Legend of Dragoon Retrospective - Sony's "Final Fantasy Killer"

this week marks the 20th anniversary of the english release of the legend of dragoon sony's late ps1 role-playing game that attempted to capture the magic and monstrous success of square's ps1 final fantasy games with its ballooning development team of over a hundred people and a budget of 16 million dollars easily one of the largest budgets a sony game ever had at the time the legend of dragoon became a moderate success selling just over a million copies worldwide and averaging a 74 on metacritic despite this success and the full weight of the playstation's marketing behind it this seemingly promising series was cut short when its sequel was quietly cancelled early in production for reasons unknown even to executive producer shuhei yoshida two decades later the legend of dragoon is a somewhat polarizing game with an incredibly passionate fan base begging for a sequel or a final fantasy vii styled remake a fan base that's ready to tear you limb from limb for pointing out any flaws and it's got an equally passionate group of detractors ready to call it meaningless derivative garbage what is it that makes this game simultaneously so beloved and so maligned why is it so special to some and bland and mundane to others i think i know the answer and hopefully this retrospective will bring that to light it's a game that for all of its many many flaws fascinates me a game that's far greater than the sum of its clumsily put together parts and it's the first game that i can confidently say turned me into a fan of japanese rpgs but before i can explain all of that i first have to tell you about what introduced me to this game see i didn't play the legend of dragoon back in 2000 i first picked it up thanks to another failed playstation game with a cult following playstation all-stars fans of my channel will probably remember that in 2017 i released a documentary video celebrating the five year anniversary of playstation all-stars battle royale sony's attempt at replicating super smash brothers all stars like the legend of dragoon before it is a game that has some of the most dedicated die hard fans that you'll find online surrounded by even more people happy to brush the game off as meaningless derivative garbage like the legend of dragoon psas landed as a moderate success critically averaging a 74 on metacritic like the legend of dragoon it sold just over 1 million copies worldwide according to shuhei yoshida and like the legend of dragoon despite all of this moderate success and sony being satisfied with its performance support for playstation all-stars as an ip was cut short these two sony games shared the exact same fate down to those very same numbers 74 and 1 million and what's more the relationship didn't stop there as one of all star's cancelled dlc fighters was later revealed to be the highly requested dart feld the protagonist of the legend of dragoon now the sheltered little bolt i was i had never heard of this game as turn-based rpgs never really captured my interest beyond pokemon so when i learned about it and i saw just how intertwined these two games fates seem to be i moved out of my comfort zone and bought the legend of dragoon on psn i just had to see what the hype was about and like i said a moment ago coming in with no nostalgia no real expectations the game captured me for the entirety of its sweeping four-disc journey since it seems that so many players never made it past the first disc i'm going to attempt to go through this adventure with you in full not necessarily revealing every single story beat but discussing the new gameplay and narrative revelations as they come at some point this is going to get really plot heavy that's simply unavoidable if you'd like a spoiler warning i'll tell you when the big stuff starts to hit [Music] as soon as the game's opening moments it's easy to see both sides of the legend of dragoon debate both those that love and hate the game on one side this opening cinematic sets an excellent tone for the rest of the game as we see a town under siege buildings burned and raised to the ground villagers fleeing from stampeding soldiers and all to capture one girl even this commander doesn't know the girl's importance only told by his cloaked companion that her capture was ordered by the emperor of sandora dole within just this intro we've learned the major plot focus of both disc 1 and the game as a whole all told through a well animated and at least decently voice acted cinematic that would stand right up there with the best on the platform the voice acting well yeah okay it's all downhill from here but we'll get there when we get there following this cinematic is our jump into in-game character models which we'll just say look fine for now we briefly see a mysterious woman watching over the forest before being introduced to dart sitting in that forest reading about the country's impending civil war dart runs into some of the soldiers marching from the destroyed village before encountering and running from a dragon in what i'm not kidding is the best animated scene this game has dart bobs and weaves around the dragon knocks down trees it's a bit slow as you'd expect given the system's limitation but far more fluid than it has any right to be i'm sure i'll be coming back to this later on but this is one of the many inconsistencies that run throughout the legend of dragoon these overworld models would look fine if the game were released in 1997 but remember this was released at the end of 1999 in japan and june 2000 in the states they're well proportioned unlike say final fantasy vii but when you compare dragoon's character models to final fantasy viii a game that came out 10 months prior it's no contest and lod looks a bit amateur by comparison joints frequently clip in and out colors often jitter it feels like these models are almost the lower res ones you'd see when the characters are way off in the distance except these are supposed to be the high quality close-up ones yeesh anyway from here dart's saved by that aforementioned woman who tells him that the nearby village his hometown of seles has been raided and is likely completely destroyed dart runs off to the town to seek revenge which is where we're introduced to the game's combat the legend of dragoon features a pretty unique combat system focused on what the game calls additions on the surface these are an expanded take on the action command gameplay of something like super mario rpg when you select the attack command the character runs towards the enemy and attempts a multi-hit combo and the length of that combo and the damage you deal will depend on whether you can press x in time with the attacks that's going to be easier said than done at first the timing indicator is really hilariously low budget it's just two blue squares in the center of the screen hit x right as the shrinking outer square is close to matching the static inner one and boom one hit of the combo is complete you'll start out with simple two or three hit combos for each party member and successfully completing these combos grants you experience for that attack which can increase its damage and grant other effects later on the timing is almost definitely going to be finicky at first press x too fast and the box turns gray too slow and the box turns blue either way if your timing isn't close enough the combo will end there if you're like me you're gonna forget which color means what right away and just experiment until you get it right after a few tries and that experimentation you'll start to master each addition and feel a burning rush of satisfaction as you do personally pardon the pun i love this edition because it makes every battle even the smallest random encounter more engaging and interactive enemies can even counter during combos forcing you to press circle at the right time or risk taking some damage every fight is really truly in your hands and even when you think you've mastered the precise timing every now and then there is a chance that you'll slip up the combat fleshes out so much more once we get the other party members though so let's put a pin in that for now and come back to our hero dart takes out the remaining soldiers in celes and one of his former neighbors reveals that the girl taken was shanna dart's closest childhood friend furious dart rushes into the prison that shauna's being held at to break in and break her out while trying to find shauna cell dart makes a new friend with another escapee a character with what's unquestionably the single greatest name featured in any rpg ever lavitt's [ __ ] slambert his last name is slambert you know what hold on we need to take a detour and talk about some of these names now i can't put this off the team at sony's japan studio when deciding names for the major characters for some reason just decided to line up a bunch of random words starting with the letters a through n and voted on which names they liked the best for each character this meant that these names ended up all over the place with inspiration taken from all around the world and it just doesn't mesh well at all for example in disc 1 we meet king albert the nephew of emperor dole and the son of the former king carlo now carlo and albert sure those two work together i guess but who the hell names one kid carlo and another dole kanye west later on in disc 2 we've got a king zire who has a daughter named lisa anything for my princess and one of the main villains is just named lloyd nobody in history ever anywhere has been intimidated by a guy named lloyd i'm just gonna go ahead and guess that dart got his name because that's how the team was picking names just throwing darts at a board you know what though it got us slavics slammered so i'm okay with it lavitz is the top knight in the kingdom of basil one of the two warring states involved in this civil war over the fractured country known as serdio originally fighting the guards together as a mutual enemy lavitz and dark quickly form a combat bond that morphs into one of gaming's best bromances and lab its vows to help rescue shana so that they can all escape together after all it'd be nearly impossible to escape alone anyway the duo quickly finds and rescues shana and we discover that she and dart hadn't seen one another in the past five years huh five years that sounds familiar well the celebration is short-lived as our heroes are forced to fight their way out of the prison with shanna picking up a nearby bow to show darth that she can defend herself this is where we learn that dart's kind of an idiot at least when it comes to shauna for a good chunk of the game he physically cannot stop thinking of shauna as if she's his little sister even though five years have passed they're both adults now and she's clearly got feelings for him he'll almost talk down to her at times as if she doesn't know any better and a good chunk of her character for the first part of the game is just trying to convince dart that she's an adult and not his baby sister dude can't take a hint even when the entire rest of the party is telling him that she wants the d art lavitz tries here to explain the dart that the girl that he knew is clearly different and grown up now and once they've escaped shauna asks dart why he disappeared five years ago it turns out dart left to seek out the black monster a mythical figure that destroyed his true hometown of neat 18 years ago and killed everybody there leaving dart orphaned a mysterious villain burning down the main character's hometown why why does that ring a bell all that was left of the burning village when dart returned the next morning was a shiny red stone that his dad always carried with him the trio returns to lavitz's hometown and basil's capital bale so that lavitz can report back to king albert and hopefully so that dark can learn more about the black monster from the king's intelligence minister along the way there are way too many random encounters another one of this game's big sticking points now i have no issue with the random enemies you'll fight such as the wonderfully named assassin [ __ ] but the enemy appearance rate is just far too high some screens will have maybe one encounter while on others you'll run into two three maybe even four encounters just trying to cross through one room there's a little indicator over dart's head that'll tell you how close you are to an encounter shifting from blue to yellow and then finally to red when a fight is imminent but there's nothing you can do to stop it as far as i've seen walking instead of running doesn't lower your encounter rate whatsoever so the indicator may as well be there just to taunt you and when you're traveling the overworld almost without fail you'll trigger an enemy encounter on the very last step before you can enter the next area it's just frustrating and it can completely tank the pace of an otherwise really exciting game i mean all of what i've described thus far is the first three hours of legend of dragoon and it could have easily been cut down by a third if the encounter rate was cut down just a bit the additions make the battling interesting and fun and leveling up your attacks by completing additions is incredibly helpful when it comes time to fight the many many bosses but the encounters quickly reveal a significant balance issue with the game see regular encounters around this point earn you maybe 20 experience which is split three ways one for each party member for comparison sake this giant snake boss on the way to bale gives you 400 and the entire game is this way regular enemies give almost no experience and you'll practically never level up on the way to the next boss fight but once you get to that boss prepare to gain thousands even tens of thousands of experience points and level up one two or three times all at once at a certain point my patience starts to wear thin usually about midway through disc 3 and at that point i would rather carry a bunch of instant escape items and just move from boss to boss but for some reason you can only carry a paltry 32 items in your inventory once you factor out all the other items you're gonna wanna carry you might have room for maybe five or ten of these instant escape items so you'd make it a little bit of the way through a dungeon but never all the way without fighting things the plus side is that it's more or less impossible to be under level than the legend of dragoon but the downside is that a game that could be an excellently paced 25 to 30 hours instead ends up milking these fights enough to stretch to 35 or 40 hours and keep in mind i'm playing the digital version i can only imagine this would get even more tedious with the ps1's notoriously slow load times thankfully these moments of downtime in between boss fights and new towns are usually sprinkled with character moments and sometimes with surprisingly great humor on the way to bale for example we see how great of a guy lavitz is when he insists that refugees from the enemy kingdom of sandora stay in his own home until they can find a place to stay and we also watch our heroes cut down a tree to use as a bridge only for the tree to fall down the cliffside and float right into the exact place they needed a bridge well that's nice when our heroes arrive at bail they quickly set off again this time to help defend the town of hoax i'm not kidding the name is actually hoax again i love these names so much hoax is the last line of defense against an imperial assault and dart decides that he can't search for the black monster until this war is taken care of it's during the siege of hoax that we finally get to the dragoon part of this game's title during a fight with a massive warrior named kongl himself the last of his species called the gigantos the mysterious woman returns and awakens dart's dragoon form it turns out his dad's red stone was one of the legendary dragoon spirits which allowed the right holder to transform into the dragon knights that liberated humanity in a war eleven thousand years ago oh yeah by the way this game has eleven thousand years worth of carefully weaved lore that we're gonna dive into later so buckle up the mysterious woman reveals that her name is rose and that she's also a dragoon and she joins the group as they proceed to their next battle site to take on the empire's dragon at this point most of the rest of disc one can be summarized in just two words power rangers in the span of the next few hours the gang obtains two more dragoon spirits one for lavitz and one for shana as they fight another handful of bosses and try to stop imperial sandora from turning the tide of war we also add another member to our party a former mentor of darts named hashel and we encounter lloyd for the first time when he absolutely trounces dart in a combat tournament lloyd is this mysterious silver-haired silent type holding a really long sword why does that sound familiar well either way he leaves right after winning the tournament and hashel introduces himself to the gang he's a martial arts master who's been searching for his daughter claire for the past 20 years he'd scared her off 25 years ago when during a training accident she killed her sparring partner nobody anywhere has seen her since but dark comments that his mom's name was also claire a very rare coincidence the good news is now that we have a handful of people in our party and we have dragoon spirits i can fully explain this game's combat unlike many other jrpgs this game doesn't have regular attacks and magic attacks in the traditional sense your only normal attacks are your additions and if you'd like to use magic you do so by tossing out a magic item supposedly the development team wanted the game to be realistic and magic isn't realistic but throwing rocks that can shoot guns is these are single-use items with various elemental effects and you can multiply their damage by mashing x when using them these items despite being items and not magic attacks deal damage in part based on the magic attack stat of the character throwing them shauna for example has the highest magic attack stat in the game so using items with her would be far more effective than tossing one out with a more physical attack focused hassle the only semblance of magic moves is each character's dragoon magic only usable when you're in a character's dragoon form these moves also rely on the magic attack stat and will consume mp they can be pure damage attacks like darts a revive or heal like some of shauna's a defense buff or a combination like rose's astral drain which saps the enemy's health and grants it back to the party being in dragoon form will generally give a character an incredible stat buff at the cost of only being able to use dragoon magic or physical dragoon attacks a dragoon can't flee a battle can't use items and can't guard generally you wouldn't have to do these things anyway because of how strong a dragoon is but if you really need to heal and you don't have a dragoon spell that lets you heal your sol to enter dragoon form you'll need to build up your spirit points which is where our additions come back into play once a character has his or her dragoon spirit performing additions will earn that character sp it costs 100 spirit points per turn to enter and stay in a character's dragoon form and at first you've got a 100 sp cap for each character also earning any sp at all through your additions even when you're already at a character's max will count towards that character's dragoon level as a dragoon level increases you can stay in that form for more turns and gain access to new and stronger magic abilities this means you'll want to keep nailing your additions and you'll want to keep experimenting with the new additions as you unlock them some attacks may be easier or harder to perform but they may grant more sp other attacks may do way more damage but grant you fewer spirit points it's entirely up to you which editions are the best for which characters and which situations for example given hashel's low magic attack and how strong his later additions are i very rarely used his dragoon form it was far more effective to just use his normal attacks the thing that sucks the most about this really promising edition system is that you can only choose one addition per character at a time before you enter combat i'd love to be able to use a heavy sp combo after exhausting dark dragoon form so that i can build that meter back up quickly but since i can't change combos on the fly i have to choose between going through longer fights and doing less damage and building up my dragoon meter quickly some moves have the best of both at least but they can take close to half the game to unlock in any case these moves and all of legend of dragoon's combat for that matter look far better than the overworld animations every move has its own unique animation timed relatively fluidly with each button press swinging or punching right as you're expected to hit x and of course if you've played legend of dragoon before probably the first thing that you remember about the game are the amazingly bad voices for these attacks i know they've been seared in my mind all these years there's something so charming about each and every one of these from the simple and corny like darts to lavishes to the absolutely amazing i love it all so so much i swear to god they just spliced together two different takes for that one and it's amazing if you didn't say some of these out loud to yourself while playing i don't think you're human my favorite though has to be [Applause] it's also noteworthy that since shawna uses a bow she doesn't have any additions because apparently the developers thought that firing multiple arrows in rapid succession wouldn't be realistic and thus we don't get to hear her bad voice acting until the very end trust me it'll be worth it it's not super balanced and shana's got a ton of issues from a gameplay standpoint really she's our dedicated healer for at least half of the game but she's also removed from the party for a good hour or two at this point because she's poisoned by the dragon that dart encountered earlier by the time she's back in the party she's three to four levels below everybody else and she already had the weakest attack and defense stats before this and as i mentioned earlier leveling up without fighting bosses is essentially impossible until midway into the game so she'll always be at a disadvantage going forward to pile on shauna even more we still can only have 32 items in our inventory that's not changing so her saving grace her high magic attack is limited by how little you can carry unless you want to cut back on health items or items that remove status effects you're going to want to be careful not to cut back on status items though because some of the game's ailments such as poison fear and dispiriting will remain after the battle is over and won't go away until you either use an item go to a clinic in town or transform into a dragoon while we're still talking about combat i also mentioned elemental effects and that's because every character friend or foe has a particular element attached to every attack something i didn't realize until playing this game again is that you can figure out that element by the color on the enemy's name box which is a helpful little touch maybe i'm just stupid for not noticing it earlier but i don't recall it being highlighted anywhere in game elements in the legend of dragoon like a lot of this game if you haven't started to notice a pattern here get kind of weird fire and water earth and wind and dark and light are natural opposites so one attack will do double the damage to the opposite type and half damage to the same type unrelated elements however have no effect on one another there are also non-elemental enemies with no particular strengths or weaknesses and hashel and many enemies are designated as thunder type characters which has no opposite so it's just kinda there that also means that hashel's dragoon magic is even less effective than i already said it was so there's pretty much no reason to ever transform him unless you have a status effect and don't have an item to cure it the elemental damage bonuses add a good level of optional strategy to many fights and it means that every party member has a guaranteed use somewhere except for one but we'll talk about that one later outside of a handful of particularly difficult fights though you won't need to worry too too much about optimizing your party and besides you can't even remove dart from your party anyway so your options were always going to be a bit limited oh boy jumping back to the plot we're almost at the end of disc 1 and we're nearing the end of the serdian civil war so here is your last warning for spoilers as the gang's leaving the combat tournament a knight informs lavitz that king albert has been taken prisoner and the gang rushes back to the prison to save him after fighting a knockoff of the rancor from star wars and defeating the prison warden for the second time lloyd suddenly shows up to steal what's called a moon gem from albert and he kills lavitz after the knight rushes to protect his king silver-haired villain killing a playable character oh god oh my god it's all hitting me now this game is just store brand final fantasy vii at least that's what those detractors like to say and it's very clear they've got a point although legend of dragoon started development in 1996 before final fantasy 7 had released we don't know exactly when the plot outline was finished and it's just about impossible to debate that legend of dragoon's first disc takes many beats from the opening hours of final fantasy 7 jumbles them around and introduces them into a different world lavitz is certainly no aerith as a character instead he and dart form this amazing little bromance in their limited time together often talking strategy to one another while shanna stands in the background confused and frustrated that she can't get dart to look at her the way he looks at lavitz we get to see how caring lavitz is for his people and for all people for that matter we help avenge his dead father by killing the man who betrayed him we see him as the total mama's boy he is when we visit his home in bale and we see him and dart promise to have a drink once the war is over a drink that can never happen now his death as earned as it may be and as poignant as it may feel to some players is still very derivative but is being derivative really a bad thing no not necessarily but along with many of the issues this first disc can have with being a relatively paint by numbers plot and cast of characters it's understandable why many people never made it past this point that's a shame because the later discs of legend of dragoon are really what brings the magic together in my eyes and with that let's finish up disc one king albert joins the party to avenge lavitz with the jade colored dragoon spirit having selected him as its next holder and the gang works towards dole's black castle if you thought lavitz was just gonna be another aerith well players don't get to feel this loss nearly as much from a gameplay standpoint because albert takes up right where lavitz left off with the same level and experience his friend had in some ways this might sour lavitz's death a bit seeing as they just replaced him anyway but i will say that they do a good bit to make these characters distinct for one albert's additions have totally different timing than lavitz's despite being the exact same additions so now you've gotta relearn your favorite combos if you want to deal damage with what's probably your strongest attacker at this point after taking down that giganto kongol a second time and sparing his life it's time to fight emperor dole and end this family war once defeated and just before his death dole reveals to the heroes that lloyd has been behind shauna's kidnapping and that he's fled to the neighboring country of tiburoa in search of that country's moon dagger to go along with albert's moon gem supposedly lloyd has been acting on behalf of somebody named emperor diaz which rose claims is impossible as diaz died 11 000 years ago during the legendary dragon campaign oh and also hashel receives the purple dragoon spirit from dole right as he's about to leave so our sentai heroes are almost fully assembled now disc 2 introduces us to our last two playable characters and focuses on hunting down lloyd to discover his plan and the nation of tiburoa is a stark contrast from serdio where serdio was ravaged by a decades-long civil war tiburoa is a much more peaceful kingdom that's only recently been dealing with an uprising of bandits the same figure sits behind both regions strife though and that is lloyd outside of those bandits the two major towns in the region are beautiful sunny seaside cities that really highlight just how good the pre-rendered backgrounds look it's not at all a stretch to say that legend of dragoon features some of if not the best looking pre-rendered areas on the ps1 that doesn't mean i would say they're super well designed however oftentimes they're not that easy to navigate so the game just outright tells you where the exits are with these floating green arrows it's not a huge issue in these towns specifically but when you're in the wild and one wrong step means another battle yeah i would like the maps to be just a bit clearer anyway chapter 2 drops the design of one overarching story in favor of tying a handful of smaller journeys together first up we have the mystery of princess emil who six months ago had a drastic change in personality after falling off of a horse then we learn of bandits beginning to rise up around that same time six months ago and when traveling between towns dart loses his dragoon spirit to abandon only to find out that one of the townsfolk foolishly chased the bandits himself what i'm saying is there's a lot of bandit related things here the crew must convince tiburo as king to let them pass through the valley of corrupted gravity to save this guy and get dart's dragoon spirit back and yes there is a valley of corrupted gravity and yes it's as irritating to go through as you might imagine those confusing screen layouts yeah toss in some upside down movement too just throw it on the pile along the way the gang recruits its sixth member a dancer named meru with her bubbly mischievous personality she especially gets along with hashel and the two tend to be the duo responsible for comedic relief going forward she's also like hashel pretty commonly accepted to be the best character in the game so these two are the perfect match as friends thanks to her incredible speed relatively high magic attack stat and her acceptable enough physical attack she can pretty much replace shauna as your pseudo-magician and once she gets her dragoon spirit because if you couldn't tell by now everybody in this party is going to be a power ranger she even gets a group he'll move so now she's your healer too speed may as well be the most important stat in legend of dragoon because if i understand it correctly turns are handed out proportionally to that stat somebody like mehru especially if you give her some speed boosting gear can move two or three times in a single turn where somebody like albert may only move once her attacks may be less powerful but she'll end up doing more damage per turn the strange problem here is that you'll never really know how many player turns you have before the enemies attack and who attacks first in a battle has always seemed random it makes it kind of hard to strategize and especially difficult to play it risky you'll often go a couple hours without returning to a town or a shop so you'll usually find yourself wanting to avoid wasting a healing item on a slower character hoping that you can bang out the battle first but at the same time you'll risk getting ko'd if the opponent moves first sure there's always the option to use guard which gives you back 10 percent of your health and halves any damage that that character takes until their next move but that's not a solution as much as a band-aid i'd rather have better healing options and more items than be forced to turtle up for a few turns related to this is another of legend of dragoon's clearly many balance issues you cannot change party members mid-combat if you walk into a boss fight you won't know until it starts if you've got the right party and reloading a save isn't always an option because the game sometimes doesn't put a save point before a boss don't get me wrong this game isn't all that hard by any means outside of maybe a couple fights and if you know what you're doing it is so incredibly easy to break but a few accessibility tweaks like this would have gone such a long way towards making this a better game i mean spending a turn to swap out when rose is low on health or something like that would save me items and stress in fights where i'm taken by surprise or where i'm just stupid and make a mistake the seventh and final party member and meru's polar opposite comes when we reach the bandit camp set up in the former giganto stronghold after defeating the bandits their leader who happens to be one of hashel's former pupils reveals that they replaced princess emil with an imposter six months ago and that she's going to steal the moon dagger at her upcoming birthday ceremony the shrine the gang is in starts to collapse only for kongol to make the save kongol says he was moved both by the power rangers strength and by dart's compassion in not killing him after their second fight and he decided to join them to see if they could bring the peace to the world that emperor dole had always promised him which on paper is really nice if not for the fact that he's a total afterthought of a character he's got insane strength but he's so slow that you essentially have to give him speed gear if you want to use him he only has three additions his friggin dragoon spirit is an optional item until disc 4 that you can buy in a disc 1 shop that only shows up after you unlock him in disc 2. the dudes not even in many of the in-game cutscenes it very much feels like kongol wasn't a finished character and because of that i only used him once in this playthrough in his one mandatory fight so with the news that the moon dagger is in danger and with lloyd likely involved somehow the gang takes the logical next step and attends a wedding instead of going to stop him what all jokes aside this is actually a really nice optional scene one of the many great character moments throughout disc 2. dart can choose to help shauna catch the bouquet when it's thrown showing that he's slowly coming around to the idea that he cares about shauna as more than just an old friend or you can just not press x and meru will catch instead once the gang makes it back to the capital they sneak past a group of bandits posing as guards to try and find the real princess emile to foil the imposter where has she been kept captive for these last six months sealed in a painting the imposter emile is revealed to be a pirate named lennis lloyd's supposed girlfriend who's gone undercover to capture the dagger for him this means that lloyd not only fanned the flames of a civil war in serdio he also planned an attempted coup of another country all in the name of two ancient moon-themed heirlooms he may have a shitty name but you can't say he's not effective lenus happens to be one of the most difficult fights in the legend of dragoon and also the point at which i think i can officially say i completely broke this game see i happened to run out of revival items near the very end of this fight and rather than start over i decided i would just finish what i started with dart alone and let my unconscious party members miss out on the experience remember bosses are the only place to earn a good amount of experience so that means that instead of splitting 6 000 experience three ways dart earned it all himself now in fairness i actually did this with two different boss fights by accident and by the end of the game dart was no fewer than 5 levels higher than everybody else but this fight here is what helped me realize just how broken this game's internal math can be see your inactive party members will earn half of the experience that each active party member earns if a fight gives you 30 experience each of the three members get 10 and each inactive member will then get five but if two party members are dead the four fighters sitting on the bench get half of what the lone survivor gets so in this fight dark gained 6 000 experience instead of 2 000 and the four people hanging out in the wings got 3 000 instead of 1 000 none of this would ever matter on its own but in any other rpg this could absolutely destroy the game in the right hands this also got me thinking about what other strange oversights must have happened elsewhere and my first thought was the weird percentages attached to the dragoon magic attacks i've spent years wondering what it is that 25 fire is actually supposed to mean the attack is going to deal fire damage no matter what because dart is the one using it so is it an extra 25 damage is it a 25 attack multiplier this time i had to figure it out and after a good amount of research i discovered that no official source explains these percentages not the game not the strategy guide the only answer i found was published i swear to god this year in 2020 by a dedicated fan who dug into the game's source files this monstrosity is the math that determines how much damage an attack does because not only is the math stated in game wrong it's also i swear to god a typo every single one of these dragoon magic attacks is incorrectly given compared to the original japanese version and given how shoddy the translation work is you know what that honestly makes so much sense i've sort of been gust of wind dancing around this topic so far but for all of the charm that legend of dragoon's characters can have and for all of the great character moments that i'm preparing to mention in disc 2 this game has more poorly written sentences than a sonic fan fiction trust me i've read several for charity further into her until he was able to fit his entire head in it takes almost two full discs for the game to dare use the contraction you're up until now everybody stiffly utters you are and the sentence that they finally do it in gives us both the wrong and right versions of your in the same sentence if that's not a perfect microcosm of this game i don't know what is much later in the game we have a weak spot spelled as in w-e-e-k somebody uses the phrase awfully powerful mega magic even in times that it's technically sound the writing can be unintentionally stilted and hilarious i couldn't stop laughing during this serious completely optional sort of romeo and juliet scene when one of the lovers says i'm sorry that we can only love in a broken planetarium only for the other to respond that's life it's so good and then there's a point early in disc 2 where rose goes full edgelord and says she forgot how to smile smile at least that's in character for her though albert goes from a noble king who likes history in passing to a complete dork right at the very start of this chapter as if the developers realized that they needed a smart character for this one line of dialogue so they just whiplashed him into that role for just a moment these may all sound like nitpicks and in some cases they definitely are but it again shows how inconsistent the legend of dragoon can be we'll have beautiful moments and lines like if you drag the past around you can't walk anywhere and other times we'll get it's the most jarring here because chapter 2 tries to focus so much on these smaller character building moments while simultaneously taking these characters out of their relatively set roles usually it ends up being really funny rather than painfully bad i suppose and in some sort of b-movie kind of way maybe that's part of the charm some of the best of these character interactions come in the next section of dragoon the obligatory boat section when lannis is defeated she reveals that she can fly as she's a winged species of magical humanoid creatures named wait for it winglies they're called they're called winglies it's like if we call the humans leglies or fish finneys i'd love to blame the bad translation for this one too but i think wingley is also their japanese name as she's flying away lannis decides to tell the party exactly where she's going because you know reasons and king zeire gives them access to the kingdom's biggest boat and its entire crew on this ship we get to play as each character individually without the fear of random encounters so we get to explore the ship talk to the others one by one and play the occasional veggie chopping mini game we get to see shawna's frustration that dart still brushes her off we see dart pushing rose on her knowledge of the black monster we see that underneath hashel's joking facade he's still dealing with the pain of searching for his daughter and we see congo learn the meaning of friendship i'm not even kidding it turns out the true meaning of friendship is chopping lettuce who would have thought after a few other events including a ghost ship because of course this game has a ghost ship we finally see our crew coming to the end of chapter two as they defeat lannis and watch lloyd flee with the moon dagger inviting them to come try and stop him in the next country mild cesao mille mille miles so mil millis is so i'm gonna go with millicesso it's a bittersweet ending as the dragoons yet again failed to stop lloyd but we still get to see a brief moment of celebration when the tiburo in royalty throws them a party and at that party we get an early resolution to the dart shana storyline that i'm sure many people were expecting to drag the whole way through shauna expresses her love for dart outright and although she cuts him off before he can say it back rude by the way it's clear that after all of their struggles their moments together their moments apart he feels the same way now too when i first played the game i 100 did not expect this ending to the chapter and altogether i would say it might be my favorite of the chapter endings the legend of dragoon for as paint by numbers as the story beats can be frequently finds ways to play with your presumptions and expectations it does it with bosses narratively setting up one boss fight only to surprise you with another stronger boss fight just before or after it does it with the plot here by tying up the obvious will they won't they before it gets too bloated and in disc 3 the game completely goes off the rails with what might be my favorite plot dump in any game if chapter 2 was the character building season of the legend of dragoon's story chapter 3 is the lore you may have noticed that i haven't commented on any cinematics since the opening one and that's because there aren't many until the start of disc 3. once the crew arrives at mill cisso i don't remember how i pronounced it last time so i'm just gonna go with whatever i want uh deal with it everything is addressed via fmv and i mean everything in the first hour alone there are no fewer than four pre-rendered cutscenes three to explain the lore and one to show the awakening of the divine dragon this chapter's big foe now i absolutely have to explain these cutscenes or else you're gonna be totally lost in just a few minutes so just bear with me the first of these scenes dives into the faith and religion by which the people of mild seasoning abide discussing the legend of the divine tree which allegedly sprouted 108 fruits one for each species on the planet i'm still not quite sure how there are only 108 species when there are more than 108 types of enemies but i'm not about to ask questions at this point humans were the 106th of these species and wingley's the 107th the second cutscene explains the dragon campaign that war we keep hearing about from millennia ago when humans led by dragoons took action against the wingley overlords who had been enslaving and destroying every other species out of perceived superiority apparently the name stands for right-winglies if you catch my drift during the dragon campaign the wingleys used their technological and magical prowess to build special weapons that were super effective against dragons and fearing that the 108th species would supersede them in power just as they had supplanted humans they sealed the fruit of the 108th species inside a magical barrier which became the moon that never sets hovering above the sky unmoving for the last 110 centuries and the final cutscene deals with the intertwined history of the black monster and the moon child according to legend every 108 years the moon child is born a chosen one said to bring life to that 108th species which will purify the world and create a utopia only in reality the black monster hunts down and kills this child every time to ensure that this doesn't happen it's around now that i want to make it clear that if some of these plot points seem to fly in out of nowhere that's probably the fault more of my hour-long retrospective than it is the fault of the 35 plus hour game many of these seeds are planted in flavor text as early as disc one they're watered in disc 2 and grown in disc 3 before being harvested at the very end of the game and that is why i'm speaking so highly of the legend of dragoon i'm not gonna say that people who don't like this game didn't make it this far or that somehow they didn't get it there are many valid reasons why people might not get behind the game the poor translation being a very significant one of them instead what i'm saying is that if you did hang around until this point and if the game did capture you enough to keep going you'd be treated to a payoff for most although probably not all of the little teases and plot points for example i haven't had a great opportunity to talk about how each region of the world has its own belief system its own religion and each one in some way captures part of the truth that will be revealed later in tiburoa the people believe in the word of the stars and in studying those stars that's why they had so many planetariums or as they said that's life in miley cyrus the people believe in predestination that you cannot control or change your fate and that your life is set down a path forged by the creator soa when i said this game had 11 000 years of lore i wasn't kidding most every npc has some bit or piece to add to this massive puzzle some hint or foreshadowing as a result some beats may be more obvious than others again i'm gonna blame the localization for that for now but they aren't always this way for example if you've played the game it's pretty obvious if not outright stated by this point that rose was alive during the dragon campaign and that her life has been full of grief and misery for the century since it's also pretty well teased that meru is actually a wingley based on the fact that every wingley so far has had silver hair thankfully the plot points of disc 3 are mostly focused on paying off that foreshadowing and lore and also the first hour or so may as well be entirely fmvs so we're already mostly through the woods i mean that literally as the gang has to go through some enchanted woods to get to meru's wingley home it turns out the winglies hadn't gone extinct like everybody thought but instead they had hidden themselves away via a magic portal towards the end of the war hey wait if wingleys just have actual magic why can't meru use spells instead of items by this point in the game if you've opened any of the optional treasure chests and dungeons you could have close to 10 reusable items meaning now your inventory is down to only about 20 open slots at most just if nothing else give every character a healing move that isn't guard for the love of god please anyway i'm getting off topic after meeting with the queen of moderate psoriasis shauna collapses and her dragoon spirit instead chooses the queen's adoptive daughter miranda as the next dragoon so yet again we've got a contrived party member swap although this time it's not due to a death at least miranda shares shanna's exact level and stats just as albert did when taking over for lavitz the new power rangers discovered that thanks to the wingley's magic weakening over time the divine dragon has awoken and it's pretty pissed off about being sealed away for 11 000 years they rushed to retrieve the wingley's dragon block staff one of the only ways of taking down the divine dragon before unintentionally teaming up with lloyd to kill the dragon both the dragon block staff and lloyd's stolen dragon buster sword the same one that killed lavitz mind you were necessary together to defeat the king of the dragons lloyd escapes with the divine dragon's dragoon spirit revealing while escaping that he's a wingley too because again silverhair means wingley and he rushes to the capital city to get the final moon artifact the group makes it back to the capital but finds that lloyd was able to walk right into the castle and kidnap the queen they chase lloyd through a tundra and defeat him only for one of the queen's other daughters to jump in front of dart's killing blow don't worry though she's fine somehow this scene is dumb having been denied his honorable death lloyd then reveals the endgame of his plan his goal this entire game has been to collect the three moon artifacts from each nation and deliver them to emperor diaz the very same warlord that fought with rose in the dragon campaign now that he's lost he joins the rangers not out of some epiphany but so that he can take the artifacts to the emperor with the gang because diaz has a bargaining chip he's got shana before we get into the big plot dump because no it hasn't happened yet i want to take a brief moment to question this game's production budget this was a million dollar game obviously that's not the same scale as the final fantasy games which even back at this point pushed into the 50 million range but it's nothing to scoff at so i don't fully understand the game's approach to cinematics it takes until disc three to get more than one or two proper cg clips and many of them are simple panning over background images meanwhile scenes like lavitz's death or dart's final strike on lloyd are animated in-game in these weird hybrid cutscenes they're far more fluid than even the combat animations but it just feels a bit hollow to see dart yelling lavish's name as his friend is killed right in front of him with no actual voice accompanying the text on screen there's often this lack of emotion in otherwise emotional scenes because of this and thanks to the limited soundtrack the game was scored by a two-person tandem of american musician dennis martin and japanese composer takeomaratsu although the two never actually met or interacted martin had never worked on a video game soundtrack before and maratsu was best known for working on the jumping flash trilogy first off wait that's a trilogy i thought it was just the one game that was the first 3d platformer you know whatever that's a topic for another day second off thanks to these two competing styles and martin's inexperience with game soundtracks we're treated to an often incredible score featuring songs that were as out of place in this fantasy world as they were earworms but when the score doesn't land it's way off mark dart's theme is this driving emotional powerful tune played to hype you up as the crew vows to press on or when dart finishes an important battle or countless other times it's probably the game's strongest and most memorable song but it's also only about a minute long and yeah i'll say it it's a bit overplayed i'd love to have seen it used as a melody in other parts of the soundtrack rather than just cueing this track every time we need a powerful moment hearing regularly used songs during scenes like lavitz's death sort of pulls me out of the moment especially when they're in these voiceless scenes at the same time the voices were absolute trash in this game so i guess i should count my blessings that they're voiceless again mixed signals are a legend of dragoon's specialty which brings me back to plot dump city as we prepare for this epic encounter with emperor diaz the boss fight to end all boss fights we don't get one disc 3 ends without a boss fight instead letting you simmer on all that diaz drops on you diaz [ __ ] slaps lloyd out of the way because he's a punk ass [ __ ] with a dumb name revealing that the utopia he'd fooled lloyd into believing the 108th species would bring was a lie that 108th species is actually the god of destruction so the utopia it creates can only come after wiping out all other life great job lloyd you didn't read the fine print emperor diaz takes off his helmet revealing that he's actually zieg dart's father [Music] but that's not all he's also rose's lover from 11 000 years ago [Music] she had assumed he was dead all those years because she watched him turn to stone at the end of the war but somehow the stone broke off of him after thousands of years and he settled down married another woman and had dart and then he reveals that rose is the black monster that destroyed dart's home 18 years ago killing all of dart's friends and family [Music] rose every 108 years had destroyed entire villages to kill the moon child and leave no survivors except this time according to zeig she had failed that ghost ship from back in disc 2 had been a royal ship holding milasasso's princess but that princess wasn't the moon child like rose had thought she was a twin [Music] and the other twin the real moon child is shauna [Music] if shauna lives zeke will use her to summon the god of destruction and kill everything which is why rose had been burdened with murdering entire towns for a hundred centuries the alternative was total doom could dart bear to find it in him to kill the person he loved most in order to save the entire world we won't find out here because zieg flies away with shauna as the power rangers and the players are left with just as many new questions as they got answers there is a lot to unpack there not all of it unexpected but good god both when i first played dragoon and even now i love every bit of this is it a bit hokey absolutely and that completely fits the game's tone it straddles this tightrope that the entire game had been shimmying across where any slip ups careened the story into the abyss and it makes it to the other side not only intact but it jumps off the rope with a damn back flip as i've said before it's very obvious that rose is the black monster but the game takes its time introducing the concept of the moon child and leaves it to the player to try and put all of the pieces together we knew that lloyd wanted to establish a utopia but we didn't expect that utopia to require an apocalypse and it's because of that apocalypse that rose's duty as the black monster is so tragic she's been demonized by the entire world as this evil being when in reality she's saving the people from themselves cursed to live an endless life of anguish for the greater good and then to hammer it all home dart has to fight his father with the person that killed his entire family and he potentially must kill not only his dad but the love of his life because of her cursed fate magnificent all of these threads are paid off at the absolute perfect time the way the game teases your expectations is just wonderful so many players would expect that disc 3 would be close to the final confrontation given the usual design of jrpgs on the ps1 less than a dozen games even had four discs and most of those were adventure games packed full of cinematics the only 4 disc rpgs were final fantasies 8 and 9 where the fourth disc was only a couple hours long and mostly wrapped up side quests even the very few 3-disc rpgs mostly used the third disc for just the final dungeon and here legend of dragoon flies in with a complete fourth disc that's longer than discs two and three and almost as long as the first disc this fourth disc barely even has dedicated side content too for the record most of your side quests are located on disc three before we close out our journey let's take a quick breather and talk about that side content depending on how you want to count them there are about 10 side quests in the legend of dragoon about half of those aren't that important such as going back to disc 1 to get kong's dragoon spirit because who is using kongol anyway let alone using his paltry magic of the four side quests located on disc three three of them are major sources of backstory and lead to some of this game's many optional boss fights one such mission involves killing four tortured spirits of rose's ancient dragoon friends so that they may be finally set free another gives us rosa's perspective of the very start of the dragon campaign and a third the game's super boss is the wingley magician faust who you can only fight by returning all 50 of the trophy hidden magical collectible to a specific character faust has some really interesting backstory that i'll spare you for the sake of time in short he was the second in command of the ancient winglets that we'll be learning about in disc 4 who was sent into exile by the commander out of fear that he was becoming too powerful to fight him requires a close to maxed out party the best gear money can buy and a whole lot of patience that you probably shouldn't have as i stated before this game is almost designed to be grind proof you could play the entirety of legend of dragoon running from every random encounter and you might end up one level lower by the end that works both ways to fight a boss like faust requires you to spend 5 to 10 hours grinding not just your character level but your additions your gold and even maybe your dragoon level the only reliable way to grind any of these things is on very specific overworld routes where unique enemies will sometimes roam these enemies usually have about four hp just four that's it but all of your attacks only do one damage the enemy has a super high evasion and it'll usually flee after two turns the quote-unquote correct way to grind in legend of dragoon is to find one of these enemies throw out a repeatable item that prevents enemy movement for three turns use the repeatable speed up item on yourself and speed down on the enemy and hope that you can hit it enough times to kill it before it flees unless you choose to fight the even more annoying special enemies that can only be damaged if you confuse them and they attack themselves you're looking at 1 000 experience or 600 gold at best per fight note that i said or just now not and some of these unique enemies give money others give experience rarely both and remember that experience is split three ways so if you wanted to go from level 35 to 45 to comfortably fight faust you're looking at over 230 fights and i'm being very generous in assuming that you'll even be at level 35 by the game's point of no return so what i'm saying here is don't grind in this game there's too much time and too many factors involved if you want to try and see everything this game has to offer i mean some boss fights even have chance-based loot items why would any one time fight like this grant you a chance at an item that's just ridiculous if i was still a kid and this was the rpg i had sure i'd grind for days and i would love it but it's not worth it today unlocking the final additions for each character by mastering every other edition would be awesome but you can comfortably beat the game without any of that the side quests especially the ancient dragoon fights and kongo's dum dragoon spirit function more as an excuse to get you to go back to previous discs and re-explore the world since the world is one of the game's strongest points i can get behind this part of it at least there's a surprising amount of text that's changed as you progress through the story should you want to go back the kid in me adores this as i always used to be the type to go back and see if there were any new nuggets of information hoping that the developers designed these worlds to seem more alive and less like fronts for a story for lod to have that as one of my first full proper jrpg experiences left a huge impression that many of the game's sins have failed to capture i'm looking at you final fantasy 10 and this is the dividing point of legend of dragoon for players i think christ it only took an hour but yeah here's the payoff if you played this game early either in your formative years or as one of your first jrpgs or hell even just as one of your first rpgs on the ps1 specifically than legend of dragoon's trite story beats and its bad translation its janky character models and its broken experience system none of that mattered because the game had the heart to buff out all of those jagged edges legend of dragoon eased players into the genre with an interesting and arguably somewhat innovative action-based combat system while ensuring that you didn't risk falling behind it introduced a simple story with simple characters that would flesh out well over time and left enough room that players could inject their own flair it respected its backstory above all else ensuring that players who paid attention would get the answers they've been craving for dozens of hours for those that had already seen the story beats of something like a final fantasy vii though just to name one of many examples on this console alone legend of dragoon provided little more than being just another rpg at the tail end of what many consider a golden age of rpgs the legend of dragoon launched in the year 2000 alongside all of the following games grandia 2 persona 2 tales of destiny 2 wild arms 2 chrono cross breath of fire 4 final fantasy 9 legend of mana skies of arcadia vagrant story pokemon gold and silver and in japan dragon quest 7 paper mario and the playstation 2. all the charm in the world couldn't push the legend of dragoon into the limelight compared to that lineup at the time because compared to many of those games it just doesn't stand up in terms of production value story even pure quality this has led to this divisive split today that we see in dragoon's online opinion thousands of people fondly remembering the high points and proclaiming that legend of dragoon is underrated and thousands of others remembering a bland paint by numbers game that's incredibly overrated and the thing is this is a rare case where both sides are correct it is everything those detractors say it is if you're a huge rpg mega fan and you hate the game for any of those reasons you're right but if dragoon is one of your early rpgs or one of your early games in general and you saw the game push past its limitations and its shortcomings to become a greater product than the sum of its parts you're also right if you're somewhere in between those two extremes you're probably right too it's the kind of game that earned its middling review scores a perfect example of a 7 out of 10 game where the score is only half the story and now that i've wrapped up this video let's wrap up this video i can't just leave the story hanging after all can i it's in chapter 4 that we learned that after the dragoon campaign ended rose lived in a hidden wingley city unknown to the entire rest of the world here the wingless crafted a necklace that would allow her to live forever and she took on the heartbreaking job of stopping the end of the world every 108 years by taking hundreds of innocent lives she became known as the woman who cries tears of blood and after a few cycles her personality hardened out of sheer necessity now over 100 cycles later rose returns to the city with her new friends the group that helped her feel somewhat human again even dart who you'd think would hate rose understands and draws a line between rose and the monster the monster died with this last cycle 18 years ago because now rose would help save the moon child and vanquish the god of destruction or witness the end of all life trying disc 4 piles onto the lore from disc 3 exploring the society and downfall of the ancient wingleys we learn about the wingley side of the dragon campaign seeing how the wingley leader melbou frama had consolidated the entire world under his control this man frama was the one responsible for the genocide against other species he even established a city where the souls of the dead would go so that he could try and control even death itself any sort of power that wasn't framas and framas alone was unacceptable and so he forced faust into hiding he subjugated humans and dragons and he brought his entire species downfall in his quest for infinite strength getting killed by zeke in the process the gang must race to each of these cities before zeke destroys these three new artifacts and harnesses their magic power these cities are some of the most fascinating locations in the legend of dragoon and in one case one of the funniest in the first city agles we meet a wingley who spent the past 11 thousand years trying to learn even more about the art of magic he's spent millennia alone studying experimenting and learning and agles exudes this air of crippling loneliness the wingley even went as far as making little magical beings to try and keep him company and help him with tasks it's heartbreaking the fruit of his research is what's called a psychedelic bomb a powerful attack item fueled by the courage of each of the party members answer all of the emotional trials correctly with each character and you'll overload the item's power turning it into the best item in the game the psychedelic bomb x this version isn't just a one use item you can use it again and again albeit only once per battle in miranda or meru's hands this thing can take a good 10 to 30 percent of most bosses health in a single use the second city is called the lost city of xenobotos probably my favorite area conceptually in the entire game xenobotto simply put is bureaucracy incarnate with thousands of little robotic drones suggesting passing and incorporating laws autonomously even centuries after the wingley's left the entire journey through the city is just to change a single law so the gang can go to the artifacts chamber to change this one single law dart and company have to first sneak through a guarded pathway to get to the legislation center where they must then wait in line to suggest a change to the law and receive a preliminary license then they have to sneak over to the law factory and deliver this preliminary license to get a second license which they then must take to the law launcher where you're [Music] slowly carried over to the launching platform to enact the law and then once you're done with this area you've got to go through the whole process and change another law to activate the teleporter to the third city this area is so tedious by design that it's just an absolute joy to play it's a living parody of societal bloat there are a handful of really funny optional laws you can pass here too if you want to spend the time from a law that lets you cut in line at the legislation center to a law that bans you from using the town shop for some reason to a law that bans random encounters in the city borders you can legislate away the concept of random encounters i love zenobotto so much the last city is the death city of mayfield essentially a sort of hades-esque purgatory where the souls of the dead are sent for all eternity here you can re-fight the souls of the three dragons that you killed throughout the game because they're all ashamed that they lost to puny humans but if you want to cut right to it you can just walk right past them and traverse the city until you encounter the lost soul of lavitz our good boy slambered his back having refused to fully ascend without helping his friends dart and albert one final time tragically though we have to fight lavitz as he's been taken over by the demon controlling mayfield but lavitz's spirit continues fighting back against the demon because he won't fight his friends lavita's sacrifice allows the gang to kill the demon and free all of the wandering souls of the dead in his final moments before dying for real lavitz has a brief moment with dart and albert before clearing their path forward what i've neglected to mention so far is the obvious every time the gang gets to one of these artifacts zeke beats them to it and destroys it once he's destroyed all three the moon that never sets comes crashing down onto the planet the second time that a game featured the moon falling in 2000 i'll see in a few months now all our power rangers can do is chase zieg into the moon into the embryo of the god of destruction and hope they stop him in time the inside of the moon plays on the fears and the psyche of each of the cast in individual boss fights allowing the developers one final moment to flesh out our crew before we move on to the final boss rush this includes moments like giving miranda any sort of backstory at all because she really has none until this point forcing the player to finally use kongl and also giving him his dragoon spirit if you didn't want to waste the money on it earlier and hashel finally making peace with his daughter claire running away as he realizes not only that he couldn't have stopped her from running but also that although he never found her he did find her son his grandson dart for as much as legend of dragoon likes to spell out its foreshadowing at points dart and hashel's relationship is another reveal that's refreshingly subtle we know that the clare of dart's flashbacks looks vaguely like the clare of hashell's memory we see hashel say right before the final fight that dart looks just like him when he was younger to which dart replies with a muted nod and we see dart talking to this younger child vision of claire only for hashel to stop him and say she doesn't know you yet since in this memory claire hadn't given birth to our hero yet it's a touching arc that doesn't need to be part of a major plot dump reveal to be effective after these moments zeke takes his dragoon spirit back from dart is promptly beaten by dart anyway and we get our final plot twist i promise during the dragon campaign when zeke had killed melbourne and both turned to stone frama actually enchanted zeke with a spell and hid his soul in the red dragoon spirit when rose attacked darts village as the black monster zieg activated his dragoon form for the first time since the dragon campaign releasing melbourne and being possessed by the wingley leader the power rangers were just a moment late however and frama is able to summon the 108th species the god of destruction and absorb his soul into it our big bad the final boss of this game is this corrupted wingley leader turned god oh and also lloyd shows up to try and kill god as revenge gets bit slapped like the weak ass lord he is and gives his divine dragoon spirit to dart to use for this fight after a genuine 40-minute marathon of a fight which features these really strange cutscenes in between showing the evolution of the world from the perspective of god the power rangers are able to kill god and stop the end of life as we know it dart grabs shauna before the blast and everybody escapes the death star except for rose and zeke who decide to quickly rekindle their love and fly into melbourne to ensure that he stays dead cue the amazingly horrible voice acting and some incredibly unfitting jazz music during this final fmv afterwards we get a touching credit scene that shows what happens to everybody in the aftermath including congo falling hundreds of feet presumably to his death because nobody in this development team thought about or cared about kongol and we closed out with dart standing in bale sharing that drink that he promised lavitz they would have as two purple and red winged birds fly away together showing that rose and zieg are watching over our remaining heroes the ending we got is in my opinion at least part of the reason that we've never gotten a new legend of dragoon game this game pays off just about every single thing it sets up and ties the whole experience in a nice complete bow there's honestly no room for a sequel that wouldn't feel even more contrived where do you go after you've killed god after you've stopped evolution everybody lives happily ever after at the end of legend of dragoon even lavitz gets a bittersweet happy ending two different times in chapter four and even the lore is wrapped up the only place that a new legend of dragoon could go without writing outside of some pretty well-defined borders is a prequel set back during the dragon campaign but it just wouldn't be nearly as satisfying the legend of dragoon simply doesn't need a sequel or prequel this game as maligned as it is by some for having such a simple story wrote such a complete story that the world almost can't come back without the series being harmed by it it's a rare predicament for a game to encounter and i can only think of one satisfying solution if we really wanted more of the series since the original is store brand final fantasy 7 our solution would be a store brand final fantasy 7 remake multiple games and all the original game already tried a rudimentary hybrid of rpg and action gameplay for one so a game in seven remake style is essentially a perfect fit take that and toss in the fact that this story is already split into four very defined chapters that don't necessarily play as arcs in one single story as much as they feel like seasons in a serialized franchise to begin with with some massaging and added depth per game a legend of dragoon remake series could recapture this game's magic while cleaning up many or all of this game's glaring issues of course i'd be shocked if an action remake of a middling ps1 rpg would sell nearly as well as the final fantasy 7 remake so this isn't going to happen but hey a guy can dream and again if i haven't made it clear i don't want to wash over this game's flaws they are as clear as day i wouldn't have spent over an hour diving into the entire plot for this retrospective if i didn't have almost as much to tear apart as i have to celebrate this game has so much going both for and against it that while i easily could have slapped together a 20-minute retrospective that vaguely glossed past the plot or sped through it and confused even those of you that have played the game the only way that i felt comfortable doing this game justice was by pinpointing just about every shining moment and every glaring one and it's because of those flaws that jank the dumb moments the weak translation that the high points are nearly as high as they are the legend of dragoon is in part remembered because it was so flawed as a game if it were even just a little better as an rpg if it played by normal rules or gave regular enemies higher experience payouts if it had better voice acting instead of the hilarious quips we got or if it had a better localization effort that covered up some of the most iconic dialogue flubs sure it would have been better but we wouldn't remember it as this charming dumpster fire of a game that somehow held up despite all of it as this game where those flaws were in some ways the very thing that held it up so highly i love the legend of dragoon it's always going to hold a special place in my heart as the game that made me a fan of japanese role-playing games the game that got me looking for more sweeping experience just like it because of my time with this game in the summer of 2013 in that next year i sought out and engrossed myself in games like final fantasy 10 nino cooney and xenoblade chronicles three games that have each stuck with me just as long as legend of dragoon i started going back and trying again with some of the classics i'd played and put down before dragoon woke me up like final fantasies 4 and 6 and chrono trigger and classics that i'd never even thought to try like xeno gears wild arms and vagrant story i began looking out for upcoming jrpgs just as i would look out for upcoming western styled rpgs and i fell in love with games like tokyo mirage sessions and even an srpg like fire emblem 3 houses which were my games of the year for 2016 and 2019 respectively and after years of putting it off due to dumb biases my younger self had rebelling against this notion that this game was as good as everybody said i picked up final fantasy vii the game that shares so much lifeblood with the legend of dragoon and i saw the magic not once but twice now thanks to the magnificent and fascinating work of the remake i've got this game to thank for those experiences and while all of those games are better in some way or maybe in every single way they'll never be my first oh we did it i made it this whole time without talking about rose's magic attack where she just menstruates on you wait [ __ ] i want to give a special thanks to a few people before i leave you because this monster of a video wouldn't have been possible without them first off a massive thanks to my good friend chris who helped piece together this edit on such short notice he's a fellow legend of dragoon fan and without another steady hand making sure i didn't miss anything there was no way i would have been able to make this in time for the anniversary hopefully we did this game the justice we've always talked about much love man make sure you check out his channel mykonos fan if you haven't already not because i'm telling youtube but because his videos are more than worthy of your time there's a reason i'm such a big fan of his i'd also like to thank chris as well as many me for their help with script overview both from the perspective of an lod die hard and somebody that has never touched the game before it's thanks to their help that i hopefully didn't lose you about halfway into disc one's winding plot a special thanks to all of my patrons who have helped grant me the time and ability to work on a video of this scale without their support i wouldn't have been able to fit this into my video schedule simply due to the massive amount of time it took those patrons include my golden bolt supporters gold storm o7 and wolf kaosan and my silverbolt supporters mayor hair bear and buckleschucklow and lastly i'd like to thank you for making it this far hopefully taking you on this journey has reminded you of fond memories or peaked your curiosity and encouraged you to check the game out yourself so as i've said hundreds of times before and before my voice finally gives out on me thank you so much for watching sharing subscribing and supporting and until next time stay golden oh [ __ ]

Channel: The Golden Bolt

Views: 502,942

Rating: 4.8596773 out of 5

Keywords: the golden bolt, the legend of dragoon, legend of dragoon, the legend of dragoon retrospective, the legend of dragoon review, legend of dragoon retrospective, legend of dragoon review, legend of dragoon 20th anniversary, Legend of Dragoon remake, Legend of Dragoon PS1 review, the legend of dragoon ps1, Legend of Dragoon PS1, LoD retrospective, the legend of dragoon ps1 review, the legend of dragoon remake, legend of dragoon psx, Legend of dragoon ps1 review

Id: xU7BaiMi78o

Length: 76min 15sec (4575 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/jdow0423]

I watched this review and really enjoyed it! The only thing that really surprises me is when people say the fanbase of TLoD is so diehard they can’t admit the game has flaws.

I mean, this community doesn’t necessarily represent the entire fanbase, but most discussion I see about the game are pretty honest and civil when it comes to valid criticisms of the game.

Maybe I just haven’t seen it but, I almost feel more like that claim about the fanbase is like a “running gag”. We’re definitely passionate.. but most fans can definitely admit it’s not a perfect game. Hence why so many people want a remake/remaster lol.

[u/Kazenovagamer]

I saw this video a couple days ago, I had always wanted to replay LoD and this video finally got me to set up Retroarch to do that. Nearing the end of Disk 1 so far and loving it just as much as the first time. I set up my old PSP save to see what my first file was like it was 77 hours with only 6 Stardust so clearly there was some stuff I missed the first time that I definitely plan on doing this time.

[u/leftyval]

It was around these video where I saw it was to compete with final fantasy but wasn’t meant to become a series. But still love it

[u/MaEaLi]

Just watched this video, and while it’s nice to see an in-depth video on the game, it’s really obvious the creator’s perspective is heavily influenced by how late he came to the game and genre.

It can be interesting to see how a latecomer experiences something in a widely different context, but very few of his reflections capture what the game felt like for anyone who actually played it 20 years ago.