I really wouldn't recommend this to anyone looking for an RPG these days

User Rating: 4.5 | Vay: Ryuusei no Yoroi SCD
Vay (pronounced Vye) is a Japanese RPG released in America by Working Designs, the people responsible for translating the Lunar series, among others. However, this is quite easily the weakest game WD have brought across, and although it provides a good challenge for RPG fans, it wasn't great in the day, hasn't aged well and doesn't have much to offer for the modern player who is spoilt for choice with great traditional style RPGs.

Vay has many problems. Firstly the battles are irritatingly frequent, so much so that the game barely manages to get through more than a couple of bars of music before you're into another one. These battles are similar to the original Phantasy Star series', as are the small characters and top-down perspective of the main part of the game, and are not very well thought out or entertaining. Boss battles in particular are a chore, where the strategy is limited to 'keep using healing items and you're dead when you run out' - the fact that these boss battles drag on doesn't help either. Although the dungeons get more interesting towards the end (and painfully difficult), earlier ones are uninteresting both graphically and in their design. The characters likewise are instantly forgettable, and not even WD's inspired translation skills can work here - this is no Lunar. And would it really have been too much effort to put a character picture next to the text boxes so we can instantly see who's speaking? It's not as if the Sega CD is short on memory, and it would've made the game at least a little more endearing. An even better idea would have been to remove the 'status screen' on the right hand side of the screen which is present all the time and takes up an unecessary amount of space, making the game look like a Master System release.

On a more positive note there are some nice graphical touches (the 'living walls' in a later dungeon were done quite well). The game also manages a half-decent plot at times with a couple of memorable moments, and the lead bad guy Sadoul stands out as at least one memorable character. A special mention must go to the soundtrack which has some first class tunes streamed straight from the CD (the main game theme is astonishingly good!), though it's a shame that some of them are repeated so often, and it's usually the weaker ones too.

Despite myself being a great defender of the Mega CD/Sega CD as a system with some exceptional games...this is not one of them, and although I played it through to the end back in the day when RPGs for the system were thin on the ground, I can't recommend it now. Overall, it's just too dull, samey and uninspired, excelling in nothing in particular and falling short of the mark in most aspects. Unless you're a collector or an RPG/Sega CD completist, I'd steer clear of this title, as it's not worth the price it currently goes for on eBay.