vagrant’s story’

I feel that vagrant story is a game where it’s really easy to let the cult of genius take over and just be like “wow, how did he do this, the mad lad” mostly because people tend to do that with squaresoft and vagrant story is an experimental game from the studio’s more experimental era

still, stuff in the game was always in the air, so to speak. I can’t say which resemblance is explicitly their own, right, I didn’t call up any of the staff to check their homework… this kind of historiography matters more to show how these ideas have been considered over time in a collective sense, and how people come to the same conclusions for whatever reason

vagrant story is mostly a dungeon crawler, because the core of the game is mapping out lea monde and the area around it. its other pillar of gameplay its missing your attacks about a third of the time, so yeah. the presentation and progression of the game often cribs from isometric zelda-ish games, notably Landstalker, which just had its swansong Time Stalkers a year before vagrant story came out. I won’t be talking about that chain of influence much, because its simply not as consequential in my opinion, but a cool thing about vagrant story is that it seems to be reaching deep into both dungeon crawlers, and then other kinds of console action rpgs, in the hopes of making the hardcore dungeon crawler more playable

for vagrant story, I’d definitely want to start with wizardry specifically (and so tabletop more broadly). it’s a funny coincidence that I started playing proving grounds of the mad overlord last month, which is honestly a hell of a game, literally I mean, its hell. greenberg and woodhead get a lot of drama out of a constrained battle system, though most of the time you’re just seeing your dice rolls play out in a bad way, and “a constrained battle system where you’re seeing your dice rolls play out” describes vagrant story pretty well. it’s not surprising to me that vagrant story is still grappling with or reinterpreting the conventions set down by wizardry

what doesn’t get noted often about wizardry is how it puts some effort into its fiction to a degree that, I would argue, crpgs before it didn’t, really. this glimmer of a really funny and petty conflict between terbor and werdna adds a personal touch that people would run with much later. notably, wizardry’s dungeon isn’t a natural fixture or a place that’s contrived to exist just for things to plunder, but it’s an artificial creation by the game’s evil wizard antagonist to give him a hiding place, right under everyone’s feet, a sort of taunting immunity. there’s this fusion of like tabletop DMing, and place, and goal, all in one fictional device, and it makes the dungeon, in all of its fakeness and artificiality, still have a surprisingly strong sense of place-ness

in general, computer rpgs would remain haunted by wizardry for quite some time. of the maze rpgs, it would be worth mentioning bard’s tale, which had a japanese famicom release and a pc-98 release. the bard’s tale is also about fighting an evil wizard, although without the humorous meta trappings. this time, it’s just an evil wizard

bard’s tale deviates from wizardry by having the idea of a dungeon terraform what would be a lived-in place. in other words, the town is a maze, the wine cellar is a maze, the sewers are a maze, and so on. in the bard’s tale you go through mostly contiguous spaces to arrive at your destination, so somehow through the abstraction you still get the sense of going somewhere. and yeah I just wanna point out that bard’s tale and vagrant story both have you starting in a wine cellar, so either both share a common influence, or more likely, bard’s tale was a reference point for vagrant story. you can see this sensibility in vagrant story as well, where lea monde contours are invaded by the maze, it’s an impossible place that is convincing nonetheless

bard’s tale was four years out from wizardry. two years from that, so six years from wizardry, dungeon master arrived on the atari ST. I’ll be honest, I’m not actually that familiar with this game, so I can’t say how it deviates from what, or close read anything. it’s a big deal for being the first real time dungeon crawler and I intend to get acquainted with it sooner than later

without dungeon master, you wouldn’t have ultima underworld, which is a game that notably inspired a wide range of things that are consequential for 3D games, you know, like a little game called doom, but also other big deals like pathways into darkness, system shock, and king’s field… and okay I haven’t played ultima underworld either, so I can only give you the wikipedia sparknotes, but! I did play king’s field. king’s field is analogous to bard’s tale, where now this ultima underworld inspired dungeon is explicitly a lived-in place, instead being more-or-less dedicated to the gameplay

there are some tweaks to the presentation that make king’s field more playable than ultima underworld, but the difference is likely really minor for the average player, so I think the deviation from king’s field to ultima underworld is mostly in terms of its fiction. ultima underworld still imagines its dungeon as a place to be conquered and saved, I think… something that needs your heroism, a problem to be solved

king’s field is a dungeon without a problem, it has a terse opening where you find that the protagonist is going into the royal catacombs, the titular king’s field, to chase after his father. as you play, you never really seem closer to finding him. ultima underworld ostensibly sets up its dungeon to be this challenging, heroic, goal-orientated adventure-into-fantasy found in a lot of fantasy rpgs, so king’s field shifts it into something more psychological and personal. the story of king’s field unfolds slowly and quietly, and its left to the player to piece together the chronology of the conflict and the implication of the story bits they discover. figuring out the goal is the goal, as it were. as surreal as the catacombs are, they’re believably a whole contiguous place that has a function in the fiction, and the king’s field is what it is because of the meddling reasons of different npcs in the game world… and yeah, if it isn’t obvious, this description also applies to vagrant story really well

I’m not saying the story in king’s field is particularly deep or anything, although its storytelling style and sense of chronology is a marvel, but like, it came out the same year as system shock, so it deserves just as much credit for this paradigm shift, as both games derived themselves from ultima underworld to create worlds that delivered their fiction through this kind of verisimilitude, or like a sense of place-ness, the kind of vibe that people would later praise half-life for inventing or whatever (wait, nowdays it’s dark souls)

between king’s field and vagrant story are plenty of what I’d conveniently coin as psychological dungeon crawlers, games that eschew party-based stories and deemphasize choice driven tactical gameplay for stuff that’s more focused and monotonous. this includes more fromsoftware games like the rest of the verdite trilogy and Shadow Tower, obscure legends like Baroque and Germs: The Targeted City, and more tenuously, but very arguably, famous canonized games like Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill

anyway, finally, I arrive at vagrant story. vagrant story, although maybe higher profile that king’s field, is still probably in the obscure legend category. to its credit, I don’t think vagrant story is a game people have reiterated on, or decided to keep returning to. I say to its credit because the game is a really singular experience

the most interesting thing about vagrant story to me is just how little ashley riot matters. dark souls would be more famous for doing this later, but I mean straight up, ashley is just being manipulated by the powers around him while he punts around goblins in the dark, and he has extremely little agency. even the rpg adventure part of the game, where you ostensibly accumulate power, well, he really ends up accumulating very little power, and has to rely mostly on the legacy of the place he finds himself in, the grimoire’s, to really do anything

and what he actually does for most of the runtime is basically inconsequential to the plot, until he’s guided to the place he has to be at the end in order to actualize syndey’s plan. if this wasn’t a videogame, I think syndney would have to be the main character, but since it is a videogame…

it’s really interesting, although sometimes agonizing, to contemplate what it means to be a side or bit character in a jrpg plot, as you change all your gear for the millionth time. while the first king’s field is very structurally similar to vagrant story, it ultimately “gives in” and allows the player to re-enact its own mythology. vagrant story holds that tight until the close, even choosing to disempower the player right at the end

honestly though, I don’t think everything in vagrant story resonates with each other, it gets a bit lost in the sauce, but yeah, it’s still a one-of-a-kind experience that’s reflexive of a lot of rpg history