Almost everything about Vagrant Story is par excel-lance. The story, the script, the characters, the graphics, the soundtrack... The English translation is especially spectacular, due to its masterful coloring with "Olde English" which adds so much to the tone and atmosphere. This is one of the ultra rare cases where the English translation is arguable far superior to the original Japanese script. Unfortunately, all of these shining examples of fine craft and "video game design as true art" is all for naught because of one single fatal flaw: The game simply isn't fun to play.
Where the game ultimately fails is in the game play. The battle system in and of itself is fine. It's an interesting hybrid cross between standard real time action combat and traditional RPG turn based combat. The problem is, at the very heart of the battle system is an abysmally UN-fun weapon and armor system. There are several (eight?) classes of enemies in the game- Beast, Human, Dragon, Undead, Phantom, etc. The enemy classes are paired off into diametric oppositions. e.g. Using your weapon against a human enemy will make it stronger against humans, but weaker against phantoms. (sic) On top of that, there are specific weakness ratings. An enemy might be weak against blunt weapons, but almost totally impervious to edged weapons or piercing weapons. And then there are the usual elementals as well- fire, ice, earth and so on. Finally, each of your weapons has its own "wear" rating. The lower the rating, the more worn out the weapon, the less damage it does. You must repair your weapons in workshops, which are few and far between in the game. Another thing you can do in workshops is disassemble your weapons and reassemble the parts to make new weapons. Whether the new weapon will be better or worse than the weapons you sacrificed to make them involves much trial and error. The end effect of all of this is that as you play the game, you are literally constantly changing weapons. Yet the creators of the game didn't bother to implement any sort of quick menu for weapon switching, a la Secret of Mana. You have no choice but to spend 45% of your game time opening the main menu, opening the weapon menu, finding the right weapon, opening the accessory menu, changing the elemental jewels on the weapon, etc. etc. etc. All they had to do was come up with some sort of quick menu for changing weapons, as Seiken Densetsu 2 did seven years earlier. As it stands, Vagrant Story is a micro-management nightmare. To call the game tedious is an understatement of epic proportions.
As is always the case, no matter how flawed something, there will be a small niche group of vocal supporters who will insist that the thing in question is the greatest creation in history, and that people who don't like it just don't "get it." Beware of misguided fanatics.
Please note that the preceding includes some ridiculous things like 'excel-lance' and 'UN-fun' because of IMDb's incredibly retarded "error checking" system. IMDb: Please get rid of that broken piece of garbage.
