Sword of the Vagrant is not, perhaps, the most original game. I picked it up knowing nearly nothing about it because it looked like a Vanillaware game to me, something like Odin Sphere: Leifthrasir. To be clear, I don’t mean that it looked similar to a Vanillaware game, but that it looks almost exactly like a Vanillaware game, and I bought it to some degree thinking that it was one. I will do 2D hacking and slashing, I hoped. I will collect recipes, I dreamed.

Once I started playing, I found that it delivered on those hopes and dreams. The central gameplay loop is exactly like those familiar Vanillaware games, including satisfying 2D combat, a variety of skills you can swap in and out and experiment with, vaguely Metroidvania-style level design, and an endless supply of pleasingly straight-forward upgrades and collectibles. It even borrowed Vanillaware’s signature inexplicably horny art style juxtaposed with a completely earnest and otherwise sexless narrative.

Our hero, Vivian, wearing a very normal outfit

In fact, I didn’t know it wasn’t a Vanillaware game until well into the story when I encountered an item called a “Glizzian Sausage.” It sounded like some kind of out of place “glizzy” joke to me – I’m still not sure whether it was or not, given that there is an actual region in the game called the Glizzian Territory, and the developer appears to be a Chinese company – but it was enough to make me look up whether the game was actually Vanillaware, or Japanese at all. It was not.

Then I read some reviews and found a lot of people taking issue with this lack of originality. Most seemed to view it as derivative and uninspired – a worse version of the style it wants to imitate – and gave it relatively low ratings. Many that I saw described it as middling to bad.

Everything is better when it's metrics-based

I was a bit thrown off by that reaction, though, because as derivative as it might be, I was having fun. It was exactly what I wanted it to be, and I could understand the criticisms more if it was something of a bait and switch where the game appears to be the thing it’s pastiching but then doesn’t deliver, but that wasn’t the case with Sword of the Vagrant. To me, it was an earnest and overall successful attempt to make a game that plays and feels just like Vanillaware. I couldn’t call it uninspired, because it wears its inspiration on its sleeve. It’s unmistakable.

It gives you all the familiar beats you want from this kind of game. You level up, you find new equipment, you try it all out and upgrade it relentlessly. You find cryptic areas you can’t access and wonder what kind of stupid, nonsensical item is going to open the way for you. You see poetic messages that point you in the vague direction of a series of clearly-themed and threateningly-named bosses, each begging for you to find and murder it. These are all things you’ve seen before, and you’re seeing them again because you love them.

I never imagined the Frozen Queen would be on the ancient snow mountain

Originality in video games is something that gets talked about in reviews a lot, but I often wonder how important it actually is to anybody playing the games. I’ve played a near-unlimited number of Soulslikes, for example, and most of their target audience would likely agree the closer they skew to both looking and feeling exactly like a Souls game, the better they are. People aren’t clamoring for games to change up the Soulslike formula; they generally want developers to adhere to it perfectly, because it’s fun every single time. That’s not to say developers shouldn’t do that or it’s somehow wrong, but that it’s not necessarily an improvement in and of itself. Sometimes people just want to play the same game again.

That was how I felt about Sword of the Vagrant. Give me that Vanillaware stuff, I thought when I bought it, and though it turned out to not be Vanillaware, it still did exactly that. I even wondered if perhaps reviewers are less inclined to accept stylistic pastiche when it’s pastiche of something kind of trashy. This isn’t a Soulslike, after all – the elite of gaming – but the sort of thing where the character design of random NPCs looks like this for no particular reason.

This early-game merchant has debilitating back problems

That leaves me wondering what we’re actually doing when we write reviews. They tend to be caught in this nebulous space between critique of an artform and recommendation of a product, but as a result, they often fail to deliver as either. Reviews describe the various ways in which Sword of the Vagrant is derivative, and they assign it a penalized point value based on those criticisms, but I’m stumped as to how anybody should interpret that number. Does it suggest that people won’t enjoy the game? Is it meant to be an objective measure of quality?

I don’t know the answer. Maybe we’re still fundamentally reeling from Roger Ebert saying that video games aren’t art, constantly (and correctly) trying to argue that they are, but simultaneously struggling with the reality that they’re often a somewhat simplistic avenue for people to get their most basic lizard brain receptors to fire over and over as shapes and numbers move around. Maybe it’s an entire field based on a core insecurity about the merit of what we’re all doing here, pressing buttons and gathering recipes for fantasy meals.

Maybe complaining about the fruitlessness of numerical scores in game reviews is a cliche as well, a familiar argument that’s been made again and again. Everybody’s heard it before, it’s old news, it’s been done. Who cares? It still makes me mad.