Gaming off the Beaten Path

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...

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. Wh...