Thanks to SoMoGa for the review code

Title: VAY
System: Steam
Price: $6.99
Release Date: 07/07/2024

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Story

In this SEGA CD era RPG, you take control of Heibelger and his party as they set out to find five orbs needed for the legendary armor, in order to defeat the evil Danek Army! A pretty typical fantasy plot all things considered, with a dash of sci-fi thrown in.

The cutscenes from the SCD version return, with their original Japanese Sega CD voice acting intact, along with a newer, sillier English dub made for the iOS release that this port is based on. They’re simple looking, but effective.

Presentation

This port of Vay is an enhanced version of the iOS port from way, way back in the early days of iOS mobile gaming. So long ago, that the iOS port is now older than the Sega CD Vay was in comparison to that version. So yeah, a very long time ago. Did SoMoGa spruce things up to make it look and sound well on Steam?

Well for starters, the cutscenes, as noted earlier, were fully redubbed with a new English dub, and this dub is the same one from the 2008 iOS version. They look oddly blurry, but the voices are still the same as the 2008 version and compared to the Sega CD dub, I thought it was a lot better, if way sillier. Some characters speak as if they recorded out of a tin can, while others sound fine. These cutscenes don’t have much to them to begin with and are rather short, and with subtitles it helps when some of these cutscenes are quiet, but even still, the voice acting quality is definitely a bit nostalgic in some ways, and I find it pretty funny that some of these VAs are clearly new to the role, while you also have Mona Marshall of Digimon fame here doing some pretty decent voicework alongside the other cast members. Pretty charming, I say.

There’s also the Japanese voices available as an option too, and with those enabled you get the same Sega CD voices from the original Japanese release of the game. The subtitles don’t appear to change based on the language, so they match the English version more as captions than localizing the Japanese dialogue, but at least we got the original voices here, though I wish the cutscene video quality was better.

For the actual game, you have a few minor visual options, mainly when it comes to the overworld and whether or not you want a blur filter on. I immediately turned that off, and once I did the game looked great, scaling up to the Steam Deck’s screen rather well. The overworld sprites are sharp and crisp, and the text has a nice bold font making it very easy for up close reading. The big visible difference that some people might have an issue with here comes from the HUD on the right side of the screen using very, very basic font, rather than the pixelated font of the original game. It still shows your party of four as much as you need to though, and I didn’t find the different layout or font here to bother me much at all.

What did bug me, and definitely will annoy some other players used to a lot of other retro ports, is how jarring the battle scenes look. In battle you have a forced blur filter, and quite frankly, this makes everything look awful. The backgrounds here are all new and just like the SCD original battles take up the full screen, and while I didn’t mind the smeary backgrounds much at all, the sprites are very, very blurry and look super jarring. Some enemies I barely could tell what they were meant to be due to the blur filter making their eyes or other facial features look like a smeary mess. Definitely the weakest part of the port as a whole, but at least the battle UI is simple and gets the job done.

For the soundtrack, it’s 100% the same songs as the Sega CD version. Nothing new here, and just a bunch of redbook audio tracks, with a fair share of memorable, catchy, or generic BGM taking up this classic soundtrack. You’ll get the battle and field themes stuck in your head a lot as they play the most throughout the adventure, and a few of the other songs aren’t that bad either, and the final boss theme is by far the most outstanding track of the entire game, well worth the trek to be able to hear it! Also unlike the SCD original, these tracks loop seamlessly rather than with a stop and start like a CD game would normally do.

Gameplay

Vay is a RPG adventure, starting like a lot of RPG games used to back in the day. Your main hero is by himself, and has to seek out allies to begin his epic quest, in a pretty traditional RPG. Right away you can pull open the options menu and be amazed by the sheer amount of customization on display, which makes this port a fun time from the start as you can immediately crank movement and battle speed up to 3X from either the menu or via the RB button, or toggle various EXP/Gold rates to change the pacing of the game as you please. Want to not worry about buying items? Max the gold out, but keep the EXP the same so the game’s still tough in spots. Or go all chaos with everything maxxed to the point you’ll gain a level after nearly every single battle. Alternatively, you can even make it tougher by just reducing the EXP/Gold gain by half or to nothing at all, if you somehow want to make things even more grindy.

Speaking of the grind, the original US Sega CD version was impacted by Working Designs and their awful difficulty tweaks, making a lot of bosses tougher, increasing the magic cost to absurd degrees, and making the overall grind a lot more brutal. With everything at the default JP settings, Vay isn’t too tough, but still has moments to keep you on your toes and allow you to experiment with different magic techniques and ways to deal with the hordes of enemies you’ll randomly encounter. But with the WD balancing? Every fight proves to be a big risk of draining your very limited and valuable MP, and way more tension goes into the boss battles.

Some may see this increased difficulty they did as more exciting, but I found the higher magic costs to be too insane for my taste, and the reason I even bring it all up to begin with is because there is a “Hard Mode” toggle that reinstates all the WD stat/magic point changes, so you can fight the battles with attack and buff spells that cost 99MP to use!

This can still be combined with the EXP/Gold toggles however, so at least you can choose to play on hard while still cutting the grinding out. You can even turn off random encounters entirely, if you so choose, if you want to do something insane like a “bosses only” run of the game. There really is a lot of customization options in this port of Vay, and I find that very admirable, since even if I personally hate the WD balancing, there are others who love it and will be more than happy with these toggles to recreate that brutal experience.

Personally speaking, I had a lot more fun with the game when playing with everything as casual as possible. Multipliers on max, JP difficulty, just playing at my own pace fully blind. The fast battle speed makes combat very swift, especially with the autobattle option being right there to wipe the floor with weak enemies in under a minute. If I ever felt like I was going in circles in a dungeon and sick of weaker enemies, I’d just disable random encounters until the next new area, and keep on having fun to see what new story beat or funny dialogue I’d encounter next. All in all, a very fun and breezy game that still got me on my toes near the very end, even with my party over Level 100 at the end of it all, with a roughly 8 hour timeframe spent in the end playing a RPG I never got bored of thanks to all the QOL.

There are a few other aspects I feel might bug people though, as they did for me a little bit. I already mentioned the weird blurry battle backgrounds, but that appears to be in the process of being changed to the original backgrounds as I’m writing this, which is a good option. The backgrounds didn’t bug me too much in the battles anyhow, but I still wished the sprites weren’t blurry during combat.

I also kinda wish there was a toggle to disable fully healing HP/MP upon level up, since while I had fun with the EXP multiplier, it did make resting at inns and such almost entirely meaningless since a level up every battle meant you never ever had to heal at any point during the game. Since I was still able to be in a pinch if I self imposed not using healing spells/items even with my very high levels (and Hard Mode makes things even tougher), it would be nice for this to be an extra option so that players who like the high EXP gains could still level up without it counting as a full heal. More options don’t hurt, after all.

There’s also the fact that the EN script for this game is uh, very strange, but not in a bad way for me. The script is still way better than the WD Script mainly because it doesn’t get offensive with dropping slurs at random points like that version did, but you’ll find it a challenge to go through one town without a random NPC complaining about taxes or making a random joke about society, or stuff that nods and makes pop culture references to the real world. Some of these were really stupid or unfunny, but some of them were genuinely laugh out loud funny, mainly the one I threw up above this paragraph that I couldn’t help but share with friends on discord once I was able to.

The main story still has a lot of humor in it too, and I also found some of the random dialogue during pre-boss scenes to be pretty funny, but none of it was jarring or outright weird like some of the NPC dialogue could be. Even the most cringe lines from the NPCs, were far better and more funny than the stuff WD threw in their translation, which I often considered to be very unfunny and poorly aged, so I think if they were aiming for a sillier translation of a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously to begin with, I feel SoMoGa did a great enough job here. Still, your mileage with the NPC humor may vary, but rest assured none of them will say anything offensive, and I still had fun reading their dialogue.

Conclusion

Ultimately, I found this port to be an outstanding way to give this Sega CD RPG a go, as the sheer amount of quality of life features are truly commendable and made this a pretty enjoysable classic RPG romp. Yes, Vay has a lot of generic aspects to its plot, even with the sci-fi dressing. Yes, this port may not have the Vay dub that you remember from your youth, but the english dub here is still campy and charming. Yes, the localization is a little weird, and while a tiny bit more faithful to the JP version than the WD Sega CD version, still has a lot of one liners and jokes that can take you out of the moment, but the weirdness has a lot of charm that I found funnier here than WD’s script.

With all this quality of life, though? You can pretty much make this Vay the experience you want it to be. Wanna reduce EXP/Gold and turn on the WD difficulty spikes to make this a brutal, grindy RPG? Go ahead! Or have everything on the easiest setting so you level up your party in no time and make it a breezy, casual RPG!

Just a lot of cool toggles to mess around with, opening up a lot of possibility for challenge runs and the like. Combine that with a very fast overworld and battle speed option, and you have yourselves a Sega CD Era RPG that plays great and is accessible in all the right ways, and I’m eager to see what SoMoGa has planned next for retro RPG ports. For a game as niche as this, I couldn’t think of a much better way to handle things.

I give Vay an 8 out of 10.