Developer: SIMS
Publisher: Working Designs
Release Date: 10-22-93
I shouldn’t have waited so long after playing Vay to finally get around to writing about it. It just doesn’t want to stick around in my brain. I’m not overly surprised. My brain is crammed full of knowledge, so it can’t be too comfortable up there. It makes sense that a less than memorable game would want to get out as quickly as possible. I remember seeing ads for Vay in magazines in the early 90s and really wanting to play it. There weren’t that many options for an RPG fan at the time, so any hint of a new RPG was exciting, even on a weird add-on that I wasn’t even convinced actually existed. Vay is one of the dozen or so obscure RPGs on Sega CD that make it so appealing to collectors. I know when I finally got my Sega CD I wanted to track them all down more than anything. Sadly, they were expensive fifteen years ago and have only gone up in price. Well I was finally able to play it, and it’s probably no surprise that it wasn’t all I expected to be. It’s not even pronounced the way I always expected. It’s pronounced Vai as in guitar virtuoso Steve Vai. You know, the legendary guitar player who was in Whitesnake for like ten minutes and because of it became a plot point on Salute Your Shorts. If you’re the average person of around my age that’s probably the only thing you know about Steve Vai. See, I’m already getting sidetracked into talking about 80s guitar players because Vay just isn’t that memorable. When a game is as vanilla as this one it’s the flaws that tend to stick out, and Vay certainly has its fair share.
Vay is about as basic JRPG as it gets. Being staunchly traditional can be good for a JRPG, but there’s just nothing about the mechanics in Vay that make it rise above mediocrity. Sure, some of the advanced features are nice. It features nice looking cutscenes peppered throughout, and there is a good amount of mostly decent voice acting, but most of the game looks like your standard second-string Genesis RPG. It’s just too full of green fields, yellow deserts, and slate-grey caves. Very little of it stands out. The dungeons and bosses are fairly generic, so it really does feel like a game only for RPG obsessives like me who just have to play them all.
The combat is what really brings the game down. When done right turn-based combat can be the best combat around. It’s all about planning and strategy. In Vay it’s all about attacking and attacking and hoping you don’t have to waste too much MP. For some reason the developers decided that instead of making monsters more difficult throughout the game they would instead just make attacks do very little damage. It felt like the farther into the game I got the less damage I was doing. Even getting more powerful weapons didn’t help much. This led to battles that were boring slogs instead of fun challenges. The only way to do much damage later in the game is from the one good magic user. Of course, since this speeds the game up and makes battles more interesting, they make this tedious too. There just aren’t any clear ways to recover MP with the one exception of gaining levels. Vay has another Great Greed situation where it becomes all about timing level gains. The difference is that where Great Greed was weird and interesting, Vay is dull and predictable. So, get ready to fight a bunch of boring battles for minimal gains while waiting to level up so you can take on a boss. It’s not a fun system.
This is another situation where I can’t figure out what other critics are seeing that I am missing. Both contemporary and modern reviews are mostly positive. Of course what critics liked in 1993 is probably the thing that gets criticized the most in 2023. Working Designs became infamous for their odd translations featuring numerous Americanisms and pop culture references. It’s surprising how much juvenile humour is in such a serious game. Of course, in 1993 critics loved it. They called it some of the most sophisticated dialogue ever in a game. That’s a bit odd in a game with so many Wayne’s World reverences and fart jokes. Sometimes this is fun, like when they reference something more obscure like Kraftwerk, but it can be jarring. Of course, I can see the reasoning behind it. The game has a decent story, but it’s a bit dry. Working Designs wanting something that would stand out more. It certainly worked at the time, but games and their reviewers have aged thirty years. It’s not quite as extreme as some of their other translations, but people certainly complain about this sort of thing today. They want authenticity, and I don’t blame them.
I know I’ve been criticizing Vay a lot, but after reading so many reviews and waiting so long to play it I had high expectations. I just couldn’t believe that it would end up being so average. I was hoping that Vay would push Sega CD into the positive, but Vay is the definition of an okay game. It’s the type of game that is made for the purple section. Yes, that does mean that Gopher and Bible Buffet are going above it, but even I can’t let a mediocre RPG slide through based on genre alone. I did like it better than any of my other purple games, so it’s now the best okay game I have played. My list is really starting to get strange, but I suppose that’s the hazard of ranking every game I can get my hands on. Luckily, the Sega CD list is much easier so far. I have one good one, one okay one, and one bad one. I have a feeling that this is going to be a trend for Sega CD. There are around 150 games on the system, so I’d be very happy if 50 of them are good. Is that too much to ask? I’m just an optimist like that.
Sega CD quality percentage: 1/3 or 33.33%
Sega CD Rankings
1. Lords of Thunder
2. Vay
3. Panic!
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