The Legend of Dragoon: Should I?

[Deeth Irteen]

Since all I have in my room is a silly little PS1 with the game FF7, I'm considering shopping around to find The Legend of Dragoon. The last time I Played it was about 7-8 years ago, and even then It was a small demo on a playstation underground disk. I thought the battle system was nice, and the graphics lookes pretty, but I didn't get much in terms of story from that hour of gameplay.

Because of this, I want to go find a gopy of the full game, so that I can enjoy the whole thing. What do you guys think?

[Dreamknight]

I never played it but everyone here seems to hate its stinking rotten guts.

[marcus]

I never played it but everyone here seems to hate its stinking rotten guts.

general opinion is pretty polar.

i thought it was riding on the coattails of final fantasy 7's success. the battle system is kind of fun at first but then you realize you're just mashing buttons except they have little spinning circles and timed presses to keep it from getting too monotonous.

the game is still stupidly easy and the story is pretty boring.

[MRevelle83]

I liked that game alot. The only problem is that the battles got tiresome with long intros to each one. After seeing the screen melting away and extensive camera shots of the environment 10,000 times in 120 hours, it gets a bit grating on the nerves.

But at least it helped me prepare for the same assery in FFIX.

[Deeth Irteen]

That demo I played was one of my first forays into the RPG genre, and I thought the trailer's score was catchy.

[Karim]

I thought it was pretty mediocre all around, and I'd have to agree it felt like it was trying to be FF7 in a lot of ways.

The one thing I really liked about the game though was the spinning circle you had to time in order to attack as a dragoon; too bad trying to time the normal combos was miserable and they were what you spent most of your time doing.

[JLaCroix]

There are so many better RPG's that you could be playing on the PS1 than this. I'm not saying Dragoon is bad, but it's nowhere near as good as the best games on the console.

[Shard]

I played it when it was new and didn't think it was awful. It hasn't aged well though. Do yourself a favor and hunt down Vagrant Story instead.

[JLaCroix]

Vagrant Story, as well as Xenogears, Star Ocean, Parasite Eve (the first one not the second one) and any one of the Final Fantasies released for it.

[Chuck]

I enjoyed Legend of Dragoon. In fact I still have it but my disc 4 got screwed up long ago. The battle system was my favorite thing about it, the story and characters were bland at best and the translation was pretty laughable. But yeah there are plenty of better games.

[Seraph]

You should play Beyond The Beyond. Seriously.


No, I'm just kidding. Don't.

[josh]

I liked it. that's not to say I'd feel the same way if I was to pick it back up, but it's worth the experience.

[orius]

You could try it, but it's really a fairly mediocre RPG. I knock it more than I normally would, since it was published by Sony and not a smaller company (i.e., they could afford to make a better game).

Here's what I consider to be the game's cons:

-Limited inventory. You only have space for 32 items, but 255 pieces of equipment. This is retarded, especially since the game's magic system revolves around items or using the dragoon transformations. You need items to cast elemental damage spells or to heal. But because you only have 32 spaces, you can't make an effective stockpile, so to take advantage of elements, you need to fall back on dragoon forms. Stupid. The high limit for gear is unnessary, I never came anywhere close to reaching that max.

-Dragoon forms are kind of the game's equivalent of the FF summon: flashy but more expensive than is really worth it. They only last a few turns, as you progress through the game, the transformations can last longer, and you build up your durations by doing attacks. The only thing is, once you transform, you have to start from scratch again (IIRC), kind of like how Mist Charges in FFXII use up chunks of your MP. I can't remember if you can voluntarily end a transofrmation early or not, but later in the game you can be transformed for 5 turns in a row, which can hamper strategy. It's often not worth the cost. It wouldn't be so bad if the Dragoon transformations weren't the most effective way of using magic (thanks to the dumb-ass use of items mentioned above).

-Dragoons aren't as effective as they could be, yet they're supposed to be the whole focus of the game. They're strong early on, but later they loose some oomph. Later, you can get more out of timing the stronger combo moves right than transforming into a dragoon.

-Horrible story. It's like the writers read the Grand List of RPG Cliches and thought they were important story elements that were needed for a good game, because they cram a ton of them in here. Oh, this game is terribly cliched and unoriginal, you'll see damn near all of the plot "twists" coming a light-year away. And there's not enough style behind it to make it enjoyable.

-Filler. Once you get to around Disk 3, it feels like the game was padded out to fill four full disks. It really ends up dragging the game quite a bit.

-Translation. I swear this game got run through a Japanese-Engrish translator or something. Yeah, all the typical translation errors are here and then some. And there's some really clumsy translations or stuff that just looks hammy as hell. And the game gets extra knocks for this because Sony could have afforded a really good translation, and it makes them look bad.

Yeah, I would agree that this game was an attempt by Sony to cash in on the coattails of FFVII. It's like the game tried to copy whsat made FFVII a success but had no idea what made it a success. It's not unplayably bad, but the game's flaws end up sticking out like a sore thumb.

[Deeth Irteen]

Damn that's a big list of cons. Doesn't the game have anything good going for it?

[Big Rick Cook]

It's shiny?

The game had a lot of potential, and it didn't live up to any of it. End of story. And there's voice acting! It blow! =D

[Denmo]

If your head is still in the pre-FFVIII era of gaming, then this game is phenomenal.

For a game that brags about being under development for four years, there's a lot to complain about. I played it all the way through, and it was rather torturous. Orius's points are spot on, and I'll add in that the final boss is an anticlimactic joke and the ending can cause you real physical pain.

I only hear people talk about how much they liked the battle system, but really it's nothing spectacular. Just take FFVII and implement timing combos. Every 'normal' attack you do is dragged out into a series of hits that you have to hit buttons at the right time. If you get it right, the game 'rewards' you with extra damage and the character yelling the name of the attack in the most cringe-worthy way possible.

The story is nothing special. Read the 100 top RPG cliche list and you've got the gist of it.

[Cosmic Jeff]

You could play a good game instead.

[orius]

Damn that's a big list of cons. Doesn't the game have anything good going for it?

It's ok if you want to try something new and some of the areas in the game actually look pretty good. But the simple truth is all the time, money, and manpower Sony spent on this sucker could have resulted in a much more polished game.