The Legend of Dragoon is a role-playing game that had seemly everything going for it: Three plus years in development, a 100 + man development team working on its creation, a massive advertisement campaign, and a multimillion-dollar budget coming out of the deep financial pockets of Sony itself. With all of this behind it, what could possibly go wrong? Apparently, a lot!
Sony’s first mistake was to give the impression that Legend of Dragoon as a Final Fantasy VII killer, that combined with an incredible marketing campaign in magazines and TV, set tremendously high expectations on customers for the product.
Of course, RPG veterans knew what to expect. After all, a lot of other titles have tried to sell us that Final Fantasy VII killer moniker before (Shadow Madness anyone?)
Whether a RPG enters greatness really depends on three categories; Story, music, and artwork. Of all of those, story matters the most. After all, what makes FFVI a great game even after 10 years? Certainly not its graphics. However, its storyline is every bit as good today as it was 10 years ago. The technical aspects of the graphics eventually become outdated in every game, but the story, artwork ,and musical compositions are forever.
That is exactly what The Legend of Dragoon lacks…it does not have a soul, as it primarily relies heavily on aesthetics rather than on substance.
While games like FFVII are developed with the idea of creating an experience for the player, while playing the Legend of Dragoon I had the feeling that the game had instead been developed with the idea of emulating FFVII’s financial success by presenting a game with a similar look and high production values.
The Legend of Dragoon Featured High Budget Graphics and FMV
Graphically, the Legend of Dragoon is as good looking as a role-playing game can look on the 10 year old PS1. The game follows the same visual style of the PS1 Final Fantasies (the series which the game tries to emulate), the towns and caves are portrayed with pre-rendered backgrounds. In contrast, the characters, monsters, battle environments and the over-world map are rendered in full 3-D graphics.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone (considering the game’s large budget) that the game looks technically more advanced than FFVII and in some ways FFVIII. The water effects in the pre-rendered backgrounds are unmatched, except by those seen in Final Fantasy XI and in Chrono Cross.
The key word here, however, is “advanced” not “better”. FFVII and FFVIII look better because of one simple reason: Artwork. One only has to witness Legend of Dragoon’s pedestrian character and monster design to realize that Sony while having the technology and money to match Square’s graphical quality, remains a level below the RPG developer and others in what artistic design in a role-playing game is concerned.
Like the rest of the game, the character design here is somewhat cliched. Take for example the main hero, Dart. Dart is a carbon copy of FFVII’s Cloud, except that he has dirty blond hair instead of Cloud’s bleach blond mane.
Shana, one of Dart’s love interests, was meant to have a pretty character design, for some reason it is pretty, but not likable. The villain, Lloyd, is a carbon copy of Sephiroth’s design complete with silver hair (although his hair is considerably shorter). However Lloyd, while one of the better characters in the game, still pales in comparison to FFVII’s legendary foe.
In the end, the whole crew seemed to me like a compilation of generic copies of cast members featured in other RPGs like Final Fantasy VII. Fortunately, for what it counts, Rose (the other love interest) had a beautiful design that is both distinctive and original, two traits that the rest of the game seems to lack.
As stated before, the polygonal characters look all around smoother than those seen in FFVII and FFVIII but because of their corny design, they don’t really look as good, or are as likable.
The town and dungeon environments, consist of pre-rendered backgrounds that look somewhat sharper than those featured in FFVII-VIII.
The amazing water effects found in these are the highlight of the presentation. Yet, for all that the game does right for the enviroments, their artistic design takes a nosedive at times.
The towns are boring and uninspired in their design (with the exception of one or two towns in the latter stages of the game). In fact, the best way to illustrate this is by looking at the puny castles found in the game.
Play Final Fantasy IX and witness the majestic magnificence of Alexandria’s Castle. Now, compare that castle’s design to the “puny” look of Fletz or Serdio’s castle in The Legend of Dragoon, and you will see what I am talking about. It is almost as if the art crew in charge of the game had no grand visions that they could make a reality within the game.
With the possible exception of the Crystal Palace and a few other locales, everything else in here looks stale and lifeless.
The battle back grounds which are done in full 3-D, like in the PS1 Final Fantasies, are decent as they depict perfectly whatever environment you find yourself fighting in. The fully polygonal 3-D over-world map, however, is very lackluster. Its colors are bland and there isn’t much vegetation in it, and while you can rotate the camera 360 degrees while on the map, you can’t move freely while in it. Instead, a dotted line marks your path. Star Ocean 2’s world map looked better to me.
The graphics during the battles match anything seen in the Final Fantasy Series and the Dragoon Spells are impressive looking. However, the monsters and bosses while good looking have ugly designs.
Finally, this brings us to the FMVs which are some of the best the PS1 has ever seen. It puts most of SquareSoft’s stuff before Chrono Cross and FFIX to shame. Unfortunately, these scenes don’t happen very often, and when they do, most of the time they are uninspired and pointless.
The Legend of Dragoon’s Soundtrack is Mediocre
Musically, one word describes The Legend of Dragoon‘s soundtrack: Mundane. The music, at least most of the time, isn’t terrible, but when it is not terrible it is incredibly mediocre. The battle music has a crappy techno feel that sounds cheap and completely out of place within the medieval setting of the game.
The composers (Dennis Martin and Takeo Miratsu) saved their best two tracks for the end, because the song that plays at the ending scenes is good and the song with vocals during the credits is very good.
This, however, does not make up for the bad to average music that I had to endure for the fifty hours that it took me to reach the end credits. If anything, it frustrated me that the composers actually had it in them to create a decent soundtrack but instead chose to slack off. Shame on them.
The sound effects are your standard fare, with the usual spell explosions, sword clashes etc. done convincingly well. The voice acting, however, is some of the worst I’ve ever heard, all the characters sound like soul less robots. The game’s translation is terrible and thus the dialog read horribly, but I would rather put equal blame on the incredibly untalented cast for the subpar acting.
Dragoon’s Gameplay Lacked Real Innovation
Gameplay wise, the legend of Dragoon plays exactly like a PS1 Final Fantasy does minus the freedom to explore the over world map. You can control characters utilizing both the D-pad and the analog stick. The menus are well done, and even though you are limited to only carrying 32 items in your party, you will see that the difficulty level of this game is relatively low, so there won’t be much of a need for healing items even in those 20-30 minute long boss battles.
There are many chests containing items and weapons placed on the backgrounds, but besides the stardust side-quest there isn’t much in the way of mini-games or side-quests. There are about three optional bosses near the end of the game, that while not yielding any super items for defeating them, yield good EXP points that helps to level up our crew.
The way the battles are fought is where the Legend of Dragoon actually differs somewhat from most games in the genre. Don’t get me wrong, the developers pretty much copied FFVII battle system into their game (like they tried to do with everything else) but they added two very important elements to the whole dance.
The first element is the choice of transforming into a dragoon and the second being the addition of “Additions”. Dishing out punishment, especially if you perform additions successfully, earns the characters SP points that fill up the Dragoon meter.
Once the meter is full you can transform into a dragoon and utilize powerful magical spells depending on the dragon level. I really had no problem with this mechanic, as it added some strategy and flavor to the boss battles. However, I must say that I was greatly annoyed by the length of some of these Dragoon spells. Constantly using their magic attacks is part of the reason while most boss battles took so damn long to finish.
The additions are combos that the characters can perform, provided that you have the timing and reflexes to press the ‘X’ button right when the square that appears on the screen turns white. Keep in mind that you only have a split second to hit the button at the right time. Of course most of the latter additions, have multiple hits that you must string together by timing and memorizing the pattern in which the square turns white.
There is one variable to this…sometimes out of nowhere the enemy counters and the square turns red, in that case you have to hit the ‘O’ button at the right time to avoid getting damaged and to keep the string of hits alive. Each addition can be leveled up to level 5. In order to reach the highest level you must successfully complete each addition you want to master about 80 times.
While this process sounds tedious, and for some players it will be, powering up your additions is the only way that you will encounter success during the latter boss battles in the game. Speaking for myself in here, I never ran into any frustrating moment with the additions, and by the time I reached the last boss, my most used trio of characters (you can only have 3 characters in the battle screen at a time) had all of their additions mastered.
I think the additions kept the otherwise sleep inducing battles from inducing any sleep because if you are not awake during them you will get your butt kicked by failing to complete the additions. The gameplay here is really average fare as, there is nothing innovative going for it save for this timed system.
The Legend of Dragoon’s Story is Too Long and Cliched
The review finally brings us to the Story of the game; this is what makes or breaks an RPG, in my opinion. The Legend of Dragoon has an epic plot, keep in mind epic means ‘long’ not ‘good’.
You play as Dart, a warrior who returns to his village only to find it in flames, while discovering that his childhood friend Shana has been kidnaped by the forces of imperial Sandora. Thus, Dart sets out to save her while keeping in mind his own personal quest to find the “Black Monster” that killed his parents and destroyed his original village when he was a child.
Of course, there is an entire background story to this that is explained on the game’s instruction booklet. This story is cliched beyond belief: 10,000 years ago the Divine Tree created the world and every race on it, including the Humans and Winglies. The Winglies ruled and enslaved the humans, the humans then utilized the power of the dragons by utilizing Dragoon spirits and waged war against the winglies successfully freeing themselves from their the latter’s control.
At the start of the game’s plot line everything is nice and peaceful, but an irresistible power is brewing behind the scenes, and naturally is up to Dart and the eventual party that will join him to stop it.
Where have we heard this before? To start, the story isn’t that bad. Games like Grandia 2 have made great stories out of cliched themes, but the problem with the Legend of Dragoon’s plot isn’t so much the story itself, as it is its characters.
The cast has little to no personality, except for Meru and Rose, all of the characters read the same. Dart is the kind of character that you don’t hate, but you also don’t like, he is in the middle of things. Shana, I didn’t care much about her either until it became clear to me that the game was forcing Dart’s character to love her, at that point I began to despise her because…Rose was the most likable and distinguished character in the whole thing and at one point she shows some feelings for Dart, and yet, everyone tells Dart to love Shana instead.
To tell you the truth if Dart didn’t admit to Shana that he loved her at the beginning of the game, when Shana declares her love for him first, then why would he change his mind towards the end? This sounds a lot like Squall’s and Rinoa’s predicament in FFVIII, only that Dart is not a jerk, and I actually liked Rinoa.
Sony tried to make an Aeris out of Shana, but they forgot that Aeris wasn’t really forced into Cloud, instead Cloud was allowed to properly fall for her and that Aeris is one of the most lovable characters in RPG history. Shana is not lovable, her design and script is too generic to allow for that.
Rose makes more sense for Dart, simply because players will like her more than Shana. The rest of the crew is uninspired really, like Dart, they are simply stale and lifeless. This can be blamed in part to the localization because they all read the same, but also because the plot was so awfully predictable and cliched.
A strong villain was needed to partially save this tale, and Lloyd answered the call. Unfortunately, the only thing he has that would certify him as the right man for the job is having Silver Hair. Apparently, that was enough for Sony’s writers to use him for the part. He (not unlike every villain that has come before him) is a mysterious man who works behind the scenes in an effort to presumably destroy the world. To the game’s misfortune, Lloyd is neither scary nor even someone who one could learn to really dislike.
Without a strong crew of characters, you can have a wonderful story and yet no one would care to see it to the end. Unfortunately, Dragoon lacks both the strong characters and the wonderful story. Three years in the making and a multi-million dollar budget were not enough to create a mildly compelling tale.
The story is cliched at its worst, there is a ghost ship (Grandia), there is a tournament (Star Ocean 2 and Xenogears) and the whole Dragoon concept feels to me like it was taken straight from the Power Rangers tv series for kids. The problem with the game is that while borrows a lot from other RPGs, it never does anything to go the extra mile that it would take to improve upon any of the elements it stole from them.
I would be lying if I told you that there were not some good twists and turns, because there were, but when these events happened I didn’t care for most of them weren’t surprising, and like I said before, I felt indifference towards my party of characters.
Most disturbing in the tale, are its many plot holes. For example, in one part of the game it is learned that Character “B” is the chosen one to become a god to destroy the world, and that is why Character “B” is so important. But then Character “C” without a reasonable or rational explanation decides that he can become the god, so Character “B’s” once seemly vital importance to the plot, is now meaningless, rendering the entire story….well meaningless.
In the end, The Legend of Dragoon feels a like a quickly put together story, it had some potential but the developers screwed it up. Think of it as that 9 year old boy who watches anime all day and thinks he can write a great story, because he has great ideas (that he stole from the anime shows, no less) but doesn’t know how to put them together without making them sound corny.
It really seems that Sony had the entire 101 checklist on how to make a FF clone down. Spiky Haired hero? Check. Love interest that is persecuted by an evil empire? Check. Silver haired villain? Check. Wise martial artist old man? Check. Cool gimmick to take ahold of younger audiences (dragoons)? Check. And the checklist goes on and on.
Maybe this won’t be a problem to newcomers to the genre, but for seasoned vets this game’s plot line will feel like a pointless waste of time, as nothing out of the strictly cliched ever happens in it.
To finish things on the story, the spelling mistakes on the dialogue run rampant throughout the game. The one that I remember the most being “the ‘vally’ of gravity” (the correct word is valley, by the way). This is really embarrassing; that a rich corporation like Sony can’t at least properly translate a RPG is beyond me.
In the end, the Legend of Dragoon turns out to be exactly what Sony had envisioned from its conception, a game inspired by FFVII’s commercial success rather than its greatness as a game. In other words, a game with the highest production values but with out a heart or soul.
The Legend of Dragoon’s Rating: Mediocre
Gameplay: 7.0 — Typical traditional RPG gameplay. The game’s overworld exploration takes a big hit thanks to the lack of complete freedom of movement, but the Additions, low level of difficulty, and slightly strategic combat, keep the gameplay from becoming completely stale. (Note: During the fourth disc you get the option to go anywhere in the game world. However, you are forced to switch CDs every time you have to return to a previously visited town, this becomes somewhat of a tedious chore for those who want to do some backtracking.)
Graphics: 8.5 — The visuals are top notch but the artistry stinks. The FMVs are great looking also, but they are uninspired, and at times, there just for the sake of being there.
Music: 4.0 — After hearing the last two wonderful songs, I began to wonder why in blazes does the rest of the soundtrack sounds so amateurish and bland.
Story: 4.0 — Cliched, cliched and more cliched, horrible translation and grammatical errors punctuate the predictable plot holed tale.
Addictiveness: 3.0 — Finishing it once is enough for anyone to be convinced of its mediocrity, that’s if you get to the end credits. Most will probably be bored to the death before the first disc ends. The only reason I kept playing was because I had to review it.
Overall: 6.5 — The words “mundane” and “mediocre” describe the game perfectly. Instead of being a contender for FFVII’s throne, The Legend of Dragoon ends up being a pretender to its crown.
(We also took a look back at The Legend of Dragoon in our Throwback Bit Thursdays feature recently.)
Metacritic rated Legend of Dragoon a 74.
I’ve never seen a more autistic take in my life. There are other JRPG’s of that era that aren’t FF7 but the fact you describe it as an “FF7 clone” shows how little you know as the game more reflects 9 than anything. But you wouldn’t know that. FF7 was an extremely overrated game sporting 3D graphics and 2D character development. It sounds like you skimmed the dialogue if you thought that about Legend of Dragoon. Horrible translation and grammatical errors? You mean like Aeris and “This guy are sick”? Get a loaded gun and put it to your temple before pulling the trigger. Because you’re either extremely black or extremely autistic
When anyone starts their opinion with “I’ve never seen a more autistic take in my life”, their opinion is automatically considered ignorant. The first sentence tells me that you don’t know the first thing about autism, so the likelihood of the rest of your babble amounting to anything is VERY slim.
If it were an autistic person, or “take”, it would have likely been overly detailed and extremely extensive. Back to the board, Junior.