Vay

Review

by Michael L. House

Working Designs is one of those companies that you can depend on for making great games, mostly in the RPG genre. They're best known for their extraordinary Lunar series. Those two games were filled with epic battles, great story and character interaction, humor and sadness, and large fantasy worlds. And Vay is no different. Though it is more traditional than their other games, Working Designs has created another great role-playing game filled with the works (story, characters, and, of course, humor).

The story is simple, but involved. As Prince Sandor, you must stop the evil forces that have come to wreak havoc on the once peaceful land by seeking out the legendary Armor of Vay. You are further driven to rid the world of evil because your lover was kidnapped. So you set out and embark on a vast journey. And this is where tradition comes in. Vay plays like almost every other role-playing game. You go from town to town via a world map and interact with characters, progress the story along, enter a dungeon, defeat a boss, and move on to the next objective. Everything (except the battles) takes place in a traditional 2D world filled with sprites and hand drawn backgrounds. But since this game was developed by professionals, this can easily be overlooked. The dialog is top-notch and is often times very humorous. There is also a lot of voice acting that takes place in this game (mostly during important story progressions) and it's very well done. Like the Lunar games, important pieces of the story are usually accompanied by some really impressive Japanese anime sequences.

The only thing that really disappoints is the battle sequences. While they're not bad by any means, they're just not on par with the system in Lunar nor is it very original. You can only have three people in your party at once and the perspective goes to a faux 3D perspective. You see your party's backs while the enemies stand before you. It's a lot like the Phantasy Star games. The problem is that they just get a bit too repetitive whereas Lunar's unique system was very interesting and strategic.

But the above doesn't really affect the game much. The bottom line is that Vay is a great role-playing game that every fan of the genre should be able to get into. Its got a great storyline and character dialog / translation, humorous overtones, and some really great anime story sequences.