Review: The Legend of Dragoon

The Legend of Dragoon is a Japanese Role Playing Game released on the PlayStation in 1999. Intended as a competitor for Final Fantasy, did the creators achieve their goal? Does The Legend of Dragoon hold up over time? Let’s break it down and see.

Story - 8/10

From a story perspective, The Legend of Dragoon is undeniably a JRPG. This isn’t an insult or compliment, as much as it is simply an observation. A band of unlikely heroes must save the world from a grandiose threat to all of humanity. It’s a trope that has been done time and time again with basically any RPG that comes out of Japan. Some games do this really well, others just flop. Fortunately, TLoD fits into the former category.
The tale is fantastically entertaining. There are ups and downs, with twists galore near the end of the game. Some of the twists are a little half-baked and seem forced, but they do come as complete surprises. The idea that “some friends become enemies, some enemies become friends” is taken to an extreme, but it works so well for the game. Every major character in the game is both round and dynamic, and each is distinctly memorable. There are instances of romance in the game, but it offers depth to the story, and it isn’t overdone. I genuinely felt personally connected with the characters. Their hurt was my hurt; their joy was my joy.
Endiness, the continent on which The Legend of Dragoon takes place, is an area of tremendous variety. There are kingdoms and there are slums. There are coastal villages, and there are landlocked mountain ranges. The balance between overworld navigation and individual area exploration gives the appears of a vast world, even though there really aren’t a ton of different areas.
Aside from a few deviations near the end of the game, most of the objectives in The Legend of Dragoon are related to the central quest line. With a small amount of grinding, it took me roughly 85 hours to beat the main story, and probably 5 hours beyond that to reach and fight the optional super boss. I probably could’ve finished the game in 60-70 hours with a more direct approach and no grinding. That time frame is roughly average length for the entire RPG genre in my experience.
While I enjoyed the story of the game, The Legend of Dragoon is not a title with any sort of replay value. There are few to no player choices in the game, so one play through is really all you need to fully experience the game. I could maybe see playing it again after quite a few years just for nostalgia’s sake, but this isn’t a game I would play again in immediate succession.

General Gameplay - 6/10

Navigation in The Legend of Dragoon is mostly standard. On the positive side, the developers did a fantastic job of making a moderate amount of explorable area seems massive. On the negative side, overworld navigation can be cumbersome. The whole of Endiness is divided into different regions, which roughly correspond to the physical discs of the game. Each of these regions has a number of cities and locations that are divided by set routes and paths that the player cannot deviate from. Getting to specific areas require the player to remember where it was, and to trek possibly across the entire map to return. In the very late game, there is a mode of quick travel that opens up, but it only allows a specific set of major destinations. Minor areas require some extra effort.
Inventory management is painful, and perhaps one of the worst aspects of The Legend of Dragoon. Key items are fortunately in their own menu, and had no limit as far as I could find. Weapons. Armor, and accessories are in a collection of up to 255 items, though I don’t recall ever having anywhere near that many. Usable items have a strict limit of 32 slots, and no items stack. This made inventory management absolutely terrible. These items include anything that restores HP or MP, as well as any combat items. Players are behooved to hold onto repeat items, of which there are 10. If you get all of them, there goes a third of your inventory space. If you come across a chest or get an enemy drop with a full inventory, what do you do? Do you get rid of an item you have, or do you leave the chest or drop behind? I swear, I encountered this decision more times than I can count, and it became so annoying.
The collectible item in The Legend of Dragoon, Stardust, gives a good balance of difficulty and reward. No Stardust is missable, though some can be a bit of a pain to revisit. There are only 50, and they are evenly dispersed throughout the entire game. They do encourage a bit of button mashing, as Stardust can be anywhere and give no visual or auditory clues of their presence. I do wish there were some way to recall which Stardust you did or didn’t pick up, but alas, there is not. It would also be nice to have some way to find Stardust besides sheer luck, but I suppose that’s what guides are for. Players receive gifts for every 10 Stardust they retrieve, with the lot of them unlocking the optional boss.
Enemy encounters occur regularly based on movement, with an arrow above Dart’s head that indicates how close the player is to an encounter. This is nice in that it allows very precise grinding, and you know when to expect an encounter, but I feel like the encounter period is ridiculously short. When you’re just trying to get through an area and navigate teleport puzzles or whatever else, it’s easy to forget where you came from and where you’re headed with all the encounters.

Combat - 5/10

Battles in The Legend of Dragoon are such a double-edged sword. For its favor, the combat is extremely interesting, a great mix of active and static elements. Turns are based completely on the speed stat of each combatant, and players have as much time as they want to make decisions between turns. When attacking, players must perform “Additions” which are timing-based combos. Successful Additions gradually improve the damage and SP gains from each attack, and gaining Dragoon levels increase the number of Additions available to a character. Higher level Additions typically do more damage and yield more SP, but they also require more hits and are thus more difficult to successfully pull off. It’s a very fine balance of your ability as a player, with the risk and reward mechanism of the Additions. Timing for the Addition hits can be unreasonably tight sometimes, but not necessarily unfair. If you can anticipate it, you can usually complete them with reliable consistency. Of any turn-based RPG I have played, this game easily has the most interesting battle mechanics.
Beyond the Addition system, the Dragoon transformation is also a very neat facet of battles. Characters must build up Dragoon turns by accumulating SP in normal mode. To add another level of complexity, many Additions have more or less damage or SP. An Addition with higher damage may yield much less SP, giving that character less time in Dragoon form. Alternatively, some Additions may do less damage, but give the character a ton of SP and allow for more turns in Dragoon form. Even within Dragoon form, characters are not universally more powerful. Dragoon form gives players boosted attack and defense stats, but also limits battle options to Dragoon attacks and Magic. While in Dragoon form, characters cannot use items, or attempt to flee from battle. This adds another tactical level to when Dragoon form may be more or less beneficial to the battle.
As much praise as I can give the mechanics, I have equal hatred for the speed of battles. Everything about battles in The Legend of Dragoon is painfully slow. When an encounter triggers, the transition from the overworld to the battle screen is slow. Once the battle has started, the actual menu navigation is slow to start and stop. When you select an ability, or the enemy begins an attack, the animation is slow. Want to use a magic attack? Get ready for the same annoyingly long animation every single time you use it. While the animations for magic attacks are cool to watch the first few times, they take forever to finish. A much better system would be to allow players to toggle between long and short animations, a la Final Fantasy X with aeon summons and overdrives. If animations and loading times were drastically reduced, my opinion of combat in The Legend of Dragoon would be universally positive. The ridiculous battle times, however, are just more than I can tolerate.

Difficulty - 6/10

The difficulty of The Legend of Dragoon is almost perfect. Death is punished by returning to the most recent save point, but saves are typically close enough that you don’t lose an insane amount of progress by dying. Standard mobs vary from cake easy to mildly difficult, with enough variety to keep things interesting. Bosses typically take more effort than normal enemies, but there is almost always a save point immediately before any boss, and I never took more than 2 or 3 attempts to kill any of them. As I mentioned previously, the timing for Additions can be a bit tighter than I would like, but nothing you can’t master with practice.

Graphics - 8/10

While The Legend of Dragoon is certainly a dated game, the graphics were fantastic for when it came out. Character and enemy models look reasonably smooth, the environments and backgrounds look spectacular. I’ve read somewhere that graphics and artwork are the vast majority of the data on the discs. It came out nearly 2 decades ago, so of course it’s going to show some age. Compared to other games released in that era, though, it really does look great.

Music - 6/10

The music in The Legend of Dragoon is alright, but it isn’t something I would frequently choose to listen to outside of playing the game. A few of the tracks, mostly the combat music, are pretty good. I keep the sound on while playing, rather than muting it and listening to something else. All in all, the music fits with the game and perhaps even adds to the experience, but doesn’t really stand on its own otherwise.

My Take

The Good

The story is great, the combat is interesting, and the graphics really were fantastic for the era.

The Bad

The combat is so painfully slow.

The Ugly

Inventory management plays a bigger role in the game’s difficulty than it has any right to.

Overall - 7/10


The Legend of Dragoon is a solid JRPG, and holds its own against the classics of the PlayStation generation. Despite some minor drawbacks, it continues to be a great game with an original story, that anyone should be able to enjoy.

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