Retro JRPG Review - Legend of Legaia (Part 2): Of Course This JRPG Ends With Childhood Trauma And Body Horror!
by zombiepie
Author's Note: This is the second part to a two-part retrospective on Legend of Legaia. If you missed the first part, here's a link. At the end of the blog I also provide a VOD of my attempt to stream this game from beginning to end. I'm still in the process of sorting the videos to be in chronological order, so bear with me for a bit. I will also include a YouTube version of a podcast I was on with fellow Giant Bomb users
Part 6: Everything Takes Too Goddamn Long To Complete
The last time we discussed Legend of Legaia, we essentially stopped at the point when the game fully formed its party and a few named locations afterwards. Unlike some of my previous written examinations of JRPGs in the past, I don't especially feel inspired to look at every level or environment because so many of them are filler towns and dungeons that add nothing to the story and only offer basic palette swaps of previously encountered enemies. There's a reason for doing this, which I'll review shortly. Still, Legend of Legaia feels artificially padded, and as I stated several times prior, would have benefited from not following the Dragon Quest template of thinking it had to be at a minimum of thirty-five hours long. For reference, I finished the game's epilogue around the fifty-hour mark. Correspondingly, I'll come clean and admit that I scoured every dungeon for hidden treasure and goodies, tried to teach everyone as many spells as possible, and dabbled in the game's mostly unnecessary minigames and "side quests." I deliberately use air quotes for the latter. There are times when the team at Prokion, the developer on record for Legend of Legaia, realized their game was missing a part of the JRPG puzzle that existed in Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, and come hell or high water, they included it here.
So, to make my case, let's look at a few of the interstitial dungeons and what you need to do in them before jumping into the main story and all of the gameplay "clutter" that starts to emerge once you cross the game's halfway point, because that's when I think Legaia starts to drag. My first case study sequence is the one near the game's mid-point, shortly after the characters revisit Vidna, the resort town that gets enveloped and besieged by the Mist. The game then directs you to Octam, which has relocated to a cave due to the Mist, and you need to work through the abandoned city while dealing with encounters. There are three monsters with magical abilities worth teaching (i.e., Zenoir, Gizam, and Nova), but they all have successful draw rates below 50%, with Nova hovering at a whopping 10%. Those are percentages the game does not manifest in any way, shape, or form, by the way! Eventually, you get to the level's bottom floor, which has a series of stone faces you can interact with that prove to be hints to a puzzle in an entirely different location; FUN! Which then results in you backtracking out of the dungeon, or using an item to bop you out to its entrance, and navigating the overworld to the northeast of the map until you bump into a new dungeon called the "Shadow Gate." A dungeon leading to a different dungeon isn't great, but somewhat expected in RPGs of this era, but what slays me is the fact that the stone faces from Octam prove to be the solution to a lower floor at the Shadow Gate and if you didn't write that shit down, you have to drag yourself all the way back to Octam. WORSE, the Shadow Gate entirely recycles the same encounters, including the same magic-bestowing monsters with the same draw rate, as the dungeon that preceded it! So, there's no reason for the game to break this into a two-dungeon sequence, considering the second part adds nothing new other than a unique environmental texture you don't see anywhere else.
For a later game sequence that undoubtedly overstays its welcome, let's talk about the Sol Tower! After messing around with some optional locations that are meant to be character-building moments, you end up at the top of the tower and fight a dark knight named "Gaza" who mistakes your characters being equipped with Seru as a sign of their corruption to the forces of evil. He's a clear "gear check" boss that hits hard, and your best option is to tank his damage and have a character as a designated healer. Nonetheless, after a reasonably long dialogue sequence, your characters are tasked with ridding the tower of the Mist in its lower floors. You then walk down to the third floor, which is the first one with Mist, and work your way to the basement. So, for reference, you walk to the top only to walk to the bottom and then back to the top to finish this quest; lovely. Floors three and two are simple enough affairs, but it is the first floor of the tower that proves to be the kicker. You have to walk past the entrance of the tower and then to the basement, and not only do you need to worry about encounters, but you also have to play the "where the fuck do I need to go?" game! Some exits and doorways aren't well marked, and the doors to industrial or factory-like environments can be difficult to discern at times. To add insult to injury, before you can fight Gaza a second time, with this second encounter being far more involved, you need to solve a color-based gate puzzle in which you use levers to enter and exit through color-coded gates in a specific order. If you go into even one gate prematurely or in the wrong order, you often need to start at the beginning of the puzzle.
The game's sequencing is also wacky. For example, after you wrap up your business in Sol Tower, you need to walk into Buma, which is covered in Mist, before trying to enter Usha's Research Center. That research center is in the western portion of the continent, and it is a ridiculous distance from the ruins of Uru Mais, where you need to pick something up to deliver to Dr. Usha! Why have the location where you pick up instructions for your next primary story mission so thoroughly removed from where you pick up a MacGuffin, only to need to walk it back to the same quest giver? Because the game wants you to slog through pointless random encounters to level up your characters. Oh, and every time you pick up a quest from Dr. Usha, his wife subjects you to a multiple-choice exam that you need to ace before she lets you continue the story. On top of that, the movement on the overworld doesn't feel good. It's at least half the speed you'd want, and everything on it is painfully spaced apart. While you do have an in-game map, when the game needs you to jump between continents, it lacks the seamlessness of simply giving you an airship and letting you go wherever you want. From beginning to end, you are limited to warp-based items and the in-game transit systems, the latter of which isn't super clear about where it is willing or able to take you.
I have already mentioned that the movement on the overworld is subpar, but what's worse is a problem I highlighted fairly prominently in the first part of this retrospective, but is worth repeating. Eventually, your characters get longer combo bars, and this allows you to discover new Hyper Arts and eventually each character's "Miracle Art," which is a combo that fills in a completely leveled-up combo meter for a character. You want to see these top-tier combos and moves because they're cool and they do a shit ton of damage. Unfortunately, even if you withhold a turn to gain your character's full combo meter, you'll often find yourself defending an additional turn or two after that because your Action Points or "AP" are at a level well below that of the requirement for this new ability you now have access to. And remember, you carry whatever your AP was from the previous battle, so if you had Gala or Noa pop simpler combos and during the next fight find yourself up against a more challenging foe, you're just going to have to have them waste two to three turns defending and doing nothing before they can use their best ability. That's counterintuitive and, honestly, muddies the game's punch of being about you watching three martial artists become the heroes of their world. These moves are the cool things you spent countless hours trying to unlock, and you usually can only use them after burning two turns during an encounter. The AP meter is a non-issue during the early- and mid-game because there aren't a ton of combos that use it at a faster rate than it restores itself. But it is a complete pain during the final leg of the game when you have what the game tells you are your character-based weapons of mass destruction.
Part 7: Fishing, Slot Machines, And The Expected JRPG "Filler" Except Not Really
Let's return to the Sol Tower for a bit because that building and what the game attempts with it is such a shameless copy-paste job of the Golden Saucer in Final Fantasy VII that it hurts. It has a bunch of merchants, dozens of NPCs, and even side quests to complete, and everything in it is mind-numbingly pointless. While they included a Golden Saucer equivalent in Legend of Legaia, developer Prokion didn't seem to grapple with why the Golden Saucer actually "works" as a location. It's not the minigames that most people enjoyed playing; it was watching characters let their hair down, as well as the way the Golden Saucer segued into Barret's character arc in North Corel. With Legend of Legaia, Sol Tower doles out minigames and side quests while the game is still not committing to its cast and narrative, so you're stuck in it, interacting with its time wasters at face value. As a result, you play a bad DDR minigame to help Noa become a "Dance Queen" and watch Gala being the straight man to a manzai two-person comedy act, and that's kind of it. There's a shitty fake fighting game in the arcade that's funny to play once or twice, but that's about it. There are rewards for playing the slot machines, and Legaia diehards will tell you there are ways to game it to work in your favor, but ultimately, the game just sits there listlessly as it expands horizontally with no vertical movement. Our characters are essentially just there to be goofy.
And just like OG Final Fantasy VII, Legend of Legaia's pacing falls off the side of a cliff after introducing its casino and doesn't regain its footing for a solid ten hours afterwards. We are about four levels removed from our characters entering the Floating Castle and being properly introduced to Cort, the game's actual antagonist. So, the story still clings to the immaterial Mist as our driving force for motivating our character's actions, accompanied by a handful of "monster of the week" cronies. Yes, there are some early hints about Cort before you enter the Floating Castle, but it's a classic"evil guy sits on a throne while assigning the task of 'kill the heroes' to a different lackey with each new environment" setup. It's not enough to keep you interested, but as I said last time, there are a few wacky moments that at least partially hold the fort. One of the better parts during the game's middle is when you meet the Delilas Family (i.e., Gi, Che, and Lu), and they are evil inversions of your three characters. They're goofy and another Monster of the Week boss, but at least they have character and make vague hints of having a loyalty to Cort based on a past life. Unfortunately, the game doesn't explore that last point for another seven hours, but hey, beggars cannot be choosers. Furthermore, seeing these bosses perform their Hyper Arts is just as fun to observe as watching yours. Taking damage usually isn't something I jump for joy at happening to me in a JRPG, but it's hard to get that angry in Legaia when things look cool and are silky smooth on fifth-generation hardware.
Another notable omission in Legaia is the lack of tangible side quests in all the significant locations. Now, it's not that there aren't any side quests. There's a guy you meet who refines rare gems into equippable summons or magics, and we have those minigames I mentioned. However, what you don't have are the expected fetch quests, hunting missions, or optional dialogue checks. It seems nitpicky to criticize this game for lacking these features, considering I just complained that it has too many levels that feel like filler, but hear me out. At least those sorts of quests build up a "wholeness" to the locations you are at, and they help you imagine how the game's world works independently from your characters. Do I actually enjoy helping random grandmas by fetching them cartons of milk or chicken eggs? No, but I do enjoy listening to the handful of lines of additional dialogue they share that provide context on their social standing and how they feel about the state of the world. There are some fun NPCs in Legaia, but you have to go out of your way and interact with everything in the towns you discover to find these. And even then, there's something incredibly sterile about the towns and villages in Legaia. Not only are your characters kind of stuck idly twiddling their thumbs, but so too are the characters in the world.
Instead of worthwhile side quests, you have one of the worst fishing minigames I have ever seen in a JRPG. It's a meter-based arcade fishing affair, but so much worse than expected. You are stuck looking at one of two possible lakes with darkened circles representing possible fish. Those fish will only bite if you have the right lure, and even when you do, you have to worry about your "Tension" and "Life" meters. This minigame has a lot of moving parts, and the RNG is soul-crushing and only gets better after you sink countless hours into it. Seemingly, it has a slower rewards onramp than playing the slot machines, and many of the rewards, while nice, are entirely unnecessary towards completing the actual game. But with there being so little in the game that allows you to have non-combat-based fun or let your characters chill, I still sank in time with the fishing because I wanted breathing room in between major dungeons. Some of the late-game dungeons, especially the final gauntlet at the end, are exhausting, though part of that is my damn fault. I made the effort to teach as much magic to each of my characters as possible, and that, along with my attempt to find as many of the hidden treasure chests, added at least fifteen hours to my playthrough.
For anyone still interested in playing Legend of Legaia, here's my advice on which spells to worry about in the game. First, do go out of your way to teach all of your characters every possible healing spell. While healing items aren't expensive in Legaia, being able to use healing magic, especially the AOE versions of healing spells, proves critical in the late game. In terms of offensive magic, get Grimard, Nighto, and Kemaro. Grimard is a great early game spell and is essential to Gala as it consistently does more damage than most of what you will be able to pull off on his puny combo meter. Nighto can one-shot a few bosses, and that's nice, but the real hero is Kemaro, who does medium earth damage at a relatively low cost, and there aren't a ton of enemies with immunities to him. There are better summons in the game, but their draw rate is often below thirty percent until the final act of the game, OR their MP cost is ridiculous, and for whatever reason, MP-restoring items drop at one-tenth the rate of HP-oriented ones. Likewise, most merchants don't have MP-restoring items, and if they do, they're crazy expensive. So, all the cool magic and summons you want to use end up being cost-prohibitive or, as I quickly found out, just downright less efficient than most Hyper Arts linked with other combos. But I put time into learning new magic because if I didn't, then the dungeons were all about four to five levels long and linear to a fault.
Part 8: Oh, Right, This Game Eventually Decides To Have A Story, But It's Well Past The Twenty Hour Mark!
Your first hint about what Legend of Legaia's story is actually about happens early, but, much like the rest of the game, it is tied to RNG. After assembling your whole party and pushing the Mist back a few times, Noa begins to have dream sequences that take place in random intervals and only after resting at Inns. I'd generally get angry at this, considering it's easily missable context-building of Noa's past, but given that JRPGs have had missable dream sequences like these since the SNES days, I can't really. They offer hints about Noa being a princess of a far-off land, later revealed to be Conkram, and that her brother, Cort, is the one responsible for all the bad shit happening in Legaia. It is around the point when you finish your affairs in Sol that the story genuinely gets its act together and decides to slowly, but surely, reveal its cards. Not only is Noa a princess, but Cort is the villainous figure who lives in the floating castle that is continually spreading Mist wherever it goes. I have been on record in saying that Final Fantasy X is my personal favorite Final Fantasy game. So, I'm not necessarily against the idea of the "real" protagonist in a role-playing game not being your playable character. And in a lot of ways, Noa reminds me of Yuna and how she, not Tidus, is the heart of her game and drives the narrative. Now, I can't say that without laughing a bit because this game genuinely doesn't give a shit about either of your other party members. Vahn continues to be a nothing burger whose only character-developing moment is that he has a girlfriend in his hometown, and Gala has a blood feud with Songi. That's all they get.
It's odd because there are NPCs that get more storytelling than our protag-kun. When you enter Buma, you are forced to confront Cara, a recurring character who is a mercenary for hire, and discover that she fell in love with a man named Grantes, who happens to be a Soren. Soren are a tribe of people who wear Seru in the form of wings that they use to fly. Grantes fell in love with Cara, and this is a big no-no with the Soren as they look down on those outside of their tribe. Nonetheless, you help Grantes overcome his alcoholism and have him reconcile with Cara, and they rekindle their relationship. That's a character arc. And yet, here we have two out of three of our party members in a perpetual state of stasis. There's an odd moment at Uru Mais wherein all three of our characters encounter "god" and are told to confront their darkest fears. When Vahn goes in, we unsurprisingly find that his biggest fear is the loss of his family and even witness a flashback involving the death of his mother after the birth of his sister. This is information you knew before starting this sequence. When Gala has his go, we find out that Songi is his greatest fear, and we watch Songi be a dick to Gala for another cutscene. Again, none of this is new because we have seen Songi fuck over Gala no less than thrice already. And then it's Noa's turn, and with her, we see her parents for the first time and get her entire backstory! She was the princess of Conkram, and the kingdom she lived in was in a perpetual war against Sol, which it was slowly losing before the Mist appeared and wreaked havoc. Noa's mother tasked a Soren companion with transporting her to safety, and that's why she was raised in a forest by a Ra-Seru.
What the game does with Noa is compelling at times. The game's actual high point comes when you convince the Soren tribe to help you with attacking the Floating Castle, and it involves a whole sequence wherein Soren commandos pick up your characters and drop them on a ledge on the castle. Despite her efforts in which she pleads with her brother to come to his senses, Noa is forced to accept that she needs to fight and possibly kill Cort. After finishing their affairs in the Floating Castle, the characters decide to enter Conkram and are horrified to find it a complete Eldritch nightmare. Bodies of people are fused into walls, writhing and screaming in pain, and the location is filled to the brim with monsters. Visually, it's an intense location with shockingly gruesome background and foreground work. However, it's when Noa finds her parents that something special happens. After having a brief moment with her father and mother, our trio finds a portal and enters it, discovering that it transports them to the past, a time when Conkram wasn't a nightmare. Our heroes learn that Conkram was desperate to turn the tide of the war against Sol and opted to use Mist in the hope of sabotaging Sol's Seru-based technology. There's an incident when a Mist generator fails and cannot be turned off, and our trio needs to do something before things get out of control. Those moments are cool, but what's even better is when Noa is allowed to interact with her family members at length and finally has a family life for the first time in her life. Sure, it's only a few minutes, and she isn't allowed to say who she is, but it's SOMETHING after this game has pussyfooted about having a heart for thirty hours!
Unfortunately, the worldbuilding is still a bunch of technobabble. It took me a while to grasp the differences between Seru, Ra-Seru, Sim-Seru, and Seru-Kai, as the lore dumps use them alongside one another and often in the same sentence or paragraph. Seru can either be things that people can wear, as is the case with the Soren, or giant monsters that can carry people, as is the case with the train system. There's also a pantheon of gods and goddesses, which is one of the messier parts of the story. At one point, you fight "Rogue," who is a god that is billed as being the figure behind bringing the Seru and Mist into Legaia. That sounds like someone who is a whole two or three paygrades above Songi and Cort, but, instead, you fight them a whole ten to fifteen hours before the game's "point of no return," and when you kill them, they're never brought up again. You kill Legaia's version of Satan, and no one seems to find that to be that big of a deal. You also meet Legaia's version of God, Tieg, and the scenes with them are inconsistent. From talking to them, you find out that the Seru and Ra-Seru are from a different dimension, Seru-Kai, and they thought they could help humanity, and then Rogue fucked it all up by being a dick.
Where that leaves us is here: Cort is the main villain, and Songi is the secondary one. What baffles me is that Cort lacks clear motivations for his actions. He murders his entire family and corrupts all of his friends to get them to see things his way, and it's ambiguous if he was always bad or if Rogue befouled him. It's clear after your battle against Rogue that Cort is still an asshole and wants to turn the world into a giant bed of tentacles and writhing flesh like Conkram. Some people tend to take umbrage with Noa constantly pleading with Cort to stop with the evil antics, but I'm not one of them. First, Noa is a child with a superficial moral compass, and also, Cort is all that's left of her family by the time you get to the end of the game; more on that in a bit. Also, one quick note, notice how Gala and Noa have antagonistic forces they can point to as motivating them to continue with their journey, but Vahn doesn't. Now, that's not to say he doesn't have any reason to continue, as what the game does with Rim Elm fills that void perfectly, but having a shit heel that is kicking sand on Vahn's shoes or hissing at him whenever he enters a new set piece wouldn't have hurt. I understand that would essentially give us two versions of Songi, but why leave one-third of our party hanging regardless?
Part 9: All Of My Earlier Complaints About The Gameplay Come To A Head, And The Story Still Isn't "Great"
I've already discussed how the gameplay slows down as it introduces more guardrails in response to your characters gaining more tools in their toolbox. However, there's another problem with Legend of Legaia's generally revolutionary combat system that becomes a real problem in its final ten hours. There just aren't enough moves to carry a thirty-five to forty-hour-long video game. To review, each character has four base attacks, eleven Arts, three Hyper Arts, five Super Arts, and one Miracle Art. Super Arts end with a special move and are the only ones that are not recorded on your Arts List, and the lower you get on that list, the higher the AP cost of performing that Art. Eleven basic Arts might sound like a lot, but it honestly isn't. You see a lot of the same attacks ad infinitum, and there are only so many logical and practical synergies to tie starting arts with ending ones. AND because the game requires so much AP to perform the flashier and cooler Super Arts and Miracle Arts, you often find yourself regurgitating medium-grade Art combos at a lower cost as they avoid running massive AP deficits. So, there's not as much variety to the combat as you'd like. And given how fucked the drop rate is for offensive magic, it's not like things are any better on that front either!
Additionally, I avoided discussing this next complaint in the last blog because I needed to verify its accuracy; however, it appears that the North American release was made more challenging than the Japanese and European releases, as it requires significantly more EXP to achieve the same level-ups. Bizarrely, you gain 75% of the EXP at the ends of battles compared to other versions, 33.3% gold compared to the EU and Japanese release, and enemies have between 1.5 to 2x stronger defense and are programmed to block more often. Even then, the levelling in Legaia is just painfully slow, and the game expects you to grind on top of not running away from every encounter in a dungeon. A lot of the late-game level-ups have insane EXP requirements that make all non-boss-based encounters completely pointless. When I neared the end of the game and felt like my characters were only treading water, I saw that they were about 8,500 EXP away from their next level up. To my horror, the best area for random encounters I could find only provided about 250 to 500 EXP per battle; that's a minimum of seventeen battles on a good day to get my next level up. Worse still, there are no gameplay tricks or exploits. The game doesn't have special enemies that provide more EXP than usual, and while there are items that double your EXP, the game only introduces them near the end as a mercy if you can't beat the final boss gauntlet.
And I do want to return to the topic that I brought up last time, of Gala being a useless sack of shit for two-thirds of the game. The fact that he cannot perform even mid-level combos until hour thirty is the worst. It's part of the reason why his "Monster Defeated" total is only 60% of that compared to Noa's and 75% of that to Vahn's. Often, you are better off having him pop spells or be on healing duty because for most of the game, he's fighting increasingly more challenging enemies with one arm tied to his back. As the encounters get more demanding, only having two characters that are capable of dealing respectable damage isn't great. Yes, Gala does get better and can even start dealing more damage than Noa in a single turn, but he still remains painfully slow, often going at the end of the turn order, even behind large, monstrous enemies. It honestly feels like this game needs a fourth party member because it wants to assign roles to each of your characters, but can't, as with only three characters, everyone needs to attack or else the combat goes on way longer than it needs to. That's brings up a different point in that when it does come time for you to heal, with you only having three characters, every time you heal or buff your party, which becomes a necessity during the late-game bosses, you lose a whole THIRD of your combat efficacy every time a turn is spent on a single character not attacking. A fourth character likely would have been too much of a technical hurdle for the PlayStation, but HOT DAMN, were there times when I wished I had just one more turn to attack but didn't.
Another nitpick I'd like to bring up is the game's inventory and equipment. Paradoxically, the game allows you to equip almost any weapon on your characters but bestows massive penalties when you force a character to use a weapon type they are not aligned to. With you only having three weapon types in the entire game, why does it just not block you from doing that? It's beyond me. Also, there are way too many stats to worry about and analyze in a game as mindless as this one. Not only do you have basic attack, magic, and defense stats, but you also have stats for the different body parts that connect to the four base attack moves that lead to combos. Legend of Legaia has a massive issue with clarity, because there are whole mechanics and concepts it does an outright shit job of explaining, like the spell elemental affinities of your characters, and also their preferred base combat inputs. For example, it wasn't until I consulted a guide that I discovered Vahn generally deals more damage with kicks and Noa deals more damage with punches. Did I notice a tangible difference when I gave them items that played into these advantages after learning this? Not really, I saw the numbers go up on their stat sheets, but it's not like things became immediately easier. However, the issue of Legaia having a signposting problem remains. When entering new environments, it's never clear what the theme or gimmick is for the encounters, which monsters have abilities to capture, and what the drop rates are for those monsters that do have spells to teach.
I do need to come clean about my playthrough in one regard. I decided to use an exploit/speedrun tactic to get something you're not meant to get in a normal playthrough. I was informed of this point while I was streaming the game on my Twitch, but there's a way for you to net Juggernaut as a summon without being level 99. All you need to do is approach the door to the room where you saw an undeveloped Juggernaut in Ratayu. It requires a lot of luck, but if you line up your characters with the yellow carpet by the guard on the left side of the door, and then walk straight until you are running in place, and then quickly turn and then hit confirm, you can glitch the door and have it open when it shouldn't. Then, you can walk through a series of walkways to find and collect the Evil Talisman, which is usually an Easter Egg. The MP cost for summoning Juggernaut is 255, but for most bosses, Juggernaut's Dark Eclipse attack one-shots them. It's a spell the final boss has to mess you up, and it can be yours even before you go to Sol. You don't need to do this, and I'd advise against it, but I also don't regret having a cheese tactic to get out of challenging encounters, which is usually a familiar mainstay in JRPGs.
Part 10: Why Does (Almost) Every Classic JRPG Have At Least One Flesh Dungeon?
Remember last episode, how I said this game semi-redeems itself in how weird it gets? Fuck man. Why isn't the entire game its last ten hours? Holy shit. So, let's take a step back and return to Conkram. Noa promises to save her family from their terrible state, and this leads us to Jette's Fortress, where we fight Jette, another of Cort's cronies, and eventually Cort himself. After you destroy what you assume is the final Mist generator, you find Conkram NOT as a revived kingdom with all of Noa's family and friends safe, but instead, a giant stone block. We learn from our Ra-Seru companions that by turning off the Mist generator, the Seru that had engulfed Conkram petrified into stone and dust, and they took all the human bodies they were entwined with as well. Everyone Noa knew and loved is dead besides Cort, so, yeah, I think I'm going to give her some leeway in holding out hope that her brother can stop being an asshole. Now, admittedly, he fuses with the heart of Juggernaut, which seems like an irredeemable bad guy act, but again, Noa is a child. After watching Noa weep, the game cuts back to Vahn's hometown, where he wakes up and is welcomed by his family. After some pleasantries, Songi appears and announces that Juggernaut is alive and cackles as it merges with the village of Rim Elm to create a new flesh tower before announcing that he's going to Seru-kai in hopes of killing god and taking all of his power. We go from chilling with Vahn's pals to PURE METAL in ten minutes, and it's FUCKING AWESOME!
After our characters pray to god for a whole minute, Tieg appears and tells them they need to save his ass first before trying to rescue Vahn's family because I guess he's not as powerful as we thought despite him being god and all. So we end up in heaven, which isn't entirely unheard of in a JRPG, and we fight Songi as he is attempting to absorb all of the energy from the tree of life. What made me cackle with glee was after the battle, when Songi is defeated and his Seru separates from his body, and he begins to die in front of your face. Unlike Noa, Gala isn't so kind about forgiving Songi for all of his antics, which is understandable, considering that as he dies, Songi turns into a pale corpse before using his dying words to curse Gala to a fate worse than death as he shatters into a million pieces. All the while, he's screaming in agony. Last month, someone tried to tell me that I have to be slightly more considerate about Legend of Legaia being for kids and tweens, and I'm sorry to put you on blast, but what game did you play? Did you forget the part where we find out that the Juggernaut's flesh temple is just Juggernaut's body digesting the citizens of Rim Elm?
That's right, the final dungeon involves you exploring the insides of the Juggernaut, and all the while, we encounter all of Vahn's family and friends as they are being vored. Like, we need to talk about this. Why is this such a common thing in classic JRPGs? Think about any fourth or fifth generation JRPG and count the number of times those games have flesh dungeons either near the back-half of the game or as the final dungeon. The first two Grandia games immediately come to mind, but so do a shocking number of Final Fantasy games (i.e., Exdeath's Castle in Final Fantasy V) as well as Earthbound. There are also all the times when you enter the body of a person or thing, and that leads to a flesh dungeon. The one that is kind of forever burned into my memory is when you enter the body of the Fairy Queen in Breath of Fire II and fight a bunch of parasites in her body. I think there are more classic JRPGs WITH flesh or body horror dungeons than not, and I don't entirely understand why. In the case of Legend of Legaia, I found an interview where one of the game's writers, Hidenori Shibao, states that their obsession with John Carpenter's The Thing inspired Juggernaut's body horror and tentacle motif, which is cool, but this is a JRPG that for 75% of the time is a silly Super Sentai-inspired romp. And now it's grody as all shit. There's even a moment when you find Vahn's five-year-old sister, and she complains about not being able to feel her feet. This final dungeon doesn't hold back any of its punches.
There's even a puzzle sequence in which your characters swim in a river of blood and flick fleshy switches that are ulcers or wounds to make different orifices open. You swim around in Juggernaut's arteries, stomach, veins, bronchial passageway, lungs, and it's all incredibly gross. This being the game's final dungeon, it's also the game's attempt to gear check you, but someone didn't properly balance things, because instead of making the enemies maybe a step or two below the final boss, they instead have a bunch of one-shot capable bullshit. There's even an encounter with an enemy named "Puera" who deals out a hand of cards, shuffles them, and while two of the cards do basic damage and healing, one instantly KOs a party member, while the other instantly KOs the monster. Unless you have a good eye, being able to beat them is essentially a matter of chance. Then there's the final battle against Cort, which is such a shameless rip of the final battle against Sephiroth in Final Fantasy VII that I found it comical. In JRPG tradition, it isn't the most brutal battle if you enter it properly levelled, and most of Cort's moves are cheap bullshit you can't avoid. He summons Juggernaut, but luckily, he is limited by an MP pool, so he can't spam it forever. I suppose I enjoyed the fact that Cort, like Songi, is unapologetic about everything he has done. When he dies, only Noa is sad about it, but even she recognizes that her brother was dead long before you fought him, which I like to call character development.
Before we jump into my final wrap-up, Legend of Legaia's epilogue, along with the Conkram flashback, is one of the game's better moments. It sees Vahn back in his village, embarking on a new adventure to help people outside of Rim Elm. With the Mist gone, all of Legaia's societies that rely on Seru technology are screwed and will need to pivot to something different. Depending on the choices you make when Dr. Usha appears, you can get one of four possible endings, though the differences aren't astoundingly varied. I opted for the most "vanilla" ending, in which Vahn leaves Rim Elm, but with his girlfriend Mei tagging along. With that ending, there's a touching moment when the two of them turn to face the town one more time, and they see the villagers collectively wave at them. The game ends with a sweeping panning shot of the continent of Drake Kingdom and all of the other central locations you previously encountered. Gala is revealed to be the new leader of Biron Monastery, and Noa is seen carrying a baby, which is Cort reincarnated. That's a bit of an odd choice, but it's a fuzzy mittens moment that shows everyone is going their separate ways and living the lives they wanted before things got weird in the land of Legaia.
Post-Mortem: What Did I Learn?
One of the worst things to happen with JRPGs was the unofficial expectation that every JRPG needed to be at least forty hours long. Legend of Legaia is one of many examples of games in the genre that are belligerently clinging to the Dragon Quest template, despite it being actively against their interests. HowLongToBeat, which I understand is not the most accurate resource for RPGs, lists most playthroughs of Legend of Legaia as ranging from 35 to 45 hours, and that seems about right. Again, I spent an inadvisable amount of time banging my head on slot machines, fishing minigames, monster collection, and treasure hunting, and rarely did any of that amount to anything notable or beyond the scope of what you would usually acquire from following the main path and doing some additional grinding on the side. Even then, the game fails to maintain its momentum, and it is a tonal mess, ranging from goofy, kid-friendly superhero antics to Eldritch-inspired body horror. Even the key mechanic, its combo system, loses steam by the twenty-hour mark, and with that, it begins to bog down.
However, I'm not going to say I regret playing Legaia. In a way, I'm thankful I saw the game through because it provided a perfect encapsulation of where JRPGs were during the fifth generation. People were making JRPGs at a ridiculous rate at that time, and most of the non-Tales, non-Falcom, non-Square, and non-Enix games in the genre were either shameless acts of plagiarism or completely without creative merit. But Legaia is different. It tries so hard to bring something new to the table while also feeling obligated to have the "Best Hits" expected of a game of its type. It's a clear example of "too many cooks in the kitchen" because it has way too many moving parts that each act independently of one another. There are probably other great examples of "also ran" JRPGs on the PS1 or even the Saturn that are just as weird as Legaia. Azure Dreams is one of the wildest mixes of genres you'll find from this era; Brigandine: The Legend of Forsena is an odd but interesting post-Final Fantasy Tactics turn-based strategy JRPG; The Granstream Saga is a trip if you want to see a JRPG team fully committed to rendering everything in a game in 3D polygons and needing to live with the consequences.
There are some forgotten JRPG gems from the fifth generation, to be sure, and perhaps you, reading this, can think of at least one example I have missed already. Some of these games have ideas that you never see crop up again anywhere else, and finding these ideas or moments is kind of magical. But you need to find that magic after scrounging through literal trash, so unless you are a complete sicko like me, I can't entirely recommend it. Nonetheless, to my fellow sickos out there, have at it, and best of luck!