The Final Fantasy Legend (Game Boy) review "A beautiful mess"

Sometimes, messes are beautiful. Even if I slap a low score on a game, I still appreciate the work and effort that goes into it. The Final Fantasy Legend falls into the “beautiful mess” category, partly because it's boldly experimental. This isn't your average JRPG where spiky-haired anime kids try to save the world or kings commission heroes to slay wicked wizards. Instead, you build your party from scratch. Despite having eight or nine warriors to choose from, they all fall under one of three races: human, mutant, or monster.

If you haven't brushed up on the game's mechanics before starting, then you're in for a harsh landing. You see, Legend eschews standard level-building practices, such as gaining experience and leveling up. Instead, each race comes with its own conditions for beefing up stats. In other words, ill-prepared adventurers can expect to get their asses kicked inside out...

For instance, humans rely almost entirely on money to grow. You only bolster these folks by farming gold and purchasing potions to permanently raise strength, agility, or hit points. Sadly, you can only boost defense by equipping new pieces of armor. On top of that, humans are awful with magic and magic-based weapons because they have almost no way to increase their mana statistic. Oh, and they possess no special abilities, either. So what are humans good for? Attacking. That's it. They're the most boring of the three races, but also one of the easiest to build up and the most powerful.

Here's the thing: you can max out humans' strength and agility before you even get halfway through the campaign. As a result, they become powerhouses who can drop even major bosses with a couple of blows. All you have to do is tediously hoard cash, then spend it on boatloads of drinks.

There are just a few snags on the road to becoming nearly unstoppable. For one thing, this game offers a very limited inventory of eight items. Potions don't stack, so you can't purchase more than eight at a go. Plus, you can't tell the shopkeeper to give you eight potions. You have to select “Buy” from the shop menu, navigate to the item you want, tell the keeper you want to buy it. After that, the game automatically kicks you out of the list, so you have to painfully begin the buying process anew each time. You then exit and feed your human the goods, only to go back in and slowly buy up to eight additional items.

To make matters worse, weapons come with finite uses before breaking. So you not only have to save up coins for strengthening items, but also to replace your swords as they shatter, thereby prolonging the torment.

Are you ready for this task to grow even more tiring? Humans' strength and agility cap at 255. However, Legend's stat display doesn't go beyond 99, and the game's balancing requires you to go well above that number if you wish to be successful. So you end up drinking potion after potion, hoping that you reach 255 without going over. You want to take care not to, because advancing beyond that golden number sets that particular stat back to 0. And yes, you will encounter bits of equipment that raise your strength or agility in addition to defense, causing you go slump back to the low end if you happened to max out.

The trade-off for all this nonsense is watching as even elemental fiends perish two swipes of a sword. Even the final boss during my own playthrough didn't last longer than three rounds before croaking.

Thankfully, mutants offer the kind of experience you might expect from a SaGa or Final Fantasy entry. These guys grow more powerful as they fight, with statistics increasing as they see use in combat. Plus, they can actually use magic and not suck at it. However, leveling up and staying competitive require constant fighting. Or as most of us call it, “grinding.” What exactly is the point of instituting a divergent leveling system if all it accomplishes is forcing you to grind, and perhaps for even longer than you normally might with an experience-driven system?

Worse, mutants start with four abilities, which limits the equipment they can use. Weapons, armor, spells, and skills all require you to negotiate the same menu in order to equip them. Each character gets eight slots, with mutants sadly losing half of them. On the flip side, they can acquire some neat abilities this way, but at the expense of only being able to handle so many weapons, pieces of armor, and/or spells.

Lastly, you have monsters, which are unreliable. They can't use equipment and their attacks all come with limited uses. However, each of their talents fully restores after sleeping at an inn. They also level up by eating the meat of other monsters after an encounter, causing them to either transform into different beasts entirely or become a stronger versions of the ones you're using (for instance, a dragon becoming “dragon 2”). Unless pore over online charts, you have no way of knowing if devouring prey will prove beneficial. Thankfully, save-scumming is on the table for this outing, so you can easily save and reload if you aren't impressed with the outcome.

Okay, so you've built your party and you're ready to set out. Now what? Rescue a damsel? Overthrow a fascist emperor? Stop a meteor from hitting the earth? No, instead your objective here is ascending a tower, with the top floor allegedly leading you to Paradise. The only trouble is the front door stands locked. So you search the initial premises, talk to townsfolk, and eventually complete a few plot beats before battling an elemental fiend. That altercation grants you access to the tower proper, and that's when things get downright weird...

Legend breaks free of some of its genre's cliches by building a surreal world that revolves around the aforementioned building. Doorways within the structure don't merely take you to rooms, but whole other plains of existence. One passage way might lead you to a tropical getaway filled with palm trees and beaches. Another, however, takes you to a Hell-like torture chamber where NPCs state that they must be punished if they wish to reach Paradise. But some corridors usher you into whole worlds like the one from the beginning. You venture into one place that consists of nothing but ocean and islands, ruled by a pissed-off dragon. Later on, a realm in the sky seeks your help with an iron-fisted feline who lives in a flying fortress. Lastly, you take a detour into an apocalyptic hellscape of smashed buildings and people desperately clinging to existence while a maddened phoenix wreaks kaiju-like havoc on their homes.

Yeah, Legend's balancing is a nightmare because the game either proves either too difficult or too easy, but it's almost always drawn-out and exhausting because of the repetitive slaughter in which you must engage. However, the game also features some of the strangest and most creative world building from an early Square title. It didn't lean heavily on medieval-inspired content, but broke into a peculiar multiverse of sorts overrun by fiendish overlords and ruled by a wacko deity. The game's storytelling may not be riveting, but its universe offers the kind of fertile material I'd like to see revisited.

Unfortunately, most of the game's rule systems come across as half-baked or experimental at best. Granted, they help Legend stand out from its peers, but they also end up condemning the adventure to an existence as a subpar RPG that's rife with repetition, mechanical blandness, and some outright flaws. In order to get anywhere, you've got to constantly war with creatures that will either pulverize you or bite the dust with little effort. The experience grows wearisome in either case, so much that you can't fault anyone for giving up on this quest before reaching Paradise.

And yet, through it all I can't help but appreciate how much it differs from its brethren. I may not entirely enjoy Legend, but there's a special place in my heart for it. Square dared to step out of its RPG comfort zone with this one and craft a title that stands out, if nothing else. Such a feat is commendable, even if the finished product consists of an exhausting mess of half-formed gimmicks.

Community review by JoeTheDestroyer (July 10, 2023) Rumor has it that Joe is not actually a man, but a machine that likes video games, horror movies, and long walks on the beach. His/Its first contribution to HonestGamers was a review of Breath of Fire III.