Vay (Sega CD) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
228A playthrough of Working Designs 1994 role-playing game for the Sega CD, Vay.
Please also be sure to check out this playthrough's companion piece, compiling cutscenes and sprite-sheets from every version of the game! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfSS5AZrDBI
Vay was the second of four Sega CD RPGs that Working Designs localized and brought to the west. After the massive success that they had with Lunar: The Silver Star, everyone had pretty big expectations for Vay.
While it wasn't anywhere near as successful (nor as good) as Lunar, it was a good RPG in its own right. The big difference between them lies with their designs: Lunar was pretty forward- thinking for its time, and focused on the story and characters while minimizing grinding. Vay subscribes to a far older design that the majority of 80s JRPGs stuck to: grind experience levels for hours at a time, finish a quest, and then grind again so you can take on the next challenge.
I personally like both styles just fine, and Vay is an excellent example of a "classic" style you don't see often anymore.
The story is simple, but it carries the game just fine. You play a prince whose kingdom is wiped out after a group of mechs come in during your wedding, blow up the city, and kidnap your fiance. To stand up against them, you've got to find a legendary suit of armor that has been sealed by the master magicians of Vay. There's the normal rotating-door for party members that come and go throughout, plenty of towns to buy equipment from, and dungeons to plunder. Solid stuff.
The graphics are pretty nice, but a bit uneven. The overworld and towns look like anything else from the early 16-bit period, but the cinematics are really well done and (for the Sega CD) fluidly animated, and the battles look great - the monster sprites are usually pretty interesting and have a fair bit of animation when they attack. The sound is really good, too. Though the CD format limits the amount of tracks in the game, they're all pretty well-suited, and the battle themes rock. They're an odd assortment of pop-dance tracks that will get stuck in your head forever after hearing them. I have to ask, though: why does the last boss theme sound like a Mortal Kombat remix? It's awesome, yes, but in an RPG, it seems like an odd choice.
Anyways, I've been wanting to do a couple of RPGs, and this is one that I really liked and doesn't get spoken about often, so it seemed like a good place to start. If you want a taste of what old JRPGs felt like, this is a quality choice, and a typical yet well-made representative of the baisc early 90s JRPG.
On a side-note, it was rereleased several years ago on iOS. The graphics were "updated" (read: ruined) and the whole thing was retranslated and redubbed in English.
*Please note that I did not record my experience/money grinding sessions. There were many hours spent leveling that aren't shown, but the edits are obvious when you see my stats jump at those points. Overall it took somewhere around 20-25 hours, not just the ten shown here.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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