Review: The Legend of Dragoon

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The Legend of Dragoon

Time Investment: 40+ Hours

Verdict: Pass

There is a lot to dislike in The Legend of Dragoon, but what stands out as the single worst thing about this game is just how close it was to being genuinely great. As it stands, though, nearly every aspect of this game is either a good idea that was not fleshed out enough to be interesting or it was just wholly bad.

It is so close to being a truly great RPG experience. On paper it has everything it needs, an interesting fantasy setting where legendary dragons and the titular dragoons that controlled their power are making a grand return. It is a fun setting full of nothing but clichéd characters and rote political intrigue that goes nowhere. The protagonist, Dart, is on the hunt for a damsel in distress as well as answers about his mysterious past; one character is a king looking to prove himself and protect his kingdom; and another is an old fighting master who has made some mistakes in his past. It feels like that is precisely how far they got in the design of the characters and then called it a day.

This incomplete feeling permeates every other aspect of the game as well. The overworld is large and intriguing, but instead of allowing you to explore and find secrets like you might expect from SNES or PS1-era Final Fantasy titles, it forces you to follow a literal dotted line on the ground from point to point. The only thing of note on the overworld is the needless random battles that serve to only interrupt the brief interlude between locations. Like in many RPGs it was exciting the first time I stepped out of town and into this grand world map. But all of that was dashed once I realized how limited it was.

The game does have its interesting bits though. It’s not just that the game tends to fail in delivering quality—though common—RPG elements. It brings some genuinely unique twists to the genre that I only wish could have been further developed. What sets this game apart from the crowd is that there is a timing element to all of the game’s attacks, called additions. You have to hit a button in a set pattern every time to see its full potential. When you get some of the more difficult additions and nail the timing it is a fun change to the standard formula that games like Paper Mario or Lost Odyssey would play with down the road. Despite that glimmer of inspired game design it tends to fall apart throughout the course of the game. There are certainly boss fights that were inventive and made you use the game’s mechanics in specific ways, but more times than not the battles just required you attack every turn and simply not miss your button prompts. There is also a chance that the enemy could counter you in the middle of an attack. The game announces this by roughly inserting a differently colored prompt into the mix. It can be difficult to catch this in time, but because it also halts the attack for an animation when you succeed, it can be even more difficult to get back on track in the attacks that are highly timing based. It seemed at first like a good way to keep you on your toes during combat. In practice though, its disruption of the flow of combat makes it an unwieldy and overly difficult feature.

As an aside, because I’m not playing this in 2000 on a CRT, the timing on the prompts often had an obnoxious amount of input latency. I was fine learning to just adjust my timing for a bit until some of the more complicated additions made it maddening. I found that the only way to get a decent experience without going through the hassle of finding and hooking up a CRT, was to play it on my Vita. It’s not a knock against the game necessarily, just something to note for modern playthroughs.

The combat in The Legend of Dragoon is pretty standard, with the ability to turn into a powerful Dragoon warrior being its main differentiator. When you turn into a dragoon you are unable to turn back to normal until you have played as the dragoon for a set number of turns, which is tied to your character’s Dragoon Level. It is the game’s big narrative hook—that you are one of these ancient, powerful beings—but the implementation is disastrous. You will still need to regularly use these transformations because their sheer power is vital in some of the tougher fights, but because you are stuck in these forms, it means that you can get in spots where you need to use an item but are forced to keep attacking until that turn counter hits zero. It sounds interesting at first that you would need to be as prepared as possible before deciding to transform, but it lasts for more turns as you level it up which means it becomes less and less tactically viable as you progress. It ends up simply being a chore that squanders these, otherwise quite cool, transformations.

I don’t want to spend too much time tearing apart all the game’s minor foibles, but the translation—from the dialogue down to the menus—is laughably bad. The character and place names are also so bad that at times it felt like they were trying to outdo themselves with each subsequent name. Your name is Dart from Neet on the continent of Endiness. It all just comes off as names from a third-rate dungeon master.

You also tend to only get any meaningful experience from boss fights which means that the random battles just serve to highlight the game’s egregious load times, pad out the game’s length, and make you feel like you have something to do between hour-long story breaks where you do nothing but click your way through poorly written dialogue. You couldn’t go fifteen minutes without getting the sense that this game was either made by people who didn’t quite know what they were doing or the team’s eyes were bigger than their stomach.

Legend of Dragoon was so close to being great, but it stumbles on the execution of nearly every one of its concepts. It is a shame. I love it when someone comes along and makes an original RPG (there are only so many Final Fantasy games a person can play), so it’s too bad that, for all it cribs from that franchise, they get so much of it wrong. I really wanted to like this game, but if you’re looking for an RPG to play, then I recommend you look elsewhere.