What the blade keeps: Vagrant Story
The only thing that remembers
There's a game where you never talk to anyone, never buy anything, and the only thing that remembers what you did is the weapon in your hands.
Vagrant Story came out of Square in 2000, made by the team that had just finished Final Fantasy Tactics, with Yasumi Matsuno writing and directing. You play Ashley Riot, a Riskbreaker. That's the job title. It means you work alone for an outfit called the Valendia Knights of the Peace, and you are sent into Leá Monde, a city an earthquake killed twenty-five years ago, chasing a cult leader named Sydney Losstarot.
The game has no shops. No town to walk into, no merchant, no inn. There is no one to talk to. You are the only living person who belongs there, in a city full of the dead, and everything you carry you either found or made. Mostly made.
It remembers undead
You build weapons. Not pick up a better sword, build one: a blade and a grip, assembled at a workshop, with three damage types and affinities to elements and to kinds of enemy. Blunt, edged, piercing. Fire, water, thunder, light, dark. Human, beast, undead, dragon, phantom. Every fight spends the thing you hit and the way you hit it, and the weapon keeps the total. Kill enough undead with it and it starts to remember undead. The affinity is not something you chose from a list. It's a residue. It's what you actually did, kept in the only ledger the game has.
Then there's Risk. Every attack you land pushes the bar up. High Risk drops your accuracy and your defense, and the enemy hits harder, and what you buy with it is a better shot at criticals and more healing. Chain enough hits and you are brilliant and wide open at the same time. Break Arts never touch Risk. They just cost hit points. So the game keeps asking whether to be careful or to be committed, and then it charges you in the currency of your own body.
When the workshop becomes the game
There's a moment, maybe eight hours in, when the workshop stops being a menu and becomes the game. You are stuck. You go back, break down a weapon you have carried since the mines, fold it into something with the affinity you finally need, and walk into the boss holding a tool that fits the problem. Nobody gave you that. You made it, out of what the city left lying around. I have never had a crafting system feel less like shopping.
The plot runs the same way. The game opens after the crime: Ashley is accused of killing the duke, and then it rolls back one week to show you how he got there. So from the first minute you know it ends badly and you are watching for the mechanism. Nobody tells you what Ashley is. You find out in the same order he does, which is to say never, not cleanly, not all at once. A game that cut half its story to fit on the disc and then chose to open on the last scene is a game that trusts you to hold a shape you cannot see yet.
The one record no one can rewrite
All of it is the same idea at different volumes. Ashley carries a family he thinks he failed. Later the game hands him another version, and then another, and he cannot check any of them, because the record was kept by people with a reason to lie. The state edited him. The one record he owns that no one else can rewrite is the blade. It remembers undead because he killed undead. You cannot tell a weapon a story about itself.
Alexander O. Smith translated the English, and he did not translate it flat. The Japanese is straightforward; the English is archaic, closer to a stage play than a game script. “I give you the city, Riskbreaker! All its power, all to you!” People either fall for that voice or bounce off it inside an hour. I fell for it the way you fall for a band no one else in the house can stand. I can still say lines I have not heard in twenty years. I would not say them at a dinner table. That's the deal this game and I have.
You can feel the missing half
The outside shape of it is strange to hold. Famitsu gave it a 40, the third perfect score the magazine had ever given, and the only one it had given a PlayStation game. It sits at 92 today. It sold a hundred thousand copies in its first twenty days while Square buried it next to Final Fantasy IX and Chrono Cross, and it took a Greatest Hits reissue three years later for enough people to find it. The team grew from twenty people to fifty. Matsuno has said more than half the story was cut for space. More than half. You can feel the missing half the way you feel a wall you know is a door.
Lonely on purpose
That's the sentence I can't say at a serious table. “You can feel the missing half.” Say that about a game and you get the patient face again, the one that waits for you to finish being enthusiastic. But the cutting is why it's shaped like this. When the story was taken out, the systems had to carry it, and they do. That's the interesting part. Most games lay a story over the systems and the two never speak. This one lost its story in the middle of the night and let the mechanics keep talking, alone in a dead city, with a tool that remembers and no narrator you can trust.
I was fifteen when I first finished it and I thought it was just a hard game with good writing. I have the words now and the words are: it is the loneliest machine in the genre, and it is lonely on purpose.
No bow on this one either. I just wanted it said that a game with no shops is not a game missing a feature. It's a game that decided the only thing worth selling you is what you made yourself.