Indie Game of the Week 440: The Vagrant

One thing I enjoy in video games are stories about vagrants that are actually action-RPGs about a single hard-ass warrior marching into a cursed land to lay the smack down on contemporary conspirators and the long dead alike. The Vagrant (also known as Sword of the Vagrant) is mostly that: released by O.T.K. Games (not the streamer-led Indie game expo people) in either 2017 or 2018, the Steam page doesn't make that clear, it follows the warrior maiden Vivian as she finds herself embroiled in any number of mysteries and subterfuge on the imperiled island of Mythrilla as the game reveals more of her backstory and her reasons for venturing to such a remote and dangerous place. Depicted entirely in 2D with hand-drawn character sprites and backgrounds, the goal of The Vagrant is to complete missions for NPCs while cutting through hordes of enemies and powerful multi-phase bosses. It's also a loot RPG, albeit a light one, with a skill tree to gradually unlock, piles of treasure to purloin, and equipment to find with various additions and enchantments.

As soon as you start the game, it's evident where O.T.K. got their inspiration from: the painterly visuals and emphasis on... certain areas of their female characters' anatomies immediately invoke the styles and preferences of Vanillaware, particularly their Muramasa: The Demon Blade and Princess/Dragon's Crown games with their open-ish 2D worlds and emphasis on hack-and-slash brawler RPG gameplay. You'd be forgiven for assuming this was an exploraction game with the way its interconnected map works, though rather than much in the way of traversal upgrades—you can acquire the double-jump from your skill tree, but it only really serves to make the already simple platforming sections easier—it's entirely driven by combat, where you'll regularly be forced into encounters with groups of enemies with no room to escape and need to dodge and juggle them to effectively control them before they can overwhelm you with sheer numbers. The combat takes a while to warm up to, owing to the fact that you have to first earn all of Vivian's basic combos from her skill tree (they're fairly early in, at least, and the game directs you towards them), but once you have the full set unlocked and several of her specials—which run from a "rage" gauge that builds with every strike—it becomes diverse and engaging enough to see you through most of the game. There's certainly a lot of enemy types to keep you busy, with elemental and status effects to either exploit yourself or be wary of them triggering from traps and the enemies that use them.

The skilltree initially seems robust with regards of the options it offers, but you'll find that it's a largely railroaded affair. For instance, there's a long chain of upgrades each for the pure damage, health, rage, defense, and critical chance stats but each successive one is considerably more expensive than the last (all nodes require mana to unlock, which drops from enemies, chests, and other breakable objects) so really the game's looking for you to maybe unlock all the tier 1 stat upgrades before you're earning enough for tier 2 and beyond. Likewise, many branches are denied until you've found a specific item out in the world somewhere: an example would be a turtle statue to unlock your tier 2 strength upgrade (I'm unsure why that item is not used to unlock defense upgrades instead, given what turtles are known for). This works in tandem with the inflated unlock requirements to curtail where you can expand to right from the jump, though the upgrades aren't so enormous to disturb the difficulty curve of the game too much. Other nodes include new skills, boosting the damage of the skills you have, bonus cash, bonus healing, and other miscellaneous utilities that can offer some significant benefits, so grinding out the extra mana for the next upgrade isn't a bad notion if a boss is giving you trouble. Neither is farming for more potions, which are the most important things to buy in stores besides the recipes for the perma-buff meals; the expensive equipment vendors offer tend to be supplanted quickly by whatever you find out in the field, most of which come already upgraded and/or include their own enchantments.

Visually I'd say this game does a fine job keeping up with Vanillaware's nigh-inimitable in-house style, with beautiful if occasionally nondescript watercolor-esque artwork wherever you turn and some detailed animation cycles to its sprites (albeit with a bit of that paper doll effect to the animated limbs). The music's generally great too, with a grand orchestral style that occasionally feels a bit too solemn for a hack-and-slash game starring a well-endowed warrioress wearing next to nothing. Likewise the story, which largely remains a grim tale of betrayal and tragedy with regards to Vivian's storyline and of even more grotesque horrors when you're digging into the backstories of entities like the mysterious undead Soulreaper (your requisite Soulsian "you can't even hope to defeat this thing yet" unwinnable early boss fight) to places like the Esgonian kingdom, which fell to ruin after resorting to foul magics in order to defeat its rivals Wesandyth and left most of its populace rueful specters who relive their own demises whenever you talk to them for extra lore. There's a surprising amount of narrative moments for a game of this sort of action-heavy genre, and it reminded me of the storytelling ambitions of another Chinese 2D action game I'd played recently: Aurogon Shanghai's Afterimage. I imagine it's a wuxia thing; not a fight goes by in one of those without a long conversation about feelings and duty beforehand.

This was a game I'll admit I was a little skeptical about booting up, given everything else of a pressing nature in my Indie backlog right now. I've liked Vanillaware's games in the past but never considered myself to be a huge fan of their work—at least not until the transcendent 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, somewhat different to the vibe here—so the idea of playing a Chinese bootleg of same seemed like a risky venture. But besides some repetition to the combat, which honestly is still a great deal of fun on a purely visceral Final Fight level once you know which combinations lead to air juggles and which ones to armor-piercing blows that stop enemies with shields from blocking all your attacks, I've found that I've been enjoying this game quite a bit in how it bridges a typically mindless loot RPG with something structurally akin to my beloved exploraction games. Glad I penciled it in for an IGotW entry in retrospect and I'm going to keep with it for a while longer—it's also maybe inspired me to pick up a digital copy of Dragon's Crown when I next see it on sale for a song.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Post-Playthrough Edit: Yep, pretty good right until the credits. Difficulty curve takes an odd hit the way it does in many RPGs with a lot of optional end-game content but I don't mind having that as a safety net: final bosses tend to be pretty intense and this game has two tough fights in a row. Once you have the full set of normal combos acquired not a whole lot shifts with the combat beyond getting new special attacks and the profound effect some of the later (and more expensive) skill tree nodes offer. For instance, I was gaining so much rage per damage taken that I'd often just tank whatever I could get away with so I'd be able to spam more special attacks. Narrative remains grim throughout, almost oppressively so, but at least I wasn't getting lost from the lore dumps the way I was in Afterimage. All in all a pretty effective fan-rendition of a Vanillaware type at a time when no-one was quite sure about that studio's future; there are certainly worse games to imitate, and those few that are better tend to have plenty of homages already.