Actively Hostile with Legend of Legacy

A little less than a month ago, I was presented with what you might call one of those good problems: Should I jump right in to Atlus' newly-released 3DS RPG Legend of Legacy, or wait it out for a few weeks for the PS4 release of Divinity: Original Sin?

Certainly, things like this aren't prone to keeping people awake at night, nor is the fate of a small nation beholden to a decision of this magnitude. But let's consider the extenuating circumstances of having a baby and raising it (and you know, working, too), and start mapping out the pros and cons. On the one hand, Legend of Legacy is a profoundly dumb name, but a recent demo of the game turned out to be pretty good, and it was on a handheld, which meant that I could level grind while baby is chilling out and the wife is watching TV. On the other was a rerelease of a PC game I've been wanting to play since last year. It looks both pretty and complex --things I tend to like-- but it wasn't set to be released for a few weeks at that point, and if I could wait a year, I can wait a little longer. Legend of Legacy it is.

So why has it taken me so long to say anything about it? Well, because LoL is a game I have to actively talk myself into playing. If this were a formal review, I'd call that a bad start. It's got a lot of things going for it, this inanely-named little game, but it's hard for me to shake off a little bit of buyer's remorse at this point.

Briefly, Legend of Legacy is the latest in a string of PlayStation-era throwback RPGs that the 3DS has slowly become known for like Bravely Default and Crimson Shroud, and that implies both nostalgic heart-tugging and genuine head-scratching. It's a game that was obviously made with love, if not the utmost care, and invokes a time in genre's life where they didn't need to be surefire hits to be a little strange.

But notice that by "strange" I don't necessarily mean "experimental," as the fans that this game will undoubtedly spawn will want you to believe when it finally hits cult status sooner or later. After all, LoL is produced by a studio called FuRyu, which is made of members from the team that brought you the often strange and sometimes maligned SaGa games (other than SaGa mastermind Akitoshi Kawazu, whom still has a prominent place in the higher ranks of Square Enix). The SaGa stuff already did the experimental thing a long time ago, and LoL's many unsaid mechanics crib much of it. If you know what I mean by any of that, you either get the SaGa thing or you don't, and had already made a decision on whether to play Legend of Legacy. The rest of the world, I guess, is just supposed to catch up if they're going to drip any enjoyment out of it at all.

So let me help you with that. Though Legend of Legacy upholds the vague tradition of "many characters/ many stories" that the SaGa games have tried to pull off, it also shares in the reality that plot and characterization are basically meaningless here. But that's ok. The point, really, is to explore the many environments and master a compelling combat system. There's a hub town to shop for items and maps to new locations, and the only real direction that the NPCs give you runs along the lines of "get out there and go see some stuff." For a game that's on a mobile platform like the 3DS, this lack of exposition vomit winds up being pretty handy. If you're commuting to work, or killing your lunch break, or waiting for your baby to fall asleep, the simple premise and excised idiotic story winds up being kind of a strength.

As far as the other two go --the exploring and combat-- your mileage is really going to vary. Since they're the bulk of the game, you're really going to want to pay attention to this, too. LoL is set up as more of a dungeon run; every environment outside of the hub is overrun with enemies, and part of the fun of these environments is map all of them and sell this information to the local shopkeeper. This is actually pretty gratifying when completed, and has a practicality past the money made off of maps because the shop will start to offer better equipment the more maps that you sell them. The real problem is the what you're going to run into while you're doing it.

The combat, to be diplomatic, is a real mess here. Your team is a set of three characters, one main character you choose at the beginning and an interchangeable pair of others. Already, you're hamstrung from total tactical control because you cannot pull whichever main character you began with, but that's small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. Often, you are grossly outnumbered, though --sometimes by as much as seven or eight against three-- and the enemy mobs will always, always have the first strike in encounters. This means that to survive, you pretty much always need a tank character soaking up the damage from the majority of the first round, and the fights tend to only be as challenging as the RNG surrounding said tank's defensive abilities.

Worse, abilities for taking on these guys is randomly awarded by some under-the-hood mechanism. While I can see the fun in unlocking a new and wacky attack, the vast majority of them only target a single foe until a significant chunk of the game is completed. And still, since you're patiently waiting for the AI to finish the beating they're administering, you're often left hoping that your team's attackers aren't dead by the time it's their turn or had been hit with stun or confuse effects. Magic AOE attacks are of equally little use when faced with a street mob of bad guys, too; unless you happen to be in a geographic proximity to an element-friendly environmental hub, you have to waste a character's turn making a "contract" with an element, meaning that even if you had an available super attack to wipe out the opposition, you at least have to suffer through both a round of getting hit, and then another round of it before you can start using it.

Here's salt in the wound: you can run away from almost everything in the game, too, which is kind of nice. But if you do, you're stuck at the beginning of every dungeon. This means that if you've been chugging along through several maps of a dungeon trying to figure out your next move, you might accidentally stumble into a crowd of enemies you can't overcome or a sub boss that you couldn't see around the foliage (which is a little bullshitty). It honestly makes the game feel actively hostile toward the player.

But like I said, there are certainly some things to like about this, though. If you have the time on your hands, and you can steel a few minutes here and there to play it, unlocking the random abilities and attacks is a nice little jolt of satisfaction, which can make some of the grinding (of which tends to be copious) a little easier to bear. The art, too, is in that now-quaint low rent polygon way that latter PSOne-era games tend to look like now, even if the game's performance absolutely chugs when exploring environments. But it's pretty in its way, and the character designs are nice and clean.

The real pull here, though, is if you like RPGs of that age. Not the straightforward, plot-heavy stuff of Final Fantasies VII or IX, though. No, no, no; go play Bravely Default if you want that (seriously, go do that). This is more like, well, SaGa Frontier, or the nuttier stuff that's come along in and around its wake. If an RPG to you is a game to both do battle with and decipher all at once, than this might be for you. The impatient or easily annoyed, though, should have probably waited for Divinity: Original Sin.