-DA sublime, avec les arrières-plan fixes très variés et inspirés. Par contre les musiques sont pas ouf et se repetent souvent (peut être l'un des plus gros défauts, ça nique l'ambiance du jeu)
-Plein de villes, variées, avec des ambiances différentes, et des pnj qui ont leur propre histoire qui évoluent tout au long du jeu (les dialogues de chaque pnj change à chaque avancé scenaristique, comme xenogears ou panzer dragoon saga). Cela donne un sentiment de vie et d'univers consistant et cohérent.
-Chara design top
-Bon scenario, plutôt bien rythmé (notamment au début, on rentre très bien dans le jeu). Plein de rebondissements, notamment fin de cd3. Un petit creux lors du cd2 tout de même. La fin est cool (et le boss de fin est archi stylé)
-Univers intriguant et intéressant
-Persos globalement intéressants, même si certains sont peu exploités et que la trad est à chier (et les rares doublages sont catastrophiquement drôles #mgs). Il y a un peu d'émotions dans certaines scènes mais c'est pas au niveau de certains ff ou de xenogears.
-Mise en scène ouffissime ! Gros point fort du jeu ! En combat avec une variation de plan et un cadrage recherché, particulièrement lors des attaques de boss ou en dragoon (animation au top) + cinématiques avec le moteur du jeu + cinematiques en image de synthèse toujours très reussies. Techniquement le jeu fait le max pour l'époque et ça se sent !
-Système de combat cool au début, avec les combos qui apportent du rythme et du stress, la transfo en dragoon sympa. Mais très répétitif sur le long terme. Quelques boss sont vraiment bien (notamment cd3 et boss de fin)
-Indicateur qui annonce les combats aleatoires et la vie des ennemis qui est bien pratique (bleu pas de combat ou ennemis a encore plein de vie, orange bientôt combat ou ennemis mid-life, rouge combat imminent et ennemis bientôt crevé). C'est bien le seul truc pratique dans ce con de jeu !

-Trop de combats aléatoires !!! (Heureusement, les donjons sont souvent en lignes droites et peu labyrinthiques). Pas de possibilité de desactivés les combats avec un objet (comme dans les ff) et pire : les chance de fuir sont souvent très minces !!!
-Pas d'overworld. En soi c'est une forme de régression par rapport aux ff mais c'est pas le problème principal... quand 2 villes sont séparées par une forêt de merde ou un canyon à la con il faut traverser cette zone sans possibilité de la contourner (et y'a plein d'aller retour entre villes ou donjons !). Et il y a à chaque fois des combats aleatoires ! Insuportable (le tp n'arrive qu'au milieu du cd 4). Et en plus, sur la carte (balisée et non ouverte comme ff) il y a aussi des combats (au secours !)
-A chaque fin de donjon, il faut se le retaper dans l'autre sens (mais what !?)
-Inventaire limité à 32 objets... cela a du sens pour éviter de casser le jeu avec trop de soins et cela nous force à utiliser le système de défense en combat (qui nous fait gagner de la vie). Mais cela reste horrible. A chaque nouveau coffre, il faut virer un objet et comme on ne sait pas quel est le nouvel item on va peut-etre jeter un truc plus intéressant que ce que l'on récupère...
-L'ergonomie du menu est pas top, notamment au niveau de l'équipement (on ne voit pas nos stats actuelles quand on veut changer d'equipement, on sait juste si ça augmente ou baisse les stats, mais on ne sait pas de combien !)
-Les micros temps de chargement a l'ouverture du menu sont relous à la longue, ou ceux quand on entre ou sort d'une zone, ou encore pire : à chaque lancement de combat !
-Les transformations en dragoon sont certes stylées mais trop longues. Ca devient chiant sur le long terme.
-Certains persos, récupérés sur le tard (meru, miranda) sont inexploités car on ne nous fait pas trop jouer avec et on ne veut pas changer notre équipe de base. Il aurait fallu que tous les persos gagnent de l'xp, même ceux qui ne combattent pas afin de nous pousser à varier les équipes (l'xp est donné a tout le monde mais la répartition est trop inégale, ce qui creuse l'écart de niveau entre perso). C'est un problème de quasiment tout les jrpg de l'epoque
-Il aurait été bon que les persos regagnent leur vie à chaque fois qu'ils montent de niveau (et pourquoi pas à chaque fin de combat, comme les jrpg modernes ?)
-Points de sauvegarde trop peu nombreux et souvent mal placés
-L'auberge ne soigne pas les altérations d'état... Il faut aller dans un centre spécifique pour cela, c'est chiant !
>>> Tout ces éléments alourdissent le rythme et minent l'expérience de jeu. Le jeu devient trop long et frustrant pour rien (heureusement le jeu n'est pas trop dur non plus, cela evite les crises de nerf)

-Pas beaucoup de quetes annexes mais c'est pas grave, elles sont cool et nous font découvrir du lore. Et par contre il y a plein de scenettes annexes si on fouine bien partout.
-Par contre, pas assez de mini jeu. Le jeu se base trop sur son système de combat et son scenar pour avancer. Il aurait été bon qu'il casse davantage le rythme avec des petites variations de gameplay (chrono trigger avec la course, xenogears avec le versus fighting etc.). Cela renforce la répétitivité du jeu.
-Il n'y pas de scène culte. Ce qui s'en rapproche le plus ce sont la fin du cd3 et le boss de fin (il y a une tentative aussi à la fin du cd1... Rip Lavitz). Il manque des musiques de ouf qui aurait sublimé certaines scènes et apporté une ambiance impeccable à l'ensemble.
-Il est dommage que les thématiques ne soient pas davantage creusées. Il y a des éléments intéressants (avec le délire de l'arbre divin, la lune qui fait penser à evangelion etc) mais on reste tout de meme à la surface.


Conclusion : jeu tres sympa mais trop lourd dans ses systèmes pour que l'expérience soit pleinement agréable. Et de manière générale le jeu n'atteint jamais l'état de grâce emotionnelle d'un ff de l'époque (meme s'il le touche du doigt parfois) ou la profondeur d'un xenogears (même s'il y a des pistes intéressantes). A faire pour les fans de jrpg, mais pas un jeu culte !

My personal favourite game of all time, the very first JRPG I remember playing at the young age of 5 years old. I don't think I really got it then but I didn't care. This cool Blonde dude in red armor transformed into a literal Dragon Knight with wings and punched a meteor. I was in awe of what I was seeing at the time. I didn't even pick up on at the time what I would realize 10 years later was one of THE COOLEST COMBAT SYSTEMS in a game for the time. ADDITIONS ARE SO RAD MAN!

Looking back yeah The Legend of Dragoon is not a perfect game, The story kind of starts to fall apart a bit in disc 3 and 4 but I really love it still.

First thing that strikes me about this game is the production values. There are some really gorgeous pre-rendered environments, and the models and animations all look great. This is one of the best looking PSX RPGs. The soundtrack is also an extremely underrated one and feels very unique.

The gameplay itself is pretty simple with a few gimmicks. The addition system is interesting and possesses a good element of risk/reward to it. It helps it stand out a bit more from all the other typical turn based games, but isn't quite as annoying as the Combo system in Xenogears and Legend of Legaia. The difficulty is mostly breezy outside of a few boss fights, but there's some really great, challenging side content in the game.

The plot is simple and not too engaging, but I found it was told really well. The plot kicks into gear pretty quickly and I found that there was very little downtime in the storytelling. This game does something that I really like in how there are moments in the game where the story is progressed by going and talking to all of your party members. This gives the characters an opportunity to feel alive whereas in most RPGs of this era your party members tend to fade into the background after their individual arc is completed.

My biggest issue with the game is with its animations. The animations look really great, but there are too many of them and they all run pretty long. The dragoon magic sequences get especially tiring considering how much of your time you'll spend in Dragoon form. There are some boss fights that took me between 30-45 minutes with at least a quarter of that time spent watching the overly elaborate boss attack sequences over and over again. It really drags down the game when even trash encounters take longer than they should. If possible play this in a way that lets you fast forward to make these segments more palatable.

There's a couple of other annoying and puzzling elements. There's a 32 item limit which I felt like I was always at. I ended up not picking up a lot of loot in dungeons simply because I didn't have item slots for it. The game also feels extremely stingy with its EXP and money. It felt like characters took forever to level up and characters on the bench would be quickly left behind. This is odd because the game definitely feels like it wants you to swap out party members to take advantage of elemental weaknesses, but characters could be left behind so easily and maintaining equipment for multiple people requires a lot of grinding.

There's a lot more effort in this game than they had to put in and it's just weighed down by a few really egregious feeling bugs.

It sounded like a prophecy. My cousin, the biggest "culprit" for making me love video games so much, in the early 2000s told me about Dragoon and concluded with: "I think this will be your favorite game."
How right he could be.

Shortly after, I played Legend of Dragoon, one of the most revered cult classics in the JRPG genre. It's funny that even though I've played hundreds of games since then, it consistently remains my favorite. My top has changed a lot over the years, but the #1 spot has always been consistent.
I love everything about Dragoon: its pace reminiscent of a good shounen anime, its almost alien visuals, its gameplay system that is a pleasure to master, its color-coded and elemental-coded party, its soundtrack completely different from other games in the genre, the idea of drawing inspiration from cultures beyond medieval Europe.

And what a beautiful game cinematically, with so many beautiful cities, incredible places to explore, memorable scenes like Lavitz against Lloyd, Rose in the shipwreck and her past, or Dart and Shana in the castle in disc 2. The stakes get higher and higher. The lore is rich, with a story that spans millennia. Everything about it seems tailored to appeal to my tastes as a kid who grew up in the '90s, heavily influenced by manga, shounen anime, color-coded armored people, stories of existential crisis, the power of friendship, protagonists with spiky hair, elementals, and crystals. And Dragoon has all of this in abundance.

My strong emotional connection with it makes me understand that even though it may not have a story that reaches the levels of Xenogears or FFVII, a battle system as competent as the press-turn in Megami Tensei, a soundtrack or dungeon design like Wild Arms, the best party in the genre as in Persona 2 Eternal Punishment, Dragoon is still such a strong, cohesive, and competent package in everything it sets out to do. It transports me to such a happy time in my life, and with so many elements and tropes that I grew up loving, it will probably be my favorite game of all time until the end of my life. It represents much of what I love most about video games.

Ever since PlayStation released the PS1 classics on the PS5 with upscaled resolution, rewind features and save states a lot of people were playing ‘The Legend of Dragoon’ which caught my attention as I love RPG games. I eventually got around to playing it recently and I felt it to be quite a punishing game.

Off the bat, ‘The Legend of Dragoon’ is a Final Fantasy wannabe game. It came out in 1999 shortly after Final Fantasy VIII and looks like a hybrid of FFVII & FFVIII. The battle system is the one element of this game that really drags it down. Battles are so slow. FFIX got a bad reputation for slow loading battles, well this game beats that. To attack successfully you need to time button presses perfectly along with your character attacking. If you miss these then it is almost as if there was no point at all in attacking. There is an item that will time the attacks for you but it is VERY expensive. Unlike Squall’s gunblade attack in FFVIII which gave you a slight damage bonus, Legend of Dragoon relies on you hitting the strike button with perfect timing to cause normal damage. I can feel my blood boil just talking about this. Along with your low impact attacks, enemies will cause you significant damage too, you will find yourself using healing items a lot.The pace of the battles as well is so sluggish, special moves taking so long to play out. You can skip the Dragoon transformations but that is about it. Like in my ‘Sea of Stars’ review where I said sometimes in RPG games I like to just sit back and repeatedly tap the action button to get through battles, I don’t want to have 120% concentration for every single battle. Due to the slow speed, concentration needed and low experience received from battles, grinding is just not a feasible option in this game at all, if you fancy keeping your sanity.

Alongside the need for multiple healing items the game limits you to 32 items max at a time. No, not 32 different types if item, 32 of any item, they do not stack. This means that on your way to a boss fight you will deplete most of your items leaving you up a certain creek without a paddle.

Each area uses the same design style as Final Fantasy, a 2D rendered image that you can move around. Each area’s doors are marked with colourful arrows which are helpful, not so helpful that each screen has 8-10 of them, each building having multiple entry and exit points, some leading to dead ends meaning that each area is confusing and frustrating to navigate. One town there is an elderly lady who can only be accessed from a building the other side of the town, across rooftops then in through the loft down a ladder. Like, how does she get out? Are there sufficient fire exits for her?

The writing is not great at all, yeah I do like the characters, they are all different and have their own personalities. The text boxes are similar to FFVII but when a box appears that lets you select a response it is not very clear and I always accidentally selected the first option from the list. Yeah there is a little bit of voice acting but only in cutscenes and when each character achieves perfect attacks they will call out the attack name. Dart has a move called ‘Volcano’ which has absolutely nothing to do with volcanoes.

I threw in the towel at the Phantom Ship area as each battle was kicking my arse as I was unable to hit the timed attacks at all. I don’t know if it is due to me or the latency between the controller and the PS5. I used up all my items and Dragoon power just getting to a boss which the guide stated that I’d need a full inventory and healthy party to be in with a chance to beat. That is another massive issue with the game. You are sent through an area with tough battles or multiple bosses with nowhere to restock items or heal your party. It is completely an endurance test.

I tried so hard to stick in with this game despite not enjoying it from the get go but I felt that it was very restrictive and didn’t want the player to have fun. If it is a Final Fantasy knockoff then they decided that Final Fantasy was too fun and easy for their standards. I understand that this game has a big following but I can only imagine that is purely nostalgia based as they played it when it first released, also gamers were a lot more resilient then.

..................................................This is Sony's answer to the critically acclaimed game Final Fantasy VII on the PlayStation 1? Fucking pathetic. How dare they even ATTEMPT to mimic one of the best games of all time. Dart wants to be Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII so fucking bad it's unbelievable. The addition mechanic is a fucking joke as well. The last thing I ever want to hear in my entire life is some, and excuse my profanity, ASSHOLE, screaming VOLCANO like a fucking inbred idiot. Don't believe me? Take a gander: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6NZr7A72Zk

Enough said.

I won’t mince words, I am unapologetically nostalgic for this Power Rangers video game and I’m not going to go the extra mile to hide it. Legend of Dragoon is your quintessential PS1 generational RPG adventure, a four-act structured chronicling a group of misfits who band together to save the world from nefarious plots. Truth be told, when I call Legend of Dragoon’s plot a take on Power Rangers, I genuinely don’t mean that as an insult. There’s some depth of humanity, heroism, and self-sacrifice in the story, hidden behind an unfortunate series of translation errors. You have your friendship speeches, your ridiculous, slapstick nonsense, et cetera. It rules and who cares.

The real meat of the experience lies in a context-sensitive turn-based system. You see, player actions aren’t simply a menu-dependent series of decisions; you will have to press button prompts in timely fashion to execute your moves correctly. For the main attacks, additions, the idea is to increase their potency; a successfully-inputed addition means you deal more damage this time - and next time, it could do more as you level it up. And, once you unlock Dragoon forms, the more additions you complete, the more of a chance you can get to use Dragoon forms. For role-playing games whereupon menu attacks can feel like strategic-based decisions, Legend of Dragoon asks you to not get cloud-visioned and be incentivized to use your most basic tool. Eventually, you may find additions themselves surpass magic-based attacks Dragoons have in certain situations. And I think that’s one of the game’s subtle strengths: Legend of Dragoon gives you options to play with and all of them are viable in some way. Whilst being forced to use the lead, Dart, means a player can’t be as creative with their lineup to maximize creativity, there’s still plenty to appreciate between elemental attributes, recognizing each character’s particular value in set encounters, how enemy types affect combat, etc. Legend of Dragoon’s system ultimately does what any competent RPG should: It makes you think about your decisions and doesn’t necessarily limit your answers. You want a team build for beating down enemies with additions, you can. You want a team that exploits the speed stat and items, you can. You want a team that is balanced, you can. By the time you have five or six of the core team, the sky is the limit on your success. There are built in mechanics to prevent too much power, namely a set item limit of thirty-two, but an observant player will note that any struggles are probably going to come down to their own lack of engagements and failed preparation. Bosses can and will be the main obstacles, even having AI script changes and phases that may change the dynamics as they progress. Though, for my money, Legend of Dragoon succeeds in what it wants with its battle system.

There are a few barriers to entry for this game: For one thing, this title’s pacing is inevitably sluggish, even by its own generational standards. While it does feel like the party is on an adventure, progression in certain areas doesn’t yield a great amount of rewards narratively or mechanically. Battles, like I said, are engaging, but they can become monotonous with the load times between the many animations. I genuinely don’t think there is a single battle, from the start to the result screen, that is capable of lasting under 30 seconds, most of it being wait time. This may not seem like a big deal and it's excusable for the hardware, but, if you’re a bit on the inpatient side, this can be noticeable. While the game does kick up with its pace and battles as it goes on and side missions (namely optional battles, some of the best of the game) open up later, the main story may not grip most for the first two discs - possibly in its entirety. Whilst none of the party are uninteresting (one of the leads is quite the opposite), one later addition feels like an obligatory replacement with a forced arc to just be there. I don’t think Legend of Dragoon’s pacing is inherently negative of the sort personally, but I can see a number finding it tedious.

That said, this game was extremely precious to me and my younger days. As an adult, I appreciate it for what it was. As good as my memory said? I wouldn’t say that, but it’s charming, unique, and entirely itself the whole way through. I remember it for a reason.

In about the year 2000 I used to try and hunt down rare JRPGS that barely got released here in the UK. At the time I used ebay, paper adverts, second hand stores, charity shops etc. It was a different time back then and I steadily got hold of games like Suikoden 1 and 2, Vandal Hearts, Wild Arms, Star Ocean the Second Story, Koudelka, special edition of Symphony of the Night among others. Legend of Dragoon I had never heard of. Walking into a video rental store that used to also do video games I saw it on the shelf, I'd never seen this anywhere else so I asked if rather than rent it if I could buy it. The clerk called the owner who said it had been recalled after two weeks so was pretty rare but said I could buy it for £17.99. An absolute steal now looking back and the game was in fantastic condition having barely been borrowed as almost no one here was aware it even got released. My friend now has that copy as I no longer physically collect media, quite the opposite but still it's a core memory of a different time. As for the actual game? I played it up to disc 3 somewhere and remember it being okay but never got around to finishing it. As it got released on PlayStation premium and my memories of it were hazy I figured now was a good time to jump in and actually finish it. Having spent 80 hours over the last few weeks on and off playing it my opinion of it hasn't really changed much, it's good.

The real issues I have with the game stem from the writing, I have heard in part it's down to a poor localization, and fans have patched the game with an improved version I understand but playing the original certainly leaves a lot to be desired. The issues stem from more than that though and into the heart of the games story. Take Shana for example, she is the childhood best friend of the protagonist Dart. Her entire personality is that she is in love with him and a woman. The game hits you over the head with this so often it's sort of ridiculous. At one point the game makes sure to really emphasize that she is weak as she is a woman (despite her proving she can fight) and instead of patrolling she should cook food for the men, of course her cooking is then also mocked. It's just painful to sit through. That said not every moment in the game is that level of, well, garbage. Though not as deep as I may have liked some moments are quite well realized with some characters, almost poignant at times it's just so inconsistent or the dialogue just glosses over what feel like quite emotionally impactful events.

That aside the game is good. Visually the game is fantastic. The character models are well detailed for the time with the baked in backgrounds. The art design is generally cohesive and well realized with some great music and it's certainly got a lot of content to it though for an RPG it's incredibly linear. I liked that you never have to level grind, it's almost impossible as you get so little experience and money that fighting most regular battles is barely even worth it. The party essentially levels up at boss fights and that's it, but it's all you need to see you through to the end.

The combat is fully turn based, 3 characters can fight at a time and party members not in battle receive maybe half the experience points so unless you swap characters all the time will become completely unusable as they did to me. There was an 8-10 level difference between my characters by the end of the game and I beat it at level 39 so I just used the same 3 characters. The combat itself rather than just select attack has some interactive prompts called additions. You have to time pressing x to squares coming into the screen almost like a rhythm game. This is pretty cool initially but quickly becomes a chore where there isn't enough variety in these once you get the strongest. Occasionally you have to press a different button to stop the enemy countering which even if successful is needlessly irritating as it blocks your view so you might fail the next input anyway on the more complicated end game additions.

The combat balance is all over the place generally actually. Largely the game is insanely easy where you can defend to regain 10% of your health and enemies aren't a threat. This is such a case that a lot of bosses have insta kill attacks you cannot stop. They are the only time I died. You can go into a Dragoon form which you can use extremely limited magic and attacks that are barely stronger than normal physical attacks in most cases so feel pointless. Add that you can only carry 32 useable items and I ended up leaving most treasure chests as my inventory was full and I had no idea if the item in there was better or not (It almost always wasn't when tested).

So overall this is a hard game for me to score to be honest because despite how negative I may seem, I don't dislike it. I like the general story idea of races born sequentially. I like Rose's storyline and the general atmosphere the whole game permeates. I can see why people like it, I can see why fans call for a remake or a sequel as this could have been something special, but it's just kind of average. Worth playing now it's more widely available for sure though.

+ Presentation values are great.
+ Decent amount of content.
+ No level grinding.

- The writing is mostly bad.
- Party in reserve get small XP amounts quickly making them useless.
- Item limit is annoying and pointless.

Here is a bonus making of video from the time. Look at those PCs!

A classic RPG from the tail-end of the PlayStation's heyday. Combat is your standard JRPG romp with some extra flair added. Attacks, Spells, and Summons range from simple to flashy with some nice looking Dragoon Transformations to boot. The score is very well done with a nostalgic, late 90's/early 2000's sounding style featuring some catchy battle tunes, a memorable menu theme, and beautiful overworld music. The game's main issues in my opinion are that the devs locked the max items you can hold to 32 for some reason, which makes the inventory management more annoying than anything. The translation is also pretty rough making it kind of difficult to be able to understand what's going on in the story. If you look online you can find patches that fix both these problems with one doubling the item limit and a script rewrite that makes the story far more coherent.

Despite its shortcomings, it is overall a good game that could have been great with some extra time in the oven. If ever a game could benefit from the remake craze of the modern age, The Legend Of Dragoon is it.

Returning to playing PS1 RPGs, I decided to pick up one that a fair few of my friends have talked to me about for years, Legend of Dragoon. This was a game I’d loosely heard of in the past, but not one I’d ever really seen anything about in particular, so I went in more or less completely blind. It was also during the course of this game that I learned of the PS1’s very own VMU equivalent: The PocketStation! It took me around 7 or so hours (which is my best guess) to play through Moguuru Dabas, and it took me around 65 hours to play through Legend of Dragoon itself. I played the Japanese versions of both on real hardware. I wanna cap off the intro here with a special thanks to my good friend Anna for gifting me the PocketStation! For reasons I’ll get into later, I likely couldn’t have beaten the game without her generosity! ^^;

Legend of Dragoon is the story of a young man named Dart. Upon returning to his hometown in the middle of a much longer journey, he’s first accosted by a dragon and then finds his hometown reduced to a charred ruin by the invading armies of the neighboring empire. Saved by a mysterious woman named Roze, Dart sets off on a journey to save his childhood friend Sheena from the evil empire. Along the way, they’ll become intertwined in a much larger world-saving plot involving the truth behind their world’s legends, its dragons, and the titular dragoons.

While the writing and story have a STRONG first impression of being just an off-brand Final Fantasy (at times it really feels like outright copying ^^;), the game thankfully manages to outgrow and outshine that impression very strongly over the course of your adventure. Handling themes like the evils of colonialism (both material and psychological); the relationships between legend, truth, and propaganda; and the trials often necessary to grow beyond past traumas; this is a game about how the past (be it distant history or just a few years ago) will always shape and mold the present, but we need not let it define the future. That said, the writing is still far from perfect. The character writing, particularly of your main party, is very strong and well done. However, that makes it only all the more noticeable how your last party member, defined largely by racial stereotypes, has comparatively poor character development when compared to the other six. Be that as it may, I still think that the good manages to outshine the bad more than well enough to let the game be one of the better written RPGs I’ve played on the system.

Unfortunately, despite its narrative successes, Legend of Dragoon leaves a LOT to be desired on a mechanical level. The main head behind this game was the same guy who did the battle design for Super Mario RPG on the SNES, and a lot of the turn-based battle system feels very much like a far more ambitious version of that game’s systems. However, the main battle systems being a series of timing QTEs for your main attacks always felt far more finicky than it should’ve been. The UI design of those QTEs is far less precise than something like we’d see in Shadow Hearts a couple years later, and the lack of a precise area to aim for really makes it a frustrating system to engage with. There are more advanced combos (called “Additions”) you can equip for your normal physical attacks well, but longer combos are not only harder to execute properly with their button timings, but they also open you up to counter attacks from enemies. As we’ll get to in a bit, this is already a game where healing is very difficult, so opening yourself up to even more damage never felt like a very good trade off, and I stuck to shorter, more reliable Additions the entire game.

One of the main reasons that healing is quite so difficult is down to the game’s dragoon system. Instead of having magic normally like most other RPGs do, your characters normally have no spells or magic. Instead, they have dragoon forms that they unlock over the course of the story. As you deal normal attacks, you’ll gain SP, and getting enough SP allows you to transform into your dragoon form. Better Additions give better damage and/or SP as well as you improve them, so that’s one reason beyond just damage to try out the harder Additions (if you’re so inclined). Every 100 points of SP allows for one turn in your dragoon form, and you increase your dragoon level to gain more spells and better stat modifiers while in that form once you hit certain (invisible) thresholds of your total ever gained SP.

All that said, you ONLY have spells within your dragoon form, and getting into your dragoon form not only takes the time of racking up that SP, but you can also only do it within battle, meaning you absolutely cannot cast spells outside of battle. Additionally, while some fraction of total EXP gained in battle is distributed to your non-active party members, you only gain SP while actively in battle. This means that non-active members gain no dragoon levels at all, and in a game that’s already this hard and has this slow of a leveling curve (grinding one level can easily take over an hour if not several), you REALLY don’t want to be experimenting with your party make up very much because you’re only going to be punished for it. Your party of seven feels almost uselessly large a lot of the time, because not only are your new party members basically always without a dragoon form for some period (meaning they’re not gaining any dragoon levels if you use them), but that also means that’s less experience that your main/strongest party members aren’t getting too. I stuck with Dart (whom you’re stuck with no matter what), Albert, and Roze the whole game, and I don’t regret it one bit, no matter how cool the other characters may be.

On the whole, Legend of Dragoon’s mechanics feel extremely poorly thought out. Having your only real form of attacking being normal attacks when you don’t have a limit break form to break out just makes battles feel like a contest in getting lucky enough that the boss doesn’t decide to just mulch you with a few repeated nasty multi-target attacks. You have attacking items, sure, but they take up very valuable inventory space, but that is extremely nonviable in a game where not only do you have virtually no healing outside of healing items (you can heal 10% of your HP if you block, but that’s almost always a useless amount), but you also need to face bosses who, from almost the very start, can often cast up to three very nasty status effects. How do you heal these status effects? Well, there are THREE different items that cover different ranges of status effects, and that’s not counting the items you’ll need to have to heal MP or revive downed party members. All of this is supposed to fit into a puny inventory of only 32 items. While the narrative may be among the best on the console, the mechanics of Legend of Dragoon make it something far less, and they’re so rough that they make the game tragically difficult to recommend as a result.

This is a good a time as any to mention that the Japanese version, while it lacks the poor translation of the English version, is overall significantly more difficult of the two versions of this game. Enemies and especially bosses have anywhere from 20 to 80% more health than their English counterparts, and you also earn roughly 3 times less money from encounters. While your main source of healing is items, so rationing your healing items accordingly is an extremely important part of your gameplay strategy, they don’t cost that much. Being that poor in the Japanese version basically just means that you’ll be forever unable to afford the super armor and helmet sold in certain shops which cost 10k each.

I’ve seen tell online that the reason that the English version has so much more money is because you don’t have the PocketStation game to earn money in, but I would disagree with that to a point, as in my experience playing Moguuru Dabas is roughly just as fast a way of earning money as just doing random battles (generally speaking). However, what Moguuru Dabas DOES get you is special items for completing stages, so that makes for a nice segue into talking about the PocketStation companion game!

Moguuru Dabas is a game starring Dabas, an eccentric merchant who you bump into around halfway through disc 1. After you meet him, you’ll gain the option to download Moguuru Dabas to your PocketStation and get yourself items, money, and special equipment by playing through it. Just like a Dreamcast’s VMU, the PocketStation has its games downloaded onto it like memory card data, and all 72kb of Moguuru Dabas live on there for you to pop out of the PS1 and play to your heart’s content. Dabas has 5 stages to dig through, with not just money, but also mushrooms, bones, and gems to find as he goes. There are caves he can find (and your radar makes finding the much easier), and you won’t know what’s inside them until you enter them. Sometimes, it will be a treasure room with items or money. But those aren’t for Dabas, of course. They’re to transfer back to Dart & friends! Other times, you’ll find a cave with a Minint dwelling in it, and they’ll convert your mushrooms into more max HP, your bones into more attack power, and your gems into cash as well as fully healing you!

In most caves, however, you’ll find a monster to fight! Monster fights are very simple, as a game with only 4 directional buttons and an action button would make them. Dabas and his opponent move back and forth automatically, with your 4 directional buttons all being a block button, and your action button swinging your pick axe to attack them. Enemies guard treasure chests full of money, items, or health for Dabas, and the bosses at the end of each stage guard a special chest as well. That special chest has a particular piece of equipment in it to send back to Dart! Some highlights are an accessory that halves all incoming magic damage, one that halves all incoming physical damage, and one that halves ALL incoming damage.

With loot this good on the table, playing through Moguuru Dabas is a pretty obvious choice for an enterprising Legend of Dragoon player. You can do it whenever you want, and despite there only being five stages (at which point you see the credits), you can just restart and play through again for the same prizes again, if you’re having enough trouble in Legend of Dragoon itself. I only played through it the one time (only actually finishing it one room before the final boss of LoD XD), but I had a lot of fun with it! The graphics are simple but very charming, and it’s a very pleasant little gameplay loop. The only music it has is over the credits screen, but that’s to be expected for a machine with such little data and power at its disposal. The only bummer is that you do need to return to home base (the PlayStation) after very stage completed to activate the next stage being playable, so it’s a somewhat inconvenient companion app at times, but given that all you lose for dying is being sent back up the hole you’ve dug a bit, you could always just die on purpose to continue your Dabas adventures on the go however much you want~.

The one place where Legend of Dragoon doesn’t slack a single bit is its aesthetics. Over 100 people at Sony Japan Studios spent three years an 16 million dollars developing this game, and hot damn does it look like it. The music is quite good, yes, but the graphics look incredible, and a lot of that is down to a deliberate focus away from the prerendered CGI cutscenes so popular in RPGs at the time. This means there are a ton of really gorgeous in-engine animations both within battles and outside of them that just never stopped looking awesome the whole way through this game’s four discs. It does have some CGI cutscenes, which look nice enough, but the in-engine cutscenes, from more dramatic chase and battle scenes to more subtle mid-conversation reactions from characters really make this story come to live in an incredible way.

This beauty sadly does come at the cost of battles taking quite some time. This game is no stranger to quite noticeable loading times even mid-battle, and those luxuriously animated fight scenes do make battles take quite a bit longer. Just how long animations (especially for spells) take is one of the main reasons the average completion time is like ten hours longer on the Japanese version of the game, and it’s also another major reason that grinding takes SO long to do. The final boss alone took me just over an hour to kill between his spell animations, my spell animations, and the 60,000 HP he has in this version of the game (vs. his 42,000 in the English version). I think overall that battles do move at least a bit faster than earlier PS1 games like Final Fantasy 7 or Persona 1, but it’s still quite noticeable, and it’s very difficult to ignore just how lengthy battles and animations take no matter how pretty they are ^^;

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. No matter how fun Moguuru Dabas is, the roughness of the mechanics of the main game can really not be ignored. They’re less of an issue in the significantly easier English version, granted that does come at the cost of a worse translation. Be that as it may, however, the story and presentation are good enough that this is still a game some will find very much worth playing. It’s hard but far from impossibly difficult, especially in English, and if you’ve played most of the other biggest RPG hits on the PS1, this is still something I think is worth checking out. I overall enjoyed my time with it, and I’m glad that I played it, even if its battle systems drove me crazy for a good portion of it XD

My girlfriend and I have been playing this game together as our next main RPG for awhile, but we took a bit of a break before the of disc 1. We're on the couch, she's doing her own thing and I stared through Skies of Arcadia. Despite kinda just looking out of the corner of her eye, she was more compelled by what was happening in this gamecube game she never heard of prior to this night, than the game that both of us had wanted to get around to for years, but just didn't have the time.

It's not like I don't have a strong taste for boring ass JRPGs. We just got done with Grandia 3. Every time I give this game a sincere shot, it comes off as less essential than almost any alternative on the console outside of like, the well known dreck. There are elements of the game that totally work, I like the soundtrack and the graphics are technically impressive.

The vibe's just not there. I don't give a fuck about this Sol Badguy knockoff, I have played +R against too many ratchet sidewinder monkeys for that archetype to carry me through four CDs. Why are the fights so fucking slow. The transformation gimmick isn't interesting from a mechanics standpoint and they take a billion years, to the extent that the developers put in a "get the fuck on with it" button in the options. The relationship with the main love interest is unfathomable boring, has man ever been in love? Why did you make the main character's best friend a lamer Rudolph Stiener?

There are attempts at worldbuilding and like, character development you would see in a really good RPG. Not the biggest fan of the Tales of series, but I think skits are really cool. The Legend of Dragoon has these developmental scenes and the writing is so fucking boring I do not care. Outside of "this is a genre on a console that's library has a bunch of fantastic JRPGs", and "I'm Blue" being the background music in a castle, I can't think of any reason I'd suggest this game to someone or a reason for it to cross my mind of a regular basis. There was effort and talent, and it isn't horribly inept, but The Legend of Dragoon just doesn't work.

Um dos melhores jogos de PS1 que eu já joguei, o nível técnico de jogo é do mesmo patamar que franquias gigantescas como Final Fantasy e Dragon Quest.

A história é excelente, ela te envolve do começo ao fim, com grandes reviravoltas e personagens carismáticos na qual você se importa mais com o desenrolar da história.
Um detalhe a comentar sobre a parte da história é que ela é relativamente longa. Eu mesmo precisei de 45-50 horas para terminar o jogo.

The Legend of Dragoon usa bastante a fórmula dos Final Fantasy antigos em todos os aspectos, mas no combate vem o seu diferencial.
O jogo utiliza uma mecânica onde o jogador precisa executar uma série de botões para obter sucesso nos ataques contra inimigos, quanto maior número de acertos, mais danos o inimigo sofrerá.
Os Addictions trazem cada série de botões em ritmos diferentes.
Sem contar a forma de Dragoon onde os personagens recebem um up em ataque e podem atacar com magias poderosas.
Tudo isso compondo o combate de The Legend of Dragoon que apesar de ser um RPG de turno, essas mecânicas fazem ele ser um jogo mesclado com ação.

A trilha sonora é boa e bem caprichada.
Cada cenário possui uma faixa diferente, indo de músicas relaxantes em lugares pacíficos para músicas épicas em batalhas.
A faixa dos créditos também é bela de escutar.

The Legend of Dragoon é um grande jogo, um baita achado na biblioteca de jogos do PS1 feitos pela Sony.
Particularmente acho que é um jogo que não precisa de uma continuação, porém um remake nos moldes de Shadow of The Colossus, Demon's Souls e Crash N. Sane Trilogy seria algo muito bem vindo.
Uma pena a Sony não ter planos para ele.

Starring Red Cloud as he came to be known back then. A game that can make dragons boring. Horrible translation alongside a nonsensical storyline holds back...Uhh. I mean it was a...game...? It had turn based with QTE when you hit people, about the only really interesting aspect about it. I would've rated this much higher when I had played it in the past, but replaying it as an adult led to noticing...A lot of issues. Like the storyline being bananas and said translation issues.

Games like this always have their loyal supporters, but there's a good reason Square hasn't gone back to this game.