Not all workshops can handle all materials, which I guess is how the game balances equipment strength. These can be leather, wood, bronze, iron, hagane, silver and damascus. Gems also add to affinities and classes, which makes the whole thing even more complicated.Įach item is also made up from a specific material. You can also combine blades, merging two different blades into a new one, which can change the weapon type completely, and merge their affinities, making the weapon stronger or weaker, depending on what you do. Finally, you can attach gems to weapons, provided there’s a gem slot on it. You can disassemble and reassemble weapons, combining different grips with different blades, which affects some of the weapon’s stats. Each weapon consists of a grip and a blade.

Workshops? Yes, there are workshops in Vagrant Story and item repair is their least important function. The first Workshop couldn’t handle my strongest weapons, especially not the Soul Kiss. The thing is, in order to repair the weapon or armor piece, you use phantom points to fill up damage points, so there’s a balance between those two. When they reach the maximum, the effectiveness is doubled. Phantom points, on the other hand, go up as you use items.

Using weapons or taking damage drops this value and when it reaches zero, the item effectiveness is halved. Damage points reflect the amount of wear and tear a piece of equipment has. There are Damage Points and Phantom Points. We’re still not done! Each item has two additional, variable stats. It’s a bit easier with armor and, since there’s a limit to the amount of stuff you can carry and a lot of armor slots for your character, I don’t think it’s really expected to carry around several armor sets. They also affect damage, but I’m not completely sure on how yet.īecause of that, it’s important to carry around several weapons, to use correctly against various creatures. These fall into one of three – blunt, edged and piercing. I’m not really sure how far it goes, or what the odds are, but it definitely goes at least two steps ahead.įinally, there are the weapon types. It goes further than that, so his dragon class might drop to, since it’s after phantom. What does that mean? It means that if, for instance, an undead enemy attacks Ashley, his armor’s undead class may rise, but his phantom class my drop. These are aranged circularly, like follows: evil – human – beast – undead – phantom – dragon – evil – human. Each enemy belongs to one of several classes.

Whatever the highest elemental affinity of the weapon is, that’s the type of damage that the weapon does. Whenever your weapon’s fire affinity increases, there’s a chance that the water affinity will drop and vice versa. However, this is where the opposites come into play. Dealing damage to water creatures increases your weapon’s fire affinity. Receiving fire damage increases your armor’s fire affinity. It has no opposite and it simply affects physical damage.īy dealing and receiving damage, you affect these affinities. Lastly, there’s the special, physical affinity. Fire is opposite to water, air is opposite to earth and light is opposite to dark. The six affinities are divided into opposites. An armor with an affinity to fire will take less damage from fire attacks. A weapon with a higher elemental affinity to fire will do more damage to water-based enemies and vice versa. There are the elemental affinities (fire, water, earth, air, light, dark). Your weapons and armor have three set of stats. There’s a lot of decision making to be had there, and also a lot of risk taking, so I guess that’s why Ashley is a Riskbreaker. Attacking the hands can cripple the enemy’s attack and attacking the feet can cripple their movement. Some body parts are harder to hit, but take more damage, such as the head on humanoid enemies. Enemies have body parts, which you can target specifically. Any enemy within the sphere can be attacked. When it’s your turn to attack, you press the circle button and, based on your weapon range, a sphere appears around your character. It looks and feels real time, though stats affect how often you can attack, what your hit and dodge chances are or how much damage you do and receive. The higher the range of the weapon or spell, the bigger it is.

Vagrant story combat