The Legend of Dragoon

Overall this game was great, but not quite on a PS1 era Final Fantasy level that they desperately tried to achieve. The battle system is kinda original, but not quite as fleshed out or as fun as later games like Shadow Hearts and felt a little tacked on.

There's only a few sidequests to be found in the game and you can't complete them until the end. Leveling up just takes way to slow for me. They split the experience you get between the playable characters, then give the non-used characters a percentage of that. Money gathering can also be a pain, but I always equipped my members with the newest and best weapons and armor from each town visit, so I never had a major problem with money, just a few out of reach accessories.

For the most part this game was pretty easy, the dungeons were small with little puzzle solving to be had, finding your next destination was simple since the world map was linear. There was a few difficult aspects about the game though, like the later Additions could be pretty hard to pull off, and some boss fights can get extremely tough around the 3rd disc. Some bosses are about impossible to beat on the first try since alot of it deals with trial and error with the combination of Dragoons you should use. You get a sense of accomplishment when you beat these bosses, so that’s good.

I had a ton of problems playing this game on my PS2, it would often freeze up after boss battles, later I learned that the game glitches up if you use your Dragoons during boss fights. I had the game freeze up on me about 10 different times, it was frustrating, but I won't let it affect the score since it is purely the PS2's fault and not the game.

----------Battle System----------
The Legend of Dragoon is a standard turn-based RPG, much like the Final Fantasy games of the time. The only small difference is a combo attack you HAVE to perform to get any sort of damage on a enemy. As you initiate your attack, a small square will appear, and another one will close in on it. Once the outside square is on the edge of the stationary square, you then tap the X button. If you hit the button in the right time, then you completed the first part of a combo. They call this Additions. Once you gain more Additions there will be a higher number of combos to perform. The more combos the greater the attack or more SP gained, each Addition has its own power and combos to perform. Each combo will have a different speed, so you have to get use to each one. You can only equip one Addition at a time and can't change them during battle. You level them up by making complete combos. Everytime you complete 20 Additions in battle you'll attack gains a level. You can only level them up to 5 though.

All your characters will eventually learn Dragoon skills. When you transform into a Dragoon, all your skills are boosted. Your Dragoons will have similar Additions to your regular forms, you have to spin a dial and hit a marker everytime it spins around, the better combo the better attack. Other than throwing magical items, this is your only time to use magic attacks. The magic attacks cost MP, but you don't have to perform any combos or anything to pull them off. You only gain max MP when your Dragoon levels up, the only way to level up your Dragoon is buy using Additions by gaining SP. Each character will eventually learn 4 magic attacks, except for Kongol with 3. To form into a Dragoon it will cost 100 Spirit Points, and your form will last until your run out of SP, level 1 will hold 100, level 2 will hold 200 and so on. If all three of your characters on screen has max SP, then you can pull off a special Dragoon formation that allows all your characters to form at once, and to have a special elemental background to help out in battle.


----------Characters / Story----------
You play as Dart, who is on a quest to find the Black Monster that destroyed his village and the residents when he was a child. While in search of the Black Monster Dart gets caught up in the middle of a war where his best friend was kidnaped, he then saves her and a knight where they eventually find their way into a conspiracy to end the world that they must stop.

The story and dialog was kinda weak, it had great back story to flesh out the present, but some of the characters (mainly Dart and Shana) were lame, and other than the main playable characters and some of the main villains, the rest of the cast is completely and utterly forgettable. It had plenty of twists at the end, but most of them were extremely obvious by the time they're revealed.


----------Graphics----------
Compared to Final Fantasy 9 which came out only a few months after this, the graphics are a tad outdated. The characters are really blocky and pixilated, not even on the level of Final Fantasy 8 but slightly better than Final Fantasy 7. The CGI cutscenes are grainy, some are just still CGI pictures with panning cameras, but the few full on action scenes are quite awesome even compared to today. The in game cutscenes are good, the characters show a wide range of emotion and there's even full action scenes aswell. After boss battles your characters will have in game cutscenes that are pretty impressive for the time. The magic attacks and dragoon attacks pale in comparison even to Final Fantasy 7 which was 3 years before this game, and they're just way to long.

The level designs are grainy pre-rendered backgrounds with small moving cgi graphics. To prevent yourself from getting lost, they added a little green arrow near every entrance and exit of the game, without this the game would be confusing, but it makes the levels look cluttered and ugly.

The Towns are huge and almost maze like. Without the markers you could easily get lost or not know what to do. The dungeons aren't very lengthy at all and can be ran through pretty quickly.


----------Sound----------
The battle theme is really good and catchy. The rest of the music is either very minimal ambient music or classic RPG keyboard driven tunes, which is really nice. All the playable characters have battle cries when they attack with their Additions. Some bosses also have voice overs as well. The FMVs also include voice overs, so they went all out in this game. The voice overs weren’t bad in all, except for the final FMV in the game, which I thought was a bit ridiculous.


----------World Map----------
The world map isn't a free-based map. This was hugely disappointing for me, but I guess they made it like that to save on space per disc, maybe. On the map the towns, fields and dungeons are all linked to each other similar to later games like Baten Kaitos and Xenosaga. The further you get into the game, the more links and more areas are open. Once you're on the map you can only walk straight to the next area, unless they is an additional link in the road. You will get randomly attacked on the world map, and since you walk faster with shorter distances the attack rate is much much higher. Towards the end of the game (later disc 4) you will get "Wings" where you can fly to any place you been before, except you need to switch out the discs when you want to visit them, not to much of a problem though.


----------Time to Complete Game (last save before final boss)----------
46:16:06

As I said earlier, this game freezes up quite a bit, and it did so again after I beat the final boss. I watched the last CGI cutscene and a followup on the characters, but after that the game froze, so I missed the credits and I'm not sure if the game saves after you beat it and I'm not sure if you unlock anything. The final boss was long and hard, so I'm sure it took me easily an hour to beat, so this game is roughly over 47 hours long, and I only skipped one sidequest and never level grind once.