Why did Famitsu give Vagrant Story a perfect score?

First, the correction, because this fact is often told wrong: Vagrant Story was not the sixth perfect score in Famitsu history. It was the third. The magazine’s four reviewers each score out of ten, and before February 2000 only two games had ever taken all forty points: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in 1998 and Soulcalibur in 1999. Vagrant Story joined them at release, and the sixth perfect score, the one the garbled version may be remembering, belongs to Final Fantasy XII in 2006.

The company it keeps is the story. In the decades since, the list of perfect scores has grown to thirty games, and Vagrant Story remains the only PlayStation title on it. The reviewers were rewarding a package the Western press praised in the same terms: graphics that broke away from Square’s house clichés, cutscenes staged inside the game’s own models, a story IGN called deep enough to please any fan of the form, and a battle system that treated the player as an adult.

The fine print matters too, and this page keeps it: the Western scores were high but not unanimous, and the same depth that won the forty was the depth some reviewers warned beginners about. Both halves are documented below.