What is Vagrant Story?

A one-man descent into a dead city, told backwards from an accusation of murder.

Vagrant Story is an action role-playing game released by Square for the PlayStation in 2000, made by the team behind Final Fantasy Tactics and directed, produced and designed by Yasumi Matsuno, who wrote it with Jun Akiyama. It is set in the world of Ivalice, in the kingdom of Valendia and the ruined city of Leá Monde.

The frame is a police file. Agent Ashley Riot, an elite Riskbreaker of the Valendia Knights of Peace, stands accused of murdering Duke Bardorba. The game replays the week before the killing, a case its documents call The Phantom Pain: a cult’s siege of the duke’s manor, a kidnapped child, and Ashley’s lone infiltration of a city whose population died in an earthquake twenty-five years earlier and did not entirely leave.

What makes it singular is what it refuses to include. There are no shops, no towns, no party and almost no friendly faces: one man, a dead city, and a battle system built on targeting individual limbs, chaining timed attacks, and forging weapons whose statistics grow with use. The Library’s history page tells the release and reception story; this shelf documents the game itself, system by system and object by object.

THE SHAPE OF IT

Four load-bearing facts

The city

Leá Monde is over two thousand years old, built around a Grand Cathedral and the Temple of Kiltia, with mines, a limestone quarry, an undercity and the Iron Maiden dungeon beneath it. Its scenery was modelled on the stone town of Saint-Émilion in southwestern France.

The frame

Everything you play is evidence. The story is presented as the events of one week, reconstructed after the fact, and it ends where the accusation begins: Ashley named as the duke’s killer, and never found.

The solo design

Ashley works alone because Riskbreakers work alone. Combat, puzzles and crafting all hang on one character, which is why the game’s depth went into weapons rather than a party.

The team

Matsuno directed; Akihito Yoshida designed the characters; Hiroshi Minagawa directed the art; Taku Murata led programming; Hitoshi Sakimoto composed. Most had just come off Final Fantasy Tactics, and most would reunite on Final Fantasy XII.

WHERE TO GO NEXT

The rest of this shelf

How it was made

Two years, a five-person research trip to France, and a polygon budget half the size of Final Fantasy’s.

How the battle system works

Risk, limbs, chains and the forge: the deepest combat system on the PlayStation, explained plainly.

The perfect score

Famitsu’s third 40 out of 40 ever, and still the only one a PlayStation game has earned.

What is Vagrant Story?

THE SHAPE OF IT

WHERE TO GO NEXT

THE FIRST WORD