The Legend of Alon D'ar

"Lace 'em with lyrics that's legendary, musical mercenary"

Legend of Alon D'Ar is a game that you can easily learn in a few minutes, but will give you at least forty hours of solid gameplay. The game combines freedom in character-building with a huge world and impressive amount of material. On the other hand, it shows once again the importance of story to a role playing game.

In terms of graphics and sound, the game certainly measures up to the standard of the PS2, but aren't that amazing. However, the amount of work that went into this game is revealed in the huge size of the world; it's so large and complex that you will be well off writing directions if you want to get back somewhere, as it is possible to get lost unless you are quite experience with the layout of the world.

The game's designers thinly sketched out the plan for each character's development, but you are pretty free to do as you want. Characters develop weapon skills through experience, as well as levels. There are a good variety of different weapon specialities, which is great, although it gets annoying when you finally get a special weapon, only to realize that none of your characters have that speciality. Still, the method of character development appealed to me, falling between the linear organization of most story-based RPGs and the freedom of ''action/adventure'' RPGs like Diablo.

Magic is well incorporated into the battle system, and operates on a elemental basis, plus restorative and barrier magic. To use a specific element of magic, a character must have the proper Magic Orb in his equipment. Characters can only carry a limited number of items, in addition to a limited party backpack. However, in battle, your character can only use what that character is carrying, so you need to be careful what you are carrying. While this adds realism, it is also frustrating in that you must drop one item to pick up another.

The game can get a bit boring at times, especially as you try to complete the side quests, but the side quests do offer worthwhile rewards, even if they are repetitive. Yet the tedium of the game is greatly multiplied by the fact that the game's story is not only thin, but is also uninteresting. In other games--shooters, action games, platformers--a weak story is only a hindrance and great gameplay can more than make up for it. But in an RPG like this, a poor story is the kiss of death. Nothing can be less fun than clicking through countless pages of text-form dialogue discussing a story you abandoned interest in long ago. The plot of Legend of Alon D'Ar hovers uncertainly between entertaining and boring; the dialogue itself is good, but the whole world seems poorly conceived and the story isn't able to drive the game. One doesn't feel a motivation for the journey of these characters.

The two-player mode I found to be not that fun. In this mode you control two party members and so does your friend. But it's not much strain to control all four yourself and two people I found to just get in the way. The idea has appeared many times before in RPGs and has never seemed to catch on, so perhaps the game itself can't be blamed--the idea just doesn't work. Still, it's a wasted feature and wasted disc space.

All in all this game provides a solid middle ground between the RPG style of Diablo or Baldur's Gate, and that of Final Fantasy. It's also fairly tough by modern RPG standards, which was appealing to me. Those who like both styles will really enjoy this game.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 05/27/02, Updated 04/10/03