Words On Wednesday

“ 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...

Finally, after all these years, I have beaten EarthBound. The Circuitous Journey I’ve started and restarted the game more times than I can recall. My first exposure to it was actually in the original Super Smash Bros., as seems to be the case for many younger fans of the EarthBound/Mother series. I’d never heard of Ness, nor EarthBound, when I encountered him as a playable character in SSB. As my blog post from back in 2015 indicated, my cousin had a modded Xbox console at some point in the early 2000s, which had a number of emulators and ROM games on it. When perusing the different SNES games on his Xbox, I stumbled across EarthBound. Recognizing the name from Ness’s info page on Super Smash Bros., I decided to try it out. I played around on the game for a while, making it as far as Threed, before I lost interest and he moved out to California and brought the Xbox with him. I restarted EarthBound numerous times through the years, across several different devices. Most recen...

After several years of playing off and on, I’ve finally reached the end of The Legend of Dragoon . For those unfamiliar with The Legend of Dragoon, it was a JRPG released on the original PlayStation back in 1999. Though never as popular as Final Fantasy, it was a solid game and got a lot of attention in both Japan and the United States. It’s become something of a cult classic or sleeper hit, with fans raving about it still. I first played the game many years ago with the original PlayStation disc. Though I didn’t play it on the PSX (which I never owned), the PS2 was backwards compatible, so I played it on that. It’s been so long ago, that the details are hazy. I didn’t own the game, it belonged to my cousins who did own an original PlayStation. I didn’t get very far, probably not even through the first disc, but it was enough to make me want to finish the game. However, I eventually migrated fully to my PS3, and the original discs for The Legend of Dragoon were either lost, sold, ...