[atsonicpark]

Can someone, ANYONE, please explain to me why ANYONE would like the game "Vagrant Story"? I played this one a couple of years ago for a few hours -- as some of you know, at one point I had every game that Square made for the PS1 -- and thought it was one of the worst, if not THE ABSOLUTE WORST, games I'd ever played in my life.

The entire game is hitting the X button to attack enemies "in the grid". Large group formations that surround you. You hit X to attack, then select a "body part" to hit, and then you do it. HIT X QUICKLY and you will get another attack or two in. But, ohhh, be careful, because every time you do ANYTHING, the "risk" meter builds up, and when it's maxed out, all the enemies attacks will do 3x the damage to you and you can't do anything. Not that you could anyway -- you often miss, or only do 1HP of damage. 1HP! For enemies who, y'know, have 200HP! OF COURSE, what you have to do is buy special weapons to hit them with -- certain blades can only kill certain enemies. Sounds cool, right (er, besides the fact that the weapons break)? Well, not in the heat of a battle when you have to change your fucking blade 4 times in a row. It's that bad. You will die, you will die often, but beyond that, you will be bored, since the whole game could probably be beaten in 2 hours, but because of the artificial lengthening of "You don't do ANY DAMAGE unless you have the EXACT blade selected -- and even then, you won't do MUCH damage", the game ends up becoming 12-15 hours long.

Graphics suck, music's alright, none of that is as important as the ABSOLUTE WORST, most BORING, TEDIOUS, AWFUL gameplay I've ever experienced in my fucking life! Oh, and you can't just save when you need to, requiring you to fight MULTIPLE BOSSES before you're allowed to save. And this might be a minor point, but for some reason, the game save takes up 3 times the space of a regular PS1 game -- and it requires ANOTHER 8kb (if you're counting, that's roughly 32kb FOR ONE GAME! -- and yes, that was a shitload on PS1 memory cards) -- for items. What?!

It is easily one of the worst games ever made, and the only reason I'm bringing it up is I was looking at Famitsu games that got perfect scores of 40 and it was the 2nd one, ever. What the fuck? Then again, Famitsu is CLEARLY co-owned by Square or something -- they said Final Fantasy X was the best game ever made (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA) and gave Dirge of Cerberus -- anohter one of the worst games ever made -- a great score.

Another thing was, PERSONA 3 was recently voted the greatest rpg of the last decade by two different highly respected RPG websites. I've been a SMT fan for years, and I have beaten tons of the recent SMT games, and all the Persona games.. and Persona 3 is a) easily the worst game in the series... it's one of the most mediocre games I've ever played and is just flat-out boring by the end, b) not even close to being the "best" RPG of the decade, it wasn't even the best RPG the MONTH it came out! ........

As for best RPG of the past decade, well... Xenogears just misses the boat doesn't it, it came out in early 99 I believe.. ah, well, I'd say Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, Valkyrie Profile 2, or Dragon Quest VIII... or, hell, VII. Or Tales of Symphonia. Hell, Skies of Arcadia, if only the battles weren't so slow. Worst RPG I played in the decade was probably Final Fantasy XII, which might be the only game I've played that's as bad as Vagrant Story -- oh, and guess what? IT WAS MADE BY THE SAME TEAM.