The Legend of Dragoon, Part 2

The Legend of Dragoon, Part 2

Last week, we talked about The Legend of Dragoon, and its awful, awful translation.  It might seem like I hated the game, but that is far from the case.  We already talked about the negative, so lets focus on the something positive.

The biggest positive?  The graphics.  This game looks great.  It may be the best looking game on the system and that is saying something.  Some of the pre-rendered backgrounds are truly breathtaking and the animations are really smooth.  The character models look really good, they’re a little blocky, but that’s to be expected on the PS1.  It isn’t even just the backgrounds, its the backgrounds of the backgrounds.  Perhaps the biggest standout moment comes when your party takes a boat from one continent to another.  The water looks and moves like its real, which is a huge accomplishment. 

You can’t talk about an RPG without talking about the story and LOD offers a decent one.  You play as Dart, who is on his way home from a failed quest to find the Black Monster, an evil entity who destroyed his hometown years ago.  Wouldn’t you know, he finds his adopted home destroyed, this time by imperial soldiers who have taken his lady friend Shana hostage.  This sets off a series of events the lead Dart and his friends on a quest to stop a deranged god from destroying the world (because of course it does).  All the while he continues his personal journey to find the black monster and avenge his family.

The story is generic RPG fare, but that kind of works in its favor.  Even if you don’t understand a lot of the minutiae of the conversations, most of the major plot points come through.  The translation does take some of the bite out of the twists, but they are still pretty impactful.  The characters are all fairly interesting and the fluid animation helps their personalities come through despite the bad translation.  There’s a pretty good variety of locations and I find them to be hit or miss.  Some are filled with personality (if Feltz were a real place, I would totally live there) while others are just blah.

The combat system in LOD really stands out, for better and for worse.  It’s a turn based RPG, but the addition system adds a twist.  Rather than just press “attack,” players are prompted to complete a series of button presses.  Successfully completing them will activate an addition and lead to more damage.  As you level up, you learn more additions.  They get way harder, but also offer the potential for way more damage.  The key here is that you don’t have to complete the additions.  By now you all know how I feel about timed button pressing mini games, but LOD doesn’t punish you too harshly for failing.

Combat is a strength, but also has its flaws.  On one hand, it makes every battle matter.  On the other, it can make easy battles take longer than they should.  The game has random encounters and it probably handles them better than most RPGs.  In the field, Dart will have an arrow above his head.  Blue means you have a while before your next fight, yellow means get ready and red means you will have an encounter any minute now.  I don’t hate random encounters as much as some, but I will say this system did take away a lot of frustration.  The field locations look great, but some of the camera angles are tricky.  That is especially true in the towns, where it can be impossible to see where your party is.  This is an unfortunate reality of pre-rendered backgrounds, but its really bad here.

At the end of the day, there just isn’t anything here that makes it stand out aside from the graphics.  The story, characters and atmosphere are just okay and suffer from the bad translation.  It’s a shame, because I think this game could have been a true classic.  It’s also dragged down a bit by coming out in prime years for RPGs.  Hell, I have even considered doing a PS1 JRPG power ranking post.  

I won’t go into that much detail here, but I can say off the top of my head I would play definitely play any of the PS1 Final Fantasy games (the 3 numbered entries and tactics), Star Ocean II, Legend of Legia, Grandia and Suikoden II before I played this.  I know they are technically Sega CD games that were re-mastered, but I had always counted the Lunar titles as PS1 games and they are both better than LOD.  Azure Dreams is a personal favorite of mine, so I would put that above it.  Xenogears, Chrono Cross, Front Mission 3 and Parasite eve are probably better.  It’s close for me, but I would have to put Vagrant Story ahead of LOD as well.  That said, LOD is probably a little better than the Arms games and the tales games.  It’s definitely better than the first Suikoden and any of the SaGa or Persona games (side note: I don’t really like any of the Persona games), and definitely way better than stuff like Shadow Madness or Beyond the Beyond.  Overall, solid and worth a play, but misses the mark of an all time great.

7.5/10

You should play this game if:

You want to see the PS1 at the top of its game graphically

You like RPGs with more active combat systems

You understood any or all of the last paragraph

Avoid if:

You absolutely can’t deal with bad translation

You like faster paced games

You can’t find humor in the following: