swanton00's Full Review: Legaia 2: Duel Saga for PlayStation 2
The genre of role-playing games has almost always interested me the most of any games for a system. So naturally my favorite thing about the PS2 is the vast amount of RPG’s. Anytime I will see an RPG in a store It’s like a get drawn to it, and if the price is right, I must buy it. It doesn’t matter if I know anything about it ore not. So sometime a little more than a year ago during one of my EB shopping sprees I saw Legaia 2. I had never played the original, Legend of Legaia, and I hadn’t heard much on it. I seen some decent ratings and thought it looked pretty cool. But most of all, it was an RPG and the price was low, so I grabbed it. Like a year later, I decided I wanted to take a break from big epic rpgs that having long twisting evil plots and just go with a simple rpg that wasn’t very in-depth. I looked through my PS2 collection and spotted Legaia 2, looked at the case and it seemed to be what I was looking for. My instincts served me right! Legaia is not much in the way of epic ness and the story is rather boring, but it was nonetheless, a fine Role-playing game.
A Boy With No Past
Your character (I called him Matt) is a young man living in a small remote village known as Nohl. The leader of the village defense force found you near the village unconscious one day roughly 10 years ago or so. Since than you have lived peacefully with these people, unaware of any events that occurred before you awoke in the town. Nohl depends on some crystal they call they aqualith to supply water for the town. When the day comes that Matt turn 17 (or maybe it was 18?) you start your first day with the town’s defense squad. And what a coincidence that that’s also the day a lot of weird things start happening. Strange monsters appear in the woods next to Nohl, one of the corps members gets killed, a crazy strong dude came and beat up all yours boys in the woods and than the aqualith gets stolen! A series of bad events puts the town in a deep depression and Matt decides there is only one way to make things right. And that’s for him to go out and get back the aqualith! So you now venture out into uinknown territory doing whatever you can to get that precious crystal back.
A Classic Kind Of RPG
Legaia 2 feels more old-school than most other RPG’s these days. Theres not a big epic plot, the bnattles aren’t complicated and the world isn’t very big. All that doesn’t mean bad now does it? You walk around towns and dungeons in third person view. The world map is a bit different. All the locations are connected by lines and you can click on any of thw towns, dungeons on the map. When you hit the button for the place, your character runs there and you can simply enter. No more wandering around the world map getting into a crazy number of fights. This here is for lazy people. Imagine how crazy it would be if I could just press a button and Im instantly at any location I wanna be at, think of the time I would save and the exercise I wouldn’t get!
Most of the characters you get (four out of five of them) are a special type of human called mystics. These mystics are humans granted powers of nature meant to protect the world I think. Since they are given these elemental powers they are also giving some kind of guardian who lives inside them that represents their power. These monsters that live inside mystics are called origins and they can come out to help the character in times of need. The dungeons of Legaia consist of just walking from a to b, collecting treasure chests and the occaisional puzzle. The puzzles are solved only with brains, maybe a crazy item and the power of your origins. When in a dungeon, you can switch which character you walk around as with the press of a button. Pressing the square button as each character enables some crazy power that allows you to overcome some obstacle which can lead you to many exotic treasures. Puzzles can involve some hefty thinking might I add. You may have to move a block somewhere and break a rock. Maybe you have to lift a pillar with the earth origin.Alot of times you’ll be lighting up lamps and putting them out. Some puzzles involve lighting only certain lamp things out of the many that will be in the room. The more complicated puzzles have some clues given to you. Some of these puzzles can be quite confusing and an force you to use gamefaqs.com……not that I ever have.
The battles are the old-school turn based party battles. You can use any three characters within your party and battle an enemy party of up to five I think. Yopu issue your characters commands like attack, guard, use and item or use their origins power. Origins act as magic attacks during battles doing things like attacking enemies or raising party stats. Then once your done telling you party what to do, everyone including the enemies of course, acts out their commands in the order of the speed. The attacks of legaia is more than just hitting attack and they do a sword slash or something of the sort. You get to command what kind of attacks they do. Each character has a number of art blocks. Art blocks determine how many attacks a character can make in one turn. If a member of you rparty has 7 art blocks than he/she can perform seven strikes during that turn. When commanding them to attack you can specifiy which direction those attackts are going to be made in. Hit any combo of the four directional buttons to make a combo of seven attacks. The characters performs the swings in the directions designated. As your characters level goes up they get more art blocks and can eventually do like 14 attacks in one turn! Every character has special attacks called arts. Certain combinations of buttons will perform these special arts. Doing art attacks gives you something called AP, art points. These points are used in doing the more powerful super and hyper arts and even the crazy special mystic arts! These other types of arts are used with certain combinations of buttons when attacking. The more powerful the art the more blocks it takes up. You don’t have to worry about remember the buttons for each attack, once you perform the attack once it gets saved in a list which can be poped up at anytime when making an attack. If you learn to combine together arts and regular attacks, you can learn to do some mighty strong attacks that deal massive damage and have bosses dead in a few rounds.
Theres more to strengthening your characters than leveling up and getting better weapons. Legaia 2 has special rings and necklaces which give your characters epical abilites. Some of these abilities do things like raie a stat 10% or give more gold at the end of battle. Maybe it will made you resistant to certain status ailments or give you more AP. Whatever the skill may be, they are gotten from accessories. Not all the abilities are known from an accessory as soon as you get it, you will need to equip it and gain experience with it in order to unlock the skills. Not all of these skills are good however, some will decrease a stat by a certain percentage. But usually when the item has bad abilities, there are good ones to gain from it. Once you have learned all of the abilities from an accessory, you can combine it with another one to make some crazy accessories. Combining the right ones can get you some good abilities.
One thing about equipping the accessories is that there is a limit to how many you can equip. Legaia 2 using a weight system for equipping items. Every piece of armor, weapon and accessory weighs something and each character has a limit to what they can carry. The limit increases with a level up though. You can also turn your character into a blacksmith as you learn to create wepons and armor. Throughtout the game you collect all differents kinds of materials for forging. These items can be combined with current weapons and armor to make more powerful equipment. Each new weapon takes certain materials listed at its side. Combining weapons and items can be done in town but also in the handy camping. Camping can be done on the world map and in dungeons when a tent is found. You can do all kinds of crazy things in camp like rest, talk with your party and combine stuff.
An important part of any RPG is the characters. For the first maybe 20-30 hours of the game, I wasn’t liking the cast at all. Your main character is your ordinary plain swordsmen whos young, ambitious and wants to do anything to save the world. Your magician girl is seriously really annoying and doesn’t talk for almost half of the game. She so afraid of everything and shes the do nothing wrong dumb type. I can’t explain it to much, but she aggravates me a lot and I hate to use her. Kazan is a 60 year old master martial artist dude who is a fairly cool character. He is a strict teacher and a master of the Sky Fang arts but he knows how to have a good time. He can be kind of a pervert and loves to drink. There is other crazy characters but I don’t really feel like getting into them, so there you go. I’ve told you about some of the crap characters you will have to deal with during the game.
The Graphics Of Legaia 2
Legaia 2 certainly isn’t a remarkable looking game, nor does it look bad. The graphics are out-dated seeing as the game is more than three years old, but I still consider this decent. The characters are nicely detailed and the textures are fair and smooth. You can even see Kazans rippling muscles! The environments look alright, could be a little more lively. The dessert dungeon is more plain and boring than anything. The regular not important towns people, have little detail to them. Sure they all have different clothing and such but their faces can be pretty dull. Some of the attacks are pretty cool looking. The origin attacks might not be the most fascinating summons ever, but going out in space and hurling down fists of fire is still pretty cool. Um…the water sparkles.
Sounds and Crazy Music
The music of Legaia was something I did enjoy when playing through. Not the most epic of music, but their where some catchy beats that I liked to tap to. Of course the battle music was always the same, it would seriously kill a developer to make different random battle themes in an rpg. The voice acting is usually pretty bad. Most of the time their were long pauses inbetween words and that gets annoying. Your main characters voice is annoying and he’s so driven on saving the world that the things he says are just so dumb. “I wont let you get away with that!” or “Their must be something I can do, it can’t be over now.” Him talking like that all the time gets annoying. And the girl you in the beginning of the gamedoesn’t talke for a good 25 or 30 hours through and when she does, your goanna wanna make her shut up again. Her voice is really annoying. It’s so mello and soft and shes so good natured, its rather annoying.
Final Exam
With the bad characters, bad voice acting and boring story aside, Legaia 2 is actually a good old-school style role playing game.
Release: October 1st, 2002
Developer: Contrail
Console: Playstation 2
Genre: Role-Playing
1 Player
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.