Exploration is the name of The Legend of Legacy’s game

Yesterday, during my lunch break, I did two things: one, I picked up a copy of The Legend of Legacy, which is a new JRPG from Atlus, and two, I put down some cash money on a pre-order of the forthcoming Xbox One bundle for Fallout 4. Now, of those two, one is certainly more exciting than the other, but I’ll talk about my decision to go with an Xbox One as my entryway into the current generation of videogaming at a later date. For now, it’s all about mapping and grinding, sometimes simultaneously.

Some of you might remember a wee unassuming game back on the PlayStation 1 called SaGa Frontier. In fact, I used to own a copy. Anyways, despite not sharing the franchise name or even having a unique, catchy title of its own, The Legend of Legacy is a spiritual successor from Furyu, in conjunction with former staff members for Square Enix and Level-5. Namely illustrator Tomomi Kobayashi and designer Kyoji Koizumi of the SaGa series, Masato Kato, writer of Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, Masashi Hamauzu, Final Fantasy XIII‘s composer, as well as ex-Level-5 staffer Masataka Matsuura as its director. Yup, it’s got quite a pedigree of creatives behind the wheel.

I’m going to hit you with a truth bomb right from the start: I don’t know the plot. I might not ever know the plot. It’s seemingly going to be told through poetry and over-dramatic descriptions of things done in the ancient past. At the start of The Legend of Legacy, you get to pick one of seven characters to play as, and I went with the default swordsman Meurs, though there are a bunch of other traditional tropes like the girl with amnesia or the ambitious, smarmy treasure hunter. After that, stuff happens, and the fellow who first discovered the island of Avalon and now goes by the uninteresting title of King of Adventurers has sent you and two others off to discover…um, I have no idea. There’s a rock that sang to my party of heroes, and then I filled in a map of a forest. Yeah.

The Legend of Legacy‘s combat is turn-based, which means it has to have more to it than just that to stand out in the crowd. Bravely Default allowed you to either burn later turns or store them up for extra actions at the risk of not being able to do anything later on if you didn’t kill the monsters right away. Paper Mario: Sticker Star requires precise button presses to deal extra damage or survive a bit longer. Some games can get by on simple turn-based combat, but not all. Anyways, The Legend of Legacy takes its leveling system from the classic SaGa games of old, which means characters don’t gain levels per se, but rather parameters and abilities based on how they acted in a fight. Ideally, this means that your sword skill levels up the more you attack with it, you gain more HP by taking damage more often, and so on, though it can feel random as it dishes out these upgrades. One nice touch is that your party is automatically fully healed after each fight.

I will say, while I abhorred filling in maps for the DS remake of Final Fantasy IV, it seems kind of fun here. Heck, I suspect that if one is fast enough they could fill in the maps quickly while still avoiding on-screen enemies in pursuit. I’ve not done this yet, but once you complete a map and all its sub-areas, you can return to town and sell it for big money, which is st in The Legend of Legacy. I know not what st stands for–stitches, perhaps–but it is an acceptable currency, and that’s enough for me.

Visually, The Legend of Legacy is pretty. It has a pop-up storybook element to its dungeons, with trees and rocks and strange, singing structures lifting up from the ground as you get closer, filling in the world around you. Not quite to the snuff of Bastion, but the idea is the same. Back in town, the game uses that zoomed out trick from Bravely Default, pulling the camera in closer as you move around and explore the inn, shops, and local inhabitants. The character designs are neat, and I almost selected the strange frog warrior because, c’mon, it’s a frog warrior, but decided to go with Meurs, which the game defaults to. Either way, I managed to recruit the frog warrior to my team in town later on, so I guess it doesn’t ultimately matter who you start with if they all team up in the end.

I’ve only put an hour and a half into The Legend of Legacy, and I’m seeing a lot of reviews call it a slow grindfest with no incentives, which is worrying, but we’ll see how things progress from here. As one knows, I’m okay with a game heavy on grinding, though I do like to be constantly working towards something in the end. If it’s just more singing rocks, then this legacy might not last very long.

GAMES I REGRET PARTING WITH: SaGa Frontier

Much like the Nintendo DS, the original PlayStation played home to a swarm of strange and untraditional RPGS, such as The Legend of Dragoon and Brave Fencer Musashi. As well as SaGa Frontier, today’s topic for Grinding Down‘s games I regret parting with thing that I do from time to time. It was an era of chance and experimentation, and that’s something that I miss, because it’s notably missing from the industry today, seeing that Bravely Default: Flying Fairy has not yet been confirmed for U.S. shores (though, thankfully, Fantasy Life has).

One of the earliest posts on Grinding Down was about a PlayStation 2 game called Unlimited SaGa, which I’m positive I purchased more because it might have a connection, however slight, to SaGa Frontier than it being relatively inexpensive and a pretty looking JRPG. I tried several times to get into it, but it’s a beast of a game, snarling and growling and constantly chasing me away. I mean really–that combat wheel, the way you “navigate” through towns. Pffft. I’m sure I’ll pop it back in yet again some day, just as I will with Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, because there will always be a part of me that needs to understand why.

Thankfully, SaGa Frontier was a lot better than Unlimited SaGa, though it definitely had its own unique pitfalls. The aspect I remember the most about it is that you had seven different characters to pick to play, some with interweaving storylines, some all on their own. And you could pick and play them as you choose. Granted, I went with Red first each and every time, as he appeared to have the most action-driven plot of the bunch, given that he basically becomes a secret superhero within minutes of the opening cutscene. The other peeps–Emelia, Blue, Asellus, T260G, Riki, and Lute–could wait.

Coming out in the states a year or so after Final Fantasy VII, the sprites on pre-rendered backgrounds in SaGa Frontier did not look as sharp as polygonal Cloud did (at the time), but they made for interesting visuals. Especially when on the region ship “Cygnus” or in the magically dark and purple Facinaturu with Asellus. There are some really pretty vistas here, and that made exploring each character’s story a joy, as even though saw some overlapping spots, many were self-contained elsewhere. Many boss fights were your tiny sprite characters versus large suckers, which often had an insane number of Health Points.

Combat is probably the oddest part of SaGa Frontier, as a lot of it is based around randomness. Before I get to that, let’s begin with a staple of fantasy-based RPGs: Health Points (MP) and Magic Points (MP). These are bound found here, but instead of just straight MP, you now have three sub-classes of it: Waza Points (WP), which is magic points but only for weapon skills; Life Points (LP), used when a character is knocked unconscious; and Jutsu Points (JP), which is used for actual magic spells not tied to weapon skills. Whew. Got all that? Right, well, battles are turn-based, and many character skills are learned mid-battle, something I remember as being both exhilarating and confusing.

According to this lengthy GameFAQ, the SaGa series uses a rather unique leveling up system, similar to that of Final Fantasy II (Japan) in that you’ll gain what you use during combat instead of a certain amount of experience points. In SaGa Frontier, experience points are in the form of stat boosts and can either gain you a direct stat boost, such as an increase in strength, or a proficiency level. You might gain stats after every fight, but you might gain hardly anything at all. Basically, you just had to try different skills from different characters, and hope that something clicked.

To me, this was genre-shattering, and certainly nothing I had experienced so far in a roleplaying game. It’s certainly not a game for everyone, but it was more than unique, unafraid to try new ideas. Plus, with the freedom to see the game through in a number of ways, with who you wanted and at your own pace, it really felt like your own version of the plot, especially if you started with Riki or T260G. And for all that, SaGa Frontier is a game I deeply regret trading in as a young, dumb teenager.

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GAMES I REGRET PARTING WITH is a regular feature here at Grinding Down where I reminisce about videogames I either sold or traded in when I was young and dumb. To read up on other games I parted with, follow the tag.