How was Vagrant Story made?

Two years, fifty people at the peak, and one research trip to a French wine town.

Development began in January 1998 with about twenty people and grew to roughly fifty by its peak, inside the Square division that had just shipped Final Fantasy Tactics. Matsuno chose to build a new title from scratch, out of staff collaborations, rather than reuse popular characters in a sequel, and he refused to file the result under an existing genre.

The look came from photographs. During design, Matsuno was shown pictures of Saint-Émilion in Bordeaux, brought back by a wine enthusiast colleague; in September 1998 a five-person team including Matsuno and the leads for graphics and decoration travelled to France and took the town’s stone architecture as the model for Leá Monde.

Technically the game was a wager. While Square’s hits still used pre-rendered backdrops, Vagrant Story went fully polygonal, using the same character models in cutscenes and gameplay so scenes never cut away. The hardware fought back: memory was the team’s hardest problem, and the interface, textures and map meshes all had to be renegotiated with the machine. What was cut to fit is its own page of this shelf: what was cut.

THE POLYGON BUDGET

Doing more with half

320 polygons a person

Japanese documentation of the game puts each character at roughly 320 to 330 polygons, about half the count used for the heroes of Final Fantasy VII and VIII. Texture work, not geometry, carried the detail.

Faces 32 pixels wide

Facial expressions are painted textures only 32 by 32 pixels, about the size of a PocketStation screen. To keep the tiny faces from feeling wrong, the team animated them partly by shifting the brightness of the colours.

Detail for seconds-long roles

Art director Hiroshi Minagawa put painstaking detail into every model, including characters who appear for a few seconds, and lead programmer Taku Murata has described the strain of building the team’s first large-scale 3D game.

Five to six hours

That was Matsuno’s own estimate for a normal playthrough, given at the Square Millennium Event in Tokyo, where the opening sequence and the weapon crafting system were shown to the public before release.

THE SOUND OF IT

Sakimoto, redirected

Too bright at first

Composer Hitoshi Sakimoto began with bright, cheerful music in the vein of his Final Fantasy Tactics score. Matsuno pushed him toward something deeper and heavier, and pointed him at the music of The X-Files for the ambient direction.

A theme for everyone

Sakimoto wrote themes for individual characters and monsters, adjusting their melodies to track relationships and antagonisms as the story moved.

A favourite score

Sakimoto has said the Vagrant Story soundtrack remains one of his favourite compositions. The album arrived on two CDs from DigiCube on March 8, 2000, weeks after the game.

How was Vagrant Story made?

THE POLYGON BUDGET

THE SOUND OF IT

THE FIRST WORD