Legend of Dragoon initial impressions

[12.02.99] » Gameplay, battle system information.

   Legend of Dragoon, Sony's 4-disc epic RPG, has been released in Japan and J.T. Kauffman, our man in Japan, has a report on the gameplay:

   There are two main things that stand out about The Legend of Dragoon: its graphics, and its difficulty. First, the pre-rendered graphics (both FMV and backgrounds) are superb, and could quite possibly the best ever seen in a video game. The rest of the graphics (ie. the real-time polygon graphics), while well done, aren't quite up to par. While the characters in the FMVs lean towards the photorealism side, in the basic gameplay screens (such as dungeons) they are more like cartoon versions of themselves, complete with exaggerated gestures. This might have been more acceptable a few years back, but with the increasing graphical standards in today’s market, this is a little slightly annoying.

   Of course, graphics aren't everything. The gameplay in Legend of Dragoon is fairly smooth, with the only real qualm being the overly long battles (more on that later, however). While early on it looked like the title borrowed quite a bit from RPGs such as Panzer Dragoon Saga, in reality the title borrows from another RPG series - Final Fantasy. Everything seems to be straight out of a Final Fantasy title, with the only real exception being the Dragoon changes seen in the demo. Luckily, it's all very well done, so pretty much all of the millions of Final Fantasy fans in the world should be able to easily sink their teeth into this title.

   Every modern RPG must have its systems, and LoD is no exception. There are two major systems: the Additional system, and the Dragoon system. While the Dragoon system has yet to make an appearance 3 hours into the game, the Additional system is proving to be quite nice. While the demo gave gamers little chance to really play around with the system, but full game is proving that it is actually fairly deep, and requires a little bit of thinking on which Additional to use. Many of the weaker Additionals have large growth rates, but are much harder to execute, while simpler, more powerful Additionals grow very, very slowly. New Additionals are added every few levels, which only makes things more enjoyable. As for the currently absent Dragoon system (which will make it's appearance when the storyline demands it), judging by the demo, it too should prove to be a fairly enjoyable system to use.

   Finally, there is the game's difficulty. There's nothing wrong with a challenge, but the level of difficulty in Legend of Dragoon seems faintly ridiculous. No monster yet has failed to inflict at least twice as much damage as the strongest attack from the best character. We're not talking about boss fights here, folks - regular, run-of-the-mill random encounter enemies are twice as powerful as the player-characters. To add insult to injury, in order to really do much damage at all, you _have_ to master the Additional system. For those of you who might have missed this system, it's basically like a larger, more complex, but infinitely cooler Gunblade system; push the circle button as you strike the enemy, and you'll begin a pre-selected chain-attack move. When the timing is even a little bit off (it's much harder to get correct than in FFVIII), Dart, the game's main character, would do a mere 1-2 points of damage. This makes for very, very long battles, considering that the enemies start around 15 HP and go up from there to about the mid 40s (again, 3 hours into the game). I would much rather see a tactically challenging game than the slow button masher that LoD is shaping up to be.

   While there are problems with the game, it does have a lot of potential, should Sony see fit to make some alterations to the game for it's North American release (as was done with Final Fantasy VII, Lunar: SSS Complete, and Thousand Arms, to name a few). By smoothing out the difficulty and making other small changes (for example, there's no pause function, and you can't get the stupid exit indicator arrows off the screen), the Legend of Dragoon should prove to be quite a winner. As for the Japanese players and import-happy gamers, they'll have to just make do, and enjoy the beautiful FMV sequences.