Returning to playing PS1 RPGs, I decided to pick up one that a fair few of my friends have talked to me about for years, Legend of Dragoon. This was a game I’d loosely heard of in the past, but not one I’d ever really seen anything about in particular, so I went in more or less completely blind. It was also during the course of this game that I learned of the PS1’s very own VMU equivalent: The PocketStation! It took me around 7 or so hours (which is my best guess) to play through Moguuru Dabas, and it took me around 65 hours to play through Legend of Dragoon itself. I played the Japanese versions of both on real hardware. I wanna cap off the intro here with a special thanks to my good friend Anna for gifting me the PocketStation! For reasons I’ll get into later, I likely couldn’t have beaten the game without her generosity! ^^;
Legend of Dragoon is the story of a young man named Dart. Upon returning to his hometown in the middle of a much longer journey, he’s first accosted by a dragon and then finds his hometown reduced to a charred ruin by the invading armies of the neighboring empire. Saved by a mysterious woman named Roze, Dart sets off on a journey to save his childhood friend Sheena from the evil empire. Along the way, they’ll become intertwined in a much larger world-saving plot involving the truth behind their world’s legends, its dragons, and the titular dragoons.
While the writing and story have a STRONG first impression of being just an off-brand Final Fantasy (at times it really feels like outright copying ^^;), the game thankfully manages to outgrow and outshine that impression very strongly over the course of your adventure. Handling themes like the evils of colonialism (both material and psychological); the relationships between legend, truth, and propaganda; and the trials often necessary to grow beyond past traumas; this is a game about how the past (be it distant history or just a few years ago) will always shape and mold the present, but we need not let it define the future. That said, the writing is still far from perfect. The character writing, particularly of your main party, is very strong and well done. However, that makes it only all the more noticeable how your last party member, defined largely by racial stereotypes, has comparatively poor character development when compared to the other six. Be that as it may, I still think that the good manages to outshine the bad more than well enough to let the game be one of the better written RPGs I’ve played on the system.
Unfortunately, despite its narrative successes, Legend of Dragoon leaves a LOT to be desired on a mechanical level. The main head behind this game was the same guy who did the battle design for Super Mario RPG on the SNES, and a lot of the turn-based battle system feels very much like a far more ambitious version of that game’s systems. However, the main battle systems being a series of timing QTEs for your main attacks always felt far more finicky than it should’ve been. The UI design of those QTEs is far less precise than something like we’d see in Shadow Hearts a couple years later, and the lack of a precise area to aim for really makes it a frustrating system to engage with. There are more advanced combos (called “Additions”) you can equip for your normal physical attacks well, but longer combos are not only harder to execute properly with their button timings, but they also open you up to counter attacks from enemies. As we’ll get to in a bit, this is already a game where healing is very difficult, so opening yourself up to even more damage never felt like a very good trade off, and I stuck to shorter, more reliable Additions the entire game.
One of the main reasons that healing is quite so difficult is down to the game’s dragoon system. Instead of having magic normally like most other RPGs do, your characters normally have no spells or magic. Instead, they have dragoon forms that they unlock over the course of the story. As you deal normal attacks, you’ll gain SP, and getting enough SP allows you to transform into your dragoon form. Better Additions give better damage and/or SP as well as you improve them, so that’s one reason beyond just damage to try out the harder Additions (if you’re so inclined). Every 100 points of SP allows for one turn in your dragoon form, and you increase your dragoon level to gain more spells and better stat modifiers while in that form once you hit certain (invisible) thresholds of your total ever gained SP.
All that said, you ONLY have spells within your dragoon form, and getting into your dragoon form not only takes the time of racking up that SP, but you can also only do it within battle, meaning you absolutely cannot cast spells outside of battle. Additionally, while some fraction of total EXP gained in battle is distributed to your non-active party members, you only gain SP while actively in battle. This means that non-active members gain no dragoon levels at all, and in a game that’s already this hard and has this slow of a leveling curve (grinding one level can easily take over an hour if not several), you REALLY don’t want to be experimenting with your party make up very much because you’re only going to be punished for it. Your party of seven feels almost uselessly large a lot of the time, because not only are your new party members basically always without a dragoon form for some period (meaning they’re not gaining any dragoon levels if you use them), but that also means that’s less experience that your main/strongest party members aren’t getting too. I stuck with Dart (whom you’re stuck with no matter what), Albert, and Roze the whole game, and I don’t regret it one bit, no matter how cool the other characters may be.
On the whole, Legend of Dragoon’s mechanics feel extremely poorly thought out. Having your only real form of attacking being normal attacks when you don’t have a limit break form to break out just makes battles feel like a contest in getting lucky enough that the boss doesn’t decide to just mulch you with a few repeated nasty multi-target attacks. You have attacking items, sure, but they take up very valuable inventory space, but that is extremely nonviable in a game where not only do you have virtually no healing outside of healing items (you can heal 10% of your HP if you block, but that’s almost always a useless amount), but you also need to face bosses who, from almost the very start, can often cast up to three very nasty status effects. How do you heal these status effects? Well, there are THREE different items that cover different ranges of status effects, and that’s not counting the items you’ll need to have to heal MP or revive downed party members. All of this is supposed to fit into a puny inventory of only 32 items. While the narrative may be among the best on the console, the mechanics of Legend of Dragoon make it something far less, and they’re so rough that they make the game tragically difficult to recommend as a result.
This is a good a time as any to mention that the Japanese version, while it lacks the poor translation of the English version, is overall significantly more difficult of the two versions of this game. Enemies and especially bosses have anywhere from 20 to 80% more health than their English counterparts, and you also earn roughly 3 times less money from encounters. While your main source of healing is items, so rationing your healing items accordingly is an extremely important part of your gameplay strategy, they don’t cost that much. Being that poor in the Japanese version basically just means that you’ll be forever unable to afford the super armor and helmet sold in certain shops which cost 10k each.
I’ve seen tell online that the reason that the English version has so much more money is because you don’t have the PocketStation game to earn money in, but I would disagree with that to a point, as in my experience playing Moguuru Dabas is roughly just as fast a way of earning money as just doing random battles (generally speaking). However, what Moguuru Dabas DOES get you is special items for completing stages, so that makes for a nice segue into talking about the PocketStation companion game!
Moguuru Dabas is a game starring Dabas, an eccentric merchant who you bump into around halfway through disc 1. After you meet him, you’ll gain the option to download Moguuru Dabas to your PocketStation and get yourself items, money, and special equipment by playing through it. Just like a Dreamcast’s VMU, the PocketStation has its games downloaded onto it like memory card data, and all 72kb of Moguuru Dabas live on there for you to pop out of the PS1 and play to your heart’s content. Dabas has 5 stages to dig through, with not just money, but also mushrooms, bones, and gems to find as he goes. There are caves he can find (and your radar makes finding the much easier), and you won’t know what’s inside them until you enter them. Sometimes, it will be a treasure room with items or money. But those aren’t for Dabas, of course. They’re to transfer back to Dart & friends! Other times, you’ll find a cave with a Minint dwelling in it, and they’ll convert your mushrooms into more max HP, your bones into more attack power, and your gems into cash as well as fully healing you!
In most caves, however, you’ll find a monster to fight! Monster fights are very simple, as a game with only 4 directional buttons and an action button would make them. Dabas and his opponent move back and forth automatically, with your 4 directional buttons all being a block button, and your action button swinging your pick axe to attack them. Enemies guard treasure chests full of money, items, or health for Dabas, and the bosses at the end of each stage guard a special chest as well. That special chest has a particular piece of equipment in it to send back to Dart! Some highlights are an accessory that halves all incoming magic damage, one that halves all incoming physical damage, and one that halves ALL incoming damage.
With loot this good on the table, playing through Moguuru Dabas is a pretty obvious choice for an enterprising Legend of Dragoon player. You can do it whenever you want, and despite there only being five stages (at which point you see the credits), you can just restart and play through again for the same prizes again, if you’re having enough trouble in Legend of Dragoon itself. I only played through it the one time (only actually finishing it one room before the final boss of LoD XD), but I had a lot of fun with it! The graphics are simple but very charming, and it’s a very pleasant little gameplay loop. The only music it has is over the credits screen, but that’s to be expected for a machine with such little data and power at its disposal. The only bummer is that you do need to return to home base (the PlayStation) after very stage completed to activate the next stage being playable, so it’s a somewhat inconvenient companion app at times, but given that all you lose for dying is being sent back up the hole you’ve dug a bit, you could always just die on purpose to continue your Dabas adventures on the go however much you want~.
The one place where Legend of Dragoon doesn’t slack a single bit is its aesthetics. Over 100 people at Sony Japan Studios spent three years an 16 million dollars developing this game, and hot damn does it look like it. The music is quite good, yes, but the graphics look incredible, and a lot of that is down to a deliberate focus away from the prerendered CGI cutscenes so popular in RPGs at the time. This means there are a ton of really gorgeous in-engine animations both within battles and outside of them that just never stopped looking awesome the whole way through this game’s four discs. It does have some CGI cutscenes, which look nice enough, but the in-engine cutscenes, from more dramatic chase and battle scenes to more subtle mid-conversation reactions from characters really make this story come to live in an incredible way.
This beauty sadly does come at the cost of battles taking quite some time. This game is no stranger to quite noticeable loading times even mid-battle, and those luxuriously animated fight scenes do make battles take quite a bit longer. Just how long animations (especially for spells) take is one of the main reasons the average completion time is like ten hours longer on the Japanese version of the game, and it’s also another major reason that grinding takes SO long to do. The final boss alone took me just over an hour to kill between his spell animations, my spell animations, and the 60,000 HP he has in this version of the game (vs. his 42,000 in the English version). I think overall that battles do move at least a bit faster than earlier PS1 games like Final Fantasy 7 or Persona 1, but it’s still quite noticeable, and it’s very difficult to ignore just how lengthy battles and animations take no matter how pretty they are ^^;
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. No matter how fun Moguuru Dabas is, the roughness of the mechanics of the main game can really not be ignored. They’re less of an issue in the significantly easier English version, granted that does come at the cost of a worse translation. Be that as it may, however, the story and presentation are good enough that this is still a game some will find very much worth playing. It’s hard but far from impossibly difficult, especially in English, and if you’ve played most of the other biggest RPG hits on the PS1, this is still something I think is worth checking out. I overall enjoyed my time with it, and I’m glad that I played it, even if its battle systems drove me crazy for a good portion of it XD
Legend of Dragoon is the story of a young man named Dart. Upon returning to his hometown in the middle of a much longer journey, he’s first accosted by a dragon and then finds his hometown reduced to a charred ruin by the invading armies of the neighboring empire. Saved by a mysterious woman named Roze, Dart sets off on a journey to save his childhood friend Sheena from the evil empire. Along the way, they’ll become intertwined in a much larger world-saving plot involving the truth behind their world’s legends, its dragons, and the titular dragoons.
While the writing and story have a STRONG first impression of being just an off-brand Final Fantasy (at times it really feels like outright copying ^^;), the game thankfully manages to outgrow and outshine that impression very strongly over the course of your adventure. Handling themes like the evils of colonialism (both material and psychological); the relationships between legend, truth, and propaganda; and the trials often necessary to grow beyond past traumas; this is a game about how the past (be it distant history or just a few years ago) will always shape and mold the present, but we need not let it define the future. That said, the writing is still far from perfect. The character writing, particularly of your main party, is very strong and well done. However, that makes it only all the more noticeable how your last party member, defined largely by racial stereotypes, has comparatively poor character development when compared to the other six. Be that as it may, I still think that the good manages to outshine the bad more than well enough to let the game be one of the better written RPGs I’ve played on the system.
Unfortunately, despite its narrative successes, Legend of Dragoon leaves a LOT to be desired on a mechanical level. The main head behind this game was the same guy who did the battle design for Super Mario RPG on the SNES, and a lot of the turn-based battle system feels very much like a far more ambitious version of that game’s systems. However, the main battle systems being a series of timing QTEs for your main attacks always felt far more finicky than it should’ve been. The UI design of those QTEs is far less precise than something like we’d see in Shadow Hearts a couple years later, and the lack of a precise area to aim for really makes it a frustrating system to engage with. There are more advanced combos (called “Additions”) you can equip for your normal physical attacks well, but longer combos are not only harder to execute properly with their button timings, but they also open you up to counter attacks from enemies. As we’ll get to in a bit, this is already a game where healing is very difficult, so opening yourself up to even more damage never felt like a very good trade off, and I stuck to shorter, more reliable Additions the entire game.
One of the main reasons that healing is quite so difficult is down to the game’s dragoon system. Instead of having magic normally like most other RPGs do, your characters normally have no spells or magic. Instead, they have dragoon forms that they unlock over the course of the story. As you deal normal attacks, you’ll gain SP, and getting enough SP allows you to transform into your dragoon form. Better Additions give better damage and/or SP as well as you improve them, so that’s one reason beyond just damage to try out the harder Additions (if you’re so inclined). Every 100 points of SP allows for one turn in your dragoon form, and you increase your dragoon level to gain more spells and better stat modifiers while in that form once you hit certain (invisible) thresholds of your total ever gained SP.
All that said, you ONLY have spells within your dragoon form, and getting into your dragoon form not only takes the time of racking up that SP, but you can also only do it within battle, meaning you absolutely cannot cast spells outside of battle. Additionally, while some fraction of total EXP gained in battle is distributed to your non-active party members, you only gain SP while actively in battle. This means that non-active members gain no dragoon levels at all, and in a game that’s already this hard and has this slow of a leveling curve (grinding one level can easily take over an hour if not several), you REALLY don’t want to be experimenting with your party make up very much because you’re only going to be punished for it. Your party of seven feels almost uselessly large a lot of the time, because not only are your new party members basically always without a dragoon form for some period (meaning they’re not gaining any dragoon levels if you use them), but that also means that’s less experience that your main/strongest party members aren’t getting too. I stuck with Dart (whom you’re stuck with no matter what), Albert, and Roze the whole game, and I don’t regret it one bit, no matter how cool the other characters may be.
On the whole, Legend of Dragoon’s mechanics feel extremely poorly thought out. Having your only real form of attacking being normal attacks when you don’t have a limit break form to break out just makes battles feel like a contest in getting lucky enough that the boss doesn’t decide to just mulch you with a few repeated nasty multi-target attacks. You have attacking items, sure, but they take up very valuable inventory space, but that is extremely nonviable in a game where not only do you have virtually no healing outside of healing items (you can heal 10% of your HP if you block, but that’s almost always a useless amount), but you also need to face bosses who, from almost the very start, can often cast up to three very nasty status effects. How do you heal these status effects? Well, there are THREE different items that cover different ranges of status effects, and that’s not counting the items you’ll need to have to heal MP or revive downed party members. All of this is supposed to fit into a puny inventory of only 32 items. While the narrative may be among the best on the console, the mechanics of Legend of Dragoon make it something far less, and they’re so rough that they make the game tragically difficult to recommend as a result.
This is a good a time as any to mention that the Japanese version, while it lacks the poor translation of the English version, is overall significantly more difficult of the two versions of this game. Enemies and especially bosses have anywhere from 20 to 80% more health than their English counterparts, and you also earn roughly 3 times less money from encounters. While your main source of healing is items, so rationing your healing items accordingly is an extremely important part of your gameplay strategy, they don’t cost that much. Being that poor in the Japanese version basically just means that you’ll be forever unable to afford the super armor and helmet sold in certain shops which cost 10k each.
I’ve seen tell online that the reason that the English version has so much more money is because you don’t have the PocketStation game to earn money in, but I would disagree with that to a point, as in my experience playing Moguuru Dabas is roughly just as fast a way of earning money as just doing random battles (generally speaking). However, what Moguuru Dabas DOES get you is special items for completing stages, so that makes for a nice segue into talking about the PocketStation companion game!
Moguuru Dabas is a game starring Dabas, an eccentric merchant who you bump into around halfway through disc 1. After you meet him, you’ll gain the option to download Moguuru Dabas to your PocketStation and get yourself items, money, and special equipment by playing through it. Just like a Dreamcast’s VMU, the PocketStation has its games downloaded onto it like memory card data, and all 72kb of Moguuru Dabas live on there for you to pop out of the PS1 and play to your heart’s content. Dabas has 5 stages to dig through, with not just money, but also mushrooms, bones, and gems to find as he goes. There are caves he can find (and your radar makes finding the much easier), and you won’t know what’s inside them until you enter them. Sometimes, it will be a treasure room with items or money. But those aren’t for Dabas, of course. They’re to transfer back to Dart & friends! Other times, you’ll find a cave with a Minint dwelling in it, and they’ll convert your mushrooms into more max HP, your bones into more attack power, and your gems into cash as well as fully healing you!
In most caves, however, you’ll find a monster to fight! Monster fights are very simple, as a game with only 4 directional buttons and an action button would make them. Dabas and his opponent move back and forth automatically, with your 4 directional buttons all being a block button, and your action button swinging your pick axe to attack them. Enemies guard treasure chests full of money, items, or health for Dabas, and the bosses at the end of each stage guard a special chest as well. That special chest has a particular piece of equipment in it to send back to Dart! Some highlights are an accessory that halves all incoming magic damage, one that halves all incoming physical damage, and one that halves ALL incoming damage.
With loot this good on the table, playing through Moguuru Dabas is a pretty obvious choice for an enterprising Legend of Dragoon player. You can do it whenever you want, and despite there only being five stages (at which point you see the credits), you can just restart and play through again for the same prizes again, if you’re having enough trouble in Legend of Dragoon itself. I only played through it the one time (only actually finishing it one room before the final boss of LoD XD), but I had a lot of fun with it! The graphics are simple but very charming, and it’s a very pleasant little gameplay loop. The only music it has is over the credits screen, but that’s to be expected for a machine with such little data and power at its disposal. The only bummer is that you do need to return to home base (the PlayStation) after very stage completed to activate the next stage being playable, so it’s a somewhat inconvenient companion app at times, but given that all you lose for dying is being sent back up the hole you’ve dug a bit, you could always just die on purpose to continue your Dabas adventures on the go however much you want~.
The one place where Legend of Dragoon doesn’t slack a single bit is its aesthetics. Over 100 people at Sony Japan Studios spent three years an 16 million dollars developing this game, and hot damn does it look like it. The music is quite good, yes, but the graphics look incredible, and a lot of that is down to a deliberate focus away from the prerendered CGI cutscenes so popular in RPGs at the time. This means there are a ton of really gorgeous in-engine animations both within battles and outside of them that just never stopped looking awesome the whole way through this game’s four discs. It does have some CGI cutscenes, which look nice enough, but the in-engine cutscenes, from more dramatic chase and battle scenes to more subtle mid-conversation reactions from characters really make this story come to live in an incredible way.
This beauty sadly does come at the cost of battles taking quite some time. This game is no stranger to quite noticeable loading times even mid-battle, and those luxuriously animated fight scenes do make battles take quite a bit longer. Just how long animations (especially for spells) take is one of the main reasons the average completion time is like ten hours longer on the Japanese version of the game, and it’s also another major reason that grinding takes SO long to do. The final boss alone took me just over an hour to kill between his spell animations, my spell animations, and the 60,000 HP he has in this version of the game (vs. his 42,000 in the English version). I think overall that battles do move at least a bit faster than earlier PS1 games like Final Fantasy 7 or Persona 1, but it’s still quite noticeable, and it’s very difficult to ignore just how lengthy battles and animations take no matter how pretty they are ^^;
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. No matter how fun Moguuru Dabas is, the roughness of the mechanics of the main game can really not be ignored. They’re less of an issue in the significantly easier English version, granted that does come at the cost of a worse translation. Be that as it may, however, the story and presentation are good enough that this is still a game some will find very much worth playing. It’s hard but far from impossibly difficult, especially in English, and if you’ve played most of the other biggest RPG hits on the PS1, this is still something I think is worth checking out. I overall enjoyed my time with it, and I’m glad that I played it, even if its battle systems drove me crazy for a good portion of it XD