Archview #36: The Legend of Dragoon

 And so I lay my demons, err, Dragons to rest.

 The Legend of Dragoon was an JRPG released towards the end of the PS1's life cycle. It had a massive 100-hundred man team(That was a large team, at the time) and a very ambitious goal. It was released to a very mixed reception, some called it average, some called it good. Me? Well, back then I wasn't a fan...
 Regardless, LoD tells the story of Dart, a man in pursuit of the "Black Monster", the creature that killed his parents, who eventually finds out he is one of the selected "Dragoons", men who harness the powers of the Dragons. Of course, there are many other nuances to the story, it is a four disc game after all.

 When exploring, the game plays like any other JRPG, you go from towns and dungeons to towns and dungeons to advance the story. The overworld here is a bit more streamlined, as Dart can only walk through predefined tracks that lead from place to place. Combat is where the game adds it's own twist. For starters, after you get their Dragoon Spirit, every character can turn into a Dragoon after increasing their SP above a hundred, which you get by attacking, every hundred of SP you get another Dragoon turn, up to five. Dragoons have only two commands, Attack and Dragoon Magic, which make seem little, but humans have no spells of their own, what's more, Dragoons have a higher attack power and defence rating than humans, so early in the game, they are fantastic.
 The real "hook" of the game, however, are the additions. When you attack, characters don't simply execute an attack, nope, every attack is a rythim minigame in which you must press the X button following certain visual cues. Sometimes enemies may "counterattack", which has you pressing O instead, unless you want your addition interrupted and recieve some damage. As you level up, each character gets anywhere from 3 to 7 different "additions", with different number of button presses, which must be selected in the Status menu. I must admit I was afraid it would get tiresome in the long run, but they never grew old. As stated before, humans have no spells of their own, to use magic they must use items, and since item capacity is limited, you must choose wisely.

 LoD has a very mixed visual presentation, while characters are very jaggy, they are quite detailed, and the designs, while basic, are pretty cool, specially when they go Dragoon. On the other hand, the spells, particularily their particles and transparencies look very good. The Pre-rendered backgrounds themselves are pretty interesting too, and it's pretty clear where you can go and where you cannot. The soundtrack is the presentation's strongest asset, there are many different pieces, and they all sound so good. There's a bit of voice acting too, and it's passable at it's best, and hilarious at it's worst, it kinda ruined one of the scenes during the ending where I found myself laughing, but it's not that bad. Not always.
 Now onto my gripes, first of all, backtracking. Every time you need to go from point A to point B, you have to go through every town and dungeon in between, you do get... means of quick travel on the fourth disc, but only for a little a while, and a little bit too late. Speaking of backtracking, some cities are only found on some discs, which means that you may need to switch between discs if you missed any optional sidequest, I found this one to be a minor annoyance, but worth noting anyways. Also, I found some of the plot points to be a bit cliche'd, even for it's time. But I did find the characters to be very well defined, and each had their own personality, even if some got shifted a bit to the sidelines. Lastly, items. There is a limit, as stated, and as bothersome as that could be, if you try to open a chest with your inventory full you won't know what's in th chest. Which means, if you want to check the contents, you need to make a gamble and discard something.

 To sum up, The Legend of Dragoon is a bit different. It's not unique, but it has it's own unique twists on the Combat, and in my opinion, they work. I did have find some annoyances with the game, but they didn't get in the way of my enjoyment of it. I really don't get why I didn't like it back then, maybe it wasn't the game I needed, but the one I deserved...
9 out of 10.