Had a staycation last week and thus, played a lot of
Legend of Legaia.
This game is mediocre as all hell. It's such a slow paced and sluggish game, where battles take forever, movement takes forever (especially on the world map), the game itself is pretty grindy (especially since equipment seems way overpriced yet necessary), and the load times aren't insignificant. The graphics were all rendered in 3D on the maps, which seems pointless since you can't rotate the camera or zoom in/out, I think things would've looked much better if they used prerendered backgrounds. The dungeon design isn't that great, usually its a straight line to the next area (filled with lots of battles), maybe a branch off to get a treasure chest. The story, just feels rather repetitive, no interesting twists, very little mystery... and the characters are one-note, you have the silent lead, annoying girl raised by wolves that carries on like a hyperactive child, and the stoic monk character who tries to put her in her place. This is during a time when RPG stories and gameplay were at their height, yet here we have simplistic story and characters from an early 16-bit RPG and a slow, grindy gameplay progression to match.
The combat has some interesting aspects - a system primarily driven by the d-pad (though it can be confusing and unintuitive with where menu options are placed, if I want to attack with a bespoke combo I need to press <- to select "Attack", then -> to select "Custom", then input the command sequence(s) for different attacks, then <- again to "Confirm"... be careful you don't press -> instead of <- at the end because then you'll have to re-input everyone's commands!) it builds nicely as you unlock new skills, and has some decent visuals (as far as PS1 3D goes). But the slow pace of combat and the fact every enemy seems to have overinflated HP (especially the boss fights which just dragggggg assssss).
Music.. most of the songs are very repetitive and loopy, especially the battle theme. Sure, I like drum and bass (the official genre of the PS1) as much as the next guy, however hearing an amen break plus 5 notes over and over again for the battle theme got old fast. Especially considering how long you spend in battle.
A little over 30 hours in. I made it past the Kowloon Walled City style town, and while this would've been the high point (since it has some minigames and a more interesting/unique graphic design than the rest of the game), however there's a big grind needed to save up for special bread. Now I'm in a snowy town and have to find something called the "TimeSpace Bomb", yeah the game's translation feels pretty stilted as well. The "Seru", "Ra-Seru", "Sim-Seru" all kinda give me L'Cie, Fal'cie vibes
But my SO2R collector's edition finally arrived so I will probably shelve this for a bit and play that.
