Legend of Legaia

"Legaia gets a 6 in the beginning and a 10 in the end - average 8! A very good game, indeed."

Ok. You start to play this game, and easily reach the conclusion that it's going to finish after... let's see: I guessed fifteen hours, just because I know I am a digger who keeps on exploring every single depth of all RPGs that cross my way. Yeah, there's no doubt - the story that begins the game, about Seru and Genesis trees looks quite simple and easy, and even the video scene that is shown a few minutes after turning the console on leads you to the conclusion that THIS GAME IS SHORT, you CERTAINLY don't need to get worried about it's story because it's simple, and even though you are ready to clean every dungeon you may find on the way, you certainly are not going to spend a lot of time playing the game. Legaia is a passtime untill another great title arrives - that's the conclusion I reached in the beginning.

But I was wrong.

And gosh, I was so wrong that I'm still playing this game that I borrowed from a friend. Fifty-something hours of gameplay, and I STILL DON'T KNOW IF I REACHED THE MIDDLE OF THE STORY!

Simply because Legaia seems endless. And it's so good it seems like that. The storyline that may sound foolish or childish in the beginning, just grows and spreads around after some of the first missions are concluded. In fact, as the time passes by, the player starts to get surrounded not only by the mist that is the big problem offered by the game, but also by lots and lots of weird characters crossing your way, strange information and seeming endless, unexpected possibilities. Every time you clear a dungeon or solve a mistery, two other dungeons or problems appear on your way, if not three. When you stop and look, there are so many new foes on the way, so many different places to visit or old places to revisit because you know you've just pulled a trigger that CERTAINLY unleashed some new event on that place... oh, well... It's ok if you feel agradably confused with so many ways to follow. Probably it's the cursed mist just working on your head.

Actually, everything in this game may look childish, idiot, in the beginning. Even the fighting system, that is no more and no less than a slow-motion street fighting game system. Yeah! You don't need to make all those fast damn sequences of movements in the control to blow up or knock down your enemy's head. Unlike it happens with all fighting games, here the fighting action is slow, easy to deal with, or to correct if something went wrong. Don't need even to memorize the movements of a sequence - the characters have a good memory, and a screen with all the combinations can be displayed for each character. This fighting system, plus the use of Ra-Seru abilities and the battle itself, in which all the characters and enemies run freely one towards the other, occuping the field as they wish, bring for RPG addicted the sensation of also playing a fighting game with no need to such Tekken controlling efforts. And there's also the shock system, for the ones who have analog joypads (the ones who doesn't have such a 'useless' feature - like me - would feel tempted to buy one just to see what happen during a combat...)

Oh, replay value... It looks like Legend of Legaia has none of it... in the beginning. But, well, I remember there was a place in which there were two forests, or two sides of the same forest, to explore. I went to the left side and when I got back, there was not possible way to explore the right side anymore. Oh, and that girl in the beginning of the story... I said NO to her, and after we met again and she was mad about me just because of that NO I've said to her twenty hours before. What would happen if I have said YES to that girl? And what about, next time I play the game, going through the RIGHT side of the forest, huh? And, man, there are SO MANY hidden items, fighting technics and other features that you are going to get amazed, reviewing the game until you find and experiment all of them.

After fifty-something hours of game play I can say Legend of Legaia starts with a 6 grade for everything. Stop playing it in the beginning and you're going to say only bad things about it, so silly it was. But you're going to change your mind after the first ten hours. Sure you will!

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 11/01/99, Updated 11/01/99