The Legend of Dragoon, Part 1

The Legend of Dragoon, Part 1

I really, really would like to play and write about JRPGs of this era, but they are just too long to review consistently.  I am trying to always have a JRPG going on as I play other games, as they are my favorite genre by far.  That said, each of them are going to get a two part blog when I finish them, because I want to get the most out of my 40 hour investment.

I firmly believe that 1995-2001 were the golden years for JRPGs and The Legend of Dragoon fits right into that window.  I wouldn’t exactly consider it a forgotten game.  In fact, I wanted to cover it for the opposite reason I have covered most games so far.  More recent online conversation around LOD paint it as a classic, an all time great, yet another jewel in the crown that is the PS1’s RPG Library.  People count it among their favorite games, touting it as a must play.  Funny, that’s not the way I remember it when it came out.

While it had plenty of hype pre-release as a “Final Fantasy killer,” I remember it being met with a fairly emphatic “meh” when it was finally hit shelves.  No one really trashed the game, they just didn’t see it as the kind of killer app it was intended as.  All reports indicate Sony themselves were disappointed with the game, with many speculating that disappointment is the reason it never got a sequel.  Final Fantasy, Persona, the Tales series and others rolled on while LOD was forgotten.  

So which is it?  Underwhelming disappointment or all time great?  It’s closer to the latter, but it has way too many glaring flaws and its way too plain to be counted among the genre’s best.  It’s better than it was given credit for at the time, but it isn’t as good as revisionist history would have you believe.  I won’t call it a must play, its more like a should play.  While I will get into greater detail I can’t talk about LOD without bringing up its one fatal flaw, the one single problem that keeps it from achieving classic status...the translation.

Translation is tricky and a lot of RPGs from this era have issues with it.  Final Fantasy, Breath of Fire, Star Ocean, Persona, you name it, it is going to have some wonky translation. But LOD puts them all to shame.  You think the first Resident Evil was bad?  Some of the text in LOD makes “Master of Unlocking” sound like Shakespeare.  You would have an easier time eating an entire tray of Jill Sandwiches, or determining if that was Chris blood than figuring out what these characters are talking about.  It’s as if the asked for bilingual translators, but instead of getting someone that spoke English and Japanese, that got someone that spoke Russian and Tagalog.  Even the menus are impossible to navigate.  How bad is it?  Just look:

 

And no, none of them make sense in the context of the story. But how does that impact the story?  And what about the gameplay?  What are the positives? You’ll have to wait until next week for that.