Sword of the Vagrant has a basic story for an action RPG. Vivian, the protagonist, is on a mission to save her father. As a sellsword, she has been journeying across the world in search of him. While crossing the ocean one night, Vivian runs into a storm, which wrecks her ship and washes her ashore somewhere foreign to her.
It’s here that she meets Lucia who contracts Vivian to find her long-lost love. One thing leads to another and Vivian starts working for other characters on the land as well in the hopes of finding her father. Premise aside, how does Sword of the Vagrant hold up since it was last released in 2018?
8 Best: Great Art
The art in this game looks amazing thanks to everything having a hand-drawn feel. The colors pop, giving players a nice variety instead of the usual more drab settings of action RPG experiences out there. While players will defeat a lot of the same enemies, there is still a good assortment early on from wolves to zombies.
The designs for them look great too and they can be appreciated in the art gallery. Usually, games force players to unlock an art gallery like this, but over a hundred pages can be looked over from the title screen menu.
7 Worst: Blurry Textures
The downside to the art is that it looks a bit blurry. It’s almost as if the game was made for mobile phones and is having trouble being blown up to a bigger size. This blurriness to the backgrounds and characters may only affect the Switch players out there. Everything could look nicer on the newer consoles like the PS5.
This is not uncommon to see a Switch version of a game run worse in some ways. There are some other hiccups as well such as button prompts, like hitting up on the controller to talk to people, not working right away.
6 Best: Tight Gameplay
Besides a few technical snafus that don’t plague Sword of the Vagrant too much, the gameplay loop is solid. Players begin with that escort mission which slowly introduces the game’s mechanics to players. After an hour at max, the world will open up more.
Players should get enough money at this point to play around with the various systems including weapon enhancements, the skill tree, cooking, and so on. Again, fighting the same enemies may get repetitive but the controls feel nice for a 2D action RPG.
5 Worst: Leveling Up Is A Bit Messy
There are two currencies in the game which can lead to players leveling up. Gold can be used to buy new equipment or to enhance gear as previously mentioned. Besides coins, enemies will also drop gem-like objects which are Mana deposits. Mana can be used for some crafting purposes but it is mostly for unlocking stat boosts and abilities in the skill tree.
This skill tree is basic, but the structure makes it hard to decipher. It might have been a better idea to have shrunk down the skill tree for essentials and to also have players level up like in a traditional RPG.
4 Best: A Modern Metroidvania
One of the best things about the gameplay loop is that it is similar to a Metroidvania. Players will continually open up a sprawling map that is connected via warp points. There are no puzzles to solve to weigh down the experience. Quests will dictate where players can and cannot go, so technically the experience is a bit linear.
However, each dungeon, or section of the map for these quests, does offer up some level of exploration. It’s the type of Metroidvania that players can get sucked into easily with hours going by without them realizing it.
3 Worst: Poor Menus
This game has a lower budget than most action RPGs and it’s apparent in the menu system. To reiterate, the skill tree is a mess. There are no decipherable sections to look into and players cannot zoom in on anything.
The normal menu is not much better as it is a static black background. As players will spend a good portion of their time on the menus, this can be a drawback. The game didn’t have to have Persona 5 levels of flair to the menus, one of the best aspects of that game, but a better structure would have been sufficient for Sword of the Vagrant.
2 Best: The Small Things
Sometimes it’s the small things that add up to create a perfect package in an RPG. For example, anything dropped by enemies will be picked up automatically. Video games tend to be split on whether or not players should be promoted to grab things off of the ground or not like God of War Ragnarok.
To that game’s credit, there is an option in God of War Ragnarok's menu to change that, which should be done as a pro tip post haste. It’s also nice in Sword of the Vagrant that players get warned before a boss fight and are offered a way out.
1 Worst: Low Budget Audio
Sword of the Vagrant is a low-budgeted game so it makes sense that it doesn’t have the audio backing of something akin to a Square Enix title. There is voice acting in the game, but only during certain scenes. It’s a rare case and the audio, of what is here, is only in Japanese.
A text-only RPG in 2022 is a bit wild since there are indie examples out there that do have plenty of voice acting. The music, while not bad, is more sleepy than it is invigorating. This goes against how players should feel in an action RPG.
Sword of the Vagrant was released on November 30, 2022, and is available to play on PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. It was originally released in 2018 on PC.