Vagrant Story's dev team were deeply inspired by Metal Gear Solid & wanted to push the limits of the PS1.
One area they wanted to improve on was the face of characters, because MGS1 didn't have eyes or facial expressions.
Vagrant Story featured moving eyes, lips and hair.
The way they were able to make faces so detailed on the PS1 has allowed them to become much more sophisticated in terms of cutscene direction, giving it a more dramatic scale.
Few people have played Vagrant Story, even fewer to completion, but the story stands among the best.
Here's one such example of how they were not just able to make Vagrant Story a technical powerhouse, but also understood the way how they could use their technology to craft striking scenes.
Vagrant Story is the combination of a technically ambitious game meeting a huge artistic drive to present things in fascinatingly new ways.
This was the way of the team that made FF Tactics and went on to make FFXII.
Vagrant Story was really the reason they felt they needed to push the envelope once again with Final Fantasy XII on the PS2. They wanted to make a modest game but slowly snowballed into becoming its spiritual successor.
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SaGa Frontier Remastered is releasing in two days and it's an incredible RPG well worth checking out, if only for the brilliant art of legendary character designer Tomomi Kobayashi.
She is one of the most brilliant artist at Square & criminally overlooked in the west.
Tomomi Kobayashi has been the character designer of the SaGa series since 1992. In fact, much of the visual identity of SaGa has been shaped by talented women.
Kobayashi's work is nothing short of breathless and is EASILY in the same conversation as Amano for FF.
Recently, Tomomi Kobayashi did an illustration for Shin Megami Tensei IV. Even Kazuma Kaneko, designer of the SMT series, praised her work and found many things in common with her in a shared interview.
When a series isn't dead enough, you give it this to make sure it never walks again
I said it many times but Toshiro Tsuchida was a smart man for formally ending the series with 5 as the conclusion.
He managed to hold the series together as a creator long enough to put it to end before the suits put their grubby mitts all over it.
Also I always thought the faces in Front Mission 5 looked a bit similar to how FFXII did it.
Turns out the character model artists were almost all the same who worked on FFXII.
Final Fantasy XII is 15 years old today! Let's take a look into this crowning artistic and technical achievement of the PS2 era!
Its legacy still endures today, inspiring games like Dragon Age, Pillars of Eternity, but especially FF14! ⬇️⬇️⬇️
First of all, Final Fantasy XII itself comes from a very different lineage from the FF series!
While FF10 and FF13 were made by the people who worked on FF7 and 8. FF12 was made by the team behind Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story! Two Squaresoft classics by Matsuno!
FFXII itself happened thanks to Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the series. He had played Vagrant Story and was emotionally moved to tears to the point that he assigned the next game in the series to Yasumi Matsuno
Here it is, a priest of the Light of Kiltia in FFXII making the sign of the Blood-Sin from Vagrant Story.
The Light of Kiltia is the biggest religion spanning all of Ivalice. They believe in the god of light, Faram.
It originated in Ordalia, which was to the east of the Ivalice (the kingdom in FFT). This is probably why it stuck out but morphed into "Farlem" milennia later in FFT.
It is interesting that a religion based on the god of light is making the prayer sign of the tattoo that gives its user control of "The Dark".
This could also mean that the Dark always existed as a form of negative energy as the opposite of the Mist in FFXII being everywhere.
Do you sometimes think about how amazing Yakuza 0 turned out to be? To this day I still can't believe what spirit possessed the writers to just go super saiyan on the plot and writing. Unfathomably good.
It's even more surprising considering the game before 0 was Yakuza 5. We went from the most massive clusterfuck in Yakuza history to the tightest narrative in the series. I was constantly amazed how everything fell into place and I haven't told myself "here we go again" ONCE
Look, I'm not the smartest tool in the shed, but I think going from five (5) characters to 2 might have had something to do with it.
I hope it gets translated in English because you learn about things like how Hironobu Sakaguchi was driven to tears at how amazing Vagrant Story was to the point Matsuno was given the Final Fantasy XII project as a result.
mATSUNO got the idea of making Vagrant Story a full 3D game because it was the future and his team didn't have experience in 3D. To think they ended up making what is arguably the most beautiful game on the PS1.
Vagrant Story was the first game from Matsuno at Square where he was director, game designer, and writer whereas he mostly stuck to writing in FFT.
Matsuno would say Vagrant Story is the only game he made at Square as a kind of "gentle dictatorship" instead of democratically.