I've been playing a lot of the Legend of Dragoon, lately. This is actually the third time I've attempted to go through the game. The first time was in the 90s, back when I had it on the original PlayStation. I was like 10 at the time, and I made it a certain length into the game and for some reason or another, whether it was the compoundment of other games that stole my interest from it, or frustration, I stopped playing. Later on, well after the death of my original PlayStation (RIP) and before I got my PS5, I tried again on emulator, and I remembered, the mechanics, and it all came back to me why I stopped playing.
Let's just say I chalked this up to input lag from emulation. Fine, I learned my lesson not to use emulators for such a game. Then I get it on my PS5 for 10 bucks and try again. This is my most recent attempt. I've finally come to realize something about the game that I couldn't quite admit to myself before; The Legend of Dragoon has top-notch presentation as far as graphics and story, everything from the visual and sound department is up there with the top Final Fantasy games of that era. The problem is that mechanically, it's not fun.
The combat in The Legend of Dragoon relies heavily on precision-based combos, but those combos are so strict that it's almost impossible to pull them off correctly consistently. After 20+ hours, I've managed to almost nail down the main character Dart's combo Volcano relatively well, but other than that, I struggle to execute basic combos even now. Imagine Expedition 33, but where the combination inputs were tightened to reliance on 1/10th of a second of input to the point where performing just the basic combos to fight enemies was so difficult that you couldn't pull them off and you felt like an idiot.
Imagine playing Final Fantasy VII, and Cloud wouldn't do more than 20 damage or so because you missed a millisecond window to hit the X button. Imagine it being like this with almost every character, the exception being Shana because she uses a bow and is fixed to a relatively low to medium single hit bow shot. The funny thing is, I think the devs of the game knew the combo system sucked, which is why they put an item in the game called Ultimate Wargod, which you can buy from a vendor for 10k gold (which is quite a lot, as neither the rewards in the form of XP or gold scale very high).
Ultimate Wargod is an accessory that allows the player to auto-perform combos, which means, in a sense, that you can just play the game as you would a Final Fantasy or any other turn-based RPG without feeling the shame of knowing that your reflexes aren't disciplined enough to actually play the game. The game is actually very restrictive like that. You don't have a lot of inventory space either, a measly 32 slots for items that aren't gear, so a maximum of 32 health potions, non-stacking, and if you fill that space, you have no room for Angel's Prayers (the equivalent to Phoenix Downs), or any offensive magic. I feel as though this restriction is totally arbitrary, as you don't really get a whole lot of gold to begin with.
So, you would assume that because I'm bitching so much about this game that I don't like it. No, it's not the case. I love the story and the characters. Everything from a presentation standpoint is A tier, and everything from a mechanical standpoint is F tier. It makes playing this game very bittersweet because there's a sense of perseverance because my love outweighs the bad, but my God, it made me realize that if any game is deserving of a remake, it's The Legend of Dragoon. I promise, I'm gonna actually finish this time. Right now, I'm on what would be disc 2, on the Phantom Ship, ready to fight the boss for that area. Wish me luck.
