Sword of Vermillion

Yes, a game post at last!

Not about MMOs though. Ever since I realized Sword of Vermillion was available on Steam and discounted during the summer sale, I have been itching to try it out. The power of nostalgia. I recall many many days in the playroom on the old Sega genesis playing one of two games I owned. Golden Axe 2 (we played 1 on the Amiga, and I recall playing Streets of Rage and Shadow Hunter and Shinobi on other friends' machines. Funny how we had to loan each other the cartridges, in those days, I didn't know where to get them, I didn't know what was available to get, one was mostly limited to the odd Amiga magazine my dad would bring home from goodness knows where and my parents certainly weren't telling) was one of them.

Sword of Vermillion was the other. It was an RPG, possibly the first non-Gold box rpg I'd ever encountered, which captured many many hours of save and load times as I slowly figured out how to play this new genre. I have major good memories of it, I never did finish it because it seemed so huge, and my save probably got corrupted at some point or the Sega got thrown away, I dunno. Called for meals, called for homework, needing and wanting to do other things, it all ate into Sword of Vermillion playtime. But it was a good standby to use up 3-4 hours in the afternoon, in the shaded playroom.

It hasn't aged well, apparently. In general, it's been panned across the internet for being a wannabe Zelda clone, very dodgy game mechanics and collision detection, a story that's nothing special, and fairly buggy implementation.

I think it's a matter of taste. And not applying new world preferences to oldschool games.

It's an RPG, and a Japanese RPG at that. You know you're going to start out in a 2D village amongst shops you can enter, NPCs you can talk to, and your (foster)father/mentor figure (lies dying and) has summoned you to him to assign you The Quest. You know the one. The over-arching raison d' etre wherein you defeat the Big Bad, reclaim your Birthright and get the (princess) Girl. That's just par for the course when you play fantasy rpgs, come on.

It's an RPG and Japanese to boot, so you know that it's going to have performance in combat based on gear and gaining levels, through fighting monsters for xp and whatver funky name money/gold/gil (and in this case, kim) is called. And it's going to involve a decent amount of walking around on the world map popping random combat encounters to do so, in order to earn enough levels and power and money to go on to the next story stage as gated by combat difficulty and a few key quest items locked behind powerful bosses. It's a JRPG, what do you expect, you sign up for this when you play one, why bitch about it?

Where Sword of Vermillion differs from the bog standard trope is in the actual combat itself. It isn't turn-based "I go, you go" hack and slash. It is real-time arcade-y, in a sort of Golden Axe vein. At the same time, it isn't as totally responsive as a real arcade game or have any deep button combos, so even Spiral Knights replicates the feel better. It's just different, a style of its own.

There is a noticeable lag time between one sword swing and another, you can't just spam like Diablo or an action arcade fighter. The trick is to time your swings so that you strike just as you run into the enemy sprite and dodge the hell away before it bumps into you. The collision detection is more of a square, rather than fitting pixel perfect, possibly just a hangover from the primitiveness of the programming of the time, who knows. The enemy AI is nothing much to write home about, consisting of fairly random movements with some vague consistencies. When it bumps into another sprite it tends to stop for a bit. When it's high on health, it tries to run into you. When it's low on health, it tries to run away until you box it against the sides of the screen. But you know, it's primitive days back then, what are we expecting, Left 4 Dead AI?

One will lose health in these fights. It is part of the mechanic. Accidents happen, inadverdent bumps will reduce your health. That, I believe, is the point. That gives you a reason to use the inn to recover health, and buy better gear that raises your armor class to the point where you get minimal 1 point damage from the bumping, rather than 10 or 20 points of damage, and why one levels from 1-3 going up about 30hp each level. That's the buffer zone increase. Now you can do more and progress to the next stage.

That's how oldschool RPGs worked, before MMOs told us we should have it all, and be able to execute perfectly first go around.

Not that I'm defending one over the other, you understand, my limited playtime these days makes me swing much over to the casual gameplay side of things, but that's just how things worked in the good/bad old days. It's like trying to blame Everquest for being grindy. It's a product of its times, rate it based on that, and choose to play it or not as you will.

For the record, I'm still playing it. It's good in piecemeal bits.