role-playing

When I first popped the game into my playstation, I was fascinated. The graphics were brilliantly done, and the FMV sequences were real cool too. If you are a twelve year old nerd, that may be enough to satisfy you, but I looked a little deeper and became disappointed. The storyline was extremely shallow and reminds me of what I wrote in 3rd grade creative writing. Also, the battle sequences and the whole "dragoon" thing are about as childish as Power Rangers or Sailor Moon. First of all, they got the meaning of "dragoon" absolutely wrong. The dragon knight is a lancer who is the champion of dragons, not some mighty morphin doofus who shouts corny slogans and casts overly flashy magic spells. So with all of that said and done, I must say that if you are content with action and flashy special effects or if you are some dragonball z type person, this game is for you. If you want something deeper, like a clear continuous plot or good characters, may I recommend any Final Fantasy game, Chrono Cross, Lunar, or Vagrant Story.

I am sorry. There are so many rave reviews for Legend of Dragoon that I am forced to write yet another sobering one so you actually know what you're buying. And, no, I am not biased toward the Final Fantasy series. In fact, I've never played a minute of it.

Legend of Dragoon is a long, four-CD role-playing game made by Sony Computer Entertainment. The game is accompinied with the company motto "created by a team of one hundred over the course of three years", probably aimed to impress.

Now, Legend of Dragoon (from now on referred to as LoD) isn't an awful game by any means. It's actually somewhat innovative. The problem with the game is that it is horribly restrictive, as if Sony was afraid to innovate too much and loose the target audience.

Take, for example, the turn-based combat system that various other reviewers tout as the greatest ever. Sony introduced a minor element of action to each character's turn in combat by allowing you to increase the number of strikes per attack with a well-timed press of a button. These combination attacks are called Additions. Each has its own name, damage multiplier, and the limit to the number of attacks. Sony went ahead and made it so EACH CHARACTER CAN ONLY PERFORM ONE TYPE OF ADDITION PER BATTLE, effectively doing away with any strategy you may have hoped to develop. In fact, these combos are actually standard attacks, since by failing to perform them all the way through will cause miserably little damage, in no way enough to kill the bosses. Whether this action element is good is up to you. I enjoyed the realism a bit, although to pull off some of the faster, longer, and more complex additions is quite hard.

This restrictiveness extends to other parts of the battle engine as well: too few magic spells (most of them attack spells in various elemental flavors) and a laughably small inventory are the major examples.

Although some of you are bound to disagree with me (why else would my reviews accumulate negative votes?), the music is unimpresive and low on melody. Likewise, the voice acting (in battle, not in FMV) ranges from uninspired to ludicrous. Although the voices fit in rather well, the translations are hideous (Flurry/Ferry of Styx comes in as the most rampant example).

The game's chief downfall is the hideous dialog which spoils an otherwise promising story. The characters spout off poor humor and awkward jokes at the most inappropriate moments, while the designated comic relief character is so amazingly annoying that I had trouble with keeping my Playstation on. Likewise, the characters are stereotypes: the short-tempered hero, the valiant knight, the mysterious dark lady, and the damsel in distress are just a sampling of the playable characters. The characters also seem utterly incapable of logical thought. At times hey brought me to tears with their "whatever happens is fine" attitudes. Example (not word for word): "Whoopie! We're sailing to the place where our chief nemesis went!" "I wonder why our enemy told us where he was going?" "Beats the heck out of me!" And so on and so forth to infinity and beyond.

The prerendered backgrounds are absolutely amazing (although the designers forgot that livelihood depends not only on photorealism but on movement as well), the very few FMVs being literally fantastic. Sadly, not too many FMVs ar what you might expect: most are "scroll across the mural in 2D" type.

The in-battle graphics are a step back, though. To accomodate the constant motion, almost everything looks blocky and low on polygons, especially the enemies (Crystal Golem and Wounded Bear being prime examples of low polygon counts). Your characters and the enemies are so far apart that it's very hard to orient the camer to see both sides of battle. The bakgrounds are low-detil and look washed-out, especiualy when compared to the rest of the game. Your enemies include a variety of rats, moles, bats, kiwi birds, tutles, and such. Somehow I didn't expect to fight forest animals on my "epic quest".

Sadly enough, this game is actually up to current standards in gaming. I can only name a few games that significantly raise the bar (and I won't name them for fear of angered fans). I can only tell you to give this game a try. If you are easily entertained by large explosions, sword-swinging characters, twenty-second-long magic spells, and muddled, simplistic chracter interaction, by all means, get this game right now.

this is one of the best rpgs i have ever played its up there with FF7 and FF8 which are really good games its very long but that is a good thing!!!! after u beat it u want to beat it again!