The Legend of Dragoon
( I think I'm gonna have to fire my top scientists.) No, this isn't over their failure to invent vomit bombs, the closest thing to weaponized puke, but the once-golden Dragoon Law. Long ago, somebody figured out that any game with the word Dragoon in the title was automatically awesome. I should've known something was up when I came across Alisia Dragoon, but I let it slide because the music was de-no, wait, that was Dynamite Headdy. Fuck Alisia Dragoon. But I still believed in the power of the Dragoon Law, until I came across The Legend of Dragoon. That's not calling the game crap, it's just calling it not-awesome.
Or, more accurately, I enjoyed the characters. Unlike those games I listed earlier ( FF8, Phantom Brave, Okami, etc.), the characters in this game are really well written, featuring a perfect balance of flaws, motivation, and backstory. Hell, even in the moments when the game did nothing to move the plot forward, I was still satisfied due to the decent amount of character development. Imagine my surprise when the villains not only showed up in the fourth disc, but they were presented in a morally ambiguous light! Now you'd expect a game like this to make it easy to switch characters whenever you want, but you'll be saddened to find that that's exactly what it does. Characters level up outside battle, and aside from a few addition/dragoon level problems, you can switch them out without consequence, even late in the game, when you're forced to do so. Unless it's Shana, in which case, you'll never switch her out because she's shit, something the game recognizes by making her unplayable for a good portion of the game. She has no additions, meaning her attack is fucked. Healing is the only reason to have her, and even then, Meru does that job well WITH additions.
In fact, a lot of stuff about the battle system (OK, the game, but shut up, I still have a major point I need to address) summons the thought, "competent, but why?". The namesake battle feature, turning into dragoons, comes to mind as soon as I summon the previous thought. I don't know if you guys know this ( you should), but I don't like when games limit the magic in ways that aren't MP costs. Usually, this means that you do all your healing through items (in this case, some through guarding), which ends up destroying a bunch of other things. Here, you can only use magic while dragoon'd up, which sucks for those times when you're not a dragoon, like when you're not battling anybody. Speaking of limits, in dragoon mode, you can only attack or use kickass magic. That's it. No guarding, no using items, hell, you can't even transform out of dragoon mode. I appreciate the creativity, guys, but I'd like the limits removed, which is an odd choice of words, given that they're one of the few things you didn't rip straight from Final Fantasy VII. Instead of limit breaks, we have specials, which are like regular dragoon mode, but one character gets better attacks and everybody gets transported into a drugged out Earthbound world.
Simply put, they're awesome. If I had to make a very stupid analogy, it'd be this: the PS1 is a pair of spandex pants, and The Legend of Dragoon is really fat. *red force field shoves me back* OK, fine! Like Final Fantasy VI, several key battles end with in-game cutscenes whose only improvement could be the introduction of voice acting. Of course, you'll only see the voice acting in the CGI scenes, which are either perfectly normal or Christian Bale talking over Egyptian murals (or something like that). Unfortunately, the compliments I can direct toward these CGI scenes, like how the lighting is amazing or how the cinematics are cool, can also be directed toward the non-CGI ones I mentioned a couple of lines ago, whereas the complaints are all CGI. Namely, the voice acting I wanted sucks. It reaches its worst point in the ending, where it sounds like they barely put any effort into it. In that sense, well....you know....eh, fuck it.
Review Synopsis
- Remember how I complained about the pacing of Silent Hill 2 last blog? Well, this is worse.
- The battle system is all kinds of fucked up, yet somehow still acceptable, leading me to give it the Sex Robot Award, for THAT SCENE IN DATE NIGHT.
- Decent music and graphics, though.
Yay, I feel like this is Tosh.0!
Final Zone
( Great, another one of those blogs.) You know, one of those blogs where I jump from game to game because none of them are beatable. First came Target Earth, a game which confuses me, like how I don't know why I was playing it. ( Jeff doesn't count.) I found to be a near-unbeatable, broken piece of shit, so I moved onto something that's exactly the same: Ninja Commando. However, my computer, perhaps concerned about my well-being, refused to play this Neo Geo game. Or any Neo Geo games. Finally, we come to Final Zone, because everything is ruled by the Rule of Threes. 
OK, I'm getting ahead of myself, given that I haven't even explained how you play the game yet. Non-boss levels task you with beating up a certain number of enemies before everything explodes. The introduction shows the numbers of each specific type of enemy in the level, which is weird, because all you have throughout the level is a huge lump sum in the upper left corner. But really, that's nitpicking, because solely on these merits (code phrase for "shit's going to hit the fan faster than you can launch it"), this part of the game works rather well. The maps are small and repeat, and you stumble into enemies enough that you won't find yourself spending hours on end trying to find the last enemy. If I ended the blog here, it'd be one paragraph too short, but I'd also have given this game a much higher score than I did.
But alas, this is a fourth paragraph, meaning the game nosedives into a pool of crap. Much like Target Earth almost immediately before it, Final Zone is a Sega Genesis mech game that makes it far too easy to die. The major problem is that health doesn't refill between levels, and I think that's because health is bundled with special weapons, for some reason. Not that you'd know, given that you select them through a pause screen you won't use often. It's a domino effect of retarded, and it all ends with me dying so many times that my playthroughs began resembling this. That probably explains why all the once-unique levels eventually reached Groundhog Day levels of repetition. Damn it, this game had so much potential to be good, and yet they couldn't iron out this one game-killing flaw. I'm forced to give it the M. Night Shyamalan Award. Guess why.
Review Synopsis
- Simple gameplay that should be really fun...
- ...is destroyed by control issues and design flaws.
- Bosses are pretty cool, though.
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