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.

good game, but definitely needs some quality of life improvements. attack animations take 1000 years and battles can feel sluggish at times.

having to backtrack through dungeons is unnecessary and just makes the game feel longer than it actually is.

However story was pretty good imo and music slaps. Characters also have good dynamic with their own reasons for going on this journey.

unfortunately this game suffers from some major bugs during certain fights preventing you from progressing if you use a certain ability!

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.

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.

I think this game has a lot of positive aspects. The combat is fun and the cast is enjoyable. Environments were varied and some of the gimmicks in the dungeons were cool!

There are some problems, however, that aggravated me. The biggest flaws are the immense amount of backtracking, only really made easier when you're mostly done with the backtracking anyway, and some dungeon design choices seemingly made to infuriate more than be enjoyable, or at the least fulfilling, to go through. Still, I DID enjoy it enough to beat it. (Although through emulator, I got to use speed up and save states. I most likely wouldn't have persevered otherwise.)

A game I remembered playing as a kid but remembered almost nothing about it (I realized once I got halfway through disc 1 and already didn't remember anything). The combat is fun, It reminds me of paper Mario the way they implement QTEs into the combat. And grinding additions instead of Levels feels like there's a lot less time spent grinding. I did like the story as well and probably has the best FMVs I've seen in a PS1 game. I think the last half of Disc 4 had some really annoying enemies and areas, but it didn't effect my enjoyment that much because once you get to the point of no return it starts to be a lot better again.

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.