The Vagrant

A 2D hack and slash that fails to impress. Most people tend to categorize The Vagrant (aka Sword of the Vagrant) as a typical Metroidvania with more emphasis on combat. This is totally wrong, there's no mechanic of areas being hidden away until you find a new skill. The closest you get to that is the double jump skill, but you get that by grinding mana points from anywhere, so you can unlock it at any time. The plot is probably one of the weakest aspects, you are Vivian, a fanservice girl who is looking for her father but then is cursed by a witch. There are some character development but everything is retold by long voiceless dialogues, with fonts that look like something from the early 2000s. Combat is what this game is about. You have access to basic equipment like swords, armors and talismans, and a big variety of skill movements, basically different kinds of attacks that help with combo chains. There's also a quick dodge than can be done even in mid air, it renders you immune to everything for a couple of frames. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of strategy. Just attack and combo every enemy until they die, and use your dodge on the highly anticipated attacks, special…

It's fun. The gameplay is addictive. The characters are charming. The story is dark, depressing. And every woman in this game just has these absolutely HUGE.... um, tracts of land. I don't envy their eventual back problems. That's for sure. Some bosses are a bit of a mess (looking at you Maximillian II), but the combat works pretty well. It's even got some depth to it. The platforming is... it's there. Nothing special. Speaking of platforming though, this [b]IS NOT[/b] a metroidvania. It's a 2D side-scrolling JRPG hack-n-slash. Just so it's clear. The Playstation/Switch versions got a special outfit apparently that looks pretty dope. Shame we didn't get it. Devs have been saying since 2023 "we'll add mod support. it's one of our goals", and here we are.... three years later...... Oh well, can't have everything!

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Played through it twice in a row.

I had a personal vendetta to complete this game because I’ve owned it on PC and console for a very long time, and it’s been sitting in my backlog forever. When you see the amazing art, you’ll wonder why the game is so cheap. Then when you actually play it, you realize there’s a little jank sprinkled into every aspect of the game.... You kind of have to turn your brain off a bit, but there are enough positives to carry you through. The story is okay: small scale, not too many characters. It can be disappointing to fight these amazing-looking bosses, only for them to have no real purpose in the story outside of being obstacles, which honestly makes this a perfect podcast game haha. Nothing is truly challenging but you'll still need to grind for potions so you just don't die unexpectedly and have to redo the same boring areas. Lastly, I hope the community around this game has grown enough to give the devs proper feedback, so their next upcoming game, which looks way bigger, is less janky and can appeal to more people.

When spotting the game and looking at the art, it sure gave Vanillagame vibes from seeing those. If you're familiar with Muramasa: The Demon Blade especially, you already have a good clue what awaits you here. The graphics style went with the ones you may have seen from Dragon's Crown, Muramasa, Odin's Sphere, and Unicorn Overlord, looking pretty and nicely done, wishing more games like those would show up. It doesn't focus on it, but you're getting quite some eye candy within the game and the characters here and there. After a short time, I've noticed that the gameplay surely took some inspiration from Muramasa with how the map is build, how the combat system works, and not minding that as it felt comfortable in general. You can pick multiple difficulty settings, taking very hard on my end which was fine and not over the edge, but a good amount of enemies became quite the HP sponge and took longer to take down. Metroidvania is a bit misleading as you don't get new abilities for exploration or unlocking new area with it, being more of a tradition action hack 'n slay in terms of gameplay. You can still find new abilities and unlocking items for your passive skill tree, a f…