A tiny love letter to Vagrant Story
Some spoilers for Vagrant Story ahead
Vagrant Story is an action RPG/dungeon crawler from the 2000s made by Square, you play as Ashley Riot, a super elite secret agent from a task force called the Riskbreakers. Your mission is to hunt down Sydney Losstarot, an evil twink with mysterious powers, who just kidnapped the son of a Duke and took him to Leá Monde, a magically charged place where no one can truly die and where people can get magical powers. There's also some Knights of the Cross who are chasing Sydney for their own nefarious goals.
The way the game plays is that Ashley crawls through various dungeons and beats monsters with his butt out in the air. There's two key elements to the game's combat: The first is that you need to time your attacks right, the second is that each weapon has an affinity that increases the more you use it against certain monster types, and decreases for others, so you should try to switch weapons often. You do this by accessing a very convoluted menu, because shortcuts weren't a thing in the 2000s, I guess.
Sometimes, you have to go through several rooms of one dungeon before a timer runs out to make it out of a dungeon section. At other times, you need to solve the most annoying block puzzles known to man. Mid game, you need to traverse snowfly forest, which is haunted and requires you to map it manually because in this section of the game, the in game map will tell you where you are, but not how each section of the forest is connected with each other.
The game rewards you for enduring through all of this with plot advancing cutscenes filled with homoeroticism, and the coolest looking monsters of the PSX era. Each boss fight comes with lovingly crafted single case animations. The ambiance of the game is amazing.
Traversing Leá Monde is very annoying because Sydney, who controls Leá Monde and the souls within, needs to see who of all the people chasing after him is good enough to inherit his powers. So the game's mechanics feel very in sync with the story.
In the end Sydney isn't the real bad guy and you never fight him, he does love to summon dragons and you do fight a lot of those, but the real enemy is the captain of the Knights of the Cross, who wishes to use the power of Leá Monde to enact a fascist regime, so you defeat him instead. Despite not being the final boss, Sydney messes with Ashley's head a lot. It seems Ashley's memories may have been tampered by the task force he's in or it might just be Sydney messing with his head.
Ashley meets some characters that seem to confirm Sydney's version of events, but some others that contradict this. The game is constantly suggesting theories of what's going on, or how characters relate to one another, but it never fully confirms it. It expects you to intuit that Rosencrantz, who claims to be another Riskbreaker, but usually allies himself with the Knights of the Cross, is a scumbag ex to Ashley and Sidney both. That Sydney and his right hand man are partners in every sense of the word. That Ashley and Sydney really should date. In short, that everyone is gay.
The game has a very succinct prose, so whatever is said, is only said once and it expects you to be smart enough to keep up with it's plot, it's puzzles and it's mechanics. I like it when games trust me, the player, to be smart.
