Vagrant Story is my only one favorite video game (the originator of Dark Souls and Monster Hunter), I like it so much that I’ve long been preparing to recreate a simplified version of this game using Unity and Blender (just for fun and to implement the game design to my satisfaction). But the game’s model building keeps standing in the way for me. After all, for a person who knows nothing about 3D modeling or drawing, it takes a lot of time and effort to reach a professional modeling level. Not to mention the later character action design, game system design, as well as many other aspects. Fortunately, I found Vagrant Story Tools.

Vagrant Story Tools (VSTOOLS for short) is a toolset for Vagrant Story (the only full-score action RPG video game featuring an outstanding character and level design, developed by Square Enix in 2000), mainly consists of complete (mostly working) model/map viewer and extractor. It was written by Morris Brodersen from Germany, using JavaScript along with three.js (formerly written in Java mainly because of higher development speed and easy deployment).

You can run Vagrant Story Tools directly in any WebGL-enabled web browser, or download the source code and run it locally via your web browser or host it on your own VPS. The viewer opens individual file obtained from a CD image which has to be extracted first from your copy of Vagrant Story. It is developed for the US Version of Vagrant Story but in fact also works with any other versions.

After actual testing, we found that Firefox’s support for Vagrant Story Tools is more perfect and user-friendly. For example, when you select different files for different options, Firefox browser can remember the different folder location for each option, while browsers like Chrome set all the options to be the same folder location you last opened, which makes it pretty cumbersome and inefficient to select and open multiple different files frequently.

BTW, Vagrant Story Tools had been discontinued for many years. Could it be a coincidence? After I emailed its developer three times in 2018 and 2019 for requesting updates/bug fixes (but no response), Vagrant Story Tools has been back up to relatively normal update and maintenance now. What an exciting thing it is! This way, I don’t have to manually model the characters, items and rooms in Vagrant Story at all. Instead, I just need to export all types of models via this tool. This certainly saves us a lot of time and energy.

// Supported File Types //

• WEP (weapons)
• SHP (characters)
• SEQ (animations)
• ZUD (basically SHP + SEQ + WEP)
• ZND (zone data)
• MPD (map)
• ARM (minimap)

*** To open an MPD file, you’ll need the correct ZND file. You can find the Zone/Map list here.

// Simple Tutorial //

1. Use jPSXdec to extract the files out from the game ROM of Vagrant Story
2. Run Vagrant Story Tools online or locally
3. Browse the extracted Vagrant Story ROM files according the Zone/Map list.
4. Done

// Tips //

• To use Vagrant Story Tools online more efficiently, use Firefox instead of Chrome. Why? Because:
  1. Firefox can remember the last file path separately for each “File Upload” field within a web page.
  2. When opening a local file, if you press ‘Esc’ to cancel the file opening operation, Chrome will change the field to “No file chosen”, while Firefox will keeps it unchanged.
  3. Firefox has a much faster file opening operation than Chrome.

// Related Links //

• Vagrant Story: Rooms List
• A prior version was written in Java
• A lot of information on Vagrant Story hacking

// Download URLs //

License	Version	Online	Download	Size
Freeware	Latest	Vagrant Story Tools		n/a

(Homepage)