Legaia 2: Duel Saga

The Good
Those who have read my review of Legend of Legaia know I've got a soft-spot for that game. So much of one that when I saw the box-art for this game 5 years ago I knew I shouldn't play it. I suffer from 'sequel aprehension', and one look at what they felt was the selling point of the game was enough to justify it here. Take a moment, if you will, to compare the U.S. box art, front and back, for Legend of Legaia (LoL) and Legaia 2: Duel Saga (L2:DS). That says right off the difference in effort you are about to experience here. Hell, 15% of the L2:DS box art is telling you that it's a "Fresh Game" by Eidos – take a look at who the positive 'review' is by on the back – Fresh Games.
LET'S TALK GAME-PLAY

• The battle system (the most innovative part of LoL) is back! It actually varies here for almost each character, weapon using characters now employ more of a 'fencing' style of attacks rather than the 'limb-based' fighting that all three characters in LoL used. Magic-based characters mix spell elements to create attacks. I like this, as it means that certain characters are essential in certain battles (you have more than 3 this time, so you'll have to keep someone out of your party).
• Item and weapon crafting allows you to make just about everything in the game with the right raw materials. This is actually a clever counterpoint to one of my favorite items (returning from the last game) the Point Card. The Point Card takes 10% of all the money you spend in cars and saves it as 'damage air miles' you can use in any battle. There is also a discount card, the Members Card, you can find (also returning from LoL).
• There are a good amount of environmental puzzles that require the talents of particular party members. These puzzles show up in early areas, and sometimes you won't be able to solve them until 1/2 to 3/4 ways through the game. Some of the dungeon puzzles can be mentally stimulating.
• There are many mini-games right inside of battles – card shuffles, press to stop, etc.
• The 'Camp' menu is probably my favorite thing about this game. You can stop, talk to the characters, cook food that gives you substantial (almost essential!) temporary stat bonuses... This is really something that ads a great amount of depth to a well-written RPG and something I would have liked to see more in better done RPG's.

LET'S TALK STORY / ATMOSPHERE

• When I booted up the game for the first time and the overworld theme from the first game played I was grinning like an idiot. Music I hadn't heard in at least 8 years made a big impression on me.
• The feeling of the 'world' is still very nature themed. The color pallete is also the same.
• The 'old martial arts master who shuns the sword because it makes things 'too easy' and has a propensity for getting dunk' archetype is a nice touch.

LET'S TALK GRAPHICS

• I really don't want to write anything in this section, because Eidos doesn't deserve recognition on this work. This was released the same year as Hitman 2 and Legacy of Kain : Soul Reaver. I'm not giving them props because they got to design on a machine with 4 times the processing power. I'll get to that in the negative zone.

LET'S TALK SOUND

• Same sound design with the terrible yelling of special attacks. Actually they hired English language voice actors this time. Honestly most of the voice acting is pretty good for the time, the monster noises are practical and recorded well, something I've noticed so much more after playing LOTR: The 3rd age. That's my next review and I'm going to tear THX a new one in that.

The Bad
LET'S TALK GAME-PLAY

• They really wanted to move this game to a dungeon based game for some reason, and the dungeons are the worst of it here. The puzzles range from good (one room puzzles you have to think about) to deplorable ones where you will wander back and forth through mazes pressing various switches. There are a few block puzzles, which I've always found pretty deplorable – I need a behemoth sized man to move these rocks - am I supposed to believe they had to move those rocks around every time they wanted into their own temple?
• The combat gets old fast, and once you figure out an effective combination of medium arts for the particular set of enemies you just keep using it.
• The characters are not balanced (damage wise) at all. Call this true-to-life but there are parts where you can't afford not to use your two main strikers in battle 100% of the time. Hell, there are times when you can't afford not to have maximum cooking buffs! I've had to run back to a camp fire like a sissy to cook up a meal because I'd get my butt handed to me otherwise. That sucks. And it's not even aggressive difficulty or good enemy A.I. - it's just badly designed dungeons with too many random encounters.
• The items in this game are stupid. There are too many minor stat changing items, too many items that completely ruin a battle – too many of everything.
• I never thought I'd say this, but there are too many mini-games. There is a 'sideways jumping' mini-game, there is a 'planting-crops' mini-game. Instead of being varied and rewarding, both of these require you to press the same sequence of buttons over and over as fast as possible. I JUST WANT TO GAMBLE AND FISH DAMMIT! IF I WANTED TO PLANT RICE I'D PLAY F'IN FARMVILLE! URGHH!
• Even when you get to the Casino (now an entire island) you are going to be let right the hell down. The slot machines suck – oh, it's the same program type, but you can no longer win any substantial amount of coinage on them. They have 'roulette', but it is the worst piece of crap roulette I have ever seen – 10 'boxes' spin in a circle, you tell the wheel when to slow down and you get whatever prize is in the box. Only one square yields nothing. You can not change your bet. What the f#%$ is that? Why even call it roulette? Why are there roulette wheels in the game environment and this shitty game when you fork up the cash for it? Why are the only two other things in this entire 'Casino' fortune tellers?
• If you want the Casino prizes you need not bother with the casino games – you'll get nowhere. It's the Tournament Fights you need to go to in order to get that swag. What's sad is that other than two or three 'real' prizes, anything else can really just be bought by changing gold for coins and then just buying it right at the casino counter.
• Gold is really not that important in this game. They give you too much of it, so much so that you will have enough to blow on furniture for your house (which serves no purpose and is a pain to travel to). The economy here is just screwed – everybody should be out slaying monsters at this point because THE MONSTERS CONTROL A DISPROPORTIONATE AMOUNT OF THE WORLDS WEALTH. OCCUPY MONSTER STREET! Seriously, for being big scary slimy monsters without thumbs or pockets these guys are loaded! Mid-game you should have a nest-egg of about 400,000 GP. There's almost nothing to spend it on, terrible design.
• Too many stats that don't matter, too many items, too much equipment that varies not at all in use and actually damages what would otherwise be a fun part of the game. Let me explain:
  • Too many swords:I like having and seeing different weapons in an RPG, I like swords. This game has far too many swords for the main character, to the point where I actually upgrade (through the item craft) PAST 3 swords just to get to the best sword I can. I'll never use those 3, never even see them because when you upgrade it replaces your current weapon and it gets used up. I switch swords almost every time I get back to the over-world map. There's no attachment to a particular sword, there's no time to admire or respect it, the next one is right around the corner so who cares?
  • Two of the main characters don't even use weapons, and armor is not visible here. Meaning that their models never change. That's not fair at all!
  • Too many stats: D&D has made due with 5 stats (STR, CON, DEX, INT, WIS, CHA) through 4 versions and over 30 years of play. Why the hell does this game need more than that? Every item has some variant on the stats bonuses it gives you, and it is all useless. I don't carethat this set of pants gives me +4 AGI because it means nothing when my AGI is 294 anyway. Why do the numbers need to be so damn high? Why can I do 80,000 HP of damage in a round when my HP is only 2,800? I don't carethat this pair of shoes is 'M' against demons because I can hardly tell what is a demon in this damn game, and the damage I lose taking a turn to scan something outweighs the 'M' damage the shoes give urghh! Who cares? My one character can barely dole out 8,000 HP per round when my main (with appropriate equipment and accessories) can do over 80,000! Who designed the parameters here?
• You know the Point Card I was glad to see? In the first game I was able to save up maybe 7 or 8 turns worth of damage on it for the last fight. Half-way through this game I only had 50,000 and change points on it. Sound like a lot? It's not, I average 120,000 a round. They actually turned a great concept that rewarded you for spending gold into a joke.

LET'S TALK STORY / ATMOSPHERE

• This story blows. This writing blows. Family Guy has more mature writing than this, and I heard that show is written by manatee's. I've always said 'don't complain if you can't do better yourself', and I could do much, much better here. What happened between the first game and this one? I'm not saying the first was a Magnum Opus but it was funny, clever, and had mature themes. This game can't write a convincing love-triangle on a Jr. High level! It can't! It's like the writer has never even been in a relationship with a woman. This is how I thought women acted and thought when I was back in grade school, I promise you it is that bad. How am I supposed to get involved in the story when it is so vapid?
• The story is utterly contrived. It tried to make me feel sorry for and examine the moral actions of killing two human villains at the mid-point. Trying to make a philosophical point about the nature of my quest conflicting with theirs is something I could see working if they had made any effort to set them up as sympathetic characters before that! These are the stock villains that were talking about making me their pet in every encounter. One is a fat, disgusting sailor moon parody! You can't make a sapient point about philosophy with a joke! Send me up against a sympathetic character (like Beatrix from FF9) and have that character die if you want me to feel remorse, this is just so stupid.
• The villages are terribly done. The number of useless buildings are too many and too far between.

LET'S TALK GRAPHICS

• It's clean enough, but it lacks inspiration. This is not the 'A' team of graphics at work here. The art design is frequently lacking, non-main characters are bland, or worse, ugly. I don't know if it is lack of experience, lack of effort, or both, but there are some fundamental graphics flaws here. You can tell they were given the tool that Eidos had to make Soul Reaver 2 and Hitman 2, but they didn't know how to use them. The 'summons' are the worst offenders, I've played around with 3D graphics and come up with better and I'm no artist.
• Clipping is terrible on character models, I know that having range of moment pre 'realistic clothing texture' programs was problematic, but you can see hair going through clothes, faces, other clothes all over the place. These are scripted scenes, they could have avoided this easily. Lack of effort? Lack of budget?

LET'S TALK SOUND

• I'm tired of complaining already. I'm glad there's nothing here that stands out as horrible.

The Bottom Line
If the first game didn't have so much heart I wouldn't even care. By all means this game is just a mediocre RPG released in a year where it was competing against both great and horrible titles. I wanted more from this game, I wanted to go back to Legaia with its pre-established cultures and places. I wanted to buy some more of that special bread from that bakery, I wanted to see the genesis trees, and statues of the main characters from the last game. I wanted to find out what happened to those guys. Instead I got these uninspired characters who are merely dropped into your party with little to no back-story.

Why play this? There is no reason to play this game. The score presented here, a mere 1% lower than the original is baffling to me. This game deserves 50%.

EDIT!!!!

I had played 95% of the game when I review this. I acted too soon, because this game's ending is laughably bad. Let me set it up for you:

So throughout the game the typical 'big bad' is building up and you are questing to go there and kick butt. Normal enough, right? Right.

Along the way there is some fore-shadowing that it will be a perilous battle against one of your mentor's previous students who went evil - so your mentor teaches you the ultimate attack just in case he dies. So obviously he dies, right? NOPE - Red Herring or Plot Hole?

So at the end you face the big bad Tekken rip-off, and he morphs into a giant 'O' face that looks just ridiculous. So we're here to foil his plan of - wait for it - destroying all life on Earth. This is going down at the 'Origin' of the world, which I affectionately call the "ass of the world" - because the rest of the world was 'pushed out from here'. So the Earth Asshole is dying because Tekken-guy shoved the three 'life-nuggets' into it causing it to transfer all of its creative energy into him (which explains the lack of imagination in his 'forms', he was working with shit to begin with).

Tekken-guy rants about something that is supposed to be philosophical but sounds like a bad grade 10 essay about Eugenics. We fight, he dies, but the Earth's Asshole appears to still be dead.

What do you do? Well, my main character proclaims that he will not give up! And we all - and I wish I was kidding - hug the Earth Ass and try to believe it back to life, complete with straining sounds like we're going super saiyan. My main character is such a screw-up that he actually DIES from trying to transfer his life energy into the Earths dormant asshole.

But they can't end it there! I got heaven Harry Potter style for a minute before we wake up on the top of a mountain (having crossed a sea, somehow) to discover the world has 'changed'.

Worst ending I've ever seen.