9/8/2019 Legend Of Legaia Ps1
When I was little I did not own many games for my. I had some sports games from relatives that did not know me well, some THQ-made licensed games from grandparents with the best of intentions, and some RPGs that I bought for myself - those were my favorites. The vast majority of the RPGs I enjoyed were from ’s late-90s hit-factory; however, there was one game that I loved as much as the PS1 Final Fantasies:. This seemingly forgotten gem was loaned to me by one of my friends in 1999 and he hasn’t seen it since. Now Legend of Legaia’s story is almost purely JRPG genre fare, complete with teenagers trying to rid a doomed world of darkness; but, there was something about its combat system and its magic system that are still compelling to me. Look at all of that graphic!
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Legend of Legaia’s combat system was purely turn-based with a unique input system. Rather than simply having a normal menu with options like attack, skills, or magic, Legend of Legaia had ordinary item and magic use with a more complex attack system. Selecting attack took you to a sub menu where you could choose which combination of right/left punches and high/low kicks to form an attack combo. These attack combos could then trigger specific “arts” or special attacks based on the specific combinations; for example, the main protagonist, would perform a summersault kick if you entered high/low/high. The lengths of your combos were limited by an attack bar that filled up as you entered commands. This attack bar would vary in length on a per-character basis and it would increase as your characters gained levels, allowing for more and more powerful arts and complex art combos.
The number of arts you could perform was limited by an AP or action point meter that prevented you from simply unloading your best attacks every turn. This meter refilled a little by not performing arts on turn, or a lot by defending (the game called it’s defend move “spirit,” but it was essentially the same as defend in most traditional RPGs). On top of refilling your AP meter, defending extended the length of your attack bar for one turn after defending. This balance between attacking, defending, and unloading spirit-boosted super combos made a deeply interesting and re-playable combat system out of what is usually taken for granted in JRPGs. Rather than creating a bunch of skills that you have to learn as you level up, Legend of Legaia gave you a fighting game-esque combo system and left it up to you how best to use it.
Just entering the correct attack commands unlocked new skills, rather than artificially gating a bunch of skills behind a level wall as so many games did. This allowed basic fights to be a place to test out potential combos and discover arts rather than purely repetitive auto-attack-fests.
The attack bar also allowed each of the game's three main characters, Vahn, and, to be defined and unique in combat based purely on the length of their attack bars. Noa was a pure attacker because her bar allowed for long combos. Vahn was in the middle between physical and magical attacks as his bar was in the middle. Gala was best used as a caster because he simply could not unload physical attacks like his companions due to his short attack bar The game even had romance! The second cool system that Legend of Legaia introduced was its magic system. The vast majority of the spells in the game were unlocked by fighting elemental monsters called Seru, the game’s main source of monster chaos.
Legend of Legaia (レガイア伝説, Regaia Densetsu) is a PlayStation action role-playing game developed by Prokion and Contrail. It was followed by Legaia 2: Duel Saga. Overview Legend of Legaia is a Japanese role-playing game for the PlayStation that follows the story of Vahn, a young man out to rid the world of a deadly mist.
When fighting a Seru, if a character delivered the killing blow with a physical attack, there was a small chance that the character would absorb the Seru and gain the ability to summon it during a battle. This made every fight with a Seru a constant juggling act to give the last-hit to the character that most needed that Seru’s magic. You could not really auto-attack your way through a fight with a Seru, because doing so could cause your characters to miss out on valuable spells. There were even some early Seru bosses that offered you a one-time early chance to gain insanely powerful magic early in the game. The random chance to gain magic again added variety and thought to what could have been a tedious combat system. Furthermore, magic leveled up as it was used, which incentivized you to use it as often as your MP allowed, rather than hoard your MP for boss fights as so many RPGs require. Legend of Legaia certainly did not rewrite the book on narrative and setting, but its achievements in combat design are a lesson that should not be forgotten.
In a way Legend of Legaia asks the question, “what if every character attacked like from and learned magic like a from?” I think that it proved that combining those two designs was one hell of an idea. Legend of Legaia was pretty great. I remember I got a standalone demo for it on a disc through PlayStation underground magazine shortly after I got my PS1. I played it so many times before the game actually came out. As I recall it was one of the very first notable games I got for the system.
The combat was pretty neat and I did really like the Seru system, but I've always felt it didn't quite hold up for the length of the game. There's a point roughly 2/3 of the waythrough where I always get tired of inputting commands and start just doing random crap. Although I think the game does drag out a bit long regardless.
That last dungeon feels like one too many. I feel like you're a bit too dismissive of the story though. It's not genre defining, but it's generally interesting and entertaining and it has a pretty likeable cast of characters. The story is as much a reason I have fond memories of it as the gameplay. I also always liked how it kind of defied genre tropes by making the young girl the kickass fighter of the group while the big burly martial artist was actually a way better magic user/healer.
You can immediately see the difference the moment you try to play Legaia 2: Duel Saga. That game is so so bad. Oh yeah, and the way the Ra-Seru grow on your arm as they get stronger is stillone of thecoolest things in a game to date.
What a flash of nostalgia. I was in high school and had never played a JRPG before. I had bought a Playstation recently to play Resident Evil and Fear Effect, and a friend told me I had to play this game he just finished, Legend of Legaia. Just minutes into the game, I was hooked by the mundane thrill of just wandering around the starting town and having conversations. I loved every moment of this game, and it inspired my deep dive over the next few years into any JRPG I could get my hands on.
It also caused me to go down the (dial-up, at the time) rabbit-hole of SNES emulation:) I had a similar flash of nostalgia a few months ago when I bought the updated FF14 MMO on sale with the sole intention of playing for the free month and quitting. It's (unfortunately, for my tastes) still an MMO at its core, but it has all of the trappings of PSX-era Final Fantasies and was worth a month of play if you can get it on sale. Thanks for bringing back these memories! : Glad to hear that other people actually played this game!: It is certainly worth at least a partial replay if you can find it!: Yeah this game is way longer than it needs to be and it certainly drags in the middle and towards the end. I don't think the story is bad by any means, it is just really cliche for a JRPG.: I've gone back to it and the game is way easier for me now that I grasp basic JRPG combat and character building. Back when I was a kid I would always get rolled by the bosses.: I have been hoping that this game would get re-released on psn, but it it looks like it just does not have the following to warrant it.
You can get a used disc for pretty cheap, but man I wish I had a digital copy for my Vita. : I think that it really depends on when you last played Legend of Legaia.
When I played it when I was younger I was less familiar with the genre tropes and I did not see that each of the main characters really fit in with Japanese character archetypes (silent protagonist, spunky girl, stoic monk). I also did not see how ubiquitous the world in peril story-line was at the time.
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There are certainly some unique elements of the story that are unique, like the main character actually having an established girlfriend that is not player chosen nor a throwaway character. The nature of the seru is also interesting once you get to that point. Perhaps it is just that Legend of Legaia is just too dang long to play more than every once in a while, and you really can't shorten the game by simply knowing the systems, like say FF8 or FF7. You need to grind in Legend of Legaia and the game is easily over 40 hours long with a lot of unskippable world-map running with slow movement with random encounters.
So I haven't really experienced its story as many times a I have most of my other favorite games. : I think it was only a few years ago that I last played it, so I still have a pretty clear image of the game in my mind. I don't think you're necessarily wrong by calling it 'cliche', but that can be a pretty pejorative term, and I think a lot of people are instantly dismissive when they see the words 'cliche' and 'JRPG' in the same sentence. There's nothing wrong with a good old-fashioned world saving adventure story in a JRPG if you do it right. But maybe I'm a little biased because it's so easy to directly compare it to Legaia 2, which is the epitome of an awful cliched JRPG. : There is nothing wrong with cliche, but when I think of games like Lost Odyssey and FF9 that really ask some hard questions about the world I can get a little tired of the cliche.
As someone who has enjoyed Anime and JRPGs for years the cliche stuff doesn't even really register emotionally anymore. I guess 'deep' and 'emotional' isn't necessarily what I'm looking for in every game. Simply being 'entertaining' can be enough. Lost Odyssey had much deeper themes, but I also kind of didn't like the majority of the cast, so ultimately I did not enjoy the story as much. (Although those short stories were really good.). I played the hell out of the demo and maxed everything out that you could do in the starting town. I knew the arts for all the moves, but a lot of them didn't work in the demo (like the dolphin move for Noa).
I eventually got the game used and played the hell out of it. I really enjoyed the combat system and how good the characters looked in combat. I didn't know it at the time as I didn't know what anime was, but thinking back on it the game was anime as hell. I don't know why Western RPGs refuse to use the 'rival' concept. Every great character can be complemented by a great rival (Virgil and Dante, Ryu and Ken, Raiden and Sam, Bayonetta and Jeanne, Red and Blue, Asura and Yasha, and the list goes on). Contrarily to most PS1 RPGs I've played, I really don't remember this specific game fondly - I didn't like the mood of the game back then.
Something about the color pallet and soundtrack felt really depressing to me. I'm pretty sure I've finished this game in my childhood, but I can't remember almost anything from the story itself. All I can gather is the fact that the world is enveloped in some kind of monster summoning mist and that there's a weird girl that joins your party at some point that was raised by wolves. For some reason I also remember keeping an item called 'point card' for the whole game without ever using it, because I felt like it should be only used against the last boss.
Sale Date ▲ ▼ Title ▲ ▼ ▲ ▼ Price 2019-03-17 $-03-15 $-03-08 $-03-06 $-03-05 $-02-28 $-02-14 $-02-10 $-02-09 $-02-04 $-02-04 $-02-01 $-01-31 $-01-31 $-01-25 $-01-14 $-01-07 $5.00 2019-01-01 $-12-31 $-12-28 $-12-13 $-12-10 $-12-03 $-12-02 $-11-29 $-11-27 $-11-26 $-11-21 $-11-21 $-11-18 $23.99. Sale Date ▲ ▼ Title ▲ ▼ ▲ ▼ Price 2019-03-17 $-03-16 $-03-15 $-03-15 $-03-14 $-03-14 $-03-14 $-03-14 $-03-13 $-03-12 $-03-10 $-03-10 $-03-09 $-03-09 $-03-08 $-03-07 $-03-07 $-03-05 $-03-04 $-03-04 $-03-03 $-03-03 $-03-03 $-03-03 $-03-02 $-03-01 $-03-01 $-02-28 $-02-28 $-02-27 $33.96. Sale Date ▲ ▼ Title ▲ ▼ ▲ ▼ Price 2019-02-27 $1-02-25 $-02-11 $-02-04 $-02-03 $-02-01 $1-01-16 $-01-07 $1-01-07 $-01-04 $1-12-24 $-12-18 $1-12-17 $-12-14 $1-11-19 $-09-10 $1-09-03 $-06-03 $1-05-10 $1-04-22 $-04-04 $1-04-04 $-11-23 $1-10-31 $-06-23 $1-06-21 $-05-29 $1-05-21 $1-03-05 $1-01-22 $159.99.
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