Legend of Dragoon for PlayStation 1

I am only a few hours into the first disc and this game has already fallen prey to some of the most overused cliche's of the RPG world.

The mysterious main characters parents were killed by some dark, evil forces when he was a child. He wishes to avenge them so he sets forth from his present home, leaving behind his sweetheart/childhood friend. He travels and becomes a warrior as she builds resentment for him leaving. They are reunited when he rescues her from a jail she was being held captor in. It turns out (c'mon) that she is "special" somehow and the dark, evil forces want to hold her for some reason.

He breaks her out and helps another knight escape from the prison. For this he is very grateful and invites the main character, who has a stupid name like Dart, to come along with him back to see the King of his country. They go and the grateful King grants you asylum for rescuing his knight. Now, anyone who has ever played an RPG will undoubtedly recognize this part. The King needs some sort of mission taken care of to change the course of "the war" and you just happen to be there so, "Why don't we all go along together?!!", "Why thats a brilliant idea!!".

How many times has this happened in an RPG? Now you all set out together to fight this war. This is as far as I have gotten. I hope I didn't ruin it for any one but this is just a little frustrating. Why, Oh why do they give us the same stuff all the time. It's like there is a mold that all RPG's think they have to follow. The characters that I have seen so far are so typical its sickening. I get so tired of playing the same game over and over. I am really hoping that this game will take a turn down originality lane somewhere along the way because so far I am just not interested.

1 Star= They must have been smoking crack
2 Stars= Not the worst, but bad
3 Stars= Could have been better but I'll give it to 'em
4 Stars= A solid effort, pretty good
5 Stars= Innovative and done excellently

One thing I do like is the:

Battle System ***
The battle system, although not very different from most other games, is efficient enough and quick and easy to understand. If you've played any of the other games like FFVII you will have no problem understanding this battle system. One cool feature of the battles is the Additions system which allows the player to complete an attack by pressing the X button at the appropriate moment, thereby stringing together certain movements into a combo.

At first this can be hard to grasp but when you find the rhythm of it it becomes really fun and breaks up the monotony of the turn based battles. One thing about the battles that annoys me though is the slow loading time. Whenever you are hit by a battle sequence you have to wait for the screen to dissolve before the battle screen appears, which takes about 7-9 seconds. This may not seem like much time but when you are being stopped every 25 feet for a battle it really takes up a lot of time.

Once the screen dissolves you have to wait for the screen to pan around the battle field before it lands on the enemies and finally on your party. This unnecessary cinematography helps to make the battles more than slightly laborious and last a good minute longer than they should. It would have been much better if they made them short and concise. Because there are so many battles, this can become quiet annoying.

Sound **
This really could have been done better. SONY? Come on. The music is just as one dimensional as what you'd expect from a third generation Sega Genesis title. I've even heard better music on Sega Genesis on titles like Flashback and Shadowrun. It is, once again (I know I am over using this word) very typical and thoughtless. I really think that a company like Sony could have put more work into the soundtrack of their latest, and probably last RPG on the PSX.

(**Update** After playing for a while I realized that the music isn't that bad in some places. It still is typical but it isn't horrible, my new sound rating is ***)

Graphics ***
The opening sequence of the game is beautiful. Slightly better than what you would normally expect on Playstation. Even in the game when wandering around towns and caves there are instances where you will be amazed by clarity and precision but unfortunately it lacks innovation enough to make me look twice. The caves are just caves, the castles are just castles, houses, towers....they are all exactly what you would expect and nothing more. Plus, when you are outside of town or in battle, huge polygons float around and "jaggies" are everywhere. The backdrops during the battles are 16-bit, one dimensional remakes of what they are outside of the battles and the character designs are screaming to be ironed flat. All of the characters have jagged edges and blocky details.

When walking between towns you are stuck on a track that leads you to the next destination and the landscaping is horrible, simply put. I wonder why, with the power of the Playstation, would Sony allow such sub FFVII graphics to exist in any part of the game. Even on FFVII graphics of such a low calibur did not exist anywhere.

Story **
Again, I am only halfway through the first disc but so far the story has been so dull that I am questioning the $40 that I spent on it. There has been very little character development and most of the people you meet along the way have nothing but stupid one sentence paragraphs or unrelated whining about how much they hate "the war" or the fact that they lost their home. The dialog is bare and one dimensional never going deep enough to make it very interesting or complex.

Dart, the main character, rarely opens his mouth and the rest of the characters don't stop to speak to eachother very much. The only part of the dialog that has received a fair amount of attention is the childish romance going on between Dart and his childhood love. As is very typical of RPG's now-a-days, Dart doesn't want to admit that he loves her and she keeps pushing it on him. When, I ask, is this going to stop? In my previous reviews (see Code Veronica review) I have pleaded with the game makers to stop this nonsensical trend of ruining games with these ridiculous, over played love stories. This same thing happens in almost every single RPG!! Doesn't anyone but me notice this!!!

The Verdict (so far) ****
So far, I am not very impressed. When I went to the store nearly a week ago, fiending for an RPG, I saw this game and it literally gave me a glimmer of great hope. It gave me that feeling that you get when you are so excited about a new game and you can't wait to get it home, get naked with it and..uh...I mean slip it in.......I mean play with it...you know what I mean! I have been starving for an RPG for so long because Dreamcast hasn't had very many good ones. So I bought this one without knowing very much about it because I wanted to slake this undying RPG thirst. But now I am a little disappointed. Of course, after having played video games for most of my life I know that games that start out mediocre can turn out to be really good so I am not crucifying this game just yet. I'm giving it a four star rating because I am very optimistic about it. I believe and hope that it will get better as time goes on.

I might be slightly biased anyway because I have spoiled myself with Dreamcast graphics and now some of the graphics from this game, like the battle sequences and the field maps just look 10 times worse to me. But maybe it isn't me though, maybe they really did a half ass job with this game. Maybe Sony is putting so much of its development team to work on PS2 games that this game was just rushed and superficially developed. We'll see as time progresses. I'll come back to update if anything changes. Samadust.
(**UPDATE: As I have been playing I have been liking the story line a little bit more. It gets a little more interesting as you go)