have always been the masters of obscure bullshit and the chucklefucks who made this game are still probably over at Squeenix, applying their weird, Lovecraftian levels of alien gook logic into their latest FF abortions, where fun isn't meant to be fun, it's meant to punish you.

HOW ARE THESE PEOPLE STILL MAKING MONEY? FUCK I'M MAD.

I played on emulator, so there was no problems with that. Managed to block attacks 50% of the time. I also used save states for some bullshit parts like inventory management (every time you access your chest you have to save your game which is slow), crafting and speed up for block pushing.
I wish there was a rom hack or whatever it's called to fix some of this bullshit if it is possible anyway. If you want to play this game you need to do a lot of reading both in game and on wikis.

The menus take longer to load than you do to jerk off.

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It's kind of overrated on Holla Forums just like Xenogears, Final Fantasy Tactics, and every other Square game that's not a mainline Final Fantasy, but still pretty good.

That trick is called chaining
No matter how shit your weapons are, if you can chain for shit your damage gradually increases in the order like
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, …

That was how I played the game as a kid who didn't read the mechanics.

Mastering the mechanics makes the game easy IMO. You simply keep at least three weapons to use against different types of monsters. If you can't even do that well, you can always use those sword arts or something that deals massive damage in exchange for using HP

Because game runs at shit PS1 framerates. What was it? 20 fps? 15?
I dunno if you can fix it with emulator though.

Graphics aged well, low poly and the textures fit nicely with each other.

It misses some QoL improvements though, like a shortcut to change weapons/armor since you'll be doing that quite a bit in the game.

I'd recommend at least a playthrough if you don't mind having to go through the menu over and over just to change your equipment.

post progress?
I'd like to know more

nigger, they do specify in the in-game manual that the two enemy types below the one you hit are the ones that lowers, so you can have one for one type, skip two types down and the next one is free to be hit against without penalties.

Wrong, you do not have to time perfectly, since the game comments on how 'perfect' your hit was. Also, the risk system was made to prevent the player from making unlimited chains, killing everyone easily and thus breaking the game.

targeting limbs also have their effects. hitting the head enough times makes the enemy silent. targeting their legs enough makes their movement speed halved. healing an enemy that has been hit by their comrades charms them into helping you in that specific level only.

i agree with the menu though.

nigger, there's a spell to reveal every trap in the room. it's not like it costs a lot of MP to use. plus the traps are usually placed in spaces where you're bound to memorize them.

Is it like this, or like I posted (>>10340620). I remember using silver weapons for undead and phantoms.

Combine one weapon with 100 in a stat and another with 100 in a different stat, new weapon will have 100 in both.
Do this for each stat and congrats you won the game

Autism aside , it's pretty accurate

the mere fact that you somehow ended up with a physical copy of one of the two games i wanted back when i first played a demo of them (Vagrant Story and Tomba!) and i remember looking for them obsessively for a good amount of time , annoys me to no end

Thank god for emulation for curring me of that itch , because fuck those scalping jews and the prices they ask

It works like
Check the wiki out:
vagrantstory.wikia.com/wiki/Raising_weapon_affinities_and_class_in_Vagrant_Story

The basic strategy for casual play is to let the Affinities take care of themselves, and to concentrate Class into three weapon types: Human + Phantom, Beast + Dragon, and Undead + Evil. This works, for example, because although gaining levels in the Human Class beats down the Beast and Undead classes mercilessly, it has no effect at all on Phantom class gains, and while Phantom gains will make a mess out of the Dragon and Evil Classes, it leaves the Human class untouched.

Which means Human weapons partner up with Phantom

Yes, I remember reading from there. I mixed it up somehow because I used same weapon for undead and phantoms somehow and did not lose affinity (silver weapons are good for them)

The game has an in game manual for retards like you m8

unless emulation is fucking it up, the risk system is broken as shit. 50ms window to hit the chain attack? I stopped caring about 2 hours in.

/thread

It has to be the emulation not being similar enough to the original hardware. There might be some way you can alter it (refresh rate or a FPS limiter). On the original hardware with my copy I don't even really need to see the movements, I get into a tempo that is as easy as riding a bike. Mastering it when I first started playing wasn't easy, but it was never anything that I thought was impossible like you are describing.

Personally for me the easiest weapons to combo with are rapiers (usually my undead/evil weapon)

I remember having trouble with this too, I improved by thinking of the chain indicator as appearing after I was already too late to press it. Like, don't react to the indicator, by the time you see it you already failed, you have to predict when it's going to appear.