Thread by @dreamboum

Vagrant Story is 20 years old! It is not only in the conversation as the best game Square has ever made, it is a towering achievement of the genre both at an artistic and technical level. Here I will share some details about the game that even Hideo Kojima was jealous of ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Vagrant Story is often touted as one of, if not the most technically impressive game on the PS1, far above Metal Gear Solid 1. However, the most impressive thing was that this full 3D game was done primarily by people who had no experience with 3D!

The Vagrant Story team was the Final Fantasy Tactics team, which was itself an incredible showcase of 2D pixel art. These people tackled 3D with only their experience on 2D under their belt, and yet this skill was enough to create a timeless game that is still impressive today

One aspect in which their experience in 2D helped them is in creating 3D models. Being a full 3D game, each character had limited memory and polygon count to work with. In fact, characters had less than half of the polygon count of Final Fantasy VII and VIII. 700 to 320!

Despite having less than half of the polygon count of FFVII and FFVIII for characters, you can check for yourself how much more expressive and detailed the 3D models of Vagrant Story can be in comparison. This feat was done by 2D artists using every trick up their sleeve.

This doesn't even stop there. Compared to another juggernaut of its time, Vagrant Story managed to feature eyes and animate mouths instead of featuring head bobs to simulate a conversation.

Just look at the difference in quality! The way her mouth animates! The way her head moves alongside her eyes to look at Ashley! The distinct textures of her clothes! To say nothing of the diffused lighting! It still floors me to this day.

This was only possible because an artist with a background in pixel art took it upon himself to do all the facial expressions, and animate mouths with sub-pixel shading. His name is Eichiro Nakatsu.

He was most recently the art director of Dragon Quest XI.

As if all of that wasn't enough, they had also simulated lighting displaying on 3D models. How so? By creating a second set of 3D models, brightening them up, and slightly moving them to the direction of the light.

Their ingenuity knew no bounds.

But the characters would be nothing without a background to set them in. And that's where Vagrant Story's environment comes in. An extremely impressive showcase that simulated a lighting environment despite not having a lighting engine.

The artistry on display is still absurd to this day. They went on a trip to Saint-Emilion in France and used it as a framework for the city of Leá Monde. A magnificent and lush area that hides some of Ivalice's darkest secrets in its underbelly.

They shaded the environment of Vagrant Story using vertex colours, that they used to brighten or darken parts of the textures. This means that they effectively simulated lighting in a convincing manner for a console released in 1994. Let that sink in!

All of this was made possible by a bunch of 2D artists who used everything they learned making 2D art and applying it to 3D. With their knowledge, they used 3D in special ways in order to reach their goal. 3D became another tool to express themselves in different ways.

But these visuals wouldn't mean much if there wasn't someone to frame them in a way that made them pop out. That's where Jun Akiyama comes in, the cutscene director of Vagrant Story (and FFXII).

His camerawork is still nothing short of fantastic. Just look at this!

Akiyama used these gorgeous visuals by framing them in the best way possible. The camera emboldens the visuals and makes a well-written story into an engrossing cinematic experience. He would go as far as simulate depth of field on the PS1.

The introduction cutscene is one of the best showcases of how good Akiyama's cutscene direction can be. It also has one of the best transitions I've seen here 👇 Also, here's a link to the intro on youtube

Jun Akiyama also worked for a way to implement seamless "cutscene to gameplay" transitions, and he succeeded with the help of the dev team. You could look at a cutscene and be into a fight immediately. No loading time, no camera cut, just straight to the action!

To accompany the visuals, Tomohiro Yajima, the sound effect director decided to create all the sfx by himself, by manipulating noise and waveforms instead of using sampling. An absurdly complex task that immensely benefited the game. He recently worked on NieR: Automata

The spirit of the whole dev team was for Vagrant Story to *not* be Final Fantasy. They didn't want any CGI in the game because they wanted the same excitement players would feel watching them to happen in the real-time visuals, with the player in control.

Remember what I've said about Hideo Kojima? An interview between Kojima and Yasumi Matsuno (director of FFT, Vagrant Story and FFXII) shows that he refused to play the game the moment he saw its introduction. Even wondering if there was a flaw he missed in his Metal Gear staff

Kojima had also praised Matsuno in other ways, saying that he had "a good sense of direction" and can "create situations that draw players in emotionally". Kojima had a lot of respect for Matsuno's work.

All of this wouldn't have been possible without Matsuno helming the project. He is the one who made it a cohesive package and managed to steer the staff in a direction that pushed them to success. Here's what Jun Akiyama had to say.

Hironobu Sakaguchi, the father of Final Fantasy had even revealed in a Famitsu column that he *cried* while playing Vagrant Story and became Matsuno's biggest fan. Vagrant Story's prowess was the reason the team was entrusted to make Final Fantasy XII. An equally ambitious game

Vagrant Story is a cornerstone of the PS1 era with its visuals alone, but it had the galls of featuring not only one of the most engrossing story-line in the medium, it did so with an extremely deep battle system and one of the best localization! More to come (hopefully) ⬇️

The story of Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics by Matsuno were already lauded as some of the best stories in the medium: politics-heavy stories that were incredibly human in its depiction of social divide.

Expectations were high for Vagrant Story.

Matsuno would dare go into heavy themes for games made for the mainstream. For example, Final Fantasy Tactics' themes were inspired by his experience in the workplace at Square. He figured that without social capital, you wouldn't succeed there despite your skill.

With Vagrant Story being in full 3D, he wanted to incorporate this new perspective into the story, and the main influence was...Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon.

Matsuno wanted to create a story that would be different depending on the perspective of each character.

Vagrant Story navigates its story by making everyone an unreliable narrator. In the depth of the hell of this dark city, it's less about the truth, and more about knowledge. What you know is enough to make your own truth into reality. And so, the player has to shape its own truth

At the crux of VS' story is the death of Ashley Riot's wife and child, murdered at the hands of bandits. A tragic event that eats at Ashley's soul every day. But is there more to it?

In the dark city of Leà Monde, where the dead becomes alive and the alive turns dead, your own eyes can turn against you. What really happened that day?

This is exemplified by Matsuno's way of writing characters. They are never truly villains or truly heroes, all you see are shades of grey on each side, making you question who is it you should trust, and even question what is there to trust in the first place!

The chemistry between Ashley Riot and Sydney Losstarot is especially worthy of praise, as the "hero" and the "villain". The way they interact between each other as they enter deeper through Leà Monde is filled with tension, and let's be honest, a lot of homo-eroticism.

Some of the best characters I've experienced in the genre can be found there. And that is something that a lot of Vagrant Story fans can share. Ashley and Sidney are your different kinds of JRPG protagonists. They are adults at their prime who are in full control of their actions

This is one of the reasons why Akiyama said that one the goals was to not make the game feel Japanese...and also why it failed. The devs came up years later saying that the Japanese audience disliked these characters. Playing adults was not something they wanted at the time :/

No amount of praise and explanation can accurately display how great Vagrant Story's writing is. It's a game that eats at your brain, constantly thinking about what the truth is, who you should trust, and ultimately, how none of this even matters. It is *that* good.

However, this would not have worked half as well if the localization wasn't up to par. Not even 3 years ago, Final Fantasy VII came out with an atrocious localization. For Vagrant Story to share the same fate with an even more complex plot would have ruined everything. BUT!

The localization ended up being flawless and is still seen as a hallmark of the genre. The work of Rich Amtower and Alexander O. Smith transformed the game into something even more powerful, all of this with Matsuno's blessing and involvement who wanted this to happen!

The localizers were given one instruction: "make it biblical". And so they worked to work on the script and adapt it to the western audience by using western culture. And it worked for several reasons:

1. VS is inspired by western culture
2. Matsuno's writing was already great

The quality of Matsuno's writing meant that their work wasn't set out to fix a bad script, but adapt its greatness in a way that harnesses the intricacies of English & western culture.

In fact, one of the inspirations was "A Song of Ice and Fire" in 2000. Now "Game of Thrones".

Matsuno's writing + the localizers' work is how we ended up with a script in which every line went harder than the previous one. Like so 👇

The quality of Vagrant Story's localization becoming a standout is one of the reasons why Square has invested into putting more effort into it and why we managed to get better localized games. It changed the course of localization at Square, and gave us FFXII by O. Smith too.

This is huge, because Matsuno was also involved and understood what was needed to accurately tell the depth of his story. In comparison, Kojima had blacklisted the localizer of MGS1 from Konami despite doing a great work because he couldn't understand what localization is about.

Have I talked about the music yet? Hitoshi Sakimoto was already a legend in its own right, he had created a soundchip at 20 years old that every Japanese companies bought from him, then he composed the immensely good sountrack of FF Tactics. But Vagrant Story is special...

Vagrant Story's score is dark, heavy and brooding. Its heavy use of percussion heightens the tension. It remains a standout even in a 30+ year old career. And all of this started with one piece of advice from Matsuno, who clearly knew what he wanted.

The result is a soundtrack that you would not necessarily listen outside the game (I do) and isn't melody-heavy, but it hits absurdly hard in the game.

This boss fight theme in particular is something that showcases the shift in tone. Listen with headphones!

The music of this game is fantastic, but even more so, it knew when to pull back, and that's something special. Some areas and cutscenes are devoid of music, only leaving the ambient sounds of Leà Monde to play. This was deliberate. For them, atmospheric sound was music itself

Every aspect of Vagrant Story was thought up in order to create the biggest impact. It had all this technical prowess, all this incredible music, all these superbly animated enemies, and yet it knew how and when to use it for maximum impact. It's ebb and flow.

I think I've said too much already, but if you want to play Vagrant Story...Well, you don't have many choices but it is a PSone classic for PS3/PSP/Vita. You can also emulate it (but don't use texture filtering, prefer emulators like Bizhawk/Mednafen) store.playstation.com/en-us/product/…

I heavily recommend you to nag those folks at Square-Enix to show your support of at least porting Vagrant Story to modern platforms, also you may as well throw in your support for other Ivalice games like Final Fantasy Tactics too 🙏

Also! Read this guide if you need help about the gameplay of Vagrant Story, it can be obtuse but is extremely deep and satisfying when you get into the flow (just don't fret too much about classes, they're just for min-maxing) chode.org/misc/vs/

Also the Vagrant Story team went on to work on Final Fantasy XII and it is also A Look. There is so much from Vagrant Story that found its way there. If Vagrant Story is PS1's technical achievement, FFXII is the same for the PS2 🤯

Thank you for reading! 🥺 I hope you learned some stuff. Please follow the man Matsuno himself at @/YasumiMatsuno (don't ask HIM for ports though, he doesn't work at Square anymore so that's not his call) and support his future endeavors 🙏

To cap it off, the best post about Vagrant Story I've seen today 🥺 Love it so much