Topic: 2025/01: Vagrant Story (PlayStation) - VGCartography

[JonLeung]

Vagrant Story

For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to VGCartography's Vagrant Story (PlayStation) maps.

The city of Leá Monde, once bustling with thousands of people, has been deserted since an earthquake a quarter of a century ago.  Now the city ruins, along with its abandoned mines and monasterial passageways, are a dark labyrinth whose inhabitants are the souls of the dead.

This is the setting for Vagrant Story, where Ashley Riot, a "Riskbreaker" agent of the Valendia Knights of the Peace, investigates the connection between a cult and the Parliament, while also having been accused of assassinating the Duke.  What revelations await in the haunted city of Leá Monde?

The mysteries of what you'll find there or how to find your way around don't have to be mysterious at all; you just have to look at VGCartography's maps.  The only thing cryptic about these (aside from the crypts) is that I haven't honoured these incredibly detailed maps earlier.  Rooms are named, doors are indicated, treasures are itemized, and all the beings that Ashley will encounter have all their stats revealed.  This is video game cartography at its finest!  VGCartography shows us, yet again, that he is quite the master of mapping three-dimensional video games and sparing no detail.  And indeed, no detail should be missed here in particular, as Vagrant Story is considered one of the best video games ever made.

So to recognize the effort put into mapping one of the most acclaimed interactive experiences from a quarter of a century ago, VGCartography's Vagrant Story (PlayStation) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for January 2025.

[VGCartography]

Awesome, thanks!

I used a suite called vstools to make these maps: https://github.com/morris/vstools
With this I could export things to OBJ format and render them orthographically for the maps. There were a couple challenging dungeons when it came to mapping - the Snowfly Forest and the Iron Maiden B2 lategame level are both labyrinths that don't fit together coherently (the traditional warp-maze style areas) so those have a ton of lines all over them connecting exits. Otherwise, the whole game world fits together pretty coherently at a time when that wasn't always the case. The game is open world in the sense that you can teleport to previous save points (eventually) and everything is continuous so you can always backtrack, rather than being discrete linear levels. As a result it feels like a consistent place.

If this game had a less obtuse combat system, it could've had a legacy up there with MGS1. The presentation, graphics, writing, cutscenes are fantastic for the PS1. But alas, the game is notoriously complex and difficult to wrap your head around the nuances of the combat system so a lot of people bounced off it. It is more of a cult classic now. For those who aren't familar, the director of this created the Ivalice world setting that is used here, in Final Fantasy Tactics and Final Fantasy 12. There is some vague DNA shared across them.