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.
