Legend of Legaia

"Major that’s true we look good every time"

It’s time for you to save the world again. This, once again, is your task in Legend of Legaia, yet another take on the standard RPG. While the game lacks freshness, it is a well-designed and mildly entertaining experience. Avid RPG players will probably want to pick it up, but this game should fall beneath the radar of more casual gamers.

This time your enemy is an insidious and implacable Mist which seems to destroy all it touches. The only people who survive this foe are those who flee its spread or block it from their dwellings. The lead character Vahn, a young hunter who could barely be called post-pubescent, has a harrowing experience when the Mist nearly destroys his village, and he commits to going out into the world and finding a way to defeat this inhuman enemy. Sounds original, eh? Anyway, Vahn is built in the same mold as Final Fantasy VIII’s Squall -- the strong silent type, although he’s not quite as sullen. The only way for him to defeat the Mist is to destroy the Mist Reactors that generate it, and at the same time to revive the powerful magic of the Genesis Trees. Naturally this quest will take him from town to town around the world, exploring as he goes, and the story develops predictably along this journey.

Vahn companions number only two but are a fairly interesting duo. Gala is the strong physical warrior; he has a samurai’s resolute nature and has a religious and spiritual background. Noa, a girl not much older than Vahn, is the most interesting character of the game: raised by a wolf (an above-average magically possessed wolf at that), Noa doesn’t seem to have a lot of respect for the ways of people. Her adjustments to and arguments with her human companions are a humorous touch in the game. The spare cast is one of Legaia’s pluses, I feel; it allows each party member to be a fully developed and interesting person despite their stereotypical appearance.

Despite the clichéd plot, Legaia has a pretty cool battle scheme which I thought was a pleasant twist on the normal turn-based system. Attacks in the game can be targeted at different parts of the enemy, and combos allow for multiple hits. Magic is also powerful, or at least as powerful as you want it to be. Within the game, the “Seru” magic is derived from powerful spirits that aid your party, called “Ra-Seru.” New magic is acquired by defeating certain enemies and taking their Seru power. Once it’s at your fingertips, magic gains strength through extensive use, which is nice because your favorite spells also become your most powerful.

The gameplay system has enough meat to last through the whole game, with new arts and magic to gain, and the abilities to form longer, more powerful combos. Legaia is also high on the difficulty scale when it comes to modern RPGs, which forces the player to remain interested and involved with the gameplay. Bosses especially are statistically strong and require careful strategies for victory. On the other hand, while the main story will keep you engaged, this title lacks sidequests and major minigames, which reduces its replay value beyond simply beating the game.

Visually, Legaia is fairly impressive but at some points seems to suggest a lack of effort on the part of the designers. The area designs are the best part, with a wide variety of locations all worked into the game. At times it seems this would be easy to accomplish, but some games seem unable to work interesting environments into a story. Legaia succeeds where they have failed, with vibrant forests, musty dungeons with creepy and uneven lighting, and abandoned, haunted villages. Yet the enemy designs don’t display the same kind of effort; here we see palette-swapping at a level unrivaled by any game I can think of except Final Fantasy X. The different enemy designs are attractive (or entertainingly disgusting) but they seem to crop up again and again. The characters aren’t very detailed, and it feels as if the game’s creators tried to forcibly make them interesting, applying such run-of-the-mill tactics as the wild hair colors -- pink and blue for Noa and Vahn -- and unusual color combinations, some of which work together nicely, and some of which clash horribly. Still, I’ve always felt that when the main players in a game are essentially human, these ploys lend a false sense of depth to a character that fades after a few hours of play. Generally, one could say that while the backgrounds in Legend of Legaia are excellent, what’s in the foreground is not.

The orchestration in Legend of Legaia is of top-notch quality. Stirring themes highlight the cutscenes which contain the emotional climaxes of the story, and the battle music is rapid and exciting. The music for the boss fights is even more enticing and gets the adrenaline flowing for these most important and difficult battles. The sound effects are pretty cool too, with nice thuds and bumps for the physical attacks, explosive sounds for magical attacks, and appropriate sounds for other battle effects like healing. The limited voice acting in the game is fairly crappy, and it sounds like some the microphones they used were piss-poor. Had it been well executed, more voice acting would actually have been nice, because the dialogue in this game is pretty well-crafted and the localization is comparatively excellent, although the typical unusual or misused idioms are present.

Legend of Legaia is a nice RPG to bide some time with for real fans of the genre. However, considering the wide selection that exists, there are many superior choices available for the Playstation that do much more with the basic concepts of role-playing. Like another similarly-titled game I played recently, Legend of Dragoon, Legaia does very little that strays from the baseline of RPGs -- it has a save the world plot, a typical cast of characters, and other classic archetypes. In terms of ingenuity and originality, Legaia fails miserably. However, good technical values, an interesting and diverting battle system, and higher-than-average difficulty make this a worthwhile choice for the experience RPGer who goes through game after game and is always hungry for more. Those interested only in the best of this genre should not apply.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 07/09/03, Updated 07/09/03