Retro JRPG Review - Legend of Legaia (Part 1): Man... PS1 JRPGs Were A Vibe

Preamble:

There may be a handful of you who recall my initial blogging gimmick on this site, where I provided extensive closed readings of RPGs, particularly the works of SquareSoft or its successor company, Square Enix. With a perpetually declining readership, I turned away from that because each entry required massive work on my part for an audience of almost nothing, and I turned to different one-off writing exercises instead. However, this year I have played an assortment of games that fit that initial brand of mine, and wanting to get back into the swing of more informative and narrative writing, rather than persuasive writing, I decided to see if this dog remembered its old tricks. I'm not sure I'll ever commit to looking at a single RPG across seven to eight essays that are each over 5,000 words long; I won't. Nonetheless, a handful of Spring and Summer gaming efforts spoke to me like the games of my earlier days on Giant Bomb, and I'd be honored if you humored me during this activity of sorts.

Part 1: Why Did I Play This Game In The Year Of Our Lord, 2025?

The late 1990s, predominantly on the PlayStation, were a boon for the JRPG. Despite genre stalwart Dragon Quest being out of the picture due to ongoing production delays, Suikoden was the game that kick-started the genre's Golden Age with titles like Wild Arms, Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, Final Fantasy VII, and Breath of Fire III following it. JRPGs quickly became a fixture on the PlayStation's best-selling games list, and advertising that your game was a JRPG almost felt like a cheat code to sell no less than 500,000 worldwide copies unless you did something stupid like pit your game against a title made by Square. But while Square was belting out hit after hit, especially when they revived the SaGa series so they had an tentpole RPG to release in between Final Fantasy games, studios like Atlus were starting to get their footing with the first two Persona games, and From was having fun making throwback RPGs like the King's Field series but let's also not forget Shadow Tower. Correspondingly, JRPGs were emerging at a breakneck speed. When Final Fantasy Tactics launched in 1997, it almost single-handedly revived the tactics genre on consoles, leading to a wave of tactical RPGs during the fifth generation of console hardware. If you liked RPGs from Japan, the late 90s had a buffet of options.

Others have tried to get to the bottom of why this boom happened and why the PS1 in particular was the primary beneficiary. I won't get into the weeds, but I credit Sony's less stringent stance against games using 2D sprite work during the fifth generation, compared to Nintendo's, which helped ensure 16-bit RPG teams could transition more smoothly on their hardware. That and the PS1's virtual monopoly didn't hurt. I hate to break it to people, but no one in Japan gave a SHIT about the N64, and the Americas practically carried that thing. However, instead of delving into the console wars, let's take a look at a fun case study on the lesser-reported games that either time has forgotten or have lived and died during this Golden Age. For every Final Fantasy VII, Dragon Quest VII, or even Parasite Eve, you have games like Beyond the Beyond, The Granstream Saga, Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure, and Saiyuki: Journey West, which could only have ever gotten the green light during this interesting JRPG bubble economy. Sometimes, these B-tier games would get lucky, like the Arc the Lad games, and end up developing long-standing fan bases that propelled them to permanently occupy a spot on the list of the best-selling PlayStation 1 games. However, the vast majority were aberrations. Some of the teams behind these games would go on to try out new ideas and even push the technological envelope, even in places Square, Capcom, and Enix were not willing to go. Some of these games, like Koudelka, Xenogears, or even Shadow Tower, were precursors to future, greater works we didn't appreciate at the time.

Nonetheless, most of the games that coasted on the PS1 JRPG Golden Age proved to be inherently meaningless even in their highest of highs. Many of their experiments, although they achieved them, never signified anything real or abstract beyond themselves. I bet some of you can rattle off how much of a blast you had playing Legend of Dragoon, but be honest, not even Sony had another bite at that apple. Between the titans that led the charge, they stood in front of dozens of games that were formless abstractions, and you sometimes even need to think hard to remember those games even existed. They sometimes present no pattern or theme for their creators, other than being attempts to cash in on a genre at its zenith, which leads to me playing Legend of Legaia in the year of our Lord, 2025. I knew this game existed and recall walking by it, along with Septerra Core: Legacy of the Creator, for five years non-stop at my local Blockbuster video rental store. And in many ways, Legend of Legaia represents the "perfect" B-tier JRPG from the fifth generation. It has a small but vocal fanbase that often presents it as an underrated "classic" while greatly overlooking its shortcomings. It also boasts production values that set it apart from some of the dreck of that era, although it is far from perfect itself. It tries things you don't see anywhere else; it's as if you are marveling at an evolutionary dead-end.

And you see, that's what makes Legaia more enticing to me than most of its contemporaneous competitors. You can play whatever Final Fantasy VII clone you want and be pulverized into boredom to your heart's delight; I'm not your daddy. But for my purposes, I need more meat on the bone than "ha ha ha, look at this wannabe Final Fantasy game not quite get there!" Legaia is also an internal Sony project that falls into that odd period when Japan Studio was convinced they could one-up Square at their own game. Legend of Dragoon is the bigger and more prominent example, which is a game that truly shoots for the stars and has presentation values up the wazoo, but in many ways still makes the same mistakes of Legaia. While it deviates from the established tradition of how basic attacks tend to be implemented in a JRPG, it doesn't mitigate the consequences of what shaking the boat may incur, and like Legaia, Dragoon lacks the "wholeness" of the world building that made Squaresoft's great works canonical texts in the first place. Likewise, I'm not going to pretend that Legaia hasn't become a modern topic of discussion thanks to SEO and AI. It appears to be a recurring feature with Valnet's SEO bait listicles, with the game on a myriad of sources labeled as "overlooked," "underrated," and even "frustratingly inaccessible." Are any of those labels warranted? I had to know, and I'm glad that you're joining me.

Part 2: PS1 JRPGs Hit Different, Man

The late 1990s provided an odd inflection point for many studios working on JRPGs. There were classic genre design standbys that were on the cusp of being excised, but not quite, and modernization points were also afoot. Overworlds had been in JRPGs for decades, but with the advent of 3D rendering, they became increasingly harder to implement without causing console hardware to buckle. Also, even the Final Fantasy team, especially with the transition from VII to VIII and then to IX, saw the writing on the wall and questioned how much more juice they could get out of the traditional turn-based and menu-based combat system. Final Fantasy VIII's junction system was a shock to many people who jumped into JRPGs thanks to Final Fantasy VII, and whether you liked it or not is besides the point that people in game development were all wrangling with the same problem: how can one mix things up to differentiate their game from an increasingly crowded field, but without alienating the hardcore fans? Legend of Legaia's developer, Prokion, caught itself in the crosshairs of this genre-based existential crisis, and for the most part handled many of these points of contention in stride.

The two key points of differentiation that Legend of Legaia makes between itself and the JRPG field are its production values and its core combat system. When it comes to the former, the game features fully polygonal characters with 3D rendered environments. Indeed, there are scaling sprites in certain parts of its overworld and dungeons, but, for the most part, it's an entirely polygonal RPG at a time when other 3D JRPGs were still using pre-rendered backgrounds and even 2D sprites to fill in gaps. Now, Legend of Legaia wasn't the first to take the plunge into being a fully 3D JRPG, as that accolade goes to The Granstream Saga. However, there's no ignoring the fact that Prokion rendered a ton of 3D assets for Legaia, an amount of which you can't help but believe would have made peak Squaresoft blush. On top of that, Legaia manages to have fairly dense polygonal characters animate while showcasing fairly involved fighting game-like combo sequences without as many technical hitches as you'd expect from a game on this era of hardware. Every battle, regardless of what you are fighting or doing, has unique fluid animations that were simply unheard of at the time. Because the game places so much value on its combo-based combat, Prokion knew they needed to make every possible combat outcome flashy and cool to look at while also not causing PS1s to combust under the weight of its animations. The fact that the game ran as well as it did, with notable dips here and there, despite all of the game's effects and animations, remains one of the most impressive accomplishments of the game.

However, I am dancing around what is the game's main selling point: its gameplay. While Legend of Legaia uses turn-based and even menu-based systems to structure its gameplay, it deviates from the standard JRPG formula by discarding your usual "Attack," Magic," "Item," "Defend," and "Escape" format. Instead, most of your attacks will involve entering a series of physical attacks that are classified as "High," "Low," "Left," or "Right," and depending on what you have inputted, your combos can translate into special or finishing moves which the game calls "Arts." Later in the game, your sequences can even flow from one Art to the next by tying the end of one combo into the start of a different one, and that often proves to be the key to defeating specific enemies. The game gives you a handy in-game reference sheet that you can populate with combos as you discover them, but your life is so much better referring to a guide with a complete list of every character's Arts. While I'm not as enthusiastic about this system as some of Legaia's supporters or defenders, there's one aspect about it that I cannot deny. Watching this game in motion is rad. Whether it be marveling over the game's animations or the excitement of watching your characters juggle enemies in the air as they wail away on them, when things "work," it's supremely cool. Now, there are some undeniable downsides, like the game not telling you even remotely what your non-tutorial combos are or even what the weaknesses of enemies might be. Still, Legaia is cool to look at, and the fluidity of its 3D animations is only something PEAK Sony would have been willing to take a gamble on.

Related, while I am going to lay some pretty blunt criticisms of this game, I must be considerate of Legaia's budget and its status as a mid-tier priority for Sony. Developer Prokion was an internal studio within the old Japan Studio network, which Shuhei Yoshida oversaw from the late 1990s until his promotion to upper echelons within the company. The limited documentation available suggests that Prokion was an offshoot of Contrail, the latter of whose credits include Legend of Legaia, Wild Arms 2 (production credit), Alundra 2 (production credit), and finally Legaia 2: Duel Saga. Mull over that list of games for a minute and consider the fact that, besides Legaia 2, they were all developed and published alongside The Legend of Dragoon and came out before it. I'm not going to pretend I have a complete historical record, but producing two games and then making one of your own (i.e., Legend of Legaia) speaks to a leaner and quicker operation than what Japan Studio was running as they burned over $16 million to make The Legend of Dragoon. Sure, there was technology and asset sharing to be had between its many silos and teams. Nevertheless, there's no doubt in my mind that the handful of experiments and revolutions Legend of Legaia achieved were minor miracles, as its team remained a low priority while bigger projects churned away. So, to the handful of you that might bristle at my notion that this game is a "B-tier" title because it came from one of Sony's internal studios, let's not sit here and act like even Sony considered it a tentpole priority within their portfolio of projects at the time.

Part 3: Yes, Legaia's Combat Is Flashy And Cool... For The First Ten Hours

I was moderately impressed with Legend of Legaia's combat during its prologue and for most of its opening acts. However, as the sub header suggests, by around the ten-hour mark, some glaring flaws in the implementation of its combat began to emerge. The first of these is the game's pace. Luckily, Legaia does remember your last inputted combo, and when you are in the middle of a dungeon, on your fifteenth encounter against the same grouping of slimes and skeletons, that's a godsend. However, each dungeon has different enemy compositions, and over time, you start to realize something about Legaia's combat. If you are not inputting a combo that aligns with an enemy's weakness, then you are practically wasting your time. That dovetails into a different issue I'll address soon, but with Legaia using a menu-based system, there's a lot of analysis paralysis and wasted time on cuing up new combos that, by the end of the game, take way longer to implement than just selecting a whole attack you know you want for the encounter you are presently on. It's not a lot of time, but this game has enough encounters on the overworld and in dungeons that it adds up. And unless you refer to a guide, which I strongly recommend, figuring out the combos blindly is a bad time, even if there are in-game NPCs that teach you combos as you progress the story.

That other problem with the combat I hinted at earlier is far more aggravating. Because the combat is designed to resemble fighting game-like physical attacks, enemies are coded to be weak or resistant to certain moves. However, because Legend of Legaia's system revolves around "High," "Low," "Left," or "Right" attacks, those weaknesses aren't as apparent as you'd like. Some of the game's tells are clear and easy to remember, like flying enemies being entirely immune to low kicks, or short enemies being immune to high punches. Everything else, however, requires trial and error, and you needing to memorize long strings of commands that clear out enemies in one or two goes. Now, there's a positive to pull from that, and it is the fact that the non-boss enemies feel more like puzzles wherein if you have Vahn, Noa, or Gala perform moves that align towards enemy weaknesses, you can clear them out in one move. However, not only does the game not give whole combos, but it also does a shit job of communicating what their elemental affinities are or how current attacks compare to other combos you have already tried. You see, you might have a neat combo involving a bunch of high kicks with Vahn, but is it really the best option on the table? There's only one way to find out, and that's to grind away and see what works best. Ultimately, the best solution to this common annoyance is to find the "good enough" combos or Arts that reliably get the job done wherever you may be, and stick with them until you transition to a new environment and need to find a different "good enough" Art.

Which leads me to my main negative about Legend of Legaia's combat: the game doesn't play to its strengths. The game's main draw is its fancy animations, and yet, you don't actually see a ton of animation variety while you play Legend of Legaia because whenever you are in a dungeon, each character has like two Arts that do respectable damage while the rest are sub-optimal or dogshit for that environment. So, as you meander in dungeons for up to thirty minutes, it's mostly the same two moves with each character, over and over again, against the same bevy of enemies, which is a different issue I now need to bring up. This game doesn't have a ton of enemies, and many of the enemies you see at the start of the game end up getting palette swaps for later environments. Don't get me wrong, I get why this was done from a technical and even gameplay perspective. However, the late-game incarnations of early-game enemy types still primarily use the same moves and spells, and that is one of the main reasons why this game feels like a blur. There are a few exceptions, but with each dungeon only having one of four enemy compositions, the optimal solution or Arts for the dungeon becomes a cinch to discover, and oftentimes those solutions are repeats of previous ones. After making a powerful first impression, shit starts to slow down, and that gets worse as new mechanics begin to crop up as you lurch closer to the game's mid-point.

The central issue on that front is the game's stamina system, which involves each character's AP levels. AP exists alongside your standard HP and MP, but in its case, limits how often you can perform longer Arts and the late-game special moves. You can mitigate this by performing standard attacks or defending, the latter of which has a secondary benefit I'll review shortly. When the game starts, it smartly allows you to ignore your AP levels as long as your first attack is a standard one. Still, as time marches on, your characters start to carry over low AP levels between battles because you popped off a long Art to make your life during a previous enemy encounter less miserable. The issue is that by the game's fifteenth hour, my opening move or turn was almost ALWAYS defending with all three of my characters, and that meant every battle that felt like it should have been one or two rounds long often got extended by an extra one or two. On top of that, and I strongly disagree with the designers doing this, but each character starts with only half of their Art meter and only unlocks the second half after you've defended for a whole turn. That sucked ass, and it was doubly annoying that after using a Hyper Art or Super Art, your character's combo meter would revert to its halfway point, thus forcing you to restore it to full for another turn.

Again, it's not a huge deal, and if anything, Legend of Legaia is a rare example of a JRPG incentivizing you to give a shit about its "Defend" command. Nonetheless, the time you spend even mid-battle burning turns to fill meters back to where you want them begins to add up. Related, the balance and progression with your three characters are out of whack. Vahn is meant to be a Jack of All Trades "Red Mage," but he honestly feels out of place as he lacks a definable role in combat. Noa's meter maxes out faster than anyone else. As a result, despite having some elemental affinities the game wants you to consider when possibly teaching her magic, she ends up being your primary DPS option for almost two-thirds of the game. Gala, on the other hand, is the worst. His combo meter upgrades at a snail's pace, and it isn't until the end of the game, unless you opt into hours of grinding, that he starts to tread water with Vahn and then crest over Noa. To turn the corner with your trio, you have to be incredibly patient for two out of three of them, and that doesn't feel great. In fact, this game requires a not insignificant amount of grinding, which, for me at least, took what positivity I had with the interactive fighting game-inspired combat system, and turned it into dust as I wailed away on the same three to four encounters in the same levels using the same two to three moves each and every time. What should be a combat system that liberates Legaia of some of the more irksome fifth-generation JRPG gameplay standbys ends up failing to do that.

Part 4: Thank Goodness Square Forced JRPGs To Give Up On "Protag-Kun"

Over on Twitch, I streamed my effort to complete Legend of Legaia from beginning to end. As I did so, I attracted many of the game's supporters who repeatedly defended the game as both an underrated classic and, in some cases, one of their favorite games on the PlayStation. When I began to lay out much of what I have articulated here to them, almost none of these people put up aggressive shields, nor did they levy hostile attacks my way. For the most part, their response was some permutation of "You're not wrong, but, look, I was a kid with a lot of time and I played this before Final Fantasy VII. What do you expect?" I find it hard to get up in arms at that reply. While I wasn't in the JRPG mines at the time, I too was engaged in playing my one game a month non-stop and developed affinities towards games that likely aren't the pristine crystals I considered them. However, there were two areas where there seemed to be near-universal agreement, even among its hardcore defenders, that the game is lacking. The first is its story and narrative pacing, and the other is its mini-games, the latter of which are a complete waste of your goddamn time.

With this entry, I'm only going to discuss the former, but rest assured, my sweet summer child, I have a lot to say about Legaia's casino slot machine horseshit or its dog water fishing mini-game. But when it comes to Legaia's story, I have a slight hot take: none of Sony's JRPG projects had great stories. Look, I get it; Legend of Dragoon has its fans. However, not only is that game a victim of one of the worst official translations I have ever seen from a console manufacturer, but it also has a pit of a middle act where nothing happens or makes sense. Eventually, when you think things are going to kick off, it becomes a bunch of convoluted nonsense that ends before it even gets started. Sure, my complaining about convoluted mid-game plot twists is ironic coming from someone who likes Final Fantasy games and has maintained that Final Fantasy X is their favorite in the series, but hear me out. The Final Fantasy series has a complete investment in their worlds with, yes, sometimes wacky moments, but characters that serve to be more than ciphers for the player and experience whole arcs and character evolutions, and in many cases, you see such character changes with the rest of your party and even the greater world itself. And if you ask me, the JRPGs Japan Studio made never really grappled that part of the puzzle; maybe you'd get one character that underwent a mostly realized process of self-actualization, but it was often spread too thin across too many hours, and others in your party were just left in the background no differently than when you first met them.

To return to Legend of Legaia specifically, the game is so invested in its mechanics that its story feels like a complete afterthought, which is a shame because, like its gameplay, it starts strong. In the opening prologue, a brief narration explains how the game's world features a fantasy realm in which humans once coexisted with supernatural beings called Seru, who provided humans with new ways to achieve scientific progress. However, at some point, a mysterious mist appeared, causing the Seru to go wild and begin attacking their human servants, which ultimately led to the collapse of society. After showing countless 3D NPCs, even children, getting murdered, the game juxtaposes to its lead protagonist, Vahn. He lives in a bucolic village that relies on hunting and subsistence farming, with him needing to take up the hunting responsibilities of his father, who is permanently handicapped due to a battle against a Seru. Luckily, his town is protected by a wall that seemingly can hold back the Mist and keep its citizens safe. However, wouldn't you believe it? Shortly after completing a trek outside, which serves as the game's tutorial mission, a giant monster named Juggernaut arrives, breaks through the wall, and forces your protagonist to make a desperate effort to rescue his friends and family before the invading monsters kill them. Sure, it's a bit by the numbers, but it's another case of the game's production values elevating a scene that could be easily dismissed as the game "going through the motions." Because man, when that big Juggernaut model, which the game cannot fit into the screen to save its life, punched a hole in that brick wall, I'm not going to lie to you, I whooped. It was cool as shit.

Here's the problem, though. Vahn is your protagonist, but his character arc resolves after about the second Genesis Tree. Noa and Gala have reasons to pursue goals beyond their introductions, but not Vahn; he's just sort of there. Sure, you occasionally get the option to pick dialogue choices during cutscenes. Nonetheless, they never significantly impact the course of the game's story until the very end, and they are few and far between to recenter him with a purpose. He's a far cry from Cloud Strife, who, despite all of his awkward storytelling, feels like a character in the game he inhabits. Vahn, on the other hand, is a complete nothing burger, and he's a venerable "Protag-kun." Multiple female characters fawn over his attractiveness, and everyone seems to trust him right from the rip, despite little of what he does or says justifying such unflinching loyalty. On top of that, Gala's character arc is a simple revenge story, which means you have two-thirds of your party bringing jack all to the narrative table. To make matters worse, the game relies on the otherworldly Mist as the story's driving antagonist for over ten hours. It doesn't introduce a forward-facing villain until around the fifteen to twenty-hour mark. For too long, you feel as if you're doing one interstitial mission after another, and the first batch of dungeons all feel like tutorials meant to get your feet wet. Still, they are all structured and formatted like real dungeons, so they take at least twenty minutes more than they feel like they should to complete.

Part 5: The Combat Is Innovative And Fast-Paced, So Why Isn't Everything Else?

To expand upon my last point, everything in Legaia takes at least ten to twenty minutes longer than it should. The first culprit is the game's decision to include an overworld for navigating from one town or continent to the next. While "trope appropriate" at the time, the speed at which you move on it is sluggish, and the placement of all the story-related interactable set pieces features frustratingly massive gaps. Sometimes the game isn't all that clear about where you need to go or which path to take, and while it does have a map you can refer to, the game's large world has some incredibly annoying bottlenecks that mean there are easy to miss roads or pathways to get to subsequent towns, cities, or dungeons. Also, the overworld has random encounters, and there's no real reason for these to exist because monsters in the overworld provide way less experience than ones in Mist-filled environments, and they also don't offer spells. Considering both points, the overworld would have been significantly improved if your attempts to explore the world were not interrupted every few minutes with random, pointless battles. Also, quick aside, I'm utterly shocked at how Legend of Legaia strictly follows JRPG orthodoxy in a lot of ways, but has next to no side quests to report. NPCs exist to dole out flavor text and, from time to time, items or equipment you can only buy from specific people in the world.

Oh, right, there's a magic system in Legend of Legaia. I understand that you have to have a magic system in your JRPG, but it feels like cowardice on the part of developer Prokion. All three of your characters are established as being different types of martial artists, and I don't think anyone would have cared that much if the game went sans magic. Nonetheless, what makes the magic system in Legend of Legaia especially heinous is the fact that it relies on you attacking a select number of enemies and hoping that they bestow a magical spell to whoever kills them. The RNG with those drops is soul-crushing, with your first encounters with enemies oftentimes being 10% or less. Luckily, almost every magic-bestowing monster has multiple opportunities for you to pick up their abilities, but regardless, getting new spells is never going to be 100%, and that's a problem, especially with healing magic, which you need to pick up from a variety of different enemies. To add insult to injury, all of these enemies only spawn during specific moments in the game, and if you progress beyond those chapters, you can completely screw yourself. Again, that's because only the enemies that exist in the Mist teach magic, and the ones you find in the overworld don't. So, if you summon a Genesis Tree before you learn something important, it could be a whole two hours or more until you get another chance to get that ability. That's what I call a dick move, as it's not as if the game tells you what skills or spells there are to pilfer from monsters in any given dungeon.

On top of that, the game's pacing issues extend beyond its systems and carry into how things are structured. Even when the game is still patching its core trio together, the whole process drags on far longer than it has any right to. For example, in Noa's introductory environment, the game has you controlling her solo in a forest and mountain without any special abilities or combos, as she doesn't have her Ra-Seru abilities yet. That goes on for two whole environments; for two whole environments, you control a single character with none of the game juice that makes Legaia even remotely compelling to play. She goes up against the same encounter types Vahn faces, and the game juxtaposes between the two until you reach the level's eventual boss encounter. Her segments go unexpectedly longer than Vahn's, and having her tag along with a boss that is NO JOKE means you are babysitting a character that has one arm tied to her back. Gala ends up getting it far worse as you pick him up at Biron Monastery, and the game has you complete multiple dungeon sequences before he can perform his Arts. The game has the audacity of having you explore two separate forest dungeons, one of which the game repeats, and a version of his monastery filled with Mist and littered with Seru monsters. And I said it before, but it's worth saying again: even when Gala gets his Ra-Seru, he can't do anything notable because his starting combo bar, even after holding an action in combat, is half of what Noa or Vahn have for most of the game! So, you don't even get to do the cool monk attacks you saw him do during the cutscenes he has with Songi; what a joke.

And by golly, the middle of this game is a bog-standard JRPG rigmarole. Vahn is a non-factor, Gala's motivations are simple enough to summarize on a napkin, and the story's intentions with Noa are still unknown. All that ties things together is that the Mist is evil, and there are mysterious forces that control it. The game rattles off the Ancient Wind Cave, Vidna, Jeremi, Octam, the Shadow Gate, and Octam a second time, and has very little to show for it other than characters with higher stats and possibly larger movesets. Starting with the first Mist generator, there are recurring antagonists for each of the significant locations or continents you explore, but the narrative paradoxically delays what connective tissue these figures have until the game's mid-point, when Cort and his floating castle become a factor. Until then, you have about a half dozen levels and dungeons that you toil away on because they are there, and this being a JRPG, you're expected to jump into the fray without asking any questions. But to tie into my main point here, it is bonkers to me that Legaia implements such an up-tempo combat system onto a story that drags its feet about telling you the fundamental underpinnings of how and why its world works the way it does. It seems utterly counterintuitive.

But if there's one saving narrative grace to Legaia that honestly kept me going, it's the fact that when it does break from tradition, it is off its goddamn rocker. This game has some bizarre and wild scenes that come out of nowhere but are oddly memorable for how weird and wacky they are. When you arrive at Octam, you discover that the central city has been abandoned in favor of an underground cavern. However, the biggest surprise is that the town's prophet, who can converse with the gods of Legaia, is a single soul that has existed for thousands of years, but is split across three babies. And then they die when the building they were housed in collapses into a chasm, but they reappear as a magical spirit that offers advice to our trio before it ascends to heaven. The game kills baby Jesus within ten minutes of introducing him. It's downright hilarious. In a prior location called Vidna, you find a vacation resort that has avoided the effects of the Mist because of powerful wind turbines. When you track down a horrible monster in a nearby volcano, as its dying action, it freezes the lava that flows from the volcano, causing the turbines in Vidna to stop, which leads to Seru monsters massacring its people. That massacre is your fault, and the game forces you to mull over the consequences of your actions for a solid five to seven minutes.

But the "big one" during the first half of the game happens in Ratayu, where you find a sheltered but large kingdom that has avoided the worst effects of the Mist thanks to their leader, but something weird is up with them. Recently, he seems to have transformed into a zombie, which didn't trigger any red flags with his advisors or citizens, but what did cock an eyebrow was his insistence that his kingdom needed to start sacrificing virgins to a pit of blood which houses Juggernaut. When you decide to take action, you have Noa swap places with a soon-to-be sacrificial bride, and when you enter the laboratory that the Juggernaut resides in, you see a portent of what's to come in the back half of Legaia. Dozens of previous brides are strung up like dolls, with fleshy wires hooked into their bodies with the Juggernaut slowly sucking their life force as a slow thumping heartbeat pulses in the background. You fight the Seru-controlled leader of Ratayu and then Dohati, the advisor who gave the king of Ratayu the Seru that corrupted him. However, you don't fight the Juggernaut, and instead watch King Saryu flick a switch and seal the monster in, AGAIN, what looks like a pool of blood. The body and eldritch horror elements of this game are sudden and abrupt, and at this point, Legaia even walks back the fact that they even happened. After the incident in Ratayu resolves itself, the game dismisses your experience as a one-off. Little do you know....