Memories of a Vagabond

My relationship with small RPG Maker releases is the kind that gets you laughed at in certain circles, so when I sat down with Memories of a Vagabond I was already rooting for it. The soul-transfer conceit is the hook worth talking about: when the hero dies, he descends to a netherworld and picks a new body from four distinct classes, Warrior, Assassin, Mage, or Hunter, each with its own skill set and equipment pool. More quietly interesting is the carry-over rule, where any technique mastered in a previous body stays locked into the hero's mind permanently, meaning you can graft a warrior's heavy strikes onto a mage frame across multiple runs. On paper that is a lovely little loop, the kind of low-friction class experimentation that bigger RPGs charge sixty hours of grinding to enable. The trouble is that the game runs out of time to let any of it breathe. Most players finish a first playthrough somewhere between two and four hours, depending on how thoroughly they poke around the world map and side areas. There is a coliseum that remixes its challenges based on your active class, and a handful of side quests, and a fishing mini-game, and an alchemy bench where you can craft potions, weapons, and armor if you bother to hunt down materials. That is a lot of furniture for a two-room apartment. The alchemy in particular never earns its keep because standard shop gear stays competitive the whole way through, and the economy never pressures you into the crafting bench. Each of those ideas hints at a longer, richer game that was either cut short or never fully scoped. What genuinely holds up is the soundtrack. Reviewers across the board singled it out, and rightly so: the battle themes have real energy, with boss encounters backed by something closer to metal riffs than the usual MIDI wallpaper. The RPG Maker visuals are what they are, serviceable sprite work that carries the SNES-era nostalgia the developers were chasing, though nothing here approaches the hand-crafted pixel artistry of the genre's better-known indie peaks. The writing is a more complicated story. Some of the dialogue has a scrappy personality to it, optional insult exchanges with enemies and a few eccentric townspeople who feel like they have actual attitudes. But localization and proofreading were clearly not priorities, and in places the text loses coherence badly enough to pull you out of whatever mood the music was building. The New Game Plus exists and does let you revisit choices with a different class selected from the start, and the turbo mode that speeds up repeated scenes is a considerate touch for returning players. But the honest summary is that the core systems needed another year and twice the content to justify each other's presence. The death-and-rebirth mechanic, the class cross-pollination, the coliseum, the alchemy, the side quests: each one sparks something and then trails off. What you are left with is a game that feels less like a completed experience and more like an extended proof-of-concept, ambitious and charming in moments, unfinished in aggregate. If you have a specific appetite for short, unpolished SNES-style RPGs and you catch it at a low price, there is a real afternoon in here. Just do not expect the systems to compound into anything deeper than their individual introductions.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Memories of a Vagabond.