Legend of Legaia
PlayStation
Nostalgia Factor:
Back in the late 90s, I remember receiving a demo disc in the mail for a game called Legend of Legaia. I had never heard of the game before, but I remember thinking the art on the disc sleeve looked cool. I was a video game obsessed teen back then, always hungry for something new, so of course I immediately popped this in and checked it out.
I remember playing through the demo and being wowed by it. A turn-based RPG with Final Fantasy VII-esque graphics about a small town cut off by a mist that was filled with monsters? Yes please. I vowed to myself I'd buy the complete version of the game and play through it. Little did I know it would take me nearly 25 years to finally get around to doing so.
Did I miss out on a great game? That is what we are here to find out.
Story:
There is a lot of lore to soak in before you actually begin playing the game. Humanity was once reliant on objects known as "Seru". It is a little unclear at the beginning what these Seru actually were. Little AI controlled robot companions? Apparently they were something that people wore on their arms.
One day a mysterious mist rolled in. The mist activated these Seru and turned them into killing machines. Most humans were either killed or turned into Seru themselves. Fast forward ten years to the beginning of the game. You play as a young man named Vahn, who lives in Rim Elm, a small village that is walled off to the mist. When the wall is breached, Vahn activates a power from the once dormant Genesis Tree located in the village. Empowered by the Ra-Seru (a helpful entity that resides in Vahn's Seru armband and guides him along the way), Vahn fights off the attackers and sets off on a journey to activate all the Genesis trees around the world, which help to keep the mist at bay.
Along the way, Vahn is joined by Noa and Gala, two other people that have been joined with the power of the Ra-Seru. They are the heroes that were prophesized, because you can't have a JRPG without some of those.
The story takes some wild twists and turns, including traveling to the past to collect something you need in order to beat the bad guys. Noa finds out that her family were responsible for the creation of the mist, and the main villain at the end of the game turns out to be her brother Cort.
This is only a small recap of the game's events. There is a lot more to be found here, but I don't have time to recap it all. You want to hear about it, read the Wikipedia summary. Or better yet - just play the game.
Gameplay:
I'll just immediately kick things off with my biggest complaint: the game's speed. It effects literally everything and is impossible to ignore. The game is slow, and I mean slow. The dialog boxes, the combat, menu selection, map traversal, loading screens, everything. Biggest offender has to be the battles, though. Holy crap are they slow. It doesn't help that this game has a very high encounter rate, and that magic spells force you to watch a long animation sequence similar to summons from the Final Fantasy series. Even just a basic healing spell takes 45 seconds to a minute to complete. It's absolutely ridiculous.
Since I was playing on a PC, and not original hardware, I was able to speed things up to three times the normal speed. That made things so, sooooo much more tolerable. I don't know if I would have been able to make it through this without it. Without the ability to speed up time, this game would have scored in the C- or D range for me. Not because the game sucked, but because it would've been such a drag to play. Look at my review of Grandia. I gave it a D+. I didn't even think the game was really that bad, but the slow speed and the long loading times completely squeezed every ounce of enjoyment out of it. That almost happened here. Which would have been a shame, because underneath all the slowness is a really solid game.
Moral of the story? Don't play this game on its original hardware. Find a rom of it. You'll thank me later. Also, I am basing my review of the game around the way I chose to play it: with the ability to speed up battle sequences and save the game at any point I wanted. As a result, its final score will be much higher than it would have been if I'd played it on a regular old PS1.
The standard gameplay itself is nothing you haven't seen in other RPGs. Walk around town, talk to NPCs, buy things at stores, upgrade your equipment, sleep at inns, etc. Battles are randomly generated. They are also pretty standard for an RPG. Walk around on the map, get pulled into a turn-based battle, pick your action from a menu. At the end of the fight, you gain money and experience.
What's different about the combat is that it is combo-based. A good comparison would be Xenogears. When you select to attack, a menu comes up with all the different moves you can make, each one corresponding to a direction on the d-pad. You would then press (for example) something like up, up, down to initiate a combo attack. Or you can pick auto attack where the computer does it for you. As you gain experience and level up, you learn bigger, more powerful combos. Your combo meter is pretty tiny, so in order to make it bigger you have to select "spirit" when it is your turn to attack. Spirit not only makes your combo meter bigger for your next turn, it also greatly increases your character's defense for the turn. Don't just ignore the spirit option. I did for a long time and it made the game very difficult. As soon as I started using it and began to master the mechanic, everything became so much easier.
Each character has a set of magic spells they can use. You learn these spells from enemies as you defeat them. So when you use the spell, you are essentially summoning the enemy to come cast it for you. I really wish they cut out the massive summoning animations, as each of them take way, waaaaaay too long to complete. A simple magic attack that takes five seconds would have been so much better. The fast forward feature definitely got used a lot during these battles.
Bosses are super hard. I don't think I've played an RPG as hard as this one. As a result, you are going to find yourself grinding quite a bit. Get that fast forward button ready! This game would have been insufferable and borderline unplayable without it. You spend so much time grinding. So much time. Luckily since I sped it up, it wasn't too terrible. I might have to play all my JRPGs on my computer now for this very reason. Imagine if I'd played Grandia this way. I might have actually liked it.
Graphics:
I understand that people don't really like the graphics from this era of gaming, but I really enjoy the way this game looks. The characters have that blocky, Final Fantasy VII feel to them. Environments are not pre-rendered, but fully 3D. The closest comparison I can come up with in my mind is Xenogears - but I would say that this game's graphics are not as good.
What I do like are the cool atmospheric moments this game creates. This is a very mystical game that is rooted in magic and the otherworldly, so some of the moments you experience (like when you are flying through space or visiting the world of the Seru) really look super cool.
Sound:
While I would not say it is on par with the all-time great JRPG soundtracks out there, Legend of Legaia still has some pretty solid music. The various themes you hear, such as the battle theme, the world map theme, and the songs you hear in different villages and locales are all great. Unlike other games where their music goes in one ear and out the other, this game's soundtrack will stick with you... for a while.
Sound effects are good, too. Really nothing too special to report. I guess if there is one annoyance as far as the audio goes, it would be the noises the characters make when they attack. Noa in particular. But I won't say it made me turn down the volume or anything like that. Just me being nitpicky.
Overall:
I had a very good time playing this game. It took me a while to get past the slow speed and the grindiness of it, but once I figured out I needed to crank up the speed to x3, the game really took off for me.
I like the story, as weird as it is. It felt like it had some real stakes to it. The characters are rock solid, too. Maybe not the deepest or most well-developed cast in RPG history, but they all have something about them that makes them special. Now that I'm done playing the game, I actually kind of miss them! And I miss the game itself, too. That must mean it was pretty good.
I would recommend playing this game, 100% But be warned: find a rom if you can. This is a C- title at best playing it without the fast forward feature. It is just too much of a painfully slow moving grind. But if you can speed things up and improve its "quality of life" features, why wouldn't you do it? Underneath the slow speed is a really fun and engaging game. It has its fair share of sucky parts (like the tower where you have to play minigames to earn coins) and I can't say that the entire journey from beginning to end was always a blast to play. But I liked it well enough.
THE GRADE:
B
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