Legend of Legaia

Legend of Legaia is a run of the mills RPG with a slightly unique battle system. Other than that battle system (which is different, but it still BORED me), the rest of the game is linear and by the books. Vahn is a silent protagonist, with only 2 other people in your party makes for weak dialog at times. At times you get to pick or choose what Vahn says, but compared to Link he is a very lackluster character. I didn't hate the plot, I kind of enjoyed it. The graphics were decent, but this game out just a few months before Final Fantasy 8, and that game makes Legend of Legaia look like its from the stone age.

The battle system is a long and drawn out process which is completely boring if you want to run through a generic maze like dungeon. They added a "auto" option that randomizes your attacks, so if you don't want to think about every battle you can put it on auto for each character, but you have to do it with each round for each character. Even with this auto option, you still have to go through 11 menus to finally get the round started. Some bosses might give you a little trouble, but the game is rarely hard. The game took me 38 hours to complete, but most of it was level and money grinding. There's not alot of meat on this game, since everything is slow it just extends the game thin.


----------Battle System----------
Legend of Legaia is a turn based RPG with random encounters. The turns are set in rounds and the character or enemy with the highest speed goes first. You set all your moves at once and watch everything unfold. You have a three party team, once you get your characters in your party they'll never leave with no reserves to edit your party.

The battle system is kind of unique for the time. Each character has an AP (Art Points) bar. You have to input combo attacks into that part, the higher the level your character is, the bigger the bar is and the more combos you can add. This is kind of similar to like Xenogears, but much slower. You gain magic spells by defeating enemies and stealing their abilities. You then summon that monster for the attack. The more you use the magic, the stronger it can get and more effects it may accomplish.

My biggest gripe with the battle system is its way to slow. There's a ton of menus you have to scroll through to get the options you want and when you finally get all your characters set you have to watch all your characters take turns and all the enemies take turns fighting it out and it takes forever. I usually dread going into a battle because of this.

The dungeons rarely involve any puzzle solving, they're mostly maze like dungeons with dead ends that make you backtrack. When you're in dungeons the random encounter rate is almost tripled over the rate when you're on the world map, but your character also moves faster too, so it might even things out.

Gaining money is a rather slow process, mostly because the battles are long and items are expensive. I never went into a new town and had enough money to resupply my party with new equipment. Even buying coins for minigames and sleeping at inns is extremely expensive. This is just another ploy to extend the game I think.


----------Characters / Story----------
You play as Vahn, a silent protagonist, who's village is attacked by the Mist. The Mist is a substance that Seru monsters live in and covers the world of Legaia (the word "Legaia is only mentioned once or twice in the game). Vahn is trying to defend his hometown, but he most save the town's guardian the Genesis Tree. The Genesis Tree repels the evil mist, a Ra-Seru can live in both the mist and world freely. A Ra-Seru attaches itself to Vahn and becomes his friend and gives him powers to save the world and revive the fallen Genesis Trees. Noa was raised by a wolf, that was attached to a Ra-Seru. As Noa is crossing the lands trying to find her parents, she stumbles on to a Genesis Tree. As she fights to protect it, the wolf that raised her is killed. Before the wolf dies, the Ra-Seru attaches itself to her and gives her the power to revive the Genesis Trees. Noa and Vahn meet up in this point and join forces. On their way to save their land from the evil Mist Generator, they find Gala, a Monk that offers his assistance in defending the land. This team of three humans and three Ra-Seru will make it their duty to save the world of the Mist.

The story wasn't bad at all, but painfully predictable. The game was linear and slightly repetitive. You go to a town that's covered in mist, revive the Genesis tree, and repeat until all that's left is the Mist Generator. That pretty much sums everything up. Some towns might need different ways of getting to that final goal, but the basic idea is always the same.


----------Graphics----------
The graphics are decent for the time. The battle system is pretty sharp, with a few exceptions like the werewolves you fight, but for the most part the battle system looks like a slightly downgraded 3D fighting game. There's not a big variety of enemies to fight, and most of them are generic looking giant insects or blobs that are totally unimaginative (with a couple exceptions). They like to repeat the same monsters over and over again aswell, like making you fight the same monster with a higher level in a different dungeon, or fighting the same monster with a name change and a color change but stronger. The dungeons are rather generic looking, and there's a few occasions where you go through a dungeon with the same pallet of a previous dungeon, which is very lazy for the developers. The camera likes to skip around all over the place with alot of were zooming in and zooming out that drives me nuts. When you summon a monster for your magic attacks it shows a long drawn out animation that unskippable and gets old after the first time. The combo attacks are short and sweet though. There are full motion cutscenes but they're extremely grainy, short and probably condensed to all fit on one disc. There some very excellent FMV but most are lame and short. When you equip armor or weapons they show up on the character during battle, but not in dialog scenes. The dialog scenes are another story, they're really really blocky, but the faces of the characters look great. They show a ton of emotion, mostly because their heads are about twice the size of their bodies. They kinda look like that puppet Randy from Pee-Wee's Playhouse.


----------Sound----------
The music is catchy and rememberable, nothing bad about it. There's no voiced out dialog, but your characters will grunt and scream in battle, while saying catch phrases during their Arts attacks. Only a few humanoid boss battles will have catch phrases aswell. The only problem is all the phrases are in Japanese, or they're complete gibberish, either way I have no idea what they're saying.

----------World Map----------
The world map is an overhead view map similar to Final Fantasy and others of that ilk. The map is separated in three sections, I assume to prepare for a disc split, but the whole game was fit into one disc amazingly. You can buy items that can warp you to any town you visited to speed up the traveling process, but actually walking on the map is slow, very very slow.


----------Time to Complete Game----------
38:11:15

Number of Battles: 725
Number of Escapes: 2
Max Hits: Vahn (9), Noa (11), Gala (9)
Max Damage: Vahn (4343), Noa (2791), Gala (2161)
Knock Outs: Vahn (8), Noa (7), Gala (3)
Monster's Defeated: Vahn (695), Noa (467), Gala (387)
Hyper Arts Learned: Vahn (11), Noa (11), Gala (10)
Magic Learned: Vahn (16), Noa (13), Gala (15)

Treasure found: 219 / 260 (84.23%)

You don't save the game after it's finished, but it tells you the time and all your stats. The ending is pretty long, but the boss is very simple. Even though I spent about 38 hours into this game, most of that was level and money grinding, as I was forced to do in many situations.