A gorgeous hack-n-slash adventure with depth - Sword of the Vagrant Quick Review
Sword of the Vagrant may be one of my most pleasant surprises of the year. This beautiful game apes the look and feel of Vanillaware’s underrated Muramasa: The Demon Blade, but actually pulls it off with tight, satisfying combat and fulfilling exploration of a strange fantasy world.
THE STORY
In Sword of the Vagrant, players step into the boots of Vivian, a scantily clad mercenary who has journeyed to the dangerous island of Mythrilia on a quest to find her family. Before long, Vivian is tossed into the middle of political strife and worldwide conflict, as she finds herself taking on quests for shady characters and trying to dodge the machinations of a corrupt academy of battlemages.
PLATFORMS
This game was first released on PC in 2018 under the title The Vagrant, but it will launch under its new title, Sword of the Vagrant, for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Xbox One later this week. I’m not totally sure why the name was changed, but the console version doesn’t seem to actually add new content. I played the PC version, which ran buttery smooth, with no major technical issues or bugs to report.
TIME PLAYED
I’m currently five hours into Sword of the Vagrant. That playtime has taken me through two and a half of the game’s six main areas and four giant boss fights. The full game reportedly lasts ten to twenty hours, depending on how much time you devote to exploring every inch of the map.
WHAT’S AWESOME
• Combat. As I mentioned above, Sword of the Vagrant’s core gameplay feels heavily comparable to Muramasa: The Demon Blade, which was one of the best hack-n-slash/beat-em-up games of its time. The core of combat is simple (one button for light attacks, one for heavy), but there are many different combos to learn, special skills you can spend rage to pull off, and a very skill-dependent and satisfying dodge mechanic. Great stuff.
• Exploration. Mythrilia is a pretty fascinating place, as it turns out, full of weirdo townspeople, creepy ghosts, dark ruins, and plenty of odd magical artifacts. The game is laid out as a series of tiny 2D screens, sort of like a Metroidvania, but you’re usually only limited by how far you’ve progressed the story or needing a key to a door. I had a ton of fun exploring every room in a dungeon to make sure I mopped up all the treasure possible.
• Translation. Indie games from Asian regions are often sent to Western regions with very rough translation work that can really distract from the story. Sword of the Vagrant shows just how important good localization is, as the dialogue is beautifully translated here and reads totally natural, as if it were written in English originally. As a result, a plot that I initially expected to be generic fantasy revealed itself to be something much darker and more compelling that really kept pushing me forward and has me wanting to finish the game.
WHAT SUCKS
• The character design...sometimes. As with the gameplay, Sword of the Vagrant seems to owe a lot of its visual inspiration to Vanillaware and the over-the-top artwork of artist George Kamitani. And as with Kamitani’s work, the design in Sword of the Vagrant can be equal parts stunning and cringe-inducing.
The very, uh, provocative design of protagonist Vivian should illustrate what I mean. If the male gaze bothers you in games, you’ll run into a lot of problems with this one. On the other hand, there are plenty of characters, especially enemies, who have incredibly cool and very unique designs, which makes the goofy, horny stuff all the more of a bummer. If that stuff doesn’t bother you, though, there’s not much else to complain about in this game!
SHOULD YOU PLAY IT?
Absolutely! I don’t know why the original release of The Vagrant in 2018 didn’t get that much buzz, but I hope the relaunch on new platforms as Sword of the Vagrant is a huge success, because this game deserves it. This is one of the most fun, simple, and straightforward slash-em-up games I’ve played in ages, and I can’t wait to hop back in!
💬 What’s your pick for the most underrated game of the last few years? What’s a game you loved that you feel like not enough people played? Leave your thoughts in a comment below!
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