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Final Fantasy Legend review

Game: Final Fantasy Legend
Platform: Game Boy
Genre: RPG (Fantasy)
Developer: Square
AKA: Makai Toushi SaGa (JP)

Staff review by Sho

August 01, 2007

I’ll give it credit for one thing: this game’s release was a radical departure from all the other RPGs of its day. Mixing the standard swords and sorcery with machine guns and nuclear missiles, you’ll even explore the post-apocalyptic ruins of a modern city in a universe where humans, mutants, and several varieties of monsters apparently live in harmony without trying to eat each other. Four distinct worlds are connected via a seemingly endless tower that’s said to ultimately lead to paradise, inspiring your party of four to risk its dizzying heights. Unfortunately for them, Final Fantasy Legend is no paradise by any stretch of the imagination; it’s actually a one-way ticket straight to the bowels of hell.

It’s not merely that Legend is incredibly difficult – it may be the most frustrating console-style RPG ever made. No matter where you are in the game, you’ll have to deal with a horrific random encounter rate featuring large groups of monsters that can wipe out your entire party in a matter of moments. Even if you emerge from one of these battles triumphant you’ll find that there aren’t any experience points to be won. Humans have to buy all their HP and stat increases via expensive items in shops, while mutants’ abilities just seem to randomly increase after certain battles. If you’re lucky. It’s not uncommon for a mutant character to remain stagnant no matter what you do, causing them to lag far behind the rest of your group, and even if one of them ever randomly learns a powerful attack, it can be suddenly replaced with something horrible just like that. You literally have to save the game after every single random encounter, as you’re always one battle away from becoming totally screwed.

Making matters even worse is the fact that all your weapons and spells have a limited number of uses before they disappear. You can’t recharge or repair them either; once a weapon is gone you’ll have to buy a completely new one. Like most old school RPGs, your survival requires countless hours of level building and all sorts of expensive equipment, but now your human characters don’t get any stronger if you don’t spend all your money on those stat upgrades – and wear out all that expensive equipment in the process, leaving you screwed once again.

You might be free to choose any combination of humans, mutants, and monsters when you form your party, but the results will either be hideously expensive or virtually impossible. Monster characters are the most interesting but comparatively useless; they can occasionally eat the flesh of a defeated enemy, transforming into a different creature altogether depending on its current form and the enemy being devoured. However besides promoting godless cannibalism, this process gives you very little control over their development. You might become something more powerful, but it’s just as likely that you’ll end up with something weaker, and since monsters can’t use any equipment these stats will remain fixed until you transform again.

More importantly, a monster can only attack with its natural abilities, and since these also have a limited number of uses it’s very possible that you’ll run out of attacks in the middle of nowhere. In such a case your entire party will be left unable to fight and forced to attempt fleeing, possibly getting slaughtered in the process. Unlike weapons, mutant and monster abilities can be recharged by staying at an inn, but for that matter inns are a scam all their own. Their cost is equal to the number of hit points that everyone needs restored, so if you don’t have enough gold to heal everyone at once you’ll all be left battered and bloody in the street.

Considering the nightmare of building up and then maintaining your characters, it’s just heaping on insult to injury when you realize that they’re ultimately disposable. A dead party member can only be revived at a town, which isn’t unusual in and of itself – but he can only be restored exactly three times. After that you’ll need to either buy a ridiculously expensive item to give him one extra life or recruit a brand new replacement from the local guild.

And as if the mechanics weren’t torturous enough on their own, some of the quests seem designed to drive you insane. At one point you have to locate a tiny island that can be used to sail across the sea despite the fact that it looks like all the other ones dotting the map, so you just have to step on every single one until you find the one that can move. Later on you’ll have to scour the aforementioned nuclear wasteland in search of an invisible city while being constantly attacked by that world’s final boss. Of course, just getting to that point would suggest that you’re the sort who enjoys senseless pain, so you probably won’t care anyway.

Like Final Fantasy II before it, Legend isn’t simply a bad game – it’s fundamentally broken. At least Square was apparently trying to liven up the RPG genre with something fresh and innovative. Needless to say, they failed.

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