01/03/2016

The Legend of Legacy: Finding my stride


Here is the game I have been pining for for ages: a good, meaty, addictive 3ds RPG. An RPG that would glue me to my 3ds screen for hours on end, until my wrists and thumbs cry for mercy. I'm been waiting for it, praying for it, and it came at long last. Joy and glory!

Mind you, that nearly miraculous gaming love story may well not have existed at all. A couple of hours ago, I was on the verge of quitting the game entirely before writing a scathing rant about it. The main issue was that I couldn't figure out the game's mechanics and thus couldn't find my footing, let alone my stride. I was totally lost at sea, exploring dungeons at random without making any discernible progress and finding myself overpowered by enemies on a regular basis. I didn't know what I was supposed to do, let alone how to do it, and playing Legend of Legacy was a confusing mess of a gameplay experience that I was very much inclined to cut short—along with my suffering.

What saved my run was a decision I made after a couple of hours of infructuous trudging and plodding, namely to gather enough money to purchase the two "Specials" available in the village's shop. We're talking about a sword and an armour, both powerful enough to give me the hope that I could gain an edge on foes at long last. Little did I know that gaining the upper hand during fights is actually a much more complicated business that requires more than overpowered gear; however, farming money for the purchase of the Specials allowed me to figure out the game's cryptic rules a lot better, along with giving me a objective to focus on and pursue. After I finally managed to get my hands on these much-coveted Specials, things started falling into place, slowly but surely. I figured out what I was supposed to accomplish in dungeons and how to gain the upper hand in fights, and I started making some very visible progress at long last. Now, after 16 hours of play, I can safely that I have gained a solid footing, and I can now make the game my own and play it my way. Better late than never, indeed.

Still, the fact that it took me more than ten hours to gain a decent knowledge of the game's rules and be able to feel at ease playing it is quite telling. It's extremely easy to write off LoL as a confusing, messy and ultimately lazy game that has little to offer beyond headaches and frustration. The game is much deeper than it seems at first sight, but it takes an awful lot of time to uncover that depth, due to cryptic rules and a non-linear progression that makes for unnecessary meanderings. I don't remember having struggled that much just to gain a basic mastery of a game's rules since... well, Final Fantasy Legend 2.

This uncanny similarity shouldn't come as a surprise, since LoL was conceived from the get-go as a "spiritual sequel" to the SaGa series. And boy, does it fit the bill perfectly. LoL is just as hard and cryptic as FFL2, and just as rewarding when obstacles are overcome at long last. I'd like to expand profusely on LoL's crypticness and toughness, but there is so much to say that I will rather leave these matters for future posts. For now, an overview of the game will suffice to conclude this post on a nice informative touch. One particular point I've not come accross so often in reviews regarding the game is its exact nature. Although it has been heavily marketed as a classic J-RPG, it is actually a pure dungeon-crawler. It present all the staples of the genre: single village acting as a restorative hub, world map with dungeon locations that can be accessed instantly, auto-drawing maps of the dungeons and last but not least, a skeletal story that is nothing more than a pretense to roam the vast and untamed game world. The game's peculiar style of crawling takes a while to get used to: instead of going for classic geometric dungeon design with straight lines, square rooms and right angles, LoL favours a more naturalistic approach that involves relief variations, hazards such as geysers or exploding cacti and all sorts of impediments linked to the nature of the terrain—without forgetting a lot of purely visual hindrances. It's an all too common occurrence to bump into an foe that was hidden behind trees or to have an flight attempt ruined by a hindering rock or bush. Still, this naturalistic brand of dungeon design offers an nice and refreshing alternative to geometric dungeons; I certainly have less trouble believing that I'm exploring vast expanses of uncharted wilderness in LoL than in, say, Gates to Infinity. LoL's brand of dungeon-crawling is also pleasantly non-linear, with several dungeons being available at the same time as a rule and many incentives to roam again previously explored dungeons—be they complimentary, like optional bosses, or mandatory, like the necessity to revisit some dungeons with newly gained items in order to progress further.

That's it for this introduction to Legend of Legacy, dear fellow gamers. See you soon with more meaty posts about that great game! Thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!

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