Priest4hire
08-03-2008, 01:31 PM
Having at last finished playing Vay I have set myself to writing down my impressions of the game just as I said I would. Be warned that while I’ll avoid specific plot references, besides the opening sequence, I still might spoil part of the game. Now then, since the final dungeon was the key challenge of this game I will start there.
Immediately upon entering the final dungeon I noticed that the save feature had been disabled. There are only three dungeons in the game that disallow free saving and this does ramp the tension up a bit. On the first level I was confronted by a series of identical rooms to traverse in order to find the ladder leading up. These rooms were spaced to make keeping track of my location more difficult. The second floor was made up of 27 enclosed rooms in a 3x9 configuration. Each room has to be entered via a door but only one room is real while the rest teleport the party back to the center room. The last floor is a teleporter maze with one duplicate 4 teleporter room tossed in for fun.
This leads to a reasonably difficult boss that I killed off fairly easily thanks to my habitual hoarding of top tier items. This dungeon might have been difficult due to how hard the enemies hit and how unreliable the running system is but that’s undermined by two party restore points: one in the center room of floor 2 and one immediately before the boss. I avoided combat entirely until I discovered the second floor restore point and almost entirely after that. Between the two restore points I had no difficulty reaching the final boss without even coming close to wiping or losing a member in combat. I would rate the final dungeon as moderately difficult but no real challenge to a well stocked and leveled party. Onto the game in general:
Our hero, the crown prince of some generic kingdom, has his bride abducted by mechs during the wedding. Thus kicks off a quest to unseal the armour of Vay, kill the grand Foozle, and rescue the princess. At the same time the game commits the beginner’s mistake of making the protagonist too important a person. After all, what crown prince is penniless and packs the worst weapons and armour his world has to offer? Had he been a pauper his plight would have been as weighty and his quest as heroic and it would have made a lot more sense.
The game itself feels both older than it is and very generic. It’s rather plain for a Sega CD title and it has some oddities for a RPG from 1993. Healing is a great example. There are four levels of healing (by item or spell): weak single, strong single, strong party, and full party. However, the strong single healing item costs 40 times a weak single and often does no more healing. Healing is so randomized that the same character at the same level casting the same weak healing spell has done 26 in one try and 125 in another. The result is that luck plays a significant role and there’s almost no reason to buy or use strong single healing spells or items. Equipment and gold scaling is even stranger. There is armour found in the second to last dungeon that costs about 1/5th of the much earlier stuff and is crappy. There’s also an accessory that gives 20 to defense and agility and costs about 1/10th the price of a 20 defense item and 1/5th a 15 agility item. Gold drops cap out before the endgame and thus the weapons at the last town are ludicrously expensive considering their marginal damage increase.
Then there’s the grinding and boy is there a lot of it. Thankfully there is auto combat and spells that one shot enemy parties. In addition characters are fully restored upon leveling up allowing for self-sustaining grind sessions. I took to listening to a lecture on the origins of the English language while grinding; an indication of the skill level of combat on the whole. The quality of grinding locations is very uneven with some being great and other sucking terribly. There is an enemy base near the end of the game that is awesome for grinding thanks to consistently high XP rewards and enemies that drop fast. After that though it’s almost all suck with too many low XP enemies, magic resistant foes and poor XP to difficulty ratios.
Even boss fights tend to be extended battles of attrition. The hardest boss in the game was the one for the second (of five) orbs. I could barely damage him with weapons, magic did next to nothing, and he had thousands of HP so that it came down to outlasting him with stacks of cheap healing potions and being lucky with the group attacks. He could easily wipe any party out if only his AI wasn’t randomized. I must have died half a dozen times at least while I killed every other boss in one try. Other than that A-hole most bosses come down to finding the weak spot, typically magic, and hitting it with everything the party has.
Add in the occasional cheesy voice acting, generic synth music and badly animated anime cutscenes and there you have it. It’s a solid if unexceptional RPG romp with a fairly generic storyline and gameplay outside the aforementioned oddities. It is grind heavy but thanks to free saving, brainless enemy AI, and simple combat the game is pretty straight forward. For an experienced RPGer like me it really didn’t offer much of a challenge. Well, other than resisting boredom during hour long grinding sessions.
Immediately upon entering the final dungeon I noticed that the save feature had been disabled. There are only three dungeons in the game that disallow free saving and this does ramp the tension up a bit. On the first level I was confronted by a series of identical rooms to traverse in order to find the ladder leading up. These rooms were spaced to make keeping track of my location more difficult. The second floor was made up of 27 enclosed rooms in a 3x9 configuration. Each room has to be entered via a door but only one room is real while the rest teleport the party back to the center room. The last floor is a teleporter maze with one duplicate 4 teleporter room tossed in for fun.
This leads to a reasonably difficult boss that I killed off fairly easily thanks to my habitual hoarding of top tier items. This dungeon might have been difficult due to how hard the enemies hit and how unreliable the running system is but that’s undermined by two party restore points: one in the center room of floor 2 and one immediately before the boss. I avoided combat entirely until I discovered the second floor restore point and almost entirely after that. Between the two restore points I had no difficulty reaching the final boss without even coming close to wiping or losing a member in combat. I would rate the final dungeon as moderately difficult but no real challenge to a well stocked and leveled party. Onto the game in general:
Our hero, the crown prince of some generic kingdom, has his bride abducted by mechs during the wedding. Thus kicks off a quest to unseal the armour of Vay, kill the grand Foozle, and rescue the princess. At the same time the game commits the beginner’s mistake of making the protagonist too important a person. After all, what crown prince is penniless and packs the worst weapons and armour his world has to offer? Had he been a pauper his plight would have been as weighty and his quest as heroic and it would have made a lot more sense.
The game itself feels both older than it is and very generic. It’s rather plain for a Sega CD title and it has some oddities for a RPG from 1993. Healing is a great example. There are four levels of healing (by item or spell): weak single, strong single, strong party, and full party. However, the strong single healing item costs 40 times a weak single and often does no more healing. Healing is so randomized that the same character at the same level casting the same weak healing spell has done 26 in one try and 125 in another. The result is that luck plays a significant role and there’s almost no reason to buy or use strong single healing spells or items. Equipment and gold scaling is even stranger. There is armour found in the second to last dungeon that costs about 1/5th of the much earlier stuff and is crappy. There’s also an accessory that gives 20 to defense and agility and costs about 1/10th the price of a 20 defense item and 1/5th a 15 agility item. Gold drops cap out before the endgame and thus the weapons at the last town are ludicrously expensive considering their marginal damage increase.
Then there’s the grinding and boy is there a lot of it. Thankfully there is auto combat and spells that one shot enemy parties. In addition characters are fully restored upon leveling up allowing for self-sustaining grind sessions. I took to listening to a lecture on the origins of the English language while grinding; an indication of the skill level of combat on the whole. The quality of grinding locations is very uneven with some being great and other sucking terribly. There is an enemy base near the end of the game that is awesome for grinding thanks to consistently high XP rewards and enemies that drop fast. After that though it’s almost all suck with too many low XP enemies, magic resistant foes and poor XP to difficulty ratios.
Even boss fights tend to be extended battles of attrition. The hardest boss in the game was the one for the second (of five) orbs. I could barely damage him with weapons, magic did next to nothing, and he had thousands of HP so that it came down to outlasting him with stacks of cheap healing potions and being lucky with the group attacks. He could easily wipe any party out if only his AI wasn’t randomized. I must have died half a dozen times at least while I killed every other boss in one try. Other than that A-hole most bosses come down to finding the weak spot, typically magic, and hitting it with everything the party has.
Add in the occasional cheesy voice acting, generic synth music and badly animated anime cutscenes and there you have it. It’s a solid if unexceptional RPG romp with a fairly generic storyline and gameplay outside the aforementioned oddities. It is grind heavy but thanks to free saving, brainless enemy AI, and simple combat the game is pretty straight forward. For an experienced RPGer like me it really didn’t offer much of a challenge. Well, other than resisting boredom during hour long grinding sessions.