Extended Edition | Why The Legend Of Dragoon Is An All Time Classic | The Legend Of Dragoon Review

as sparingly used as these cutscenes are when they break them out you know they mean business like I can pretty much name over a dozen just off the top of my head that I love the one point is the Legend of Dragoon is a very atmospheric game between the graphics the soundtrack and the overall tone so once you do start getting those long combos down patch you're on top of the world so I don't have Dragoon for my taste however is one of the most well executed narratives I've ever seen if not the best [Music] you know I've asked this question before but it's worth reiterating how does one review a JRPG yes JRPGs or Japanese role-playing games for the uninitiated the one genre that more than anything is nearly impossible to talk about if you're not willing to put the time in because if there's one thing that 90% of JRPGs have in common they're all about as long as the Spanish Inquisition personally JRPGs are traditionally one of my least favorite genres of games not because of the length I can handle a bit of length giggity mostly because JRPGs consists of the worst of Japanese media tropes or to put that in another way I'm not a fan of the animoves sure anime is a wild and diverse world but I've seen enough Mexican soap operas to know I'm not a fan of those either and if there's one thing that JRPGs usually are its offensively anime there was a point in here somewhere JRPGs aside from usually being filled to the brim with annoying anime tropes and being a million years long are also usually heavily style over substance and also have gameplay equivalent to navigating the options menu in any other game so they're usually filed alongside games like mmo's RTS and dating simulators as games that I just don't touch which is a shame because JRPGs are not a genre I'm wholly against nor am incapable of enjoying it's usually these three things that hold back my enjoyment so the games that have these aspects subdued or eliminated are the ones that I've played and enjoyed of which there have been three and a half and given my schedule these days and severe lack of time means I generally can't get into longer games so that three point five number will probably never change I have fond memories of playing Final Fantasy 9 in my youth Final Fantasy 12 is the only game in that series I've actually played from start to finish and the jury's still out on if I liked the first Kingdom Hearts because it had solid gameplay but anything that wasn't Disney nostalgia made me want to claw my eyes out including the three most insufferable lead characters in the history of the universe however I nonetheless beat the first game but have no desire to continue one so we'll call that a half and saying things like this will probably get people on my ass because JRPGs are probably the most divisive genre of games and so you guaranteed to piss someone off whether you praise a game or bash it because you have the long-standing fanboys who will defend their favorite games to the ends of the earth and then you have the haters who think all JRPG is our derivative boring pretentious garbage so you're always going to get some level of strong emotion out of everybody no matter what you say now the reason I keep giving JRPG is a chance I suppose is probably because of my number one favorite JRPG because it seems that when I find a JRPG that I like I love it and today's subject is a game that I definitely love a game that's made an impact on me like few other games before it and a game that has a firm placement in my top five favorite games of all time and in fact it might just be my favorite ps1 game of all time The Legend of Dragoon something I've often thought to myself is if I only make one more video it will be on The Legend of Dragoon I've played this game for years and yet inevitably I always feel that old itch I always feel the urge to play this game just one more time which is very rare for me I'll be playing something or doing something and my mind will inevitably wander - damn I really want to play through The Legend of Dragoon one more time it's like a drug that I need to take every so often so I don't go insane if anything I can always be assured that I have something to go back to and can enjoy for 40 hours and still be excited to play after all these years even spyro 3 which I've often cited as my favorite ps1 game I don't really find myself pining to play it again and again I think about it a fair bit and will never have anything but fondness for it that said it's been a long time since I thought of Spyro 3 or any specific moment from it and suddenly the little voice in my head begging me to replay it chimes in where The Legend of Dragoon has me feeling those urges in as little as a few months between playthroughs that may not sound like a lot but consider the fact that my usual deal is to go literal years before replaying games even my favorites so a few months before wanting to replay it is huge for me and even then I try to limit myself to once a year as to not overdo it so the Legend of Dragoon may have overtaken Spyro 3 as my favorite ps1 game after all these years without me even realizing it though the jury's still out on that one and that's why we're here today this has been one of those games that no matter how many times I play it I always come back and now I want to do it proper justice there's always more to say there's always more to do but this time I'm going to try what I can do to cover this game in its entirety and attempt to explain why the Legend of Dragoon is an all-time classic and one of my favorite games of all or die trying to give a JRPG a proper review there's a shitload of content to get through which is generally my big reservation but in this case I'm willing to make the exception so without further ado let's take a look at one of my favorite games of all time The Legend of Dragoon and explain in no uncertain terms why that's the case hold on to your butt's this is going to be a doozy so preemptively I'm gonna explain how this video is gonna work I'm gonna split this video into multiple sections in order of least spoilery content to most spoilery content if you want my recommendation I'll say that yes you should definitely play this game 100% from this point forward you're either not convinced or you've already played slash beat in the game to those in the former category at whatever point you feel that you've been sold on the game either stop watching the video or skip to this timecode pre-release minor spoilers so before we get into this game as a whole I wanted to take a special look at the history surrounding this game both personal and otherwise so the Legend of Dragoon came out in North America on June 13th 2000 but also came out about six months previously in Japan and then came out roughly seven months later in Europe funny that this game has three release dates and all of them on separate years the primary one would obviously be the Japanese one because that was the initial release date interestingly this was one of the most ambitious games of its time it came out in 1999 specifically December 2nd but had started development as early as 1996 with a very small team of around 10 members which included director designer I think if pronounced he has a Yuki hisab a and legendary producer Shuhei Yoshida made by a first-party Sony studio called SAE Japan or as it was known at the time SCE Japan which was partially or wholly responsible for some of Sony's most prolific first party games including the rather excellent Ape Escape and Shadow of the Colossus with the CGI cutscenes being handed over to polyphony digital si you weren't at their shadow of the colossus zennith yet but they were far from their knack in a dear while Ape Escape of the first game they were credited for came out roughly half a year earlier ape escape also had a development cycle roughly half a year shorter than Dragoon so it's entirely possible that T LOD was the first game that si II had been working on some interesting facts that came out of this were that they wanted to focus on the player being an active member in gameplay unlike so many other JRPGs and very interestingly while they wanted the world to be fantastical they wanted the design and tone to be rooted in reality as to not be overly out there and while it came out on three separate years it was also being worked on over three separate years from 1996 to 1999 as I mentioned which was unheard of in the fifth generation of gaming this was an era where games like crash three were made over the span of less than a year that combined with the fact that the development team at one point spanned over a hundred members both of which were such big deals that they were touted on the back of the box know how simpler times were the fact that this game costs 16 million dollars to make in late 90s money and the fact that The Legend of Dragoon doesn't come out on one disc doesn't come on two disks doesn't come on three disks doesn't come on five disks doesn't come on sit okay I'll stop it comes on four discs and it's one of only 9 ps1 games to do so seeing as how expensive it was to manufacture print and ship a 1 disc game let alone for this was clearly one of the most ambitious games of its time much of that may seem quaint in hindsight but it was groundbreaking like the Hulk back then so it was a first party game from a company that practically owned a worldwide monopoly on the console market around this time and a game that had millions pumped into it hundreds of hands working on it and even a feature on PlayStation underground so it had all the tools to be launched into the stratosphere as an all-time great game but Sony made one critical error that kneecapped this game preventing it from the true success that it could have had and deserved what is that error I'll come back to that in a while but it still came out to positive reviews sold over a million copies in its lifetime and went on to have a dedicated cult fanbase to this day yours truly being part of it obviously seeing as this game is in my top 5 favorite games of all time I've mentioned Christmas Day 2003 before the day that I got my first ps1 which as a six-year-old who had only had an NES up to that point had his little mind blown by the spectacular power of full 3d even though unbeknownst to me most of my friends well classmates we're moving on to the ps2 still I loved my ps1 like a mother loves its child Dragoon though it would be a while before I actually played this one while I was never explicitly told not to play it for being a T rated game my parents had returned Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 soon after getting it because it contained blood and also the song Blood Brothers by Papa Roach which had adult enough lyrics that my parents didn't want my young mind exposed to it you see my dad had well has this thing where he hates blood in movies and video games for whatever reason and I've always found that weird because if I get cut I bleed I'm filled with blood why is it bad to see blood what does society is stigma against internal fluids anyways I didn't play this game for many years for reasons of I didn't want to get in trouble but I would constantly backseat it with my siblings and I was absolutely gobsmacked still being a game this was also around the time when I was still amazed that you could like press buttons and have them correspond to an on screen action I was a simple kid the lights and sounds were breathtaking for a six-year-old eventually I did play it some years later but it wasn't until 2012 when I decided to pick it up with a spring in my step because I wanted to beat it and after nine years I finally conquered the game I was even the first person in my family to do so which is funny cuz it took me nine years after which I concluded that I absolutely loved the game legend really is a good way to describe this game from the legendary development to the legendary impact it left on me whatever your take this game is legendary there's no doubt that this game left an impact on me like few other games they wanted to create something epic and cool seriously they used that exact word and do so they did but boy is that an understatement and no I am NOT over selling this game not even slightly intro minor spoilers so now that we've covered everything about this game other than the game let's jump in an impactful intro is key to a good first impression and this game punches you in the face with its epic intro [Music] that awesome synth guitar riff that transitions into the games main theme if you still believe right as the games title is shown all of these different evocative images like the ancient writing a ruined battlefield or a time-lapse of a mountain range with an overlay of various events that happen throughout the game and those haunting words when the clash of swords echo the journey chasing the past ends and the journey to no today begins one soul seeks another and pledges their sworn friendship to another one mystery baguettes the next and the doors of fate are opened you are free to sever the chains of fate that bind you speaking for myself this is an instant hooking mechanism it's short sweet effective and most of all gripping and we haven't even started the game yet what's funny about this intro sequence is that these lines of text that they show may seem vague but they're much less vague than they seem but you only know that once you've played the game there are minor spoilers but you don't know what they mean the journey chasing the past is obviously darts five-year long journey chasing the black monster but not only that roses journey could also be considered chasing the past the journey to know today begins is obviously the journey that this game takes us on and the plot slowly unfolds one mystery begets the next most of all you are free to sever the chains of fate that bind you I love this line because while being evocative it's also a good summation of one of the game's primary themes breaking free from what fate has decided throughout the game many characters entire rules and arcs are to break free from what fate has decided for them what they think fate has decided for them or the events of the game causing fate to change including the overarching plot they may seem like just words but these words were chosen carefully at least I think it may have been entirely accidental for these words and images to have been so evocative in which case boom meaning the only thing that I'm a bit iffy about is the phrase pledges their sworn friendship to another are they saying one another or is there a third person they're referring to which I think in this case would be a little bit so either it's a phrasing issue or me being a dumbass you decide either way terrific and most of all gripping a little bit of storytelling even in something as insubstantial as the intro graphics minor spoilers so now that we're really getting into it how does this game look it may surprise you to hear that I think this game is easily one of the best if not the best looking game on the the entire platform with that said this game as far as I'm aware is still locked at the standard 320 by 240 P resolution that the ps1 was locked at but as I've implied many times it's not about how many pixels you can fit on screen it's about how you use them on further inspection this game seems to have a slightly more anamorphic resolution than 320 by 240 P as the screen tends to move around and expand on the right a lot so the exact resolution is a little bit more inexact than that and even then on further further inspection the PS one's native resolution is well a little bit more complicated than just saying 240p but we'll say 240p just for the sake of convenience the Legend of Dragoon uses a combination of pre-rendered and polygonal graphics that fits together really nicely the actual character models look very jagged from afar which obviously looks dated but that's understandable but the backgrounds are what you're here for and there are some breathtaking backgrounds in this game from the holy city of Denning grad to the flower city of go now to the Royal City of let's to the shrine of surely to the tranquil Prairie these are some stunning environments not just damn can we just take a moment to appreciate how beautiful these landscapes are [Music] [Music] I particularly love it whenever they do something based around water because that's where you really get the prettiest environments the absolute highlight of this for me is that the peak of the queen fury it's just such a stunning looking environment with the waves of a seemingly endless ocean crashing up against the Queen fury at sunset just looking at this makes me relaxed I can go through naming all my favourite environments but the shortlist is basically all of them almost all of these environments provide stunning panoramic views and I can't think of one off the top of my head that doesn't look great or at least epic and while most of them are brightly lit and they contrast nicely against the other side of the coin with decrepit environment such as Belle Webb Helena or cos øz not to be confused with Kansas the original violet Dragoon warrior or Kansas aka toto I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore or even the opening environment of Sohus ruined landscapes that have such a dark dismal look to them which I can't get enough of these are usually the places that are abandoned or ruled by an oppressive regime and as such have a much darker more depressing color palette like Kasasa is mostly dark drained Browns or blacks which wall decrepit never loses its overall aesthetic appeal the use of color in this game is super vivid it just pops out of the screen it's very stark and beautiful the detail is plentiful these look like watercolor paintings come to life even in more dreary environments you get little splashes of bright color which is emphasized by the dreariness except in places like a bell web which is almost all earth tones which emphasizes that this is a truly dead city sometimes I even turned off the HUD just so I can get a better look at these places in short these are some of the most beautiful pre-rendered environments on the PlayStation it's the type of game where you want to keep going just to see the next place and see how it can continue to push the borders of the ps1 hardware and there's so much detail that there's always a bunch of new elements that I notice whenever I play this game like the faces in Helena or the bird flying in the distance in the Barrens that said there are some elements that look weird because you can clearly tell the backgrounds are just still or moving flat images and so trying to add animations to these pre-rendered backgrounds can look very uncanny as it also can when some of these characters interact with the background sometimes it can look quite just weird also while I wish I could see what these backgrounds could look like uncompressed because with the 240p resolution these backgrounds while still beautiful are clearly compressed beyond belief in being able to see the individual pixels you can tell that they were being held back and when you look closer you can see that many of the individual shapes in the background are just cleverly shaded small groups of pixels that give the illusion of cohesive shapes so I hope you like dithering because this game certainly does and there's this weird thing where in many of the backgrounds the negative space has random colored pixels there's no reason and usually no coherent shapes they're just there for no reason and as a matter of fact most of this game has this weird effect over the graphics it's not quite differing but everything has an alternating color scheme in the menus in the game everything I'm not sure if there's a reason for this to exist and maybe it's not even the actual game it has more to do with the hardware it's running on but I'm seriously curious about what this is also I'm assuming this game was never meant to be played outside of a CRT setup because when you play this in HD there are constantly graphical elements where the edge can be seen even as early as the opening moments of the game otherwise these environments are beautiful with almost no exception I've mentioned before that the character models are on the level that you'd expect for the ps1 they're fairly jagged and dated in terms of quality they're mostly comprised of several individual pieces of the model that clip into each other to give the illusion of being a cohesive shape when in actuality they're just mashed together bits this is especially prominent in the in engine cutscenes when they try and give the same effect that they would with the CGI cutscenes but with the in-game models it doesn't look bad but you can clearly tell they wanted to do more but were held back by the technology of the time in these instances you really notice the ps1 great texturing because this is where the game models are in your face more than any other point and so you have no choice but to see them up close and personal when at all other times they're far enough away in the distance that the low-poly nature isn't as noticeable or as prominent that said the perspective tricks they pull to create the illusion of the characters existing in the same space as the world are very impressive like I'm fully aware that these pre-rendered backgrounds are just that pre-rendered backgrounds or still images that exist on a different level to the characters but I almost never noticed that because the characters are so perfectly scaled and placed in correlation with the correct perspective in these environments that may seem like an obvious and necessary touch but I really appreciate the artistic merit of tricking the eye into thinking that these two pieces of art that exist in separate forms can exist as one in the same and I really appreciate the little touches like this that makes the game world feel more real in spite of the low resolution it's like CGI in movies we should applaud good CGI because it should be the standard but you only realize how important good CGI is when you see how bad it can get the same goes for prospective tricks and games like this you'd definitely notice it if it wasn't as well done and the fact that we don't notice it means that they did a good job as for the character models there's not too much to complain about a common issue with many JRPGs and many games in general I find is that the character designs usually devolve into artistic vomit which means that many characters and many games I've seen just have such crazy character designs that most of the detail fades into the white noise of detail there's just too much detail to process what I appreciate about the character designs in the Legend of Dragoon is that they're all starkly simple but badass I might even go as far as to say iconic dark for example spiked hair almost on the level of a dragon ball character headband boots pants that look vaguely like jeans and a stark red armor set on his upper body with one arm heavily armored to block attacks and with the other arm lightly armored to give his swings more mobility also a weird hole in the center of his armor set that I've never really understood the purpose of a simple enough design that says I am a hardened warrior with a refined fighting style then we have shana in a white blue tunic shorts combo is that really a tunic though I don't know I think it's a tunic but it may not be might just be a regular shirt with a championship belt and armored shoulder pads enough detail to stand out but you can properly digest every detail this is a look that says staying light on my feet and prioritizing mobility over defense will keep me safe also I'm cute as a button or how about love bits with a standard armor set over his legs torso and arms covering green pantaloons and a green shirt this is a look that says I'm a high-ranking Knight for my army and will serve my country to my dying breath which is because well therefore mine and also I'm a big Dallas Stars fan jumping ahead of it we have Congo while he experimented with more designs he settled on a design that prioritizes earth-toned animal hides with armored shoulder pads and a leather strap going over his chest none of which does anything to hide his tremendous physique this is a look that says I am a massive hulking brute who has the capacity to crush your skull even by accident your human weapons will bounce off my hulking frame like rubber also I'm a he-man cosplayer okay I'll stop there if only to save time point is all of the main characters are subdued enough for the detail to stand out and are all well designed enough that all of them look memorable and most of all practical for warriors with the exception of the fact that I don't think Rose actually wears pants also Maru looks very impractical but that's the exception and I think artistic consistency in some ways is more important than the actual artistic quality and this is thankfully a game where everything that exists within does very much look like a cohesive world without much feeling out of place I remember spending so much time here trying to figure out how to go north the graphics are a bit cluttered in this area so it's not easy to tell at first that there's a path on the left here damn the characters are consistent enough to fit the locations all feel very much like they fit into this world and so on and even the Dragoon transformations feel like they fit into this world for how outlandish the premise is and might I say they also look very badass all of them like seriously the awesome designs of the Dragoon armor in every case cannot be overstated oh right lest we forget about the fantastic portraits of each of these characters they're all beautifully made seriously these portraits are an amazing bit of pixel art that is all the only thing I'm kind of iffy about are the enemy designs there are some interesting designs and even some pretty good ones but man are some of these enemy designs artistic chaos like the ugly balloon ugly is correct or the spider urgent which is actually a quatro pet with a spiky ball for a body now there are dozens of enemy designs in this game and oh yeah physical attack barrier [ __ ] you you have physical and magical attack barriers or things you might come across from time to time and they make the enemy you're fighting immune to set attack type yeah you can grind on these things when they have the attack barriers but then it makes the battle that's supposed to only take a few hits several rounds of attacks because they just won't die and it's not like you need to grind to level up additions with a few exceptions you can handle that just by playing the game yeah the barriers aren't what I'd call much fun side of the bosses and even then but what are you gonna do panic and throw up anyways now there are dozens of enemy designs in this game and trust me when I say wall there were plenty of enemy designs that look well thought out and creative there were quite a few that were probably made right before lunch and just end up looking like somebody threw up on the concept art sheet but there's plenty of enemy variety and so you'll have a good amount of time to see the good the bad and the trademarked such as the enemy that's clearly just blast away but with fire so even though some of these enemies are quite ugly I can look past those trees and see the massive forest in front of me and it's just fun to travel around and see the different enemies because there are always new ones to encounter around every corner and performance wise this game runs pretty consistently this won't translate well into video because my capture has a fixed frame rate but this game mostly runs at 30fps however there are aspects that occasionally run at 60fps and it looks very jarring to see this game swapped from 30fps to 60fps on the fly but more or less this game is consistent in terms of performance that said in my last two playthroughs the same thing happened to me where out of the blue towards the end of the third chapter I seemingly lost my mojo in terms of timing with the additions I really can't tell if that's on me or if there's a seismic change in the game's performance around the end of chapter 3 that throws me off but I seriously can't tell why I lost my timing at the same point two times in a row perhaps it has something to do with the ps3 hardware but through all of that through the beautiful panoramic landscapes the great designs the consistent a static the variety the impressive visual effects more than anything we're here for the CGI cutscenes here's the thing there's a reason why this game comes out on 4 discs had everything in this game been in engine this game probably would have been 2 maybe 3 discs but I can almost guarantee that the CGI cutscenes in the Legend of Dragoon is what pushed this game over the edge requiring the extra disk or two these are simply amazing this is late 90s CGI and still amazingly holds up of course it doesn't look as crisp as the CGI these days but that goes without saying but they're still super well animated and look on par with the highest of high end CG movies from around the turn of the millennium even if you don't want to play this game I highly recommend just looking up these cutscenes because they are stunning especially when you take into account that they managed to fit all of this onto a PlayStation 1 disc that's insane part of me has a hard time processing that they're so epic and action-packed to the flashback to the dragon campaign looks like it could have been out of an actual movie as sparingly used as these cutscenes are when they break them out you know they mean business like the attack on Denning grad or cell ace the reveal of the divine dragon but once again while this looks absolutely stunning there's still one thing holding it back because the ps1 runs natively in 240p these cutscenes had to be compressed to the point that wall-e still look good they're just screaming to be played uncompressed of course the fact that they are in 240p might be what makes it look ok even now because maybe if these were played uncompressed it might look much more plasticky than it appears the pixelization is so incredibly noticeable with just like the in-game graphics and that may or may not be what makes it work and that said this game is without a doubt one of the greatest looking ps1 games because it's basically at the apex of how good it could look for the ps1 and just gets to the point that is practically screaming to be broken free from the 240p constraints which is why as much as I love how this game looks I would have really loved to see this game be made for the ps2 at least because it's just screaming to be uncompressed or at least less compressed to be a let out of its restraints I think this game looks great in almost every way but you can tell it's being held back by the hardware but great is still great and this game looks great front to back top 10 best looking ps1 games easily however because this game looks so good what does that say about the loading times well I'm not gonna say the loading times are overtly bad but they're certainly noticeable first of all the loading times for the battles are objectively the worst part of it and one of the bigger annoyances in the game because you need to sit through the cool screen melting effect and watch the camera swing around the battlefield before getting to select your attack let's time it [Applause] yeah that's roughly 16 seconds that's cool at first but once you've seen it several hundred times it starts to wear out a bit to put it mildly I'm not sure how much of that is necessary if they need the full 16 seconds to load the game then fine but if it can hypothetically be shortened like the option to shorten the Dragoon transformation cutscenes then that'd be great but a full 16 seconds is a bit of a rough pill to swallow I think the most annoying loading time is loading the menu even though it's only two and a half seconds you're gonna go into the menu is a whole hell of a lot more than you do anything else and it's the one time you're gonna want to have things happen instantaneously nobody wants to wait on a menu so that two-and-a-half seconds is a bit annoying after a while especially if you forget something and have to go back in and out a few times thankfully loading the areas is much more easily digestible in a random sampling of transitions from area to area it takes an average of about three and a half seconds to load the new area this will vary by about a second depending on where you are and how big the area is but it's perfectly manageable given the fact that you're only gonna be transferring from place to place every few minutes unless you're in an area with a bunch of sub areas like a city so the loading isn't great but much like being sick to enjoy a game that's worth enjoying you got to be able to swallow a few pills and playing The Legend of Dragoon is certainly worth swallowing a few pills in my books soundtrack moderate spoilers I've been accused in the past of not really knowing what I'm talking about when it comes to soundtracks and gaming as I've talked [ __ ] about some of the most iconic soundtracks in videogame history or allegedly the most iconic well perhaps that's an indication of my taste in music so if I've talked [ __ ] about your favorite soundtrack in the past then always be sure to take the opposite stance that I do so when I say that the Legend of Dragoon soundtrack is outright perfect then you probably wouldn't like it at all and that's okay but I mean that this is probably the only video game soundtrack I've ever heard where I can't possibly say anything negative about it I can generally listen to any type of music but I definitely prefer my rock and metal the more gun shot asked the sound of a snare makes the better as far as I'm concerned the soundtrack in the Legend of Dragoon was composed by Japanese born composer Takeo Murat sue and American born composer Dennis Martin and there's a healthy dosage of rock electronic techno and metal in the soundtrack as well as some elements of classical and even synth it's something that I could listen to for hours the main theme if you still believe is soulful and impassioned ballad about reuniting with the ones you love [Music] [Applause] [Music] it's performed by the painfully underrated singer Elsa Raven or Elsa Cornish I still don't know which one she prefers better that than the Elsa from [ __ ] frozen seriously go like her facebook page right now she deserves way more recognition than she gets this is an incredibly well composed track singing OnPoint instrumentally OnPoint it's honestly good enough to be a standalone song without the game though if you still believe does have the line level fight away in it which is one of my all-time least favorite lyrical lines because love by itself won't ever solve anything it's like love isn't some sort of physical being that can help you if you believe in it enough it's a bit of a dumb lovestruck thing to say and it's a thing that's said way too much in music for my taste it's also the only lyrical track in the game the rest is comprised of instrumentals and I can pretty much name over a dozen just off the top of my head that I love the one that I immediately think of when it comes to great pieces is darts theme [Music] [Applause] god damn does that not just pump you up it's like that speech that Braveheart gave to his men converted into musical form it makes me want to charge into battle or punch a [ __ ] tiger fittingly this song is played whenever guard is rallying the troops whenever they're taking their next major step in their journey or whenever they're just getting ready to kick some major ass it's just the most inspiring piece of music I've ever heard and instrumentally it's also the type of music that I can head bang to and that's definitely a plus in my book other major heavy hitting pieces that I can name off the top of my head include the battle themes including the boss battles [Music] [Music] they all fittingly feel like an intense battle and instrumentally also pumped me right up with a little tweaking these wouldn't sound out of place as risks for high quality metal tracks and I could headbang to these all day and the remixes I've heard I can definitely head bang - what I love about this game from a soundtrack perspective is that there's a piece for pretty much every single situation there's over 50 unique tracks in this game for every possible event you could be in many are reused however but they're only reused when it makes sense for example bail and flats both use the same track as they're both beautiful royal capitals [Music] there are however plenty of one use piece is usually in places that have such a unique atmosphere that you couldn't use them anywhere else such as the piece used for the city of cos øz [Music] you can practically feel the turmoil the people of this city are being put through under their oppressive ruler or the commercial city of Lohan [Music] I wonder if you could buy drugs here it feels like an old-timey bazaar it definitely fits the feel of a dirty dismal marketplace certainly better than the unused remix [Music] Wow I've never wanted to kill a music track so badly this is a legit track on the disk thank God it was unused there is another unused track that's basically an extended version of the main menu theme which is actually really good [Music] overall what I'm trying to get at is that these pieces aside from being crate instrumentally are also so great at setting the tone for when they are used the tranquil pieces for example like whispering of the trees [Music] grassy plains [Music] and most of all peace between Hills [Music] are all such soft tranquil pieces that set the tone of whatever area they're being used for as a peaceful relaxing place where everything is okay you feel that they're just feel-good tracks for whenever things going all right I think together in peace with you is also a great piece for this and it's used to great effect in one of my favorite moments in the game when livets is reminiscing to dart about growing up in bail wanting to become a great night while sitting on the roof it's such a great scene [Music] and then in terms of being pure upbeat you have morose theme which is just such a jaunty happy track that makes me smile [Music] then things can turn around on a dime tracks like uneasy state or enemy attack which play when shits about to get serious [Music] the instrumentation here is really anxiety-inducing and very intense whenever you're charging into a seemingly unwinnable battle or you stumble into a battle these play and you always feel the crushing weight of the battle that's about to take place but me being a nihilist when this game sets a depressing dismal tone that's when the soundtrack is arguably at its best to the track reminiscence is the primary track used for this in moments like when the gang wanders onto a ruined battlefield and finds many dead soldiers from both sides of Sergio and the dialogues you can get here by examining the dead bodies are heartbreaking and it's all hit home by the soundtrack the vibe I get from this scene is that there are no winners in war and the theme is expertly put forth by the soundtrack it's also used for other moments like when the gang is coping with basically hitting rock bottom after a crushing defeat with only Albert's survival as the silver lining and we'll talk about that momentarily or when the gang is talking to a severely weakened Shauna after an almost deadly event these are all great moments amplified tenfold by the soundtrack a good soundtrack can make or break an emotional moment and to these moments are made by the music but the single greatest use of the soundtrack is with a similar track to reminiscence called death and mourning this track is used sparingly but it's most notable usage is probably in the most shocking and heartbreaking emotional gut-punch in the entire game and if you know anything about this game chances are it's this scene to set the stage we're just entering the final moments of the second act of chapter 1 up to this point we've gotten a bunch of character development between the principal main characters and there's nothing to indicate that these people are going anywhere because we spent too much time with them so we're going to rescue the king of north sérgio or basel as it's known albert who up to this point has been a fairly minor character we've just finished the boss fight with the person who was going to execute him then we look over and the hooded figure from earlier in the game is doing something to King Albert but we don't know what however lavetta's devotion to his King and his hubris gets the better of him and he charges in little knowing that the hooded figure was wielding the blade specifically made to kill dragons and get stabbed through the chest and falls dead almost instantaneously even with his Dragoon armor and in his final moments this piece death and mourning plays it's one of the most tragic and emotional moments in the game and this piece that plays over it just hits home the gut-wrenchingly tragic feeling that the scene goes for even to this day this is a scene that will still make me well up a bit and the soundtrack really seals it such an effectively tragic moment I'll talk more about this moment when we get to the story portion but I'll leave it with this this is where the game gets really really good I'd now like to take a moment to talk about what are definitely my top three favorite pieces in the entire game in third we have the menu theme which is just a really chill rhythm that's like taking a deep breath after a long stressful day [Music] I could listen to that for hours in second place we have the tip aroma theme now every map theme is a contender for this accolade as they're all fantastic but tea borough is something else [Music] [Applause] [Music] instrumentally it's just glorious and that's the only way I can put it another one that I could listen to for hours but I still haven't shown you what is single-handedly my favorite track in this entire game you see back when I was really making an effort to beat this game I wasn't a hundred percent sold on the soundtrack when I went into the third chapter but then I made my way through to the holy city of Denon grad and I saw the light [Music] [Applause] I remember when I first got to this part of the game I was gob struck by how amazing this piece was and I just sat there for ten minutes just soaking it in no joke the only word I could possibly use to describe this piece would be epic it sounds like the type of piece that would be played by like a John Williams style Orchestra which is perfect for the fact that this is the holy city it is without a doubt my soundtrack MVP of the entire game I could listen to it forever you want to know how much I love this soundtrack as a whole wha-bam that's right I actually shelled out for the physical soundtrack it's the only soundtrack that I actually went out of my way to buy all other soundtracks are things that I've acquired usually in bundles and whatnot I also shelled out quite a bit of money for this one but trust me when I say it was well worth the money for me also well I used several of these tracks for various functions on my channels so of course I love this soundtrack I used the Forbidden Land battle theme for my outro and I also used it for my intro for a while and also my intro these days uses a part of the final boss theme have I convinced you yet how great this soundtrack is well if you aren't sold by now you'll never be I could go on naming all of my favourite pieces in this game but I would be here all day so I'm just gonna cheat and say all of them this soundtrack is nothing short of perfect and I will probably never say that about any other game ever again I think the three people who worked on the soundtrack definitely don't get enough credit Dennis Martin is still around and while he's not working on anything super high-profile he's worked on like a million things so he's still keeping busy thankfully Elsa is still around and performing so check her out Takeo Murata however wasn't so lucky unfortunately while he worked on several soundtracks for several high-profile games in anime yeah he unfortunately died in 2006 to liver cancer rest in peace you legend atmosphere minor spoilers now I've already touched on the atmosphere a bit but this game's atmosphere is thick as butter this won't really take that long to get across because there's only so much you can say about atmosphere without it descending into a string of examples atmosphere is one of those things in gaming that's really hard to quantify because there's no real one hard definition of what exactly it is it's like the video game equivalent of charisma you don't really know exactly what it is but you recognize it when you see it I've always equated atmosphere in a similar fashion to tone where tone has to do with the emotional feeling that something convey is ie I spoke to you in an angry tone atmosphere I equate to how something can make you feel which wallet can be similar to tone isn't necessarily the same the emotion that something conveys can invoke a much different feeling intention T for example can invoke fear but there's also a number of other factors that play into atmosphere such as immersion authenticity and so on of course I may be completely off-base here but that's just my interpretation point is the Legend of Dragoon is a very atmospheric game between the graphics the soundtrack and the overall tone some of the points where this really jumped out at me are places like the city of Bell Webb [Music] it's such a desolate space that you can practically hear the death cries of a thousand lonely spirits it just feels so dreary in the best way possible another example would be the death frontier [Music] an abandoned wasteland were nothing but monsters lived just miles and miles of nothingness and there's a similar feeling that's evoke by the no longer inhabited home of the giganto [Music] a place that's broken down and decaying after all of the inhabitants were murdered of course there are the more depressive examples of atmosphere but of course that juxtaposes nicely against the town areas which have this nice peaceful and homely atmosphere that just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy [Music] when this game gets down to brass tacks it has a tremendous atmosphere so thick you could spread it on toast maybe I'm completely off base here but all I know for certain is that you can really feel the atmosphere in these locations pretty much each environment invokes a similar but unique feel and that's something I find very appealing interlude I should get a few things out of the way before we continue and that's the pronunciation of Dragoon you may notice that I'm pronouncing Dragoon with a hard a whereas most people you hear talking about this game will say Dragoon with a soft day like Dragoon I've taken issue with this for many years and not just because I've been pronouncing it my way for most of my life but I find it outright ignorant to pronounce Dragoon with a soft a because the titular Dragoon is a fusion of dragon and human by way of solidified dragon soul dragon dragoon hmm it's almost as if the word is literally just a dragon with an extra oh you could say oh well that's just how they pronounce it in Japan or well it's a made-up word you can pronounce it however you want except no why because they say it how I say it several times throughout the game via FMV cutscenes there was seven warriors Dragoon's the anger and sadness of the people was fuel for the dragoons cause you could argue that it's just down to how the voice actors pronounced it or once again that is pronounced differently in Japan but that's a moot point because it was pronounced a certain way in the game therefore as far as I'm concerned that's how it's pronounced end of story for more information here's 2016 TGX for the scoop dragoon is prefixed by the word dragon dragoons are dragon spirits the basis of the game and therefore dragoon is pronounced dragon not dragoon unless you're some ass clown with an IQ smaller than your shoe size we'd wife beaters for breakfast is fine fine then you do not pronounce dragon dragon and therefore you do not pronounce dragoon dragoon in fact they even say in the game the reason I get so hung up on this is because I see so many people fail to grasp this including some YouTube channels with millions of subscribers and tons of money when they occasionally talk about it it's not some random thing you never really hear that much it's the name of the game and one of the primary MacGuffins so I'm on a mission to shoehorn it into the minds of the masses that they're saying Dragoon wrong at least in this context that said every time I've mentioned this in the past people have taken issue with the ways I've pronounced other things throughout the game some popular ones include Shauna Lovitz Marui first of all if you think I'm mispronouncing Shauna go back to first grade literally it's the female equivalent of Sean like Alexander and Alexandria I've never heard it pronounced as anything but Shauna because that's how it's pronounced I can't imagine it being pronounced as anything else the only slight ambiguity is whether or not is pronounced Shauna or Shana however I use the word slight because the name Shana has a y in it as in Shayna Baszler but don't take my word for it what does the game have to say there we go I used to think it was Shanna for years but I was a dumb kid that's almost but not quite Shannon but we're getting off topic as for Lovitz well as far as I'm aware that's a name that doesn't exist Levitz is a proper surname as in Paul Levitz but Lovitz isn't this could be another case of the emphasis being different but once again I'm saying it in the way that I find most natural it's a name that doesn't exist so you can't theoretically pronounce it however you want but I'm having a hard time even understanding what it could be perhaps it Slavit sore lave it but none of that sounds or feels natural coming out of my perhaps I'm pronouncing it wrong but how else can I pronounce it finally Maru this one I'm probably getting wrong and I'll fully admit to that I've heard it pronounced as mezu with more emphasis on the e that sounds like a Japanese pronunciation and Maru is a very Japanese name so I'll admit to that if it is pronounced that way however mather who is awkward to say so while continue to willfully pronounce it in the way that sounds the most natural coming out of my mouth and it's a nitpick anyway I mean Maru and mezu aren't really that different they just emphasize the syllables differently it's a made-up name and not pronounced in the FMV cutscenes so it's a moot point anyway five minutes late Dale actually now that I've checked apparently I'm off-base Dragoon's are actually a form of European cavalry unit that dates all the way back to the 1500s carrying Spears and later carrying muskets they haven't been used on a consistent basis since World War one but they survived to this day in a few countries even so in this regard Dragoon is something utterly different being a form of Dragon Warrior by way of Dragon Soul fusion so there was precedent for them being pronounced differently but thankfully as far as history is concerned they're both pronounced the same way so it doesn't really matter then Lovett's is actually a real name apparently an archaic name no longer really around but a name nonetheless it's of Hebrew origins and is apparently pronounced Levitz which I guess means alive it's as Jewish [Music] I still prefer love it's over Levites because it's easier to say and doesn't sound like a root vegetable though Meru isn't a real name aside from being a town in Malaysia but that's besides the point so honestly most of the words I thought were made-up are just really obscure things but whatever just don't pronounce Dragoon with a soft a I'm mostly being ironic because I mispronounced things all the time as you can tell it's mostly just a regional dialect thing or a speech impediment thing like saying expecially instead of especially which I'm trying to work on I don't know maybe I'm just pronouncing everything wrong and I don't know it anything else I may or may not mispronounce just comes down to them being weird words I've never heard made-up words or both and there's quite a lot of that in this game so they don't ultimately matter but my point still stands that it's pronounced Dragoon because it said in the game end of story if you want to get it to mispronunciations however look no further than the absolutely horrid Legend of Dragoon GameSpot review from the year 2000 it's one of the most embarrassing ly written pieces of games journalism short of Kotaku you may think that games journalism is a joke today well it is but it always was and here's proof how bad is it they misspelled one of the principal main characters who's literally in the game from start to finish the author Peter Barr follow spells Shana as shenna you fail it's not a one-time thing either he calls her this through the entire review he also refers to the black monster as the black devil he insists that defeating the sandor and Empire was the main plot of the entire game when it's the plot of all of one chapter the first one the sir D in war he compares all of the characters to the Power Rangers because each of their armor sets match the element they represent which was such a subtle and vestigial detail that I never even noticed it so any similarity to the Power Rangers is superficial at best which even that is a stretch once again it's so subtle I didn't even notice it Rose wears dark colors because she's a dark brooding character dark has a blood-red armor set on his upper body but that doesn't seem out of the ordinary in a fantasy game like this Albert wears deep greens because he's Noble royalty and so on he says that the goal of their quest was to gather the dragoons when that was an incidental part of the request that was brought on by faith when each of the characters encountered the Dragoon spirit tied to their physical beings and finally fulfilling The Legend of Dragoon this is aneurysm inducing there is no Legend of Dragoon to fulfill the reason it's called The Legend of Dragoon is because dragoons are legendary warriors the city of Troy is a legendary city that probably didn't exist but if I were to do some summoning ritual to bring Troy into existence that's not me fulfilling the legend of Troy because it's not some prophesized a legend to be fulfilled that's fundamentally missing the meaning of the word legend in this context I don't want to drag this on too long but I would recommend giving this review a read if you can hold in your vomit the amount of condescension in the writing blatant false facts and outright absurd reasons for docking points bordering on the biased makes this easily the worst review I've ever seen it's atrocious game dude Pro Jared irate gamer they ain't got [ __ ] on Peter barf all oh well except that Peter is probably a lovely person in real life but seeing how wrong this entire review is especially the overarching plot it makes me think that he played the first chapter of the game if that then called it a day which is weird because this review came out months before the game came out in North America perhaps he got a nun localized copy but it didn't come out that long before the North American version and there are a bunch of things that are so close yet so far so he probably just got an early copy and published the review months in advance I'm surprised he was even able to call it the San Dora Empire but even then San Dora is the name of the Empire you don't call the Canadian government the Canada government that's absurd in the game it's referred to as Imperial stand Ora Peter bar follow you fail how could you possibly fail so badly your review is almost as unfinished as your name seriously why is it bartholow can it be Bartholomew it's a joke don't take it to heart and I thought GameSpot wasn't gonna be bad until the Jeff Kurt's been firing years later anyway back to more important topics gameplay moderate spoilers ah yes now we're really getting into the nitty-gritty of The Legend of Dragoon this is personally the aspect of the game that really propels the Legend of Dragoon into legendary status and what separates it from any other game in the genre bar none normally JRPG gameplay isn't actually very extensive back in this era it was all about the turn-based gameplay done through a sheer menu interface some of the games tried to mix it up with a little gimmicks here and there for example the Final Fantasy games used a timer system called the active Time battle system where everybody's actions including the enemy you were fighting were on a time delay a system that allowed for tense decision-making under the pressure of walking under the pressure of constant timers but not much else these days JRPGs are quite eclectic in their approaches to gameplay but the menu selector and turn-based gameplay is something that still haunts JRPGs to this day with many trying different ways to integrate menu selection into real-time battles with varying levels of success the problem is usually turn-based and real-time hybrid battle systems don't work out as well as going all the way one or the other way because there are aspects of real-time and turn-based gameplay that inherently don't mesh for example if you're in a real-time battle and have to fumble down your list of commands to your defend command the time to do so might end with you being hit where if you had a designated defend button it wouldn't take you any time at all it's just preserving aspects of the past for the sake of itself rather than being a great real time or turn-based system independently the advantage of turn-based gameplay is being able to methodically select your commands but real-time and methodical do not go together usually I have nothing against straight turn-based gameplay I just find it boring I find myself watching characters pulling off these impressive attacks when I'd rather be doing that myself I like to play games I don't like to watch games so if given the choice I take a real time battle system over a traditional turn-based battle system any day of the week but there have been some games to succeed in creating a hybrid system famously the Mario RPGs and Kingdom Hearts are beloved series that makes real-time and turn-based and Final Fantasy 12 is a personal favorite of mine but even that game works as well as it does more in spite of itself than anything but I think that The Legend of dragoons edition system blows them all out of the water because it manages a mix of real-time and turn-based gameplay in such a way that neither get in the way of each other and in fact greatly complement each other so how does it work well each character is assigned a number of what's called additions which are essentially combo attacks and how it works is that when you select the command to attack there will be two boxes the bigger box will spin and shrink until they overlap and when they do overlap you press the X button if you get the timing properly you'll hit the next attack in your addition until you get to the final hit in your addition where the character will yell out the name of the addition to signify success which ranges from the sober to the quite ridiculous or more like or or even sounds like a sex move it's a system similar to that of the Mario RPGs but I think the addition system is the one I prefer 100% you may say that this is a system of glorified QuickTime events you know if you're a dumbass but I think it goes much deeper than that on the surface yes you could say that you're just pressing buttons but it's the way the system is presented that makes it work the one thing that really separates this from a system of QuickTime events is that there's a key factor here that's missing from QuickTime events Vaness and also skill in most games QTEs are forced on you and won't let you proceed until you complete them there's no skill in a scripted sequence you're required to do at that point you're just pressing buttons to continue the game rather than pressing buttons with any deeper purpose but at its core all video games are are pressing buttons with a purpose the addition system is like a system of QuickTime events but with actual skill thought and reflexes required each character is once again given multiple additions that you can swap out at any time some will give you a higher SP count for successful completion some will deal higher damage and the more successful you pull off any singular addition the more you'll level it up to a maximum of level 5 with each level increasing the various stats of the attack the higher leveled and longer additions will give you more SP and damage but will be a longer combos that will be much harder to pull off whether that be for the length of the combo being much longer or the timing being much tighter and harder to predict requiring more finesse on your part and some enemies won't just sit around and allow themselves to be attacked sometimes in the middle of your combo you'll have to deal with a sudden counter-attack window and if you don't hit the circle button when the two squares line up at this point the combo will suddenly end and you'll be thrown away with some damage being done to you the thing about this system is the timing is very precise so it takes a lot of practice to get down and it's very stressful yet very exciting the tension of having to pull off a long combo is a very real tension so you get a momentary satisfaction whenever you pull off a successful addition and this is a momentary satisfaction and feeling of accomplishment that you get pretty well several times a fight but another benefit to the system that separates it from your standard QuickTime event is that you're not penalized too hard if you don't pull off the attack successfully you just won't do as much damage as an end result and you also won't get that extra point that goes to Wars leveling up your addition but it's always something you can bounce back once you've gotten all of your additions to level 5 you unlock your final addition which is usually an ultra powerful attack but also insanely long and hard yet satisfying to pull off it's a game play system where I'm clenching my teeth and leaning forward in sheer stress of having to get it right I lost count of the amount of times I swore under my breath if I was about to complete a combo but [ __ ] it up or how many times I pumped my fist in glee when I pulled off a successful combo during a close call and in a moment of stress and thus now design really seals this each hit connects with a sickening Lee visceral crunch that really adds to the weighty thunk of combat I can't get enough of how gratifying it feels to slash these [ __ ] thanks to the gratifyingly visceral sound design the combat sound design is super satisfying and adds to the satisfaction of combat which was already great to begin with moreover it has this great addition no pun intended where every character grunts in exertion after every hit as I've said this used properly can add to the combat greatly because if the character sounds like they're struggling against the weight of their weapons it could add to the impact even just hearing them yell out the name of the addition in that trademark bad voice-acting can add to the satisfaction as a vocal success indicator like a lab rat getting its food so you get that moment-to-moment tension of having to precisely hit six seven or even eight attacks in a row while having to worry about counter attacks and perhaps the repercussions of what happens if you don't pull off the addition successfully and perhaps having to deal with the enemy it takes a lot of skill and practice to master to find your groove but once you do start getting those long combos down pat you're on top of the world so while it may seem simple on the surface it acquires a ton of depth as it goes on as any good system of gameplay should a simple idea done right with a bunch of room for expansion capitalized on gracefully so don't be fooled by the outwardly simple presentation the best way to describe the gameplay in the Legend of Dragoon is either be successful or deal with the consequences I seriously love the feeling of having this momentary crushing anxiety of pulling off long combos dare I say it this combat system is very uniquely cathartic there's a million momentary catharsis to be had and unlike the standard combat setup where it has more to do with simple attacking you know swinging a sword this almost has more to it because you have to hit a sequence of attacks almost like a rhythm game on crack so it might even have more to it than the standard combat setup the only difference is that you yourself can't block it's unique in that it's turn-based until the moment you have to act attack and that it goes back to being turned based once your attack is over it's a system that switches between real-time and turn-based gameplay when it needs to be one or the other but never in such a way that they get in the way of each other and it's [ __ ] sweet you always have to be alert you always have to be on your toes you always have to be precise to always get the best results and with the added tension of never knowing when a counter-attack prompt is going to spring up on you it's seriously rewarding at a moment-to-moment level although sometimes the counter-attack window also leaves almost no reaction time to hit the next attack in your addition because of the game's short pause during the counter-attack window so I wish I could just turn off the small pauses but still learning the timing around to that short pause just adds an extra layer of skill to the addition system so neither of these points really matter all that much they're just nitpicks something I haven't really thought about until now if you have the urge to get a character's final addition whatsoever you'll almost always be switching to your next addition as soon as the last one is at level 5 so it's the type of system where you can never settle on one thing or it's counterproductive to settle and even then for some characters you're only just barely able to get their final addition to level 5 before the end of the game unless you made sure to grind XP which I only did for one playthrough not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing but it's worth mentioning if only for the sake of my dumb past self who spent most of the game using burning rush because it was the one I was comfortable with the only real problem I have with the addition system and it's only a problem when you start using a new character is that because the timing with the additions are usually based around when each hit takes place there are characters who just launched into battle with all piss and vinegar so I don't really have a chance to react but once again that's really only a problem when you're introduced to new characters you'll earn each new character subtleties easily enough I've heard kickback for this system however while I've seen many people express their love and admiration for this combat system there's a very real demographic of people who don't like it from what I've seen most of the people who don't like it are JRPG traditionalists who like straight menu based systems as far back as 2016 I've had people tell me they didn't like it for a multitude of reasons from it's different to what I was used to I already did the facepalm bit but still all the way to I didn't like it because it's a system that required you to have fast reflexes oh honey bunny if you don't like this system because it requires you to have reflexes you're gonna have a hard time with most games but that's the thing it's a system that G RPG traditionalists may not necessarily because it's a system that prioritizes arcade reflexes and timing over strategy which some might see as a slap in the face of their favorite genre so perhaps it's to inactive for traditionalists to like but to inactive for action gamers to enjoy but to say that would imply there's no overlap between these two demographics which is an asinine thought and I'm proof of that trust me the strategy and action go hand in hand very gracefully enough for anyone to like theoretically anyway and the people who say this system is a poor system are a relative minority from what I've seen I've seen hundreds of people say that the addition system is a great system and it is it combines the best aspects of real-time and turn-based gameplay without either getting in the way of each other so both demographics can enjoy it theoretically as much though probably action gamers more so and I love it because it's a fast frantic tense exciting system that has a very real escalation and organic reward system for playing and mastering it it gives you the same satisfaction as a standard real-time combat system while also being a hundred percent it's own thing with the exception of maybe the Mario RPGs I really can't think of any game that's ever done anything similar to this so while the end results may feel the same the Legend of Dragoon very much does its own thing gameplay wise and I love it for that you'll never play another game quite like this the addition system is what gives the Legend of Dragoon its unique edge and quite frankly what makes this game legendary and I wouldn't trade that for the world that's not to say I'm against traditional RPGs or that I don't understand their appeal I have one friend in particular who's taken exception with my overt love for the act of combat in this game he's a big fan of Golden Sun incidentally a traditional RPG with a lot of visual flair there's an appeal to sitting back and knocking out an entire team of enemies with one single well-placed attack that has spectacular visual flair regardless of how involved you are and if it's a passive gameplay system that can be a nice chill experience that's fine it has its place I just prefer the way the Legend of Dragoon does it personally there are many games that have more passive gameplay systems and there's a lot of satisfaction to be derived off that me liking performing additions doesn't diminish that I just vastly prefer having agency in gameplay don't forget I can't think of one game that has similar gameplay to the Legend of Dragoon so if you were to make it like all the other JRPGs and robbed it of its uniqueness just because some people don't like additions that would be nothing short of a crime you can call that gatekeeping I call it my one unique gate is here you don't need it you already have hundreds of gates perfectly kept to your specifications why should this gate be yours - everyone should have something that appeals to them but not everything should appeal to everyone if you see what I mean honestly though if you can't master timed button presses if you're advocating for this game to have a less gameplay I'm sorry I'm genuinely sorry but I have no problem telling you to play a different game if having a game tell you to play it its way rather than your own way is too much that's not the fault of the game and it shouldn't be seen as such what I enjoy Final Fantasy 9 more if I had more agency in the battles sure but I'm not gonna demand it that'd be selfish that'd be me demanding a game that doesn't fit a certain shape fit that certain shape when that was never the intention of the design it's no different for Dragoon and it's not a flaw so the additions are the core that this game is built around but there are plenty of other aspects to the game for example there's the option between attack and magic that's the guard command the guarding if I'm being honest is a bit overpowered you can use it as many times as you want then it recovers 10% of your health makes any attack until your next turn do half damage and nullifies any status elements that might affect you you'll never have that many health items with you at any given time so unless you're in a pinch this is the best means to protect yourself it's an all-in-one that makes some fights ridiculously easy and if you're running low on health before a boss you can get into a random encounter and just defend until you're at full health they can usually only attack one person at a time after all I didn't do that so often because that's very boring and takes a while and that you can only recover 10% at a time plus in regards to nullifying status elements it's never gonna be clear when somebody might try to inflict you with a status ailment so it's a [ __ ] toss as to when and who you want to use guard but it makes it no less satisfying when you do counter their status ailments and see that little visual effect I think having an all-in-one defend command is a bit of a cop-out maybe they should have split it up into several defend commands but then again that might have ruined the game's balance if they weren't careful and balancing this game for challenge when having something like 30 different combinations of characters with all the different attacks Dragoon abilities and builds probably isn't something that you really want to mess with by adding complexity is that may or may not enhance the experience then you have the magic items the idea behind the magical items in this game is that you can buy them or you might find them laying around and there are many different types different elementals once that attack one character a ones that attack multiple characters once with a fixed damage ones with a vary damaged systems special items and so on the ones with the variable damaged system are the most fun you throw them and button mash the X button as much as you can for maximum damage I actually used a turbo controller for this at one point because I'm a lazy ass but then eventually I actually discovered a method where I don't need to use a turbo controller and in many cases end up doing better than I would have by cheating you hold the controller in your left hand and you use your index finger like presto and with that I never got anything below 200% I think my record was actually 218 percent but I don't remember I enjoy the magic system in this game for the same reason I enjoy the addition system it makes you an active component in the battling system separating this game gameplay-wise for most JRPGs and makes it so your damage output is more based on some level of skill of course this isn't as skill based as the additions but it's still more so than I'd expect there are plenty of items that have a fixed damage output and were accompanied by an impressive-looking animation but I'm not too fond of those because especially with the longer ones I wish you could just be playing the game or even more useless are the ones that cost status ailments like poison or fear when you're hit with fear it's actually relevant to the gameplay because it's something that carries over but why should I use an item that will poison an enemy that I'll see all of once I mean it doesn't work on bosses granted getting knocked out though is hilarious on both sides and the love status ailment is even better you'll fight for the person you fall in love with but it loses its effect the moment they die and sometimes one status ailment can cancel out another in regards to the fixed damage items I still use them when I had to because sometimes they lined up correctly with the elemental weaknesses the elemental weakness system in this game works like this fire and water are weak to each other as our wind and earth and light and dark the only two elements that don't have a weakness are thunder and non elemental I think there was a missed opportunity here to put an opposite element to thunder you can see the element of a character by what colour their attack window is the big catch with this system is that you will only do half damage to an enemy that has the same element as the person attacking or by chance if you used an attack item with the same element as the enemy this does employ the use of a bit of strategy with who you choose to face your party around do you try to employ the power of characters that cover the entire spectrum and risk having nobody who can act as the weakness for any given enemy and in fact possibly come across enemies who are resistant to one or all of you or do you cover all your bases by having two sides of the same elemental weakness and play it safe hassel doesn't have an L a weakness so he's a bit of a wild card then that carries over into the Dragoon forms which are a major part of the game and probably the game's biggest USP so the mechanic as it sits is not as you attack you'll gain SP or spirit points and once you've gained at least 100 spirit points you can transform into your Dragoon form complete with elaborate animations for every character [Music] whoa my pants suddenly shrink what's interesting about the designs of the Dragoon Armour is that they seem to be adaptive to the personality and current armor sets of the person using them which is why they always look so different when you're fighting the person using the Dragoon versus using them yourself that's why hassle has a less cool-looking version of the violet Dragoon armor than dole that's why Shauna's Dragoon armor is a little breezy shall we say we're Miranda's is more covered up and fitting with her more noble matured personality well matured is a relative term she's still an absolute [ __ ] but that's besides the point in theory she's all these things because she's royalty and the Dragoon armor reflects that I think it's a very clever visual design that every Dragoon in some way reflects the person who wields that Dragoon spirit you can upgrade your Dragoon level I always thought basically whenever the game feels like it to a maximum of level 5 but that's not fully true I always thought the leveling was random but I can verify now that the SP is the method that dragoons level up you know the point you get whenever you do in addition I always thought those were just the points for the bar you needed to fill up in order to activate your Dragoon but no it actually has a double use as sort of the experience points it's just never explicitly said so for those of you who want to level up your dragoons quickly having an addition with a high SP count is paramount the higher the Dragoon level the more turns you can be in your Dragoon form in a row the more magic points you'll have and the more magic attacks you have access to in your Dragoon form all of your major stats are buffed physical attack magic defense and so on and you can either do a Dragoon addition or a magic attack the Dragoon addition is a 4 or 5 hit combo and it's very tough to hit to this day I still haven't gotten the timing just right but when you do get the timing right you'll hit the full combo and end it with a boom or an hassles case and it with a Kamehameha or you can hit these magic attacks which will take up some of your magic points these are probably pound-for-pound the most powerful attacks in the game but with the added catch that each animation is very long and drawn out with no interactivity just like most of my sentences and impressive as they are it's practically an obligation to sit through them whenever they come up so I try my best to avoid them when I can the thing is using my general overall strategy of prioritizing additions the dragoons start out useful but over time they slowly lose their usefulness usually I stopped using them altogether around the middle of the disk and then there are some of these bosses where you actively can't use your dragoons because for one reason or another in the later game the dragoons become a liability either from some massive boss specific stat decrease or from some bosses actively being able to one-shot you if you turn to Dragoon form which is the most massive of dick moves of course this doesn't apply to every boss battle and it certainly doesn't apply to every play style but it does for me as much as I love using the dragoons they just stop being useful for me after a while even in the final boss at one point I used the special ability but then the final boss pulled out his ability that gimped my Dragoon power and I was stuck with it for five turns for each character I don't think I've ever been more tense than that stuck in the middle of a 30-minute final boss maybe having to redo it because my current form that I'm stuck with just got gimped an option to turn it off whenever would have been nice the idea behind the special ability is that when all of your characters are at their maximum SP you can activate it which activates the Dragoon forms for all three characters simultaneously and the person who activates it gets a massive power buff for their element and the ability to automatically do the Dragoon addition to completion without any input it's a great ability and while I didn't use it too often for the reasons I just established they're a great trump card to pull out if you're really wanting to lay into the enemy for example if you're fighting a water-based boss you can activate dart special which multiplies his power while minimizing water attack power for what it's worth they're still super satisfying to use and there's nothing quite like being able to pull off a successful Dragoon Edition and in general seeing as there are seven different characters to play as I appreciate the amount of different approaches to gameplay that this allows you to have both as dragoons and normal but one thing I've constantly gotten [ __ ] for is saying that Shauna is pretty useless she deals low damage and Walker speed and accuracy are great that doesn't matter when all of her other stats are weak and she doesn't even have additions which circumvents the best part of the game in most situations she's the first to die but people keep telling me that she's majorly overpowered the big reason for that according to so many people is because if you build your party around the use of magic then you'll kick the [ __ ] out of everyone that opposes you if you give her the items that gives her MP or magic power every time she gets hit or maybe the item that you don't get until later into the game that doubles your MP then position each fighter round her turning into her dragoon form her magic does [ __ ] loads of damage because she has the highest base magic stat and most of her magic attacks also heal you so you're basically unstoppable using Shauna can make this game a breeze if you use her right but I can also do well in many online shooters of I camp but either way I'm not having fun because I'm just sitting there waiting for things to happen you see I've always prioritized fun over optimization and while I can optimize my character build and utilize magic to its fullest potential I'm not gonna be having fun and why is that because I like to play games not watch games like I said before using magic forces you to watch these long drawn-out animations of things happening which while impressive much of the time doesn't change the fact that I'm sitting back and scratching my ass thinking boy this sure looks cool I wish I could be playing I think that's what separates me from the average G RPG fan many JRPG fans by the very nature of the genre perform more methodical experiences and so that lends the average G RPG fan to look into more optimized builds even if it makes the game much less interactive at least compared to what I would do because the genre by its very nature is much less interactive whereas I don't like JRPGs usually and the reason I like the Legend of Dragoon so much is because of all the ways it differs from its contemporaries I like video games as a storytelling medium but unless I'm actually an active participant in gameplay then I don't want it because then they're just glorified movies so if using the bow users and building your party around the use of magic means that you can be more dominant then more power to you but I'll stick to my suboptimal build where I have to put the work in myself to get the most out of it because I find that's the most enjoyable part of the game I don't see taking away gameplay as a reward I see that as a failure of the developers because the best thing you can reward your players with is more gameplay so I have no intention to build my party around less gameplay so build your parties around magic all you want and you'll probably even beat the game before me but I can guarantee you'll have more fun than you the same thing goes for the ultimate war god item but before we talk about that I have a confession to make the footage you're seeing before you was from my first 100% playthrough but also that's not technically true you see in the ghost ship section of the game there's a portion of the level where you have four ghosts that give you a random number and then you go back to the beginning of the level and there's a treasure chest with a three-digit code a combination of the three numbers that you've got from the ghosts are the code to the treasure chest issue is it gives you the numbers with no apparent indication of what the combination of those numbers are and you only get a handful of chances to get the correct number before it resets and then you have to go all the way back to the place where the ghosts were where you have to get the numbers again and it's all RNG so there's no way to cheese it meaning you theoretically do this forever and not get the correct answer no thank you I already have enough existential dread in my everyday life the only indication as to whether or not you're on the right track is that you'll get a notification if you have any of the numbers in the correct spot but there's no indication of which numbers or how many and so your guess is as good as mine as to which of these numbers it's referring to so either you have the combination or you don't then you can keep coming back to this treasure chest for five separate items which culminates with an item that costs ten thousand gold the ultimate War God in the entire game this is the only thing I didn't do because the time I'd waste trying to get through this tedious puzzle would make me want to commit Helen Keller when I'd rather just be spending my time doing things that I actually want to do like actually playing the game while there are parts of this game that can drag on a bit long this is just optional tedium and offer what five items in ascending order of usefulness No thank you well this is the only thing I didn't do in this 100% playthrough I don't really count it you see I consider content that counts towards your percentage to only really count if it's something that you could do anytime these optional bosses can be fought anytime in theory as soon as you get to the area where these bosses are but once the ghost ship disappears so too does the chest and even then it's just a treasure chest to say that a treasure chest is required to get a hundred percent completion even if it's a special chest with multiple items would imply that every treasure chest and item box should be open for 100% completion and in my opinion that's like having to get every ring in a Sonic game to get a hundred percent or get every coin in a Mario game to get 100% I think there should be a limit to what constitutes getting full completion and I don't consider the treasure chests part of that personally so while I may not of a hundred percent of the game by your definition I did by my definition and besides what's the reward for tediously trying to get the combination and then finally getting it after a hundred tries the ultimate war god an item that will cause additions to automatically be pulled off without any input from you right so I'm gonna jump through all of these hoops so I can not enjoy the game and ruin the Edition system which is the single most unique aspect of the game as a whole and is one thing that separates this game from every other JRPG thereby making it the same as every other menu based RPG but with longer more drawn-out animations for attacks hard [ __ ] pass that said I do appreciate that this game has so many ways to play to the point that I'm still figuring out new ways to play to this day and there's no correct way to play this game and that means that even while knowing the story this game has tons of replayability I even heard one person talk about how they chose the weapons with the lowest attack power available so that they can play the game for a longer that's crazy and would also really help with addition grinding there are so many ways to play your own way something I realized going into this video is that I'd played this game multiple times throughout my personal history but I'd only actually beaten it twice once I believe in late 2012 for the [ __ ] of it and once in mid 2016 when I was bedridden post-surgery so in preparation for this video I played it and beat it again and that was my first 100% playthrough including the intensest [ __ ] magician Faust boss fight and let me tell you there is no fear like having the items with the highest magical defense in the game and still having one of your characters be one shotted by a boss they don't call Faust the hardest boss in the game for nothing after I'd beaten that playthrough I was inundated with multiple people telling me I was playing the game wrong in a number of ways some saying I was under utilizing the magic system some were telling me that Shauna was actually really overpowered if you know what you're doing yada yada yada stuff we've already mentioned everybody had a different opinion on how I should be playing the game so I tried something new after my initial playthrough with dart Albert and Rose which is my comfort zone I decided to play the game again with a character combination I've never used before in this case dart hatchling Maru I also decided to focus on XP grinding as opposed to my usual money grinding so basically I decided to flip my usual strategy on its head to see how different my experience was and what did I find different about how the game played well some things were very different and others not so much I found that hassle as a brick [ __ ] with absolutely amazing attack power like Albert but also with better defense and speed so he became the rock of my group and I ended up giving him the best equipment however Muro for as fast as she is has subpar attack power and offensive power so while she attacked more often the end result was generally the same in terms of total damage dealt but then even late into the game she was the only character who was still routinely being one shotted or nearly one shotted by bosses even after a hot few hours of exp grinding so after this playthrough I think my ideal team would be dart hassle and Albert which I guess makes me a misogynist on my comfort zone team Rose had good attack power but didn't really gain health nearly as quickly as everybody else and so she took damage at roughly the same pace as everyone else but with less overall health meaning she died more often then Albert is an absolute tank of a human being but also took damage a time much higher rate than everyone else and so he's a glass cannon but one hell of a cannon now the only two characters I have yet to play the game all the way through with our Congo and Sean Aranda and [ __ ] that with a tuning fork Congo is so slow that even with my speed upgrades he almost never had the chance to attack and even if bow users had attack power worth a damn they don't have the additions meaning you don't so much play as them as much as you watch them play the game without any input from you but we've already covered that the only real downside to excluding rows for my super star tag-team is that she's the one who ends up being able to use the Dragon Buster the issue there however is that you get to use the dragon Buster for all of one fight the final boss you also get to use the Dragoon spirit of the divine dragon for that one fight so while it's cool to see it makes the game cry out for a new game plus mode that it just doesn't have I would have loved to go through a super hard mode of The Legend of Dragoon with the dragon Buster the divine Dragoon and ultra hard enemies but alas tis not the world in which we live and hell if Rose could use the dragon Buster for more than just the final boss then yes she would be a permanent member of my superstar tag team but unfortunately now though recently I found out that a new game+ does sort of exist as it turns out if you start a new game over an existing game and reset the console with perfect timing you'll start a new game with the endgame equipment not exactly a new game plus more of a game plus because you're playing through the same game just as Darth or god of death but hey at least Rose gets to use the dragon Buster for more than just the final boss while researching this I also discovered a number of other different challenge runs man some of these might be fun like the no death run although the idea of doing anything that might mean restarting what is usually around a 40-hour game from scratch well no thanks I have a limited time these days and speedrunning a turn-based RPG doesn't sound like fun at all regardless my ideal party would now be dart whom I forced to use then Albert and hassel who are tanks that walk like men so yes please I don't usually pay attention to specific stats and optimizing character builds I usually just equip whatever has more blue stats than red stats in the menu but stat optimization is another thing to consider if you're looking to optimize your playthrough and as you level up the stats do change and grow some better than others as for the specific character stats I've decided to look into them more dart is obviously the most balanced in all areas - slightly low speed but he's the one you're stuck with so naturally he'd be the most balanced which pretty much already figured Albert slash Lovitz have high health physical damage and defense but have slightly low speed and absolutely crumpled when it comes to anything that involves magic but that's balanced by the health somewhat Shona / Miranda have a low physical attack and defense but incredible speed accuracy and the best magic stats in the game so there the mages of the group using magic items and dragoon magic is most effective with them but that's assuming they don't die first Rose has good speed defense and attack both physical and magical though her stat growth slows considerably by the end of the game making her generally average in the late stages once everybody catches up to her stats as you level up and she has extremely low health so she starts useful and that Peters off by the end of the game when it comes to hassle all of his offensive stats are good as well as his speed but he has slightly low health and defense of all kinds so he's a bit of a glass cannon but not as much of a glass cannon as Albert / Lovitz Maru has incredible speed and magic stats but she has the lowest health out of anyone and her physical attack is low offset by her final addition being a whopping 600 percent that's a spicy meatball so she's gonna be doing everything faster than anyone attack use up magic in SP die she's running at 150 percent opposite of her as the one who I've never really played with at all Kangol he has incredible health physical attack and physical defense but everything magic related sucks and his speed is so low that it's an absolute deal breaker so you need to up his speed by any means necessary to make him useful at all obviously there's more detailed info on the wiki but hopefully this should help you decide what kind of character combinations you want to use on your various escapades although to be fair as long as you play your cards right you can get through with pretty much any build but if you happen to get to the final area in the game and find yourself under leveled for the final boss after you've passed the point of no return there's an enemy you can find here called the Triceratops that Walt tuff gives you a whopping 2000 XP per kill so it's the easiest way to level up throughout the entire game but it can only be found in the ep final area leading to where you might find Michael I won't give you any more context than that for fear of spoilers so it's really just for the sake of giving yourself an extra boost if you need it in terms of unorthodox strategy recently I've been taking up a self-sabotage method you see as the story goes on more and more care will become available to play as fairly standard stuff but if I've already decided that I'm going to replace the characters I have now for other ones as soon as they become available that I'm not gonna want to allow the characters that I'm currently being forced to use to gain unnecessary experience points so I'll self-sabotage my characters that I'm not going to use by keeping them at as low health as possible so they'll die as often as possible giving a bit of extra experience to the other characters while circumventing the progress of the other characters as much as possible putting the people who I'm actually going to use ahead in this playthrough because one of my chosen characters was Maru who is not available to play as until about a third of the way through the game I was self sabotaging my characters for all that time even and especially in bosses as risky as that was it's a fun game that almost borders on emergent gameplay where the game becomes how many ways can I kill the characters that I'm not going to use and how do I keep them down while still putting them to work the reason this is a necessary touch is due to a bit of a dumb design choice you're not able to have any less than three characters the moment you get more than two so the moment Shauna joins the party you're forced to use her and if not her you're forced to use some combination of three characters so the only way to prevent characters you're not going to use from getting extra experience is by letting them die at every turn that might explain why my comfort zone has always been dart Rose and Albert because they were the first three people with additions that become available this gap became more noticeable here using characters that aren't available until later so while people are used to seeing Lovitz die once I've now seen him die like six times in the span of a few hours get on my level [Music] seriously Lovitz you couldn't have waited ten more minutes until you actually died oh yeah and occasionally you'll be forced to use one specific character for story reasons and usually that character you're forced to play as is the one to deliver the final blow so if you're using the self-sabotage method in these circumstances this happens [ __ ] I'm Hershel just don't mean [ __ ] to me I don't think I've ever laughed harder at something in this game then when I saw hash will spring to life like that and that includes the odd laugh-out-loud moment like the character who claims to be you and then gets arrested there's a reason why being forced to use three characters is such a big deal unlike so many other games where the only thing different about characters are minor stats so you could theoretically play as any of them all the way through your choice of character is fundamental to how the game plays here meaning your choice of character and the Legend of Dragoon is integral to how the gameplay is much more than most if not all JRPGs so forcing us to play as people we know we're not going to use just because we have to use three characters at any given time is a big annoyance I don't want to practice the characters additions and level them up if I'm going to give up that character when I'd rather be leveling up editions and gaining experience at a higher frequency with characters I'm actually going to use even if that means fighting with two or even one character another bit of dumb design that kind of limits how you can play the game is that you have to use dart like no debate dart is the main character and so there's absolutely no point in the game where you're not forced to use him this kind of seems backward there are points where for story reasons you're forced to use certain characters which usually makes sense in context and gives you a good sampling of the different characters but there's no reason you should be forced to use Dart other than the purely incidental fact that he's the principal main character the reason this is an issue is that there are potential play styles that become inaccessible because forcing you to use one character for the entire game greatly limits the amount of combinations you can use like are we really gonna forget that dart is the main character if we make it so you don't have to play as him it should be and in fact is obvious that he's the main character from the story there's really only so many ways I can complain about this but it's a problem I've had pretty much since the first time I played this game why are there even so many character slots in the replace menu when we don't get a swap-out dart also the menu choice for switching characters is called replace that's weird generally speaking though being forced to use dart won't hinder you as he's a good all-rounder for pretty much any situation it's just a shame he's forced on us and given the right items he can pretty much fit into any builds because the way the stats work the character builds have more to do with your item optimization than anything searching for all of these items that you can use to ward your specific build can be a rewarding journey in and of themselves items and equipment that have certain effects if something happens perhaps there might be a reason for you to want an item that elicits fear when you use additions who knows the description of my play style will probably continue to make hardcore JRPG enthusiasts cringe but my general strategy for equipment is [ __ ] if I find a piece of equipment that gives me a higher stat so I can in some way make a character more powerful or easy to use then I pick it except for the Soul Eater that does damage when I use it [ __ ] that sword one thing I've come to learn is that the therapy ring which heals you every turn can cancel out the Soul Eater the only issue there is that it takes up the accessory slot which can limit your build but if you want to fully utilize darts most powerful weapon by a wide margin without the design fault getting in your way if you want that to be your build so you don't have to heal every few turns that's your ticket there's only a handful of weapons available to each character in the game and none of them are all that much different from the others aside from overall attack power so there's very little reason to use anything but the weapon with the highest attack power that you currently have I wish we could have some more equipment and weapon varieties so if there's one thing that Final Fantasy does better than Dragoon it's this small point there's also the matter of the side activities now there's a healthy amount of side activities in this game I'd say around 10 optional bosses some of which correlate with side quests and plenty of short side quests in other areas that said there could have been more I think the only Final Fantasy game I've played all the way through was 12 but one of my favorite things about that game was as you got further along into the game there were completely optional areas that you did not have any reason to go to in the story some of these areas had side quests some of them had secret shops where you could buy super-powerful items and so on The Legend of Dragoon has a very tight and deliberate focus which is a double-edged sword on one hand everywhere you go has a purpose and everything has a reason to be there even the areas that are little side areas in the main environment but on the other hand what this means is that there's very little to do other than what you have to do for the main plot I would have liked a few extra cities to explore side of the main plot with some extra hard enemies and tangental optional bosses at the end I'm going to assume that this was probably a matter of space limitations they were already on four disks so the idea of giving you more side activities and optional areas was probably a bridge too far for four CDs and there's still plenty of optional bosses they're just usually not too out of the way you have the three dragon souls and may fill Kamui in the evergreen forest of the scarred super Viraj the polar armour and fort may grad the four dragoons and Belle web and finally magician Faust I definitely like these optional bosses because any excuse to play extra bits of this game especially bits of this game that are really challenging I can dig like a shallow grave bringing the four Dead dragoons piece is especially challenging and the end result is heartbreaking but they're more challenging because their physical attacks are insanely overpowered and in one of my playthroughs I had the item that gave me amazing magical protection but not the physical equivalent and I don't mind there being less optional bosses as long as there's plenty of real bosses and that there is any of the Virage is the divine dragon the grand jewel Emperor doles act well or the surely boss fight that flips the combat on its head are just some of the great memorable boss fights I can name off the top of my head but there's simply too many great boss fights to list here's a tip you can also use surely to grind additions as she has theoretically unlimited health but I didn't personally do that because I thought it would take too long we would probably be a bit boring so tips to any players starting out as the surely boss fight implies some of the bosses have special gimmicks which make each fight feel unique some of them are as simple as having them have some weird unique attack that has a special effect some of them will have some sort of protection and then there are the ones with these outright completely unique effects like how the grand jewel will roll back your level to try and make your attacks do less damage that one is both the highlight and the low light of the gimmicks because it's really cool and catches you off-guard but it's also an unfair dick move but as long as you have the legend cast by this point which you should it's at your mercy the forbidden lands as a whole is such a unique area unlike the rest of the game right down to the music which is really cool it's such an awesome desolate space with a great design and atmosphere but that's all there is to say on that the other boss fights with unique gimmicks are the ones that use the Dragoon form likeliness or dole the poulter armor with each of its extremities acting independently or map you with his disappearing act and that's only scraping the surface of this really no two boss fights optional or mandatory are ever the same and that's a great thing considering how many boss fights there are in this game strangely though there are many parts of this game that were changed when this game came overseas and one of them is the boss health in the Japanese version all the bosses have much more health while magic and items do much less damage I've heard it was a common practice to make North American versions of games much easier because the Japanese don't think that Americans like challenge there's a bunch of other little changes from what I understand but these are the most prominent changes on the surface each region also have different discs but they all look badass they also all have different covers but they're not all so awesome the Japanese version is really simple but elegant the North American version is okay but I think it would have been better without the collage of faces and would have just been the background image enlarged but then you have the PAL version which is a bit of a mess it says still from one of the cutscenes with no relation to the games primary imagery and then you have the render of dart in the front this does not sell the game and looks like it could have been made in less than five minutes it's still not ugly but it's kind of mediocre anyway even with the standard enemies there's too many great ones to list all complete with weird-ass names in fact let's have a montage of the best ones not right now though one thing I like about this game is that even with all of these bosses optional or otherwise you could theoretically get through the entire thing without a single moment of grinding because just going through as you are you generally level up fast enough that you can keep pace with most bosses you might have a hard time but you can do it the only time I feel the urge to grind is to make this game easier and I enjoy the gameplay anyway so I don't mind grinding mostly and these two playthroughs I took two very different approaches to grinding in one case I grinded for money to get the legend cask and the armor of legend one item that makes you almost impervious to magical damage and the other item that makes you almost impervious to physical attacks you need to grind 60,000 gold to get three sets of these two items which I did in my traditional method of grinding the enemy called double o parts between Helena and cos øz in the other playthrough I grinded for experience with the Bluebird which is most commonly outside of the home of the giganto is basically there's a handful of special enemies that will give you copious amounts of gold or experience you can only do one damage at a time at best but most of them have between four and six health and they all can dodge most of your attacks unless you have incredible accuracy and then they have the tendency to run away after a short amount of time so generally what you have to do is give everybody the items that ops their speed and/or accuracy hit these things with the magic stick stone found in the marshlands which will freeze them for three turns use the speed-up found in the valley of corrupted gravity on the person with the highest hit chance and pray you can kill them before they unfreeze and run away especially with double-o parts because when they run away they have an instant kill [ __ ] you attack on a side note I really really really hate the enemies in this game that have instant kill attacks one of the things that brings a lot of tension and desire to end these battles as soon as possible is that most enemies bosses included have a final [ __ ] you attack if they have the chance to attack wall at critical health some of them are fairly standard magical attacks which are easy enough to take but then there are some enemies whose final [ __ ] you attack when they get to low health our instant kill attacks whoever thought it was a good idea to have enemies who can kill you instantly regardless of stats you are an idiot sir or madam but back to it in both cases the end result was much of the same I think that grinding for the best items in the game will yield better results as higher levels don't do much to protect you overall you need protection not power and it's also a bit easier because you can use anyone to grind money including shana with her amazing accuracy and speed which makes her perfect for hitting double low parts and not much else for me whereas with experience you need your a list on the team and their stats may not be optimized for grinding fast enemies that dodge a lot so even in the game where I grinded experience I still ended up grinding for the legend cask just for my own peace of mind and it sure worked though seeing as there are some characters who don't get their penultimate editions until a ridiculously high level dart and also Maru especially Maru grinding for experience is at least useful so you can max out your additions and unlock your final addition at least moderately early into the game you're fairly spoiled for choice when it comes to enemies you can grind with both for experience and money personally though there are a few that are absolute no goes for me they all have unique methods of dealing with them some are vulnerable to pretty much every attack as long as you can hit them and as long as you can get them before they run away then there are some that require absolutely arcane methods to deal with them the only time I ever used a poison needle is against the lucky jar because it's the only thing that can damage it you keep getting zero damage notifications otherwise so once you get it poisoned it's a dice roll as to whether or not you beat it or it runs away before it dies first and when I say it's a dice roll it's a dice roll where sides 1 to 5 are all giant middle fingers and the 6th side is just a bit of text that says flip a coin if head you have a 50/50 chance for you to succeed in killing the lucky jar what I'm trying to say is that it's very very rare for you to succeed in killing them then there's the rainbow bird I didn't even bother with a rainbow bird because it's only vulnerable to confusion at least the poison is guaranteed to damage the lucky jar this is taking your chances that you had with the lucky jar and splitting it in half or worse sure that in theory makes it more satisfying to defeat them but it's such a hassle that there isn't really any satisfaction to be had by that point the only time I actually bothered with the rainbow bird is when I had sachets and I'll get back to that in a moment now here's what's interesting about the game in regards to the matter of grinding in this case regular old grinding of regular old enemies for reasons mentioned previously livets leaves the plot by the end of the first disc even while that's true him / Albert get the gust of wind dance at a low enough level that it's possible to get the final addition a flower store Maslov bits before he dies usually you'll get the gust of wind dance just before you're held in a revisit or during the hell in a revisit so if you're willing to spend some time grinding you can see Levitz pull off the flower storm or in his case the row storm I've never done it because I usually don't get flower storm until maybe late chapter 2 at the very earliest so imagine how long it would take to grind up levitz's editions just to see him pull off the final addition quite a while i'm assuming i'm happy that they even bothered to give it to him and animate it and all that but if i'm gonna grind I'd rather it be for a larger reason than just because i want to see one version of an animation as opposed to another especially if it's four hours I'd rather be grinding four levels or grinding for the best armor in the game I can just look up live it's his final edition on the youtubes if I really want to see it I'm not that dedicated nor am i that bothered to get it myself so I'm not [ __ ] with that level of grinding so obviously the primary gameplay loop is structured around random encounters funny thing actually some people have said that because you get an indicator on how long you have until you get into a battle that these aren't actually random encounters well that's fair but not quite true random encounters refers to the combat scenarios that weren't explicitly programmed to start in a single place the enemies in Helena are placed deliberately and spawn in the same places [Music] [Music] those aren't random encounters because they spawn in the same place but battles that don't take place in a fixed predetermined spot regardless of if the game gives you a notification that they're happening are still random it's once again a semantic thing but there are people who have taken exception with calling these what they are but anyways to the non RPG enthusiasts to the random encounter rate may seem a bit high there's an item called the charm potion which is like the repel in Pokemon ik really lowers the encounter rate granted the random encounter rate changes depending on which area you go to but it's still often enough that if you don't really like the gameplay that would be a make-or-break factor as to whether or not I can recommend this game and trust me this game isn't for everyone but it's certainly for me this gameplay system really clicks with me so I could do it forever and you weren't really gonna be playing this game for super long anyway where most JRPGs at this time would last you 70 to 100 hours plus my average playthrough of The Legend of Dragoon clocks in at around 40 to 45 hours depending on how much grinding I do yes to the uninitiated this is actually short for RPG standards or at least not long if you want to choose the grinding for at least a bit of time there's actually an item that can help you they're called sachets and they're ultra rare items that have to use is putting jeon go to sleep in helena prison and doing ten guaranteed damage to any enemy which means that this is the only item that can kill special enemies in one hit guaranteed personally though i always save them for the rainbow bird which appears in the fourth disc which gives you 3000 experience points each seeing is you're only guaranteed to get three sachets in the entire game and 9000 experience points is too good an offer to pass up there is however a 1% drop rate for sachets in the home of the giganto x' yeah I'll take my chances elsewhere the only issue with saving these items for the fourth chapter is that unfortunately you're only given a 32 item limit at any given time in your inventory which on one hand does employ a bit of extra strategy especially seeing as items work in correlation with how level wrie healing potions heal a fixed percentage of your health not a fixed amount so all items remain equally useful the whole way through but that does also cause some other issues like in the after mentioned situation where I have to waste five spaces on sachets the magic sakes stone and the speed-up for grinding like there's a possible debate about whether or not we should even be able to sell these special items because there's no way to get them back so that makes sense to me that they'd want to restrict your ability to sell them but on the other hand that means you'd permanently have a smaller inventory than you would otherwise so that would cause further issues the only way to prevent these issues would be to have special items not take up an inventory slot that's the everybody wins scenario so you can't accidentally sell all three useful one-time items but also don't feel like you're having to hoard them but we play with the cards were dealt and so I'm forced to have a borderline permanently smaller inventory because of my borderline hoarding habits it was in situations like this where I never knew exactly how many items to carry for example if I carry that one extra angels prayer for revival ie a ludonarrative dissonance in item form seriously Lovitz didn't need to die what does that mean if my characters need a body purifier that I could have bought instead it's a double-edged sword because it gives you this uncertainty of never knowing exactly how many of one item that you'll need so there's a tension of never knowing if you're fully prepared but that also means I'll almost never have room for some items the items that cause status ailments I almost never carried so on one hand this is something that causes some issues but it's an aspect that's integrated into the game so it's not something I'll complain about too much my only other issue and this has more to do with me than anything there are some items that pull the old catch-22 where they're so useful and rare that I never use them Healing Rain is the big one because they're the one that's essentially a full restore for the entire party and there's only like four of them in the entire game but that's on me not the game once again eventually I did find a decent system of keeping at least four angels prayers and two status ailment healing items each then things got complicated when petrification got involved which has all the same effects of being killed but needed a special item to undo thankfully the effects only last as long as the battle but that still caused hassle to lose a boss battles worth of experience thank you [ __ ] you bye incidentally I once went to the Forbidden Lands without first stocking up on healing items and got [ __ ] over because the Forbidden Lands don't have a shop and you can't leave there once you go there so be prepared for that section more than anything unless you get [ __ ] over and don't have a backup safe to fall back on although if you do make it through the Forbidden Lands and you get to the grand jewel with a legend cask or maybe the entire party having legend casks you'll make the grand jewel you're a little [ __ ] as it can only attack with magic and so that cuts its balls off meaning the dragon block staff is yours of course though this game isn't all action all the time because that would be mind-numbing some of my favorite parts of the game are the sloped template of character building sections in safe cities it provides a contrast so the action has a bit of time to breathe and you have a bit of time to process everything it makes the action feel all the more special when it's not all you're doing and wandering around exploring these cities are some of the most fun I have getting to know the characters and the environments better having plot building dialogues stumbling across fun little Easter eggs like this couple hiding in the broken star watching theater and you can examine pretty much everything around you to get DARS perspective on the world around him like backing away slowly there's a shelf here I guess navigation can be a bit of a bother on the overworld as you have a tendency to get caught up in the scenery but I never noticed it until I watched back some of this footage so that's a problem that's less than nothing in my eyes so these peaceful dialogue heavy sections contrasts nicely against the sections that are action-packed so both stand out and feel more special I will say though that the opening portion of the game maybe has a little bit too much talking and not enough action and the addition system hadn't yet come into its own so this game takes a bit of time to get going a few hours give or take around the Battle of hoaxes I had a bit of an oh dear moment when I wasn't enjoying the game as much as I thought I should have at first but once it gets going I was having a hard time putting it down now I've mentioned a magician Faust a few times already but trust me I can't stress enough how big of a deal this guy is in the story he was melba from a second-in-command during the dragon campaign who even Mel boof Rama was afraid of and has been alive all the way until the in-game present day in the Tower of landfill but hold up if you actually fight Faust cold you won't even be able to hit him what you need to do is complete the game white side quest for Stardust slash not that Stardust that's incredibly dated Stardust is an item found around to the game specifically in safe cities and other safe areas and there's this woman named Martel who you'll come across and you can give her your Stardust and for every 10 Stardust you give her she'll give you a new item including the physical ring that gives you 50% more maximum health allowing dart to have over 5,000 health by the end of the game holy [ __ ] funny I actually thought this person was a guy for ages until it was pointed out to me that she is in fact a woman you call it being ignorant I call it being progressive what can I say Martel sounds like a guy's name and I couldn't tell from up here what gender this person was and I actually have come around to the Stardust concept in this game because going into it knowing that the entire game is building up to you gaining the power to fight the toughest boss in the game it makes this quest feel epic searching in every nook and cranny to try and eventually get all 50 Stardust it organically builds the tension always having this in the back of your head so when you eventually make your way to him it feels earned it feels like you've overcome a big hurdle and can appreciate the spectacle all the more and some of the Stardust is in very obscure areas that require several part environmental puzzles to access the best of which is in bail where you need to solve a multi-part puzzle which includes things like enabling a hobos drinking habit which by the way the bartender actually acknowledges that they're doing so make no mistake you need to earn those 50 Stardust though they start to give up on that by the second or third chapter and so when you're finally able to get in and struggle against him even with the most powerful items in the game there's nothing more satisfying than laying that final attack and oh [ __ ] yeah he ate the final boss but there's nothing quite like accessing the ability to fight him then beating him seeing those animations when you win the battle are always fun but in this moment there's nothing more satisfying than seeing those animations plus you have the satisfaction of helping out Martell sick kid otherwise this game basically blames you for the illness like the child's dying and it's all my fault for not helping it well good serves the game right for trying to make me feel guilty for something I had no part in so at least I didn't have to deal with that again but in all seriousness beating Faust is a bigger deal in my opinion than beating the final boss who was an absolute chump comparatively and after that there's really not much to be talked about gameplay wise I could talk about the poorly made but absolutely vestigial minigames yeah let's drop veggies on the Queen fury by pressing X and a rhythm let's throw balls at monkeys let's play the shell game let's play a guess the differences between these two scenes game yeah these are all interludes at best and adds nothing of substance to the game thankfully you can in theory not have to play any of them but in this one case you're on a date with shauna and I can't disappoint her the only one of these minigames that have the slightest bit of substance is the obstacle course because you're just maneuvering around like you would in the overworld but it's very unforgiving we can talk about all of these contextual actions that you might come across in the overworld that usually have little effect like hey you can cross this wood flanked by constantly pressing X to get a healing breeze we can talk about how the screen melting effect is the greatest battle intro ever I don't even know how to describe that all I can tell you is it's awesome all of these years I've taken it for granted how weird it is that characters can just pop out of your ass like this even the ginormous Kong hole because it's just become so mundane to me but on reflection that really is weird and kind of uncanny but honestly I think I've exhausted all my points everything comes down to the battle system and specifically the additions some may not like the addition system but aside from being what gives The Legend of Dragoon its unique identity it's a tense frantic exciting and fun system that encourages finesse without being inaccessible to the laymen a unique combination of real-time and turn-based which is a rare case of giving you the best of both worlds and everything builds into this system gracefully with the end result being what might be the greatest gameplay system in the history of Japanese role-playing games and I wouldn't want this game to be any other way [ __ ] I love this game interlude now before we move on let's take a look at some of those funny enemy names I have not disappointed story heavy spoilers watching from this point forward either means you've already played the game or will never want to play it so this is a heavy load I don't even know where to start with this one because while the plot events don't unfold concurrently your understanding of the plot events do as a story buff though I will say the story in this game was what elevated it to the level of an all-time favorite and it's not even because of something special it does it doesn't have the real-world connections that Deus Ex has or the perfect visual storytelling of Silent Hill 2 The Legend of Dragoon for my taste however is one of the most well executed narratives I've ever seen if not the best it does a hundred things perfectly or nearly perfectly and manages to tie it all together with other story elements and sometimes even gameplay but it's hard to talk about one thing without having to talk about everything so I will in all seriousness the story starts out at the beginning of time the earth was a barren wasteland until this world's God so uh created the divine tree it's worth mentioning that this universe is God has a name but many of the characters still refer to him simply as God but why so the idea behind the divine tree is that it's a giant magical tree lost a time and each fruit gave birth to one of the species that roam the earth for a total of 108 fruit it only specifies which fruit represents which species for a few species such as the giganto as being the 97th fruit manitos being the 99th fruit humans being the 106th fruit and so on however throughout the game according to various online sources we encounter roughly 80 unique species in the game give or take depending on what constitutes a unique species so that checks out so after that so a [ __ ] off however the 108 fruit according to legend was the fruit of what is referred to for much of the game as the moon child which when birthed would bring a holy gift to the world a utopia the nature of which is kept secret until a very long way through the game still with me by the time the plot relevant events started the wing lays an ancient race of magical winged creatures ruled the world with an iron fist enslaving all other species led by a genocide 'old dictator named Melville Fromm who believes all other species had no right to live also feeling threatened by the power of the one hundred and eight fruit he found a way to magically isolate the soul and the body of the moon child Mel boo kept the soul in a crystal sphere and seeing as it was basically the soul of a God granted him the power to rule the world however as with all malicious regimes a resistance forms led by the proclaimed human Emperor Emperor Diaz who established the resistance in a remote region called Gloriana or as I facetiously call it Gloria no whole spearheading the resistance as the primary soldiers on the front lines were seven dragoon warriors who all commanded the spirit of deceased dragons each commanding a different element with these seven warriors and an army behind them the humans declared war against the winged Lee's in what we'd come to know as the dragon campaign many parts of this war are told to us but the big one however was the final one the battle of kadia every remaining Dragoon warrior died except for the Dragoon warrior of darkness Rose technically the Dragoon warrior of fire Zieg also survived but he was petrified in a state of living death it's also theorized that Emperor Diaz died in this battle but that's never said but in this battle no bouff Rama and his army were narrowly defeated during the battle of khadiyah however the sphere that held the soul of the Moon child was broken and the soul of the Moon child was released and so it being the 108 fruit every 108 years the soul of the Moon child feels itself with an unsuspecting newborn child with the ultimate goal being to merge the soul in the body of the Moon child are you still with me that said ever since the soul of the Moon child was released so too was what would come to be known as the black monster of being so evil its flames burned black as legend has it when the moon that never sets glows red it's a warning sign of the black monsters arrival its only goal kill the moon child before it confuse itself with the body however what the body is or how it can be fused remains a mystery for much of the game this pattern continued for about 11,000 years until the present day of the game takes place in where as legend tells the dragoons are summoned again because history needs them that was a lot to get through but that was also an entire games worth of abbreviated exposition explained in a matter of moments I'm referring to many of the main plot devices by what they were known as for the first three discs because I'm not quite ready to spoil what they really were called and based on the order of explanations you could probably guess which characters are connected to what events now the whole ancient battle causing X&Y to resurface in the present day bla bla bla may sound kind of generic on the surface level that's probably the most common criticism I've seen leveled at this game is that the story is generic filled with tropes and falls apart by the end I remember seeing this one video called every jrpg ever which facetiously went over all of the general tropes and JRPGs and some of them are present in this game I won't deny that but as I've said before there's a reason why tropes are tropes because they work but even then I wouldn't say this game is cliched because to say that would it be giving this game enough credit it wouldn't be giving credit to the massive amounts of subtleties and nuances that give this game its unique identity what I love about the Legend of Dragoon is that it's completely unlike any JRPG I've ever played and in spite of some of the things I've just mentioned I consider that to be true for the story as well it uses a slightly cliched premise for a nuanced approach evolution as opposed to revolution says the man as he drops the mic that said I do think that this game does take a dip towards the final chapter as the character driven storytelling makes way for the mythology of the world taking the forefront and most of the backstory and its relevance to the main plot is kept secret from the characters and you the player for much of the game they front-load a lot of this mythology and its relevance to the beginning of chapter 4 which is almost too much too soon and the mythology itself isn't as interesting as the characters in the game I have other issues with the fourth chapter but we'll get to those as they come everything subtly builds to all of these big reveals in fact the progression of the plot almost matches your progression through the world you start out in a barren corner of the map with nowhere to go and the scope of what you know opens up as the scope of the world itself opens up until you find yourself traveling to the very edge of the world before everything is revealed to you and then everything just goes all over the place for the fourth chapter that's an allegory for the story there are four chapters and thankfully each chapter has a three-act story structure with a bunch of story threads that gracefully tie into the main overarching plot in the beginning it starts out with a lot of mystery a town gets burnt to the ground while a single woman is taken into custody but then they hold an object over her head which creates a reaction of light implying some greater power as well as some purpose to her then were introduced to our principal main character dart felled after a five-year journey of which were not privy at this point however he's informed of an imminent invasion and stumbles across a legion of soldiers from Imperial Santora and then a [ __ ] dragon attacks so far so intense darts narrowly saved by a mysterious mercenary who won't become important until later he runs off to try and save what we'd learn is his hometown only to find it in embers while the mysterious mercenary has some sort of revelation about who she just saved based off a magical reaction dart runs in all piss and vinegar to try and save what's left of his hometown to find out that his childhood friend Shauna was the only one taken and she'd been taken to the notorious prison Helena prison and so step one of the journey is a fairly straightforward point which can basically be summed up as rescue the princess which is strangely apropos for reasons that won't become clear until Chapter three first of all can I just say I really like the brevity of this intro The Legend of Dragoon doesn't waste your time after a brief and action-heavy intro that establishes who you are and what your motives are while adding some vague intrigues to be expanded upon later you're off to save Shana and they let the story evolved from there naturally it starts off quickly with a narrow straightforward goal it doesn't spend hours meandering around the world or lore it hooks you right in from the beginning before broadening the scope later I was replaying Final Fantasy 9 for the first time in ages recently and I genuinely forgot how much talking is in that game I was sitting patiently through dialogue scene after dialogue scene I think I was five hours in and maybe actually played the game for one hour if that the rest is just dialogue scene after dialogue scene and worse yet I haven't even gotten a sense of what the overall goal is it's just been going from place to place to place so far I don't want to rag on it too hard but it illustrates the need for a good story game play balance don't get me wrong Final Fantasy 9 is still probably my second favorite Final Fantasy game but you need to have the story and gameplay were in tandem because too much story and not enough gameplay I might as well be watching a movie and too much gameplay and not enough story and you lose a sense of purpose especially in a game like The Legend of Dragoon but Dragoon doesn't feel like it's wasting your time it waits until you're invested in the characters and have experienced a good portion of gameplay before it dives into larger subplots and Lord best of all it never feels like you're wandering aimlessly there's always that sense of what now but in particular the intro puts this game off to a flying start and because you'll never get a second chance at a first impression it lures you in with a quick start without tripping over itself with the lore before easing you into the larger plot that is perfect the more I think about it the more I realize how much the pace in this game makes the experience and from that starting point the game gradually evolves soon enough you're tasked with fighting the 30 and Civil War along with your companion lovitz who you met along the way and is the leader of the first knighthood of Bazell basically meaning that you end up at the forefront of war soon enough the nature of Rose becomes clear she awakens the Dragoon power within you and so on and so forth it's a game that finds ways to constantly organically escalate the stakes as the game goes on in accordance to plot and gameplay progression there's simply so many layers and you know one thing I really hate about most JRPGs are the characters because they all follow the same template usually G RPG protagonists are the type of anime archetypical trash bags that anime fans like but make me want to rip my hair out each with one distinct character trait but otherwise our angsty annoying whiny idiotic teenagers I'm still fairly young but I don't like teenagers teenagers pissed the living [ __ ] out of me even when I was a teen I hated most teenagers around me and though that was probably just the angst I've mentioned the final fantasy 12 example a few times already but you want to know who the absolute worst characters in that game were in my opinion vaan and penelo the two principal main leads everybody else were adults with distinct personalities and struggles to overcome but the two main leads who were barely even relevant to the plot were the most whiny annoying idiots in the game apparently they were only put in so teens could have people to relate to well that failed the difference is every character in the Legend of Dragoon are all mature adult with one technical exception that works for being the odd one out and all the main characters are all multi-layered tragic sympathetic likeable and most of all human you can write me as many paragraphs as you want explaining why this game is actually super cliched anime trash and all I have to say as a response to that is while this game doesn't let its Dalian sis with those tropes and whatnot get in the way of my enjoyment and anime pisses me off usually so clearly this games aspects of anime tropes and archetypes aren't very prominent because I'm not tearing my hair out well mostly another one of this games main themes is accepting the past to create a better future because almost every characters arc involves in some way accepting the past take for example dart felled our main character and a better character than Cloud Strife bite me his story is that when he was 5 years old the black monster attacked his hometown and killed his parents the only thing that remained in the rubble was a stone that his father kept with him at all times which we would later find out with his Dragoon spirit he later ends up in another remote town named Seles where he meets and subsequently grows up with his longtime friend and eventual love interest Shana 13 years later and dart decides to go out on his own to hunt down the black monster in a quest for revenge I've recently come across some complaint regarding dart and his characterization some saying he's bland some saying he's a bad character some even going as far as to say that he should have been killed off and replaced by lloyd in the later game which by the way would have absolutely derailed the story because of how central dart is to the final part of the game he has to make the decision and potentially the ultimate sacrifice also spending three quarters of the game with one guy only to have him be swapped out for another person would be monumentally dumb personally though I don't see how he's in any way planned on one hand you have the rather excellent subplot between him and Shana that can simply be called Shana attempts to tame the beast and on the other hand there's also the point of him having blind fury towards the black monster and his lust for revenge basically dart is characterized by his blind stubbornness and his obliviousness to what's in front of him in fact at one point Shana even brings up that one start sets his mind to something it's impossible to get him to change his mind he's a good man constantly weighed down by the tragedies of his past and even though he's a good man he suffers from the inability to forgive or to move on from the past he's so blinded by his lust for revenge in his quest to find the black monster that he's essentially blinded himself to everything around him Shawna's growing affections roses suspiciousness hash holes obvious relation nothing matters to him more than revenge in fact while it's not outwardly stated it's heavily implied to that dark going after lloyd has less to do with him wanting Roy to give them the answers as to what Lloyd's been orchestrating this whole time and more him wanting to kill Lloyd as revenge for killing love it's one in a long list of great moments in this game is when dart is finally able to overcome his inability to move on after you defeat Lloyd Lloyd gives you the divine moon objects and tells you where to go to get your answers to the questions this games been building up and lays down his weapon dart has literally no reason not to kill Lloyd at this point but in a moment of clarity dart lays down his weapon opting to deck Lloyd because he knows that killing Lloyd won't do anything to undo what's happened which is his emotional maturation that eventually helps him conclude the black monster arc I think that wall dart may start out on shaky ground he acquires a bunch of human character depth and becomes a very likable and worthy protagonist brave and loyal to a fault but with very clear character flaws with that for him to overcome there's also the matter of the Shauna situation throughout the opening chapters of the game it's strongly hinted that things have changed between Shauna and dark she's grown up but dart hasn't he's still clinging to the idea that he sees Shauna as a baby sister while she thinks more of him much more it's not clear how much she thinks of him until a certain point through the game like they grew up together they were together for 13 years and he left her for five years and you know what they say about distance making the heart grow fonder and now they've been through hell and back together and for each other I'm gonna be real with you the relationship between Shauna and dart in the Legend of Dragoon probably my favorite relationship in all of fiction for a number of reasons but most of all because it feels so real dark constantly denies his feelings for Shana because he's afraid of things changing but there's clearly something more there and everybody but dark knows it or dark just can't accept it can't accept that things have changed but then after a certain point in the game things do change there's this point towards the end of the second chapter of my favorite chapter which I count as the best part of the chapter and probably the best part of the game front to back the entire Queen fury section all the way up until the tearful reunion but I'm gonna skip to the best part so through a number of circumstances the entire gang nearly escapes a ghost ship except for dart who slips and falls with Rose being the one to catch him but can't hold on they both tumble overboard and for an undisclosed amount of time they're separated from the group you learn a lot about Rose's backstory here and what led her to this moment it's a lot of character building for the most mysterious brooding character in the game eventually they make it back to the group - one conspicuous absence Shana who we find out later had been crying in her room ever since dart went missing and then the reunion between the two of them well you [Music] it's one of the most heartfelt and genuine things I've ever seen they just stand there silently embracing allowing the moment to sink in Seana in tears of joy because she was so afraid that she lost a dart again this time for good it's such a genuine and sweet moment but not saccharine because it feels earned which leads into one of the funniest moments in the game where three separate people all tumble in because they were spying it's such a perfectly executed moment with a few issues I wish they would have somehow established more of a time gap between dart and rose going missing and then reappearing there's nothing stopping you from having the time gap be no more than five minutes I wish they would have established them being away from the group for like two weeks while dart recovers or something just so we feel the time separation a bit more than we do I'm also a little confused as to how they ended up on a remote island after they fell off the ship the only explanations I can think of is maybe the current of the disappearing ghost ship was pulling them away maybe the Queen fury was already moving when they fell off or perhaps and this is a stretch darks armor made them too heavy and made them sink uncontrollably so Rose thinking quick turn to two or more powerful dragoon form underwater so they could swim to shore this is something that could have been explained but wasn't and I wish it was but I'm willing to accept that because this moment is just so perfectly executed and even with my cynical ass it completely melts my heart every time you see I'm very cynical towards relationships in media because usually I find that it very rarely feels odd as someone who really liked endgame the one thing that didn't work for me was kept going back in time to be with Peggy because I just didn't buy that cap was unconditionally in love with a woman he knew for like three months in what would have been ten or so years prior from his perspective but The Legend of Dragoon has one of the most a genuine heartfelt organic and real love stories in any game I've ever played and this is a key example of that or maybe that's just me I also appreciate the subtle humor of GART running upstairs to Shana and then going in the wrong room if only there was somebody in there to say nah man next room over this whole ordeal gives Shana the strength to admit her feelings to dart with no ambiguity anymore which is the first thing that really breaks through to dark he almost admits the same until they're interrupted several times before saying [ __ ] it we'll talk about it later and then finally under the starry sky late that night after 20 hours of Bill do you finally see this plot point paid off when after a heartwarming exchange they kiss and goddamnit I just want to stand up and Cheer every time I see this and this is coming from me I feel like I've seen these characters grow and change and this just feels so real it's one of the many reasons I love this game this relationship actually managed to break through to me through sheer authenticity with the characters that I've grown so attached to but then the fact that this plot event marks the exact middle point of the plot might seem a bit suspicious because hits where things start to go self now hold onto your butts because this is probably the most obvious yet shocking revelation in the game you start to notice shana displays mysterious powers that even she doesn't understand and there are many different little things happening with shana throughout the game that tie into the moon that never sets and that's because da da da Shana is the moon child here the Mandrake's scream but the big twist is that the moon child is in fact destined to bring a holy utopia issue is that utopia will come at the expense of the current world because the moon child is in fact the god of destruction and a fail-safe reset button in case sowa ever wants to start again and the thing about shana that really intrigues me is that many people throughout the game suddenly fall for her like when she speaks people listen according to multiple sources throughout the game the Moon child has the ability to manipulate those around it to serve the god of destruction and help them reunite the soul with the body to bring about total destruction so wall Shauna may seem like the stereotypical anime girlfriend archetype much like many things they subvert this aspect of the archetype to help it serve the plot does Shana get along with everybody and is she such a great negotiator because she's such a kind-hearted soul that brings the best out of everybody around her or is it really just the soul of the god of destruction manipulating everybody around her without her even knowing while this was never brought up I actually questioned if the relationship between her and dart was ever really genuine because of this Shana is a divisive character because her personality is good but not overly complex she is good-natured almost to a fault cutesy insecure but confident as long as she can stand alongside dark because she trusts him more than anyone or anything even with all of these weird things happening that seemingly involved her at the center but also likes a good laugh every now and again usually at the expensive dart she usually plays the moral compass of the group stopping them from doing the wrong thing multiple times in particular she spent a lot of her time in the game tried to change dart for the better but fails to break through until the ghostship section one thing that really wouldn't fly today is that there are several points where she is how do I say this she's classified by traditional female roles at one point she's told that she'll make a good wife someday which is taken as a compliment there are a few points where she helps cook including the Battle of hoaxes which is a funny exchange if you're the type of person who despises traditional female roles then her betrayal may seem a bit backwards to you because even I cringed a bit at some of these lines but I don't know she seems to enjoy herself so I'm not wholly against the idea I mean she herself chooses to do a lot of these things and also part of her character is dart being way too overprotective and then she decides to fight anyway like she chooses to fight alongside Dart even though he insisted that she didn't do it so that's actually some strong female character work but if they remade this game and rewrote these aspects of her character I wouldn't be against it to be clear I'm not saying these are inherently bad things but there are people who would she lives her life how she wants and takes pride and joy and doing things associated with being a traditional homemaker and I think the way it's presented makes her very charming some people rightfully think that being a house spouse is a submission of power and inherently oppressive because that's what women were expected to do for so long so women having the freedom of choice these days to go into whatever field they want is great everybody deserves the opportunity to choose their own path but freedom of choice ultimately means the freedom to allow people to choose to do something that maybe you don't approve of assuming it's legal anyway so the fact that Shawna wants to do these things means that I don't see it as a bad thing but if people saw it as enough of a bad thing that they'd want a hypothetical remake to change that I'd be fine with that as long as they keep the essence of her charming character intact some people might see the fact that she was deliberately written this way as an indictment of her character because people had to write her that way but I don't agree if every female character was written like Shawna a cutesy semi pacifist who enjoys cooking and takes the comment you'll make a good wife one day as a compliment then yes that'd be a problem but it's a good thing that's not the case all the characters are distinct furthermore some may interpret these things as making Shawna a weak character but that's entirely not the case she's been treated like a kid all her life and is now finally getting the chance to break out and be her own person even while dart stands obliviously they're treating her like a kid she's strong but her strength comes out in a different way than the others because she's treated so differently and the fact that she is so different she's the only one who hasn't really had much experience as a fighter she started training within the previous five years where most everyone else has had at least double that experience and have the mindset of fighters so it makes sense that Shauna would be the most passive and traditionally normal out of everyone that's not a bad thing that's differentiating the characters and when you have different characters strength of character comes in many shapes and sizes having the strength to stand and fight alongside your friends and loved ones even while being the most physically frail and least experienced that bravery that's guts that strength of character where all the other characters show their strength of character in different ways because standing and fighting is the default for all but Shauna this game is far far removed from even the loosest definition of the word misogynistic because most of the characters come across as very human and very humanly flawed regardless of gender sure Rose is showing off enough die to feed a hungry cannibal for a week and moreau is prancing around in an orbit bikini even in the frozen tundra for the record I know it's not actually an armored bikini I just like that phrase better than dancers outfit though if that's a dancers outfit I imagine her future does involve dancing but a very specific type of dancing but in terms of female representation in games The Legend of Dragoon was very ahead of its time there are four main female characters and they're all shown to have agency in the story beyond being eye candy in fact with the possible exception of Miranda all the female leads have more agency in the story than Conville hassle and arguably Albert you can argue about them being role models or whatever and even then I find having fictional characters as role models to be absolute [ __ ] anyway because that's setting unrealistic standards but they're all strong in their own ways and they all have distinct personalities that can be isolated to one point in which the rest of their characterization jumps off from Shauna's cutesy Rose's brooding Maru is a goofball Miranda is noble I'm no sjw nor am I an MRA but I like to see different people get represented because everybody should have someone they can relate to people argue for a good female representation in games and I'm all for that if it means having good characters and stories and more appeal to lesser serve demographics and the Legend of Dragoon has multiple good strong female characters while yet this also having them still be feminine there this weird fallacy in media these days that goes that a female character can't be a good female character if they're at all feminine so you get these really weird masculine females like they just slap the stereotypical male personality onto a female model and that goes all the way in the other direction in my opinion because it implies that femininity makes you weak no you can make strong female characters without making them glorified men with tits and that's what I feel the Legend of Dragoon gets right Rose in particular is probably the best character with the best arc in the entire game and it doesn't feel like it's cynically presented like it's supposed to be used as a selling points no there are good characters that happen to be female which is treated as mundane and incidental there should it be anything wrong with that regardless of what side of the political spectrum you occupy though I am indeed male so I can't exactly get a female perspective on this but this is what I truly believe I think the worst you can say about Shauna is that she doesn't really have a chance to grow that much but that's because a she's a very mysterious character so mysterious that even she doesn't understand what's going on be she spends half the game indisposed see she doesn't really need to develop much based on her character and beyond dark there's very few places for her character to go and Di's she essentially becomes the primary plot device by the end but I still really like Shauna if I'm being honest Shauna was my first video game crush so I guess the moonchild had an influence over me I'd call her my first w-word but I'd rather Jam Forks into my eye and headbutt a toaster than used that word ironically or otherwise but I'm not gonna lie Shauna is cute as hell doesn't even need to have all the goods on display to be super attractive she's subtly attractive in a way that distinctly really appeals to me granted she is 18 in the game so it's not illegal for me to say that but as I get older it's gonna get weirder and weirder interestingly the black monster thought it killed the moon child but it turns out that princess lluvia the baby that was mistaken for the moon child had a twin sister Shauna another twist but according to the player's guide when the siblings were born Shauna was hidden and moved away due to the birthing law in Mill seesaw Malay seesaw meal see so [ __ ] I'm just gonna call it meal seesaw meal seesaw at the time making Shauna the heir to the throne of meal sis ow although the fact that Shawn is technically a princess has actually never even brought up once which kind of makes me think that the writers didn't even put two and two together in that case and they didn't even realise themselves that they made Shawn a princess but then again I'm kind of happy that they didn't do that because the whole secret princess thing would have been an incredibly egregious cliche and then Shawn is just Shana through the rest of the game so it's kind of a good thing that they didn't really play that up that much if at all one thing you'll notice is that the only character that constantly disagrees with Shana with the exception of exactly one time off the top of my head is Rose almost as if she's immune to the moon child's manipulation Rose for much of the game is the mysterious brooding one that occasionally shows warmth and humanity she's an enigma for much of the running time seemingly knowing everything but also not really revealing anything much at all and not until much later into the game do we really learn the true nature of Rose and what is that nature well this is probably the most obvious twist because she's seen multiple times getting defensive about certain plot events and topics and that is while she is the original Dragoon warrior of darkness from the dragon campaign eleven thousand years prior Dada Rose is also the black monster but as most things the black monster is misunderstood it turns out the black monster was brought forth every 108 years to kill the moon child to prevent the end of the world and kill anyone who was influenced by the moon child but tragically history remembers it as a monster makes me wonder how different history would remember it if it were say a white monster That's not me being political or racist black is generally associated with evil ie black magic while white is associated with goodness and light ie white magic cleverly they spent the entire game using the pronoun he when referring to the black monster as a red or I suppose black herring or maybe right because only men can do evil right then the black monster was revealed to not be evil when it was also revealed that it was a woman why do you hate me gaming industry anyway now that I've alienated everyone she was given a magic choker that made her immortal crafted by Melba from a sister Charlie so she could carry on the task of killing the moon child however as time wore on and Rose was forced to kill over and over and over she slowly lost touch with her humanity forced to act like a monster and in a way she became a monster even if it was for the greater good tragic which is why she's so cold inward and humorless acting without word hostility to most people around her and generally being very hard to reach that in the fact that she holds the weight of everyone and everything she's ever lost as in she's lost everyone everything she's ever held a dear her entire Ark centers around her finally having companions again after eleven thousand years and not really knowing how to interact with them basically having to relearn and remember her own humanity and accept all of the evil that she's done she hates the fact that history remembers her as a monster and she learns to accept that and then eventually open up a bit she's such a cold and bitter individual that seeing something as simple as a small giggle from her is satisfying and seeing her open up and remember who she once was remembering her humanity is also very satisfying when we know how she started as a cold bitter loner but that also comes crashing down when her darkest secret is revealed Rose could have theoretically admitted the truth at any point but then she would have been killed by Dart as he had yet to develop the emotional maturity to resist the urge to kill the black monster and while it's obvious in hindsight nobody knew for sure that Shana was the moonchild so Rose could never go after her but dart developing the emotional maturity to let go of limits his death allowed him to let go of the black monster plus he finally understood that Rose was forced by fate to become the black monster and that was their chance to finally change fate destroy the god of destruction and leave the black monster behind once and for all Rose is probably the most intriguing character in the game because she's such a tragic and mysterious character apparently that makes her very attractive to much of the fan base but I never really felt that way I knew that she was over 11,000 years old so in my head that always translated to old woman I didn't know until much later that she stopped her aging although my sister admitted that she had a thing for rose growing up this game is just incredibly sexy isn't it even more intriguing is her relationship to dark there's hints thrown out here and there that she has a thing for dark but it's revealed too that what it is is that dart reminded Rose of her long-lost fiance from the dragon campaign I've seen people interpret Rose's thoughts as a crush on dart because he reminds her of her former lover personally I don't see it that way I think it's less of an attraction and more of a fascination like Rose is intrigued by Dart and finds nostalgia and how much dart reminds her of Zeke but she's well aware of her own feelings and they aren't attraction because regardless of everything she still loves her fiance from the dragon campaign who was long dead or is he strangely though I actually identify with Rose more than most characters in this game and that's because aside from a few conspicuous aspects I'm basically just a gender swap to Rose I wear all black most of the time I'm cynical and jaded to the point of actually being quite unpleasant to be around a lot of the time I have a sword I carry the burden of many things that happen to me in my past that I generally prefer not to talk about we even both do that thing where we lean on the wall with our arms crossed while everybody else is sitting I feel like we're kindred spirits or maybe I'm just projecting what I'm certainly not projecting though is Rose's weird sexual ization roses paradoxically subtly hyper-sexualized here's what I mean if you take her entire character at face value there's nothing inherently sexual she's sensibly dressed - the Curious Case of her pants maybe she lost a pant leg in battle at some point but then you take a deeper look and you notice some reoccurring patterns like how her first edition is called whip smack or how one of her first weapons you can get is called the demon stiletto which to the uninitiated are very blatant references to BDSM then there are some things which may be sexual ization but may also just be examples of Japanese weirdness life [Music] or the astral drain ends with [Music] now I would make a joke along the lines up huh more like [ __ ] drain but um I'd like to think I'm more classy than that believe it or not now I really like rose I think she's a great character with great progression but I do think that there's one bit of a missed opportunity with her so the scene where Rose lays down her sword and allowed dart to kill her but dart refuses was a great scene that ties up darts primary character development even though it maybe could have been a little bit more emotionally resonance otherwise there's one bit of business with the black monster that gets glossed over and that's hash holes beef with the black monster because while the game never expects you to draw this conclusion because I don't even think the writers did the black monster killed hassles daughter let me explain so hash hole and dart met during their mutual journeys start to find the black monster and hassle to find his daughter whom he chased away many years earlier and his daughter is the primary character motivation he has he searched across the entire continent to try and find her to no avail in Chapter two attented that hassle is actually darts grandfather because they find out that darts mother had the same name as has daughter you think yeah well that's just a coincidence until the beginning of the third chapter where Hal catches Shawna singing a lullaby that hassles daughter came up with dart used to sing Shana to sleep with that lullaby and who did he learn it from his mother who was the one who came up with it suddenly it all becomes clear darkness hassles grandson no ambiguity whatsoever now aside from never really being brought up again after this aside from a brief mention in the final area seriously why did hash will never bring this up with dart Heschel just realized of the past twenty years of his life were wasted and it's not really played up again after this and even more perplexing is that he never confronts Rose Paschal knows that darts parents were killed by the black monster and he can just as easily put two and two together the moment Rose is revealed to be the black monster so the fact that we never saw hash will confront Rose about this is another big missed opportunity we could have had another moment just as good as we did when dart laid down his sword yes it's obviously within his characterization that hash hole doesn't blame Rose because he blames himself more than anyone how can I blame you if it's me I can't forgive bed alone down bed alone down bed alone down and all that but don't you think it would come up at all even in passing hey just so you know one of the people you killed happens to be my daughter who happens to be darts mother I guess that's why hassle frustrates me mildly he has the opportunity to have a much more satisfying payoff to his story but he just doesn't alas otherwise I really like hassle because he's a kooky old man who likes to have fun his entire character can be summed up with this one throwaway line he actually does provide a good amount of laughs and even though he's a very tragic and pain figure and that he carries the burden of causing his daughter to run away he doesn't let that get in the way of his general goofball nature but his arc is centered around coping with the fact that his daughter is gone and he can't change that that's the funny thing about Hal he's not a super complex character but he's a very good one a good-natured goofball who's overbearing nature cost him the one thing he cared about more than anything spending 20 years trying to undo his mistakes only to slowly realize that he's doomed to live with them for the rest of his life ultimately learning to accept his mistakes there by accepting the past to create a better future furthermore he becomes almost like a surrogate father figure for the group offering fatherly advice whenever it comes up and oddly he gets along with Maru the best ironic seeing as they're complete opposites at a base level yet somehow kindred spirits at heart so for many years I thought that Maru was just the obligatory chicken the armored bikini that every RPG has but I've actually come around to her in recent years for a number of reasons the whole armored bikini thing kind of becomes incidental though Don't Tell devianart and she becomes so much more most of all because she's just so gosh darn charming is just a straight goofball most of all bouncing off hassle and Albert she is pretty well a juvenile quirky flux to the relative seriousness of the other characters and it's honestly adorable her childlike nature and even clumsiness is even worked into her additions she's technically 16 I'll touch on the technicalities in a moment she's very emotionally immature so much so as to not really be able to grasp but the concepts around her and she pretty much pisses everybody off to the point that you're technically allowed to deny her entry into the group in a standard but thou must dialogue option but as time goes on she kind of becomes the emotional heart of the team and someone who's always around to boost morale and she is just so happy and excitable she's always eager to jump for joy or just dance about which wall off-putting to pretty much everybody as their more serious than that she's so perky that you just can't help but love her for that that said as she becomes more and more of the emotional heart of the group you also learn more about her and she becomes a somewhat tragic figure as well it turns out that she's a winged Lee and the winged Lee's have lived in secret for 11,000 years since the dragon campaign they also age much slower than humans so how old mer ooh really is is a mystery she even has a fiance surprisingly enough it also turns out that she actually clung on to the group because walnut directly stated it's implied that she was lonely as she's a cast off from the wing Lee's she wanted to see the world left the forest and wasn't welcomed back after that she gave up everything just to defy tradition damn near avoiding a physical altercation when she did try to come back she actually hid the fact that she was a winged Lee from the group because she was afraid that they were suddenly gonna reject her the moment they found out which ties into the other thing I just mentioned was that she felt very lonely and isolated because she didn't have the wing Lee's and she didn't have any human friends as we'll discuss later this is actually a similar plot point with a damia the original water Dragoon because she was also non-human and also considered an outcast in this case for being considered a freak and as a result she developed a fear of isolation Meru ends up being used as the link between the humans and the winged Lee's and she helps the winged Lee's establish a connection with the outside world ultimately helping the winged Lee's overcome their crippling racism towards humans at least in this section of the world as there are other wing Lee's in other parts of the world I'm not sure if the themes of racism or intentional but it's compelling and strangely classically conveyed nonetheless somaru helps the wing Lee's accept the past to create a better future where humans and wing Lee's can co-exist so she starts out as a very vestigial character but acquires depth as the game goes on though she's not the only wing Li to escape leanness and Lloyd are both wing Li's you can tell who's a wing Li based on the Platinum colored hair you'd think that maybe Lena sir Lloyd would recognize Moreau at some point but maybe it never came up in fact if the Platinum haired connection is used as a great foreshadowing method you know shits about to hit the fan when you see someone with platinum hair but they do a good job at hiding it for first-time players because Lena's wears a headband and so you can barely see her hair not long enough to draw that connection of wing leads to platinum hair and by the time you fight her and you get to see her hair full on the fact that she's a wing Li would have happened just long enough before that you'd likely have forgotten which is masterful pacing and okay it's not entirely true that neither leanness or Lloyd acknowledged Marui leanness does give a very vague hint that she knows Moreau is a winged Li but it's so vague that I missed it up until now here it is [Music] yeah it's very easy to miss which I guess makes sense because they wanted the platinum haired connection to not be revealed until chapter 3 where the big reveal is a massive aha slash no [ __ ] how did I not see that coming moment it makes so much of the story suddenly makes sense but unless you've played the game already you probably wouldn't catch it until the reveal incidentally the name leanness somehow autocorrected to Kenya at one point on my phone so yeah you've got the platinum hair connection as masterful foreshadowing so subtle that you wouldn't even notice until it all comes together but that's not the only foreshadowing in the game half the plot events are expertly hinted at throughout the game such as Rose being the black monster Shana being the moonchile ovitzes death and so on it's not a big point but it's really cool to see how deliberately planned out every event is and it's really cool to go back and see all of the hints and details leading into every event anyway the other kind of comedy relief character is Congo Haman Moreau don't really bounce off each other that much Congo is more or less in his own world he's a very painfully as he's the only giganto to survive the human led genocide of the giganto is he was taken in by dole who in exchange for fighting on doles behalf he promised congo that he'd create a world where all species are equal and so this genocide could never happen again so he's not evil he's just idealistic and doesn't want anybody to suffer the same fate that he has finally seeing as bill was the one who saved Congo we know he wasn't the one to kill the giganto so that implies that Waldo has his own self-interest in mind he had the capacity to do good and were not told who killed the giganto as all were told this why implying that humans are just as capable of atrocities as winged leaves before them so there's no good guys only progressively less bad guys so in a way Congo doesn't have an arc because he was the same person he was when he joined the party as he was when he fought the party we just gained a greater understanding of who he is and why he fought alongside dole however when we defeat him the second time Shona and dart convince Rose to spare him even as he's begging us to kill him and in showing him mercy congo sees that we have the same capacity to do good as dole did and later saves everybody's life and then pledges his life to you but later we get a glimpse of congo almost being dumbfounded that he's coexisting with humans and even calling them friends which is actually a really great moment issue is congo zark kinda ends there then he becomes the bumbling comedy relief the humans killed the giganto sand so that illustrates that neither the humans nor the winged leads are the straight good guys everybody is capable of atrocities and nobody can really the moral high ground I wish this idea was played in two more with Congo but once he joins the team and has a few other character building moments afterward he settles into the slightly lame role of having his size hinder him and it be played for laughs and this has its moments for sure but his most epic moment in the game happens in the second chapter pom will had a lot of untapped character potential I think Thor in the latter-day Marvel movies is a good example of how they could have done it Thor is an absolute goofball but he's a goofball with a lot of anguish and emotional baggage that gives him a lot of depth so you can have the silly moments alongside that darkest Knight undertones so I'd be fine with the fact that Kangol became a goofball once the facade he did bodied while working with the dole subsided if they made him more integral to the plot and gave him something that you want he's probably the only character that you could have cut from the later game and not had it affect anything because the writers had nothing for him he worked for a dole so presumably Kangol would have some info on lloyd that nobody else would be privy and the fact that he was the most physically strong out of everyone in the team could have also been played up plus I can't be the only one disappointed with how nerfed he was after he joined the team compared to when he was a boss that pissed me off for years you have no idea how excited I was to have a boss join my team and how disappointed I was with how [ __ ] he turned out to be and also he's the only character in the game where you couldn't buy his Dragoon the guy you get the bottle from in Chapter 1 that you used to get to the shrine of Shirley somehow acquired the golden Dragoon spirit and you have to buy it for a thousand gold otherwise wait until the end of chapter 4 to get it which really speaks to how little they had for him once he joined the party they could have had him in murrow bounce off each other pretty well because they're both the main outliers in the group then being the only nonhumans I'm just spitballing point is there could have been so many ways to do Congo better justice than having him be the straight comedy relief although at least that's better than the alternate ending where we kill him [Applause] [Music] then you have the curious case of Lovitz and Albert first of all Lovitz slam Bert what a [ __ ] kick-ass name why didn't he go into professional wrestling well Vic's goal was for the slam Burke slam hey hits it Orton is broken and her what is that is that rich frugal its frugal its frugal already hits limits what the hell enough ones chokeslam somebody stop the damn match I'll be frank I think'll evinces a better character than Albert from a purely objective standpoint he's hot-headed and impulsive if it comes to his country or his King he'll fight to his dying breath and no questions asked with that he's basically selfless to a fault and while he has an unwavering loyalty to his country he also hasn't even more unwavering humanity he's always putting the needs of the many over his own even if they're on the enemy side and he develops an almost brotherly chemistry with a dart almost immediately bit of a mama's boy too which is super charming it's also interesting to note that his addition for flower storm he calls Rowe storm but his magic attack called Rowe storm he calls blossom storm yet this is the exact opposite for Albert the implication being that the addition is their favorite flower but with the magic attack they say the favorite flower of their closest friend which just so happens to be each other implying that the magic barrier is basically powered by friendship cheesy but charming and a nice little detail you see Lovitz is a great character and has lots of great moments but he doesn't really have an arc as he's basically as good of a character as he'll ever be from the moment you meet him Albert's arc is more based around him transitioning from a noble King to an average person he's eager to help out but is expected to stay back and let the people do it for him they treat him differently but he wants to be equal it's out of his element but he's up for the challenge the biggest indicator of this comes after the second visit to hell in a prison when they're trying to find a place to hide out and everybody insists that he arrests but he goes forth and helps anyway as well it's established that his kingdom is under occupation and the only way to win the war is for them to infiltrate the black castle so right there we have him going from the commander far away from the fight earlier in the game to the men leading the charge in a small gorilla unit at the end of the chapter with the help of the resistance led by a kid named Popo out of his element but rising to the occasion hypothetically he could have left and gone home after that but he stays aboard fighting in loving memory of his fallen friend Allah vet in fact that could be considered a secondary arcs similar to darts quest for revenge although Albert is more noble and level-headed than that also he Falls unconditionally in love with the real princess of tubero uh Emily he becomes a bit of a mush for her and also a bit of a poof I'd argue that the love story between Albert and Emily is probably the most cringe Li written part of the game which is funny because it takes place during my favorite part of the game and words fail to do justice to how cringe-worthy the princess Emily returns scene is long story short the real princess Emily is swapped out for a fake that acts completely different embodied by a winged Lea named leanness it's funny cuz her name rhymes with penis so when the real princess emerges everybody just goes crazy for her she's such a Mary Sue it's terrible a solid minute of cringe also question when Lina's replaced princess Emily after the horseback riding incident why did they have the real princess in a place that she could easily be found in the castle and also what did it be smart to try and embody Princess Emily's personality as much as possible if you're trying to infiltrate the place I mean if you act completely differently then of course people are gonna suspect something's wrong dumbass there might be a logical explanation for all of this but they don't give us one and for some reason when Albert yells at her she wakes up but not when princess Lisa yells at her I think it would have been funny if Albert and a fit of passion slapped Emily so hard she woke up but I'm also a terrible person Albert's personality can be summed up as a noble dork his kingliness shines through in everything he does and he's much more interested in rather mundane topics compared to everyone else including reforestation and he also has zero social skills which makes for some funny moments also Albert has a slide leading out of his room in the castle therefore he's my hero but back to love it's specifically the death of limits Levitch is a great character and his loss is an outright shocking occurrence it's funny actually there's been an ongoing discussion practically since this game came out over whether or not they should have killed Lovitz or Albert because perhaps it would have been more narrative ly satisfying to see Lovitz turn into a grief-stricken madman bent on revenge for his longtime friend and King and that would have also given him an arc I can see the argument there but i 100% disagree with it and the reason is simple if Albert would have been the one to die Lovitz and all of basil would have felt it but when ylvis' died we the player felt it we did it no Albert because he was only in the game once up to this point and so while his death would have greatly affected the characters in the game it wouldn't have affected us the play we had yet to get to know Albert so we weren't conditioned to care about him so him dying would have had next to no narrative impact bail was already overrun making Albert's status as king basically knowin void anyway so killing him would have had no effect because the end result is the same either way in addition no sir that's a pun again killing limits off does something that I love that very few games have the balls to do it kills off one of the main characters which establishes that even the main characters do not have plot armor they are as vulnerable to death as everyone else moreover it establishes that death has consequences which makes the tension and stake seem so much more real way to many games or shows I've seen have it where characters can just be brought back from the dead or just can't die and it takes me out of it why should I give a [ __ ] if people can just come back no i 100% believe that killing Lovitz was the right thing to do we spent so much time getting to know him that his death really is an effective narrative gut-punch even to this day I still get a little bit teary-eyed at this scene plus answer me this question he died trying to serve his King and friend letting his hubris and love for his country be his ultimate undoing name one conclusion to his character that would have been as negatively impactful and thereby negatively satisfying as what they gave us based on his established personality at character you really can't isn't the fact that we're so quick to discuss whether or not he should have been the one to die proof of how much we liked him if he wasn't such a great character we wouldn't be discussing this wish fulfillment fantasy of him surviving and besides we'd also be taking away one of darts primary arcs as he would have had no reason to pursue lloyd as revenge for Albert which would have hindered the black monster resolution because we wouldn't have had the emotional maturation that built up the eventual letting go of the black boster so really killing Lovitz was the only option but speaking of Lovitz and oh boy I'm gonna say something controversial here there's a lot of people that ship dart and Lovitz right it seems the overwhelming amount of shippers who talk about this game will go with that as their primary ship and yeah they do grow really close over the course of the chapter they're together for but that feeds into this mindset that I personally think is backwards really backwards that many people seem to have at least from what I've seen on the internet that mindset that states that two men can't just be really good friends without it being romantic I genuinely hate that mindset it's not me being anti representation it's just anti being called what you're not it's kind of like when the dark side of the Ring on walking out and people were insisting up and down that him and Eddie Guerrero were romantically involved even though they were both married with kids because allegedly there's no way a man could be that broken up about another man's death without it being romantic even though they've been best friends for 15 years and traveled the world together in their wrestling endeavors hey fellas is it gay to have emotions I mean people will make fun of those really insecure guys who won't do really innocuous things for fear of looking gay and I find those kind of insecurities hilarious but this is the opposite side of the same coin and both sides feed into the same problem the problem of people insisting that you are something that you're not you could make the case that even though Lovitz does make a pass at rose that his mother complaining that he hasn't started a family yet could say something to that effect but then again that also feeds into this backwards mindset that goes if you're not on the prowl 24/7 that obviously means that you don't like women perhaps he's just focused on his knighthood right now basically you can have your own head cannon but don't be enforcing that head cannon on everyone else especially if that head cannon goes against the actual cannon or in some cases reality what does that say about me you can say what you want I just don't like the idea going around that - men can't just be really close friends I mean nothing malicious about this so I'm gonna stop teabagging this bear trap before I say something that can really be taken out of context but either way the death of Lovett's was genuinely one of the most powerful scenes regardless perhaps the highlight of the entire game if I could only pick one what I find so impressive about this scene is that it's the culmination of pretty much every subplot in the entire first chapter both foreground and background dart and levitz's Brotherhood the mysterious hooded figure working on both sides the Syrian civil war limits his devotion to his people and his King the power of the Dragoon spirits the mysterious and seemingly invincible platinum haired man the Helena prison saga almost every single plot thread in the game comes to a head in this scene I can't praise this scene enough it almost seems like this is the game kicking it up to another level and it was already great up to this point but this is like the game entering second gear even though the chapter still has two hours to go another reason you could say this is that this is where we're introduced to the dragon Buster and the divine moon objects which will become major plot devices going forward it's actually interesting to note too that during the hero competition Lovitz told dart not to transform into his Dragoon which is interesting because if he did the dragon Buster may have got him because lloyd was the one who he fought in the last round so the major overarching plot starts to really form here the dragon Buster is an object from the dragon campaign that's powerful enough to even bring dragons to their knees the Dragoon form is established to almost be unstoppable in both gameplay and story and it even one-shotted Kangol so the real kicker is that now we understand too that this man for which we know almost nothing about can destroy our ultimate forms like the armor is made of tinfoil Lloyd is kind of an enigma you see throughout the story that he was ubiquitous with various conflicts from the start but for example in the manual it doesn't really reveal much about the story past the first half of the first disc because it's such a long cerebral plot so one thing of note which is a bit of a bait-and-switch is that Lloyd and the hooded man who fun fact actually appears in the plot before dart in the opening cutscene are one in the same the thing about Lloyd is that were conditioned to believe that he's evil because he's seemingly a cold ruthless killer to so many people around him and yet he does good deeds several times throughout the games for in his own admission no reason so we start to believe that there's more to him than just being outright evil and there is he manipulates the Syrian civil war on both sides to capture Shana even lying about who is giving the orders to a high-ranking officer and to incapacitate Albert so he can get the moon gem later he manipulated the feelings and affections of the character named Al eNOS so that she could get the moon dagger and later still manipulated the sacred sisters so that he could get Queen Teresa to give him the moon mirror he does a hundred things to try and pursue his own goals but he's very human and very humanly flawed you learned that everything he's done is in an effort to try and bring a utopia and people like Lovitz are just necessary sacrifices on his road to a utopia you start to learn that he's morally ambiguous before he reveals himself to kind of be a moral in a way doing everything he does to further his own agenda regardless of who's caught in the crossfire or saved from the crossfire in the meantime he saves the entire gang at one point killing the divine dragon with the afro mentioned dragon Buster but only so he could get the divine dragon spirit even tried to kill them himself afterward just to get them off his tail and after a while it turns out that he himself is just a pawn and is being influenced by a man claiming to be Emperor Diaz Lloyd genuinely wants to bring a utopia and so goes along with everything that this man tells him only to be told in the final moments of chapter 3 that the Utopia he's just allowed to be created requires the destruction of the world which is the same cutscene that we're told about rose and Shawna's roles and at this point Lloyd is seemingly killed while I obviously wouldn't want dart to be replaced by Lloyd I would have at least a section where he's briefly playable when he's with the party leading up to the confrontation with a man claiming to be Diaz perhaps just as a sampler and a tease for a potential new game plus mode where he's fully playable intent bit of a missed opportunity because by the time Lloyds full character was revealed I was actually warming to him because obviously were conditioned to dislike him but in the end he was actually merely acting according to his own agenda and is slightly misunderstood and very reasonable and also is being manipulated by someone else and even after he tells us everything we still don't really know that much about him which makes him a very intriguing character other than him there are other reoccurring characters that I kind of wish were playable or at least expanded upon one would be Master Tasman who is the person who trained dart and disappears from the plot as soon as you leave Seles the military commander who kidnapped Shana would have been cool because he displays disdain for his rank and being forced to carry out atrocities maybe even Martell who knows what her fighting style could have been but she was clearly an adventurer and in a world of this hostile you don't get through just by being crafty I don't know there are so many characters you meet throughout the game that could have been party members with just a little bit more depth because in general there are so many great characters throughout the game and too many great moments for me to go over all of them but one character who wasn't so great at all was the 8th party member Miranda the guy who killed Lovitz was a better character than her so Miranda is one of Queen Teresa's sacred sisters and her adopted daughter I'll be frank Miranda is the most forced character in the entire game and her existence is pretty much purely for the purpose of having somebody to replace Shana wall Shana goes off to be a plot device the issue is that she appears way too late in the game to be properly characterized and so her backstory is incredibly forced and her personality in quotation marks is just not likable whatsoever she's straight faced and stoic but explodes with emotion from time to time and said outbursts are also cases where she's incredibly rude and I just wanted her to get over herself Rose has an appealing dry wit and sass about her that makes the odd mean-spirited comment work but Miranda is just an unjustified cold [ __ ] to everyone and her backstory is even worse so we get no indication of her backstory for ages and then out of nowhere there's a random conversation where she mentions that she was abused by her mother and later abandoned this comes out of nowhere and is extremely heavy-handed then there are a few more points where they shoehorn more detail into her backstory like they established that she has a problem with roses because there were always roses behind her mother when her mother was beating her I don't know I feel like her relations with her mother is kind of a moot point because well look at the life she lives now that she's been abandoned if being abandoned meant I'd get to live in luxury then well I'd bloody well get over myself and the resolution is the dumbest thing I've ever seen in the final chapter where everybody's facing a trial to overcome their biggest ailment to complete the character development most of these work but Miranda's is the first and is by far the worst they try to add some [ __ ] to make Miranda's mother seem more sympathetic by justifying her beating Miranda and abandoning them apparently her father was a lazy alcoholic and spent all their money and so her mother worked herself to the bone to try and provide and that's justification for beating your child and later abandoning her and her father for another man really and then out of nowhere this option comes up and you select the option to accept the apology and even the image of your mother doesn't seem to be particularly happy that you accepted her apology more surprised and yeah I'd be surprised too because that was a beyond weak conclusion to a terrible forced arc and the worst character in the game she's given almost nothing to do and what she is given is terrible though there might actually be a deliberate reason for Miranda's unlike ability because she's meant to be a completely different character to Shana who had the previously mentioned power of manipulation so perhaps that's the big reason for Miranda to be so outwardly unlikable compared to Shana but if that were the case they went way too far with it there were potential places for them to take her like you could build up the idea that dart is resentful of the fact that everything that's happened to Shana started happening as soon as she showed up so you could have a scene where they talk it out and you could get a sense of Miranda's personality through a storyline like this but any potential is squandered in favor of pure unlike ability if you like her fair enough but I must ask what's wrong with you another big issue is that she wasn't present for much of the slow plot and character building sections until later into the third disc which means that she lost out on so much potential for character building and these character building sections were arguably my favorite part of the game because they were just slow sections away from the action where you take a deep breath and talk to every character and you really get a feel for everybody's personality and their development after Lovitz dies you have to get everybody's feel for the situation and the valley of corrupted gravity I can't believe that's actually a place on the Queen fury which as I've said is one of my favorite parts of the game where you have to go from character to character and you end up controlling each subsequent character while getting a feel for their characters there's one of the ball at the end of the second chapter and so on as a side note even though we do hear bits of their voices I have a head Canon for how every character talks that I sometimes imitate while playing which takes some of the seriousness away from these scenes for me when I imagine Albert talking with a comedy JFK voice the existence of the drug games on the existence of the Rogers should have ended 11,000 years ago oh yeah and then my head Canon for dart is to have generic grizzled low tones woofer has all the talk with a generic old man voice and Concord within under the giant style barely understandable heavy accent oh that's more than about an example to critically somebody actually made that what the [ __ ] I'd give an example of how I'd imagine the female characters to sound in my head Canon but I don't want to embarrass myself anyway the advantage of having such a long game with such a massive story with so many characters and so many points that tie into each other is that you can have little asides like this so missing those Miranda never had the chance but beyond that every character is super likable with a good personality depth and each with a good arc I brought this up earlier but you can see some of the archetypes here but they also Burtt the archetypes and if not they overcome those archetypes but there's one thing I haven't brought up yet that I wanted to touch on what is the setting in this game because it's a weird setting so the game takes place on the continent of endedness I'm not sure if this is the entire world or if there's more continents because it's never said but regardless unlike most contemporary games the Legend of Dragoon wasn't strictly speaking a fantasy game it's kind of a standard fantasy setting through the filter of Japanese weirdness made to be as believable as possible it's a more sober affair that's tied to some level of reality with the aspects of fantasy that do pop up usually being played very straight and oddly believable I guess the best way to describe this setting is like a mostly pre-industrial society where magic exists in small pockets and the utilization of which is bringing about a new age as science very much exists but it's also tied into a lot of aspects of magic in the same way that we might look at electricity so it's a familiar yet weird setting but a unique one and one that I quite like for this game though this brings up an interesting point so there's a time gap of over 11,000 years between the in-game modern day and the dragon campaign correct well some people have brought up the fact that after 11,000 years of progress and an S is still in a pre-industrial society that uses archaic weapons with a little bit of magic here and there why is it that there's been so little progress in that 11,000 years gap well the functional reason is that the pre-industrial Middle Ages is the standard fantasy setting it's your work a day setting that allow for melee sword combat with fantasy creatures it wouldn't be very fun if we could just shoot the hell out of a bunch of wild creatures or would it as for the actual reason within the context of the game I think the best explanation is aside from having an incredibly hostile bunch of wild animals that would make progress quite hard the fact that the dragon campaign was a near apocalyptic event is a big factor we as humans have survived many many wars but something like the dragon campaign I would place on a level similar to a nuclear war yes we can bounce back and even flourish after war but if we had a near apocalyptic nuclear war yeah I think taking 11,000 years to bounce back isn't a stretch especially if the after-effects are so catastrophic that it triggers a short Ice Age or some other similar event given the tech that we see in a few parts of the game they seem to be on the cusp of an industrial revolution so that's something that could be explored in the sequel if I had one that's only my personal interpretation but another interpretation for why the setting is the way it is is just because not everything needs a grant reason and that's the fun of interpretive fiction as far as the setting goes I like that many of the standard fantasy aspects are subdued enough that when they do come up they actually feel special they're spaced out a lot as well after the opening of the game with a small buttload of magic elements including a [ __ ] mothering dragon we don't see anything of the sort until a few hours later when Shonda displays mysterious powers which kills a giant snake boy I've had women like that before as well and the next time we see anything fantastical is another few hours later when we're introduced to Kangol the introduction of Congo is one of the best parts of the game from an organic storytelling perspective and one of my favorite moments of ludonarrative synchronicity in the entire game it reminds me of when Hannibal introduced war elephants when Lang siege on Rome it's like beyond a few fantastical elements everything has been mostly sober but then there's this monster who appears from nothing like holy hell like we play through the battle of hoax and each fight is a fair challenge but nothing we can't handle but then as soon as Imperial santora's trump card is released we know based on how hard the last few fights were that we're in over our heads as now we have to contend with a giant he's such a gigantic brute that he can kick the [ __ ] out of us with his bare hands and in fact he automatically counter-attacks if you don't get your full edition so you're conditioned to understand that you don't stand a chance against this character then storyline wise even when you do beat him you don't actually beat him because he's too powerful he just about does dart in with a giant axe but then the only thing that can save him is Rose activating his dry in spirit at that point he turns into a ball of fire and only then can they defeat Conville for the time being this is part of my shortlist for best moments in the entire game it's such an epic moment that you almost momentarily forget that darts the main character and obviously isn't going to die this being a good few hours before Lovitz has done in sorry to keep reminding you it's a fantastic scene I think the entire siege scene was at least one of the highlights of the first two discs the great thing about the setting in this game is that they really run with it and the world-building in this game is fantastic you get a sense for how this world runs and operates how the world is laid out how the day-to-day operations of this world works even though you may not see the entire environment that you're in due to space limitations you're aware of the environment around you and everything and everybody that's in it and every chapter of this game as I mentioned before has a self-contained three-act plot that also builds into the overarching plot that really kicks off in the fourth chapter what I find so impressive and appealing about this game storytelling wise is that we're able to have all of these story threads work towards the individual plot of the chapter while also serving the overall plot graceful is what that is obviously the first chapter is based around the Syrian war but then the mysterious platinum haired man it turns out was behind everything and now with Albert in each party you have to take down go and unite the warring regions of basil and sand aura following which you pursue lloyd to a country called tea borough which has all but been taken over by bandits you later find out that the princess of this country was replaced by an imposter and a plot to steal a mysterious object handed down from generation to generation in the same vein as the item Loyd took from Albert you start to learn more about the mythology of the world and what the mood that never sets is then you go to meal seesaw and suddenly [ __ ] hits the fan the divine dragon awakes from its imprisonment and blows the [ __ ] out of Denon grad humans and winged Lee's working together mass hysteria you learn even more about this world's mythology Shawna's mysterious powers start to get out of control and she's incapacitated but somehow saves the queen you finally face Lloyd Shawn is kidnapped by a mysterious man claiming to be Emperor Diaz who's been dead for over 11,000 years and everything comes to a head at the edge of the world going into the final chapter and then you have all of these great subplots there's an aside where you have to cure Shona of a mysterious poison because she's the only one who can't handle the environment in the nest of the dragon you cure her by trying to find the Drago any plant which may or may not exist and it turns out it doesn't so you have to go to the shrine of Shirley to face yourself and your own inner flaws so the titular spirit Shirley will help you and give you the Silver Dragoon spirit though oddly nobody questions why Rose knows early and then using the silver Dragoon spirit you heal Shona or how about facing grayham the man who broke the peace treaty between basil and Santora after defecting from basil and unleashing fair brand on the army of basil then there's the part where he volunteered to fight in the battle of hopes the championship tournament in lohan where you meet lloyd start losing his dragon spirit to bandits and having to get it back from a character who it turns out with the pupil of hash holes who helped instigate the fake Emily's story the entire Queen fury / ghost ship section Lina's being tricked into falling in love with lloyd leading to an unwavering devotion and a heartfelt yet tragically misled death scene the reuniting of tio and father tragic story where you fight the souls of the original Dragoon warriors to give their souls rest and for one reason or another they can't move on Khan's oz who was afraid that the atrocities that he'd committed in life meant that he'd be punished in death so you Vale who was an academic who studied life and death but was afraid of what would happen if he moved on who also looks like me but with short hair I feel assaulted Bell Zack a man who loved children and even more loved Shirley and could it accept that Shirley and the children were dead and most tragic of all day Mia a half mermaid half-human who wasn't outcast by everyone didn't even want the responsibility of being a dragoon but when she took the mantle she clung to rose and Rose took day Mia under her wing and they became very close she wasn't in Rosa's flashback so presumably she died before the Battle of Cadiz along with soil Vale she couldn't move on for fear of in death being truly alone without Rose she's also the youngest dragoon in the game at only 15 that's heartbreaking it's interesting to note that Albert told Emily a story of a mermaid and a man but stopped himself could this be the legend that resulted in de Mia it's a heartbreaking side quest having to force these characters to move on but storyline wise it's the best side quest in the game and there are things I'm still finding out about this game to this day I'm pretty knowledgeable about this game but every time I read about it every time I play it every time I look at it again I noticed new details did you know that you could go back to areas after the story in that area is concluded and see new characters and dialogues like if you go back to the Prairie after a certain point you can meet the guy who owns the shack you occupied in the first chapter who hasn't almost fetishistic enjoyment for chopping wood did you know that if you go to Princess Emily's room before you head off to rote you can get an optional dialog between her and Albert and the screen fades out after a certain point after everybody leaves so you can probably draw your own conclusions they [ __ ] or how about this did you know that if you lose the fight in the hero competition in lohan they have to contrive a way for you to can you want to the next round so it's possible for you to win every match via disqualification like a reverse JBL and most of the people you fight are present for the bounty hunt in Chapter three there are still things I'm finding out about this game to this day and god I love this game I could literally talk about this game all day I want to be able to talk about everything this game has to offer but there's so much depth and so much going on that I could talk about The Legend of Dragoon for a year and still not cover everything I can count on my one hand the amount of things that fell flat for me in this game if there's one big overarching thing I wish could be fixed it's the writing and I don't mean the plot because the overall plot is insanely well-written I mean the actual word to word writing I mean there's just a lot of very weird phrasing [Music] there's only a few instances of outright typos so thankfully the localization in this game is actually really good but everything else strikes me as the writing of someone who's second language was English so everything is coherent and makes sense but it's just oddly phrased and a bit juvenile II phrased it needs a little bit more sting a little bit more oomph the emotions are there but it needs a little bit more melodrama not too much though as then you risk looking like Albert the dialogue wall not badly written just seems a bit robotic like it had very little emotion behind it and one of the best examples of this comes when dart rescues Shana from Helena prison when dart says you haven't forgotten me even though we haven't seen each other in five years how about this it's been five years and yet you still remember me as though I never left that's good right it does get better after chapter one but there's still the occasional line that makes me go wait what so fix the phrasing and add a little bit more sting to the dialogue and it would be perfect you could argue that this is just how they speak in this world and if that's the case that's fine but I either need to know that or they need to have the dialogue be a bit more akin to good writing in our world there's a bit of ludonarrative dissonance in places like there are these situations where you can stay overnight at an inn while there's a big event happening in moments another thing that kind of pissed me off is how confusing the timeline is my Cashel was searching for Clare for 20 years but Dardis 23 so did Paschal wait a few years before looking but then how long did he wait and and how long was it before Clare met darts father and had darts and if dart was five when neat was destroyed then how did he end up in Seles which is across the continent and another flaw in the story is that they missed some really good opportunities to add some good drama and emotion I've already brought up a few of these but there are still some more that I haven't mentioned yet the big one is how I shall never outright admitted to dart that he's his grandson what they could have done is that when they're going to row castles hometown have hash will come up to dart on the boat through teary eyes and admit the truth and now knowing the fate of Clare once they leave rogue it will be the last time he'll do so or when dark spares Rose in chapter 4 in a throwaway scene Rose could have broken down and felt a crushing blow of 11,000 years of loneliness poring over her as the one chance she had to die is spared or when lloyd angrily a start what does Shona mean to you dart could struggle to say I loved her before Albert interrupts them which would further the internal conflict of dark not being able to display his emotion there's never an explanation as to why dart and Shona don't act like a couple after their first kiss and so on and in terms of flaws with the story beyond to the writing most of all the voice acting for us specially used as it is is legendarily bad in astronomy a move that never says necessary it is his majesty take that girl into custody and the worst yet [Music] I shouldn't be laughing at this but [ __ ] it if it isn't hilarious and the lip-syncing in this game was made for Japanese first and so the lip-syncing to English is probably the worst lip-syncing I've ever seen this [Music] goddamn that is terrible but none of that is a deal breaker far from it in fact however my most major issue I have with the story is the ending maximum spoilers so there's a massive info dump in the last portion of the game that explains all of the unanswered questions regarding the relevance of the Moon objects who Diaz is and of course Rosen Shana being the black monster and the moon child respectively it turns out however that Diaz is actually Zeke Rose's fiance from 11,000 years prior who escaped petrification but not only that he's Dartz father so everything is tied together he wants to bring about the end of the world for reasons were not really privy at this point you then meet up with Charlie Nobu from a sister the one responsible for giving Rose the item which gives her immortality she created five signet spheres during the dragon campaign which were devices that limited the power of the soul of the Moon child thereby somewhat depowering Mel booth Rama and it also held the body of the Moon child in the sky as the moon that never sets you see the soul in the body would be isolated as long as the soul was safe in the crystal sphere but once the crystal sphere was destroyed the only thing separating the soul in the body were the signet spheres no Bluff Rama found out about the signet spheres and created the divine moon objects so he could destroy the signet spheres whenever he wanted and bring himself back to full power and good thing he did it which cleverly explained the plot holes away as to why objects designed specifically to destroy the cygnets feeders even exist Charlie even implies that she just wanted to coexist with nobu which would explain why she didn't do anything about the moon objects now the divine moon objects that were stolen by Lloyd are objects the winged Lee's gave to the humans as peace offerings following the dragon campaign headed down from generation to generation now specifically what the divine moon objects are in layman's terms are they're objects that conceal enough power to destroy the Signet spheres however the signet spheres could be destroyed with a magical burst of equal power so this game in the last chapter becomes a very straightforward race against time to stop Zeke who has the moon child and the three divine moon objects and only three signet spheres to destroy as one of them was destroyed and dead and grabbed by the divine dragon earlier in the game and the other during the dragon campaign as this is where the game gets really up its own ass with the mythology and the slightly convoluted plot convoluted enough that I had to read over the details to make sure I got everything right yes this is the weakest part of the game for me the characters take a slight backseat to the mythology and it suffers for that if chapter 1 the sir war is an 80 chapter to the Platinum shadow is a 100 chapter 3 fate and soul is an 85 then this chapter moon and fate would probably be a 75 80 not bad but a noticeable downgrade you visit rogue you go through and meet roses old friends watch a bunch of people die beyond your control and so on and so forth granted even though the fourth disc was comparatively weak to the rest of the game it definitely has its moments I think one of the most heart-wrenching moments in this game wasn't the death City may Phil let me stress that lavetta's death was already a fantastic highlight of the game and this is what cemented it as an all-time favorite plotline for me you see his soul in the city but strangely amongst the souls in the city he's suspiciously corporeal everything seems fairly normal about this encounter but then suddenly it's revealed that boom he's being possessed by a demon named Zac well and when you try and help him he becomes hostile and for some reason loses his shirt dude you only got possessed by a demon no need to get your tits out even more is that this has the connotation that even in death his soul cannot rest and even in death he still suffers play your cards right and you can reveal Zac well and fight him then in the Yenta lafitte stabs himself to finally do sack well in then him dart and Albert have one more moment before livets fades away I mean that is just so powerful his lasting legacy is in death overcoming a possession to reunite with his best friends one last time before fading to dust and using his life essence to ensure that you have the ability to save the world before fading away forever even in death even as his physical form decayed before your very eyes he never loses his sense of loyalty and self-sacrifice for his friends and for the greater good that's what live its leaves behind a great man a great hero loyal to the very end I think another highlight of the last part of the game are the trials for the psychedelic bomb in a group [ __ ] another name um agile Asst I think it's agile as' maybe it's a Gliss I'm just gonna call it Atlas basically Civ on an old friend of roses worked for 7,000 years to create the ultimate weapon with power like nothing else ever conceived the last thing he needs is raw courage to power it up because magic is molded by emotion so he uses a courage absorbing machine which in retrospect sounds very anime but you know we'll roll with it it sounds dumb but it leads to these little character moments where you get little snippets of what ails these characters hassle with his daughter Albert with his Kingdom dart with the prospect of not being able to save shana and the great moment of ros being so generally courageous that she passes the test before the test has even begun it's all great stuff granted I do think that Miranda's is backwards her ultimate courage is saying that she can't die but unless it's a pointless death that's not really right because dying for the greater good is the ultimate courage in my opinion so that's where I always used to mess up make sure to save before this point and make sure you get all of the answers right because the psychedelic bomb is opie as hell after agile sr a Gliss or whatever it gets blowed up and you head over to the next area you thankfully get a fast travel option via the Stingray type creature named kulan he's so cool on then you have the rather hilarious lost city of Xena batos where you can just go in and change laws depending on the law you can change the fact that enemies attack you it's a great part of the game with some great humorous moments fun fact I played this game seriously for the first time back in 2008 and got stuck at this boss in the end everything leads up to you ultimately failing and the moon that never sets falls to earth and lands on the suddenly re-emerging divine tree the final fruit hatches and it launches a bunch of fear Rajas to protect it and those were all bosses before and so that gives an indication of how powerful the real god of destruction is if it's protection are all standard bosses so you make your way into the moon with the ultimate goal to reach to the center of the moon before the soul and the body are reunited and somehow save Shauna so you fight through hell and high water to get through every character deals with a great compelling personal battle Kangol has to face his past Maru has to face her own Archangel Albert has to face dole and so on those are all really great compelling conclusions to their personal conflicts which I can really sink my teeth into these are fantastic final conclusions to everybody from a character standpoint and you really get a sense that they've changed over this journey Maranda aside because she never really had the chance you finally make it to the center of the moon after a boss fight with a super Viraj who among other things throws galaxies at you then you finally make it to Shauna who oddly is wearing her regular attire sans shoes questions for later and you finally face Zig who takes darts Dragoon spirit but then you finally defeat him and Nobu from a soul emerges from Zig then they'll boo promise like I am he the foam this one the fallen angel watching you seriously why do I keep being reminded of moonchild by Iron Maiden all right you see in defeat Melba froma implanted his soul into dekes Dragoon spirit and so when Z used his Dragoon spirit for the first time after the spell of petrification wore off during the black monsters invasion of NEET Melba Rama possessed him and started setting everything into motion although that does beg the question as to why Zieg that is to say Mel boof Rama discarded the Dragoon as soon as he was freed maybe it was part of his plan to make the dragoons come back because that may in some way help maybe he didn't think he'd needed until dart dropped it when they were fighting it's not necessarily a plot hole it's just something that goes unexplained and there's a big difference but this is where we get into the massive cop-out territory the entire plot up to this point was whether or not we'd have to kill shana to save the world but instead the soul meets the egg and Mel boo just pulls her out and takes her place so as long as the soul meets the body anybody can take the form of the god of destruction making the Shona aspect seem like a massive check-offs gun okay then but then would reimburse and subsequently gets his ass killed but it would have been too little too late for him to join the party anyway this just wasn't as good as it could have been so I'm gonna throw this scenario out there here's how I would have done it so after you fight Zeke Shauna begins being pulled into the core then after a conversation hinging on needing to stop her you're given a choice text box either I can't bring myself to do this or we have no choice the former ends with a short cutscene leading to an instant game over the ladder leading to a pseudo boss fight with Shauna in the amniotic sac now you have the emotional weight because you feel like you're being forced to kill Shauna but then nothing works attack after attack does zero damage after zero damage as Shauna is pulled into the core then a scripted event has rose go fully powered in a last-ditch effort to stop Shauna she doesn't go in to Dragoon form she goes full-blown black monster she flies into the orb attack after attack and it starts to work the sack starts to crack the audience would be on the edge of their seat at this point because they know this scripted event could mean the world saved but also Shauna dying then right as she's about to deliver the final blow she's given a magical equivalent of an atomic bitch-slap from the ghost of Melba from and now as he's leaving the body of Z it was all part of his plan he knew that she would unleash the black monster and it would weaken the walls of Shauna's amniotic sac enough that he could take her place once the embryo of the god of destruction was fertilized at this point she'd be pulled out just like it happened in the game he's able to swoop in and replace her right as she enters lloyd tries to make the save and is annihilated and so on Rose would have exerted herself too much to unleash the black monster again yeah it would end with the same result but you'd have real narrative tension over the prospect of killing Shana as opposed to taking check-offs gun off the wall and throwing it out the window you'd also have justification for everything that's happened up to this point and a reason albeit flimsy for why Mel boof Rama could just take Shauna's place plus we could have seen the black monster properly before the game ended we were never entirely sure what the black monster was as it was never fully explained I choose to believe that it was to Rose what The Hulk is to Bruce Banner it couldn't have just been her Dragoon form because she was shrouded in darkness artistic license sure they were probably just doing that for the twist reveal but that still does create the separation so I choose to believe it's a Hulk esque alter ego I feel like this would have been a much more compelling and narrative Lee satisfying way to write this scene but hey that's just me finally with that said a brief conversation with every character a new Dragoon for dart and the Dragon Buster for Rose that's our final boss now boof Rama the god of destruction so just like every good JRPG we're teenagers using the power of friendship to kill God or rather adults using the power of Dragon spirits to kill a god ooh and it's actually pretty good I've heard you can cheese this boss fight using magic but [ __ ] that and I've already explained why I actually like the idea of fighting Mel boof Rama in hindsight because while he was never physically in the game he was a name that was constantly mentioned and he was established to be the most heinous person in this world's history I'm glad that somebody with that kind of personality and amount of times mentioned actually played a big role in the game in the end it's not a very hard boss fight if you've gotten this far but it's very very long goes through multiple stages and resembles more of a battle of attrition than anything so make sure to have lots of healing items on hand just in case what's really cool is that each stage of the boss fight is a different stage and time period of human development and shows these really cool illustrations of the progress of human history that may or may not have been inspired by religious texts but the final stage is the most shocking because everything looks good then the images start to get darker and darker and then at last the final generation the seventh generation and you fight the final stage of Mel booth Rama on a mound of human giblets with a river of blood behind him like it's too dark to be lava it's blood like this is shocking in the best way possible because it's almost like Mel boof Rama's illustration of the Apocalypse his mental illustration of where the world will end up if he doesn't personally hit the recess and now that I've gotten that out of the way I wanted to discuss something else if you're here you know everything there is to know about The Legend of Dragoon which is why I wanted to discuss something that's intrigued me for a while that I've never really gotten the chance to talk about the biblical themes in this final boss and to a lesser extent the entire game I'm gonna say this before anything else I am no expert on the matter of the Bible so take everything I say here with a pinch of salt I'm just interpreting what I've read and what I'm seeing in regards to the Bible the number seven is an important number seven deadly sins in all that but in particular the most important - number seven in the Bible is the seventh seal of the apocalypse that is to say the final seal that needs to break to cement the apocalypse and the death of mankind the seventh seal once broken involves seven angels with trumpets coming down from the heavens to enact God's wrath such as written in Revelation 16 1 and I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels go your ways and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth well do you think it's a coincidence that there are seven dragoon warriors at the foot of the god of destruction aka the thing that's supposed to bring the apocalypse as is the word of sowa I think the seven warriors being sent by fate is supposed to represent the seven angels sent to enact God's final wrath only in this game's interpretation the seven angels sent are working to subvert the will of God in this case so a-- it's an inversion of the biblical seventh seal right as the seven angels arrive the apocalypse starts coincidence maybe and that brings up an interesting point if these seven warriors are working to subvert the will of Sowa is there an unseen third party working with the dragoon warriors to try and make sure that they succeed hmmm perhaps the whole sent by faith thing is a little bit more apropos than I thought but if they represent the seventh seal what are the other six seals well this is where things get a little bit tricky there are five signet spheres that needed to be destroyed in order for the body and the soul of the god of destruction to be reunited those cygnus fears could be literal manifestations of five of the seven seals reading about the seven seals they are kind of vague and open to interpretation so there's nothing that says they can't be artificially manufactured so the five signet spheres could be just that five apocalyptic seals but that would leave us with one seal to go and I don't really have a concrete answer as to what that could be in this case it could be any number of historical events or events within the game the historical interpretations of the apocalypse seem to have different rotations on when the first few seals were broken but in many if not all the interpretations I've seen at least some of the seals have already been broken due to historical events dating as far back as the death of Christ if I had to take a rough stab I'd say the sixth seal which isn't necessarily the numerical sixth seal would be the death of the divine dragon because of how big of a role the Divine Dragoon plays into the file boss but that's just a rough guess the moon child and the birth of the god of destruction in my mind is meant to represent the birth of the Antichrist the false prophet and agent of chaos meant to signal the end times the Great Tribulation and finally the second coming of Jesus because you can't get any more endtime Z than the birth of the god that's supposed to reset the entire world to square one and how long is this Great Tribulation prophesized to last seven prophetic Hebrew years there's that number again people in the Legend of Dragoon thought that the birth of the one hundred and eight fruit would bring a time of enlightenment a second coming of sorts but instead it was to bring destruction everyone was fooled one of the things with the biblical Antichrist is deception tricking people into thinking he's the real Jesus and manipulating them to evil while the god of destruction wasn't fooling anyone by the time it was born it was prophesized that the Moon child would bring a divine gift and a time of enlightenment even fooling Lloyd but that was a deception that deceived everyone which lines up with the biblical Antichrist and the coming of the Antichrist in the Bible is supposed to signal the second coming of Jesus so as far as an equivalent to the second coming of Jesus in the Legend of Dragoon look no further than Zeke the man who rose from the dead or the not quite dead after eleven thousand years and ends up being one of the two people who strike down the god of destruction the other person being the black monster interpret from that what you will which means that Mel booth Rama himself would be the embodiment of the fallen angel Satan as he's the one looking to bring chaos and destruction only in this case him and God are technically on the same side and he fuses with the god of destruction to become both the Antichrist and Satan simultaneously hell even the divine tree strikes me as this games take on the Christian tree of life in the Garden of Eden The Tree of Life has many interpretations including Mesopotamian mythology where the remaining artifacts look very much like something in the chapter three divine tree cutscene but the idea that the fruit of the tree of life brings destruction to mankind does seem like a connection to Eden just taken to the extreme why does any of this matter well you know that Iron Maiden song I've referenced a few times already called moonchild the opening song to the concept album seventh son of the seventh son there's that number again well the song has many lyrics that got me thinking moonchild opens with the line I am he the born last one the fallen angel watching you and includes other lyrics like seven angels seven demons battle for his soul when Gabriel lies sleeping the child was born to die something about this started to become a little bit too coincidental there was a strange correlation between the biblical themes and the Legend of Dragoon and I only realised this when I started paying attention to the lyrics of the middle man a song called moon child so it got me interested in how religion influences fiction and in particular how religion influences the Legend of Dragoon at least how I interpret it and this is interpretive fiction and I find this fascinating how some things can influence other people perhaps I've missed something perhaps there's an entirely different interpretation to make and perhaps I'm wildly off-base but I find this so fascinating but regardless you fight Melvin Fromm for what feels like an eternity dealing with all the cheap tricks he can muster all in an effort to save the world from its own destruction he has 42,000 health 60,000 in Japan and I took a look at his attacks page on the wiki and it's like six pages long there's no grand strategy to beat him you just got to survive by any means necessary and also utilized the divine dragoo and as dark because this is the only time you're going to be able to use it anyway eventually you beat Mel boo from Dart transforms into the divine Dragoon and gives him one more good shot with a cannon and off to the final cutscene you go then Zieg N'Roses together fulfilled their destiny and defeat the god of destruction together with a weirdly upbeat soundtrack as everybody else dramatically escapes in what's easily the best CGI cutscene in the game [Music] [Music] [Music] finally the moon that never sets explodes and it's all over rose and Zig are gone and everybody else narrowly escapes and I mean narrowly they had to outrun a nuke in like ten seconds which I call [ __ ] on by the way and after that you get a brief epilogue with all of the characters and where they ended up and this scene always makes me well up a bit [Music] seeing all these characters and where they ended up even the minor characters is just so cathartic and the music that plays is like Oh lamenting over the fact that the adventure of a lifetime is now over it encapsulates the feeling of the end of such a long adventure with characters that you've come to know and love in a world that you know better than your own the bitter sweetness of goodbye every time I play this game it briefly becomes a part of my life as do these characters and to see it all come to an end is such a bittersweet feeling but in this cutscene you get to reflect on everything that's happened and how great of a ride it was it's the best type of ending in that it's very introspective there's even a reference to a throwaway line where Lovitz insisted that he and dart get drinks after the war is over so dart leaves a drink at a memorial for love it's in his house [Music] Wow and him at Shauna finally settled down to rebuild Seles and through it all you see a bird with dark blue feathers after the credits where you hear if you still believe in full in the end it lands on a tree alongside a bird with red feathers under which you see two discarded dragoons implying that these two seagulls were in fact rose and Zig reincarnated and can live on and finally be together after eleven thousand years the end yep I still love this game perhaps even more so than I did and man is it so bittersweet to see it all come to an end The Legend of Dragoon is such a special game to me it's one of the most special games I've ever played I'd like to think that this isn't nostalgia but I'm not taking that out of the equation this game is just so great graphically it almost transcends the ps1 musically it's perfect - the gameplay is unlike anything I've ever seen and front to back the story is one of the best stories in any game I've ever played - a few issues that has great characterization fantastic progression plot stakes mystery intrigue great themes masterful consistency setup payoff everything and you know more than anything everything is significant everything you say and do has a purpose while there's not a ton of sod content every bit of side content ties into the overall plot and has some sort of significance to the greater world not a single bit of screen time is wasted it's not groundbreaking but for me and my tastes it does everything almost perfectly from a story point of view and overall another thing that I love about this game is that it's so unlike anything else in its genre it's unlike any game I've ever played it does its own things so incredibly well that it just grabs my heart every single time I could play this game again and again every time I play it it's a 40-hour journey that feels like a ten-hour journey and I love it it's one of the few games that I have the urge to revisit every few months and I could talk about it for days and as great as the game is the history of this world and the lore is so much more than what you see on screen it's building a living breathing world where you know that there are a million stories to tell a world that draws you in with an intriguing mythology and a rich unexplored history the game itself is amazing the gameplay is great the graphics are fantastic the story is great the characters are incredibly likable the atmosphere is awesome the soundtrack is perfect but the real strength of the Legend of Dragoon and why it's constantly on my mind is because it uses a rich endlessly explorable history and a deep intriguing lore to create a living breathing universe where there's endless storytelling possibilities and it draws you in you will want to know more than this game tells you you will want to know everything there is to know about the Legend of Dragoon universe and that's why I'm a fan because of the absorbing universe The Legend of Dragoon creates or maybe I'm just talking out of my ass but regardless I love this game I really really do I could gush about it for ages easily in my top 5 favorite games of all time but as I brought up at the beginning why didn't this game get the recognition it deserved being such a majorly backed title well when you look at the release date of this game you'll see that it came out not four months before the ps2 the entire industry was so focused on the upcoming next-generation that The Legend of Dragoon slipped through the cracks the same thing happened to Final Fantasy 9 and when I see the mounds of mediocrity that was the ps2 launch lineup it makes me sad knowing what could have been what we could have had a game that was worked on by a studio that made some of the greatest games of all time had some of their best work be forgotten lost a time [Music] you know what though maybe it's a good thing that The Legend of Dragoon never had a sequel which could have potentially ruined it because if this is it don't standalone product then I am perfectly fine with the way it turned out whether it has anything to stand by or not a true gem of the PlayStation I heartily recommend it will The Legend of Dragoon ever see the light of day well perhaps perhaps not all that matters for now is that you deserve to play this game however you can I don't care how because all that matters is that goddamn it whether or not the Legend of Dragoon ever rises from the ashes you desert no no you owe it to yourself to play The Legend of Dragoon and that's it that's it it's done it's over and there come those bitter sweet feelings epilogue slash general discussion Wow I'm kind of in disbelief that I managed to make it this far I'm gonna say off the record that this has been one of the most draining yet simultaneously fulfilling projects I've ever worked on never I worked out right for so long on a singular project there were many sleepless nights and times where I had to disregard my personal duties to try and finish this project but I would do it again in a heartbeat this has been easily the most satisfying project I've ever made and I know I say satisfying a lot but I really mean it this time for such a special game to me I really feel like I made something special and I hope you agree with me and have enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed making it you know I had my doubts I really did you know there were several times while making this video that I thought to myself a [ __ ] it's not as good as I would have hoped or [ __ ] this video is falling apart but in the end I think it came together and I really enjoyed making it I think the final project was really good and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it that said I really did try my absolute best to say and include everything there is to say about this game at least briefly so just for my sake just as a personal courtesy if I happen to forget something maybe let it slide this time cuz after all this time hearing the words oh you forgot to talk about this or you forgot to talk about that I would really suck right now but hey Who am I to tell commenters what to do I think in the time between my original take on this game and now I've learned a lot about this game and there's so much to know I'm far from the most knowledgeable person on this topic and there's just too much to ever cover in one go and I'm sure in time with the constantly updated wiki page and the dedicated Legend of Dragoon community we will turn every stone it's only a matter of time and this is a big game to discover all the secrets to like the groundbreaking website that no longer exists but it was during that weird era where some websites were on disk so there's footage of the intro sequence and it's pretty weird it was framed as a factual event worth checking out or how about the secret path behind Seles where people have hacked the game data had found that it's a road to nowhere worthy of Ozzy Osbourne or Crash Bandicoot there's constant new info being found out about the game beta info resurfacing it's a never-ending archaeological dig that becomes bigger every day and even beyond that there's cost a discussion and jokes being made all the time in the community it's a passionate and lively community there's people making memes people making modern renders people just generally discussing the game it's still going strong after all these years I've heard people say that the fans can myth the legend of dragoon has flaws but if I'm being honest that's a load of [ __ ] I'm a Legend of Dragoon fan it's one of my favourite games but I've admitted a bunch of flaws with it I think the script could use some work I think Kangol falls off the map by the second half of the game Miranda is under written and unlikable this game has plenty of flaws and I don't think anyone's gonna pretend otherwise we're a passionate people but we're very aware of what's wrong with the game the petition for the remake has an itemized list of all the flaws we want fixed yes the petition I generally don't think petitions I've ever done any good at least in 99% of cases either something happens or it doesn't 20,000 signatures don't really mean much to the immoral businesses of the world that don't really care about anything but profit no company hates you they just want to make the most money off of you by any means necessary but if you want to sign the petition I'll leave a link in the description but really the only way we get anything is if Sony can make a profit with a little risk if they see that a Legend of Dragoon remake has the potential for massive profit we'll get a remake just like if Sony saw a potential profit in sly cooper or ape escape or any number of IPs they own we'd get more of those it's all down to a bunch of suits in a boardroom deciding what's popular and what they can make profit off of seeing is The Legend of Dragoon is over 20 years old now I'd say we're due for something because it's kind of in that nostalgic time period now but I'm not one to say so now that I've given the game away once all the stones are turned what then well it's a consistent topic among the community sequel sequel sequel remake remake remake every Legend of Dragoon fan has those two words in the back of their minds like a bullet and a machine gun and I think this game is a prime candidate for a remake because of the graphics the writing the little quality of life tweaks here and there and everywhere but I'm still [ __ ] cynical as hell I'm not a hundred percent convinced that they can remake this game properly because can they really do it faithfully there are so many aspects about this game that could definitely use an update but what if in updating it they completely ruin the game because the one thing I love about this game more than anything is that it's completely unlike most games so if they can remake the game and change things like this [Music] while preserving things like this I'd be all for it but I'm still cynical but that's just who I am do I want them to remake the Legend of Dragoon and give it the spotlight it deserves absolutely do I think they can do it properly I have my reservations because there are so many great aspects that can be ruined the gameplay system can be turned into real time killing the originality the mild anime overtones could be turned up to 11 making the characters go from likable to straight archetypical in a second and God knows how they've redesigned the characters I don't even want to think about that allegedly according to Reddit there's a remake currently in the works as confirmed by an anonymous Sony rep but that's flimsy as hell so I'll believe it when I see it however I guarantee that Sony knows that there's a demand and this is one of the only first party IP is that they haven't touched in years other than the ill-fated Sony Smash Bros DLC which was can't due to low sales however beyond my reservations they would have to make a remake before they make a sequel because it's been so long since the original that if they did make a sequel nobody beyond to the dedicated community would know what's going on who buys a sequel to a game that they've never heard of from 1999 exactly and the dedicated community while sizable and vocal is not big enough to support a full triple-a game so the general gaming public has all but forgotten about this game by and large meaning the general gaming public needs to be reacquainted with this game before anyone would buy the sequel otherwise nobody would buy it or at least nobody beyond the morbidly curious and maybe people who have heard the game but then we have the curious case of The Legend of Dragoon sequel there was apparently a sequel in the works at some point I've heard conflicting reports of when exactly it was in development some saying it was as far back as 2000 2001 and other reports saying it was as late as 2012 2013 when Sony saw the success of The Legend of Dragoon on the PSN classics section where it was the top seller for like the first three months it was online but either way it was cancelled in the pre-production phase that said what would a sequel look like because with the god of destruction killed and the divine tree destroyed where could a sequel go well I've thought about this right so the idea of the god of destruction is that it was meant as a final trump card in case so ever wanted to destroy the world and build a new one well seeing as the very people that still were created disobeyed his will and killed the thing that he him all created in order to be their ultimate demise don't you think that solo would just be the slightest bit pissed about that so my idea would involve so uh slowly becoming a bigger presence perhaps have the big MacGuffin hunt this time be based around the incorporeal Sowa taking physical form via an army of crazed worshipers that could be the overarching plot I'd probably want it to be set several hundred years after the events of the first game with a new set of allies with the only returning characters being dark Congo and meroux Congo and Moreau having long life based on their species and dart being cursed with long life in my hypothetical game because of the power of the Divine Dragoon Spirit he'd take on the role of Rose but with a bit more of a death wish he would have become disconnected with reality and with life and with humanity as he basically had to have watched everyone he'd ever loved to die like I said I'm a nihilist I don't like happily ever after I'm just spitballing obviously but this is the sequel I would have loved to see if there'd be a third game or the specific plot events of the sequel are things I haven't really thought of very thoroughly but this is basically what I would like to see perhaps the winged Lee's and the humans could be living harmoniously but then a second war could be sparked Rose indeed could be some sort of animal companions once again I'm just spitballing I mean there's no way to go back the god of destruction is definitively dead and gone and so there's no going back on that front so there needs to be something new one thing that's constantly come up is the wat for a prequel going through the days of the dragon campaign that sounds like a good idea on paper but there's one major thorn in the condom that kind of ruins that idea for me by and large we already know how it ends this is the major pit trap that almost all prequel stories fall into unless it's the type of story that can't be done justice from an explanation or a brief flashback it's never gonna be worthwhile we already saw the dragon campaign and a brief flashback in chapter 2 that tells us all we need to know noble Rama and Z get petrified Rose fails to save the love of her life and the original Dragoon warriors fall one by one in a sacrifice that wins them the dragon campaign it's pretty easily summarized and additionally it's not exactly narrative ly satisfying to have an entire game lead into a situation where everyone dies or ends up a miserable hostile lost wandering the world alone regardless of what Naughty Dog will tell you but I think I have an idea that could allow these little narrative asides to happen while not forcing you to pay full price for a game we already know the ending to before it's even out if they ever do a remake for this game I recommend adding what I call flashback quests my idea would involve the parts of the story that we're told about Orsi but don't actually get to experience ourselves for example in the early parts of the game we meet hassle and he tells the rest of the group and subsequently the player that he and dart met on their travels then there will be a pop-up that I'll say something like play this memory question mark and then will flashback to a playable side quest where hassle and dart meet in their mutual travels then the writers can explore how they met perhaps one helps the other fight some monster they were struggling with followed by setting up camp and getting drunk I don't know all while exploring their mutual chemistry kind of like the active time events in Final Fantasy 9 there are so many opportunities for flashback quests livets tells us about his father briefly while we're in bail why not have the option for a flashback quest to Daddy slam burg his final days then there's the big part of the story in chapter 4 that involves a flashback to bail 20 years in the past so why don't we see more of that they can literally just take a look it's his moveset and give it to his father while giving him a short story about the end and this could also tie into the story of the death of king carlo at the hands of emperor dole that's a part of the story that I'm interested in but seems to be under explored of course these quests would be optional and can be played later if you don't feel like it at that moment but I think this would be a great idea to add extra layers to the story without having entire separate games that end up falling flat so if they ever decide to give The Legend of Dragoon another shot I think something like this would be pretty high on my list as far as things to add some other examples would obviously be the flashback to the dragon campaign there are a few stories that we don't fully know what happened like what happened to SOI a veil or damia especially her story is so tragic that I really want to know more about it Congo working under Dole is another opportunity to flesh out his life and experiences as well dartz training under master Tasmin could provide some opportunities to show darts past leading up to his quest to pursue the black monster the list goes on and on and on what I'm asking for is for more gameplay and expansion to the lesser explored parts of the story this is just a pipe dream but what a pipe dream to have honestly even just looking at the artwork for this game makes me want more there is so much life and creativity to this world that they could expand on seriously just to look at this art it's stunning I guess my one request to the fans is don't be a dick about wanting more okay saying things like we don't want much we just want you to remake the game actually just makes you sound very entitled and oblivious to how hard it actually is to make a game even a master these are people who work hard and we shouldn't sound so entitled or demanding otherwise perhaps there's potential with an HBO style TV show or Castlevania style anime I don't know because I would really like to see expansion on many parts that weren't really elaborated on too much in the game like bits of story that clearly happened off screen for example that we weren't privy because they were kind of irrelevant to the game's plot and gameplay how did dart end up in sally's how did he end up with shauna what was his training like what was the sequence of events leading to them getting from Helena to Silas what was the first meetup with hash will and art like there are so many things that could be elaborated on with more attention focused on individual events there's a potential gold mine with a Legend of Dragoon and an entire world of magic with untapped potential I've been seeing more and more discussion about The Legend of Dragoon even in general more casual gaming circles so the demand is there and the demand has existed for years and the demand has only been increasing I don't know whatever the future holds for The Legend of Dragoon if anything I'll be right there because whether you can do The Legend of Dragoon justice in the future is up in the air but it's one of the few things that I'm willing to say I'll take whatever you can give me and not immediately be cynical about and for me well that is a big freaking deal [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you still [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: TGX Game Reviews

Views: 10,171

Rating: 4.8699188 out of 5

Keywords: LOD retrospective, legend of dragoon story review, legend of dragoon ps1 review, The legend of dragoon retrospective, legend of dragoon review, the legend of dragoon review, legend of dragoon, legend of dragoon 2, the legend of dragoon, the legend of dragoon remake, tgx game reviews, legend of dragoon remake, tgx, legend of dragoon ps4, the legend of dragoon ost, the legend of dragoon ps4, legend of dragoon ps1, the legend of dragoon ps1, lod, the golden bolt, Lets play

Id: q7RRo2yq--4

Length: 224min 4sec (13444 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 17 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/desertsprinkle]

Thank you for supporting this amazing game!

[u/imLucki]

Added to my watch later, will give me something to listen to while grinding, cheers!

[u/PlayaHatinIG-88]

I've already watched both like 3 times each. I love it when a great game gets high praise.

[u/HJM9X]

*Only 4 hours...

[u/Kevin_Pentagram]

Hi TGX, italian fan here, I love your reviews! I don’t know if I’ll be watching this cause I already saw the 3 hour one twice, the last time just recently, but I’ll definitely go back to it :)