Legaia 2
Duel Saga

Review by Chi Phan

Legaia 2 came out in fall of 2001 with little fanfare. Not surprising since Kingdom Hearts was the big rpg game during that time. Legaia 1 was an underrated rpg game and it's surprising that there was a sequel made for Legaia 1 due to the small attention it got from the rpg world. And you would hardly notice there was a sequel for Legaia 1 at all with the little advertising or hype surrounding the release of the sequel. So for those that did miss this rpg game, we'll give you the low down on it and you can judge for yourself if you should pick this game up as a back order rpg game.

Are you my origin? I'm so cute. The story begins in a small village of Nohl. Nohl is a unique village cause it has a magical stone crystal called the Aqualith that provided water to the village. Here a young man name Lang begins his first day as a member of Vigilance Corps. A group that defends the village from monsters. Lang is different from the rest of the people of Nohl because he has an unusual birthmark on his chest. As his first job, his duty is to patrol Hunter's Wood and protect the village from any dangerous monster. During his patrol, he came upon a mysterious powerful man who called himself, Avalon. Avalon ask Lang if he knew of any magical crystal in this part of the woods as he is searching for a magical crystal. Without even waiting for an answer from Lang, Avalon read Lang's mind and found out about the Aqualith. The very crystal that he was looking for. Lang ask Avalon what he wanted with the crystal that gave life to his village. Avalon answer was that he intended to destroy the world and recreated it for Mystic. Lang mystify and shock by all this asked Avalon what are Mystic. Avalon quickly reveal to Lang a birthmark on his hand that is similiar to Lang's birthmark on his chest. Avalon explained that those that are borned with such birthmarks are Mystics. A gifted race with powers of the Origins in them. Origins are spirited guardians of the world. And for years the Mystic race have been hunted downed and prosecuted by the humans. Now Avalon what to rid this world of the hated that the human race has and restore the Mystic race to it's glory. Inorder for Avalon to do this, he will need to gather 3 elemental magical stones. One of these 3 magical stone is the Aqualith from Nohl's village. After these revelations, Avalon knock Lang unconscious and proceeded to Nohl's village. Upon regaining consciousness and returning to his village, Lang learned that Avalon had stolen the Aqualith from his village. Angry at this, Lang vowed to track down Avalon and to take back the Aqualith. Lang then decided to set forth on a quest to search for Avalon and to learn more about his race, the Mystics. During his long journey, he will encounter other Mystics that will help him understand his own Origin and race. As well as to save the world from Avalon. So that conclude our short summary. As you can tell from the quick summary, the plot isn't very original. The big bad guy wants to destroy the world and the human race due to the human race prejudice and racial attitude toward different races. He wants to create a new world where there will be no more human and everyone will leave in harmony. It's been done in numerous rpgs before. Different game, different characters but same plot. Still it's not the fact that the story uses the same plot that other rpg stories have used as this rpg game isn't the only one to use a similiar plotline, it's the fact that the game doesn't really spend too much time telling the story. To say that this game probably only provided about 45 minutes of actual storytelling time is an understatement. Most of the story real cut scenes with voice overs comes from in-between boss battles. That's where the real story sequences take place. And that there lies the problem. If your story sequences comes from in-between battles than that should give you an idea as to how much time is spent on the storytelling side. Is the story bad? No, it's not. Is it a rich in-depth rpg story? No, it's not. It's what I like to call an appetizer rpg story. Something you don't want to get too involved in but enough to wet your rpg hunger before the next real big rpg story quest.

Camping is fun. This is a small cast of characters. A total of 5 members. Lang, Kazan, Maya, Sharon, and Ayne. The game doesn't really spend too much time with Sharon and Ayne background. Especially with Ayne. We do know a little bit about Sharon and her childhood. But in general Lang, Kazan, and Maya get the most of the developements. But that doesn't really mean a whole lot in the end. Overall the game basically skim the surface of these characters and gives us a little insight into their backgrounds. Just enough to move the sub-plots of the story. But it fails to actually spend more than a few minutes into digging deeper into what motivates these characters into who they are. Interaction between these characters during the story is held to a minimum. Interaction between characters define to us how the group function as a team and how they get along with one another. There aren't a whole lot of scenes where you see these guys gather around and discuss the hardship of their journey and opening up to one another on their past tragic lives. The best you get in term of group conversations are from chats during camping. But most of those chats are non serious chats that have nothing to do with the overall story plots. It's more or less random chatter. It's too bad that the game only wants to skim the surface of these characters instead of trying to develope them deeper. In the end, you know enough of these characters to get you by. But you don't know enough of these characters to love them or hate them.

I will destroy you! The graphic designs of this game is huge as in drawn big. And I don't mean that as a complement. It's not totally bad but it can be done much better. The graphic is done in a 3-D smooth texture. The background graphic is done smoothly but lack real detail to them. Especially far away scenary. Close up scenary is done okay with decent detail to attention. But it's that far away shot that you don't see much effort into making the game as realistic as possible. Character designs are done in an animated look. These characters are design very big. They are giant size figurines. Something you don't see much of in rpgs. On the close up screenshots, you can see the finely outline details of each characters body and movement for the main characters and villains. But for the none characters such as towns people, they give out the blocky polygon look and not the smooth rendered detailed polygon look. You can really see the influence of the anime look on the character designs on their faces. Another thing that hurt the graphics is the coloring in this game. This game colors look very dull and dark. Mostly dull. It's like whatever colors the game designers decided to use, they pick the darker of the choices. Example: if they want to use red, they use a dark red and not just red or bright red. By doing this for all the colors, this game comes out looking very dull. They should try and mix it up a little by using some bright colors to help give life to the graphics. While the overall graphics aren't as detailed as I would like, I fully believe that it would look at least 25% better with better coloring in the game.

Who's the big guy? Music is average to a little bit above average. There are 4 kinds of musical theme in rpgs. Battle theme, towns/village theme, character themes, and storyline scene themes. The thing that you will notice here is that there's a real lack of character and storyline music themes. I'm not saying there aren't any but you just don't know that it's there. That should give you some idea on the lack of strong music presentation. There are a few towns/villages theme but those are lacklustre to. The strongest musical scores would come from the battle musical themes. That's only time where you really feel there's some music in this game. Some of the battle score are really good. For the most part, I hardly pay any attention to the music other than during fights nor was I moved by any musical scores renditions when playing through the game. I'm trying to describe the music as best as I can so you can make your judgement from there but in all honestly I really have nothing to say either than it was average at best cause I really can't come up with one musical theme that I can identify the game with.

We will crush them together. The Alpha and The Omega Game Information    Genre: Traditional Rpg    Publisher: Eidos    Disc: 1 DVD Disc    Memory: 280 KB    Players: 1 Player Mode    Vibration: Yes    Dual Analog: Yes    Digital Control: No    Rating: Teen    Release: September 2002 Three things comes to mind when you think of gameplay. Arts, skills, and cooking. Those are the 3 features that really comes to my mind when describing the gameplay. Oh there are other stuff too but those are the big 3 features. Let's start off with the basic. Traversing through towns and villages are pretty simple. It's like with most rpgs where you see houses and buildings and the various townsfolks inside. Shops and Inns can be found in towns and villages like usual. World map travel is very simple and straight forward going from one place to the next. Overall the world of Legaia 2 is pretty small. The quest itself is pretty straightforward so you'll know where to go next and what to do next. The dungeons in the game can be pretty big at times. But traveling or finding the way out isn't too difficult as it's really just one big maze. However I will warn you that there are some puzzles that you may need to solve inorder to gain access deeper into the dungeon. The game is base on random battles. The rate of the random battles occurance is pretty good and balance out. While you can have up to 5 party members, you can really only use 3 party members in battles. Battles are done in turn base with menu commands of Attack, Item, Guard, Run, and Origin(magic). The basic commands that most gamers should be familiar with. Well, that's the basic concept of the gameplay. Let's breakdown some of the key features in the gameplay then. Arts. In this case the use of Arts in battles. Legaia is different from other rpgs attack mode in that it uses a streetfighter style of fighting that relies on combos attacks. These attack can come from fists to swords at high range, mid range, and low range attacks. You input the type of range you would like to do as if you were playing a pure fighting game using directional key in up, down, left, or right direction. These Arts will be your main focus of attack during all battles. You can get up to a maximum of 14 range attacks combo. But simply inputing the directional key in whatever direction isn't enough. What you need to do is find a good combo attack. Combo attacks are like special attack move that are more powerful then the usual range attacks. These special art attacks come in 4 variation. Super Arts, Hyper Arts, Mystic Arts, and Variation Arts. Choose the best arts for you. The downside is that using these special art attack will drain your AP (arts points). So you will need to replenish your AP with normal art attacks. If a good idea to learn how to use your arts properly as they are your main survival skills in boss fights. Skills. The game uses 2 types of skills. Offensive and defensive skills. For the most part, these skills are usually attached to your armour, weapons, and accessories. Most of them are auto skills that will help your fighters. Some skills however will require you to equip them. Once you equip another armour, weapon, or accessory, you will lose that skill. However it's possible for you to transfer a skill from an accessory to another accessory through the use of customizing your own accessory. I'll explain that later on in the Customize feature. Getting back on track, not all skills will be activated immediately. You may need to level up the skills first inorder to get it activated for usage. Planning what skills to use ahead of time and finding the most useful skills for you to use can greatly increase your chance of winning a battle. Origins. Origins are spirited guardians that each of your fighters are attached to. Each Origin is base on an element. These Origins are your main source of magic attacks. As your Origin level up, so do the choices of magic available for you to use. These magic are really not so much as regular magic but summon magic attacks. They are nice to look at but not really useful. In the end, you rely more on your Arts during battles than Origin magic. There is another purpose that your Origin will serve. Each Origin has a special skill tool that they are assigned to use. These special skill tools are a way to unravel a puzzle that may block your progress during exploration of a dungeon. You can switch characters in & out and use whatever Origin who's skill tool will help you on a particular puzzle. Before signing off in this section, I need to note that only Ayne doesn't have an Origin. Customization. Legaia 2 provide a massive use of weapon, armour, accessories, and item upgrade customization. In addition to the old conservative way of buying new equipment to upgrade your old equipment, you can now make your own new equipment. As I just stated you can always buy better weapons from shops but if you want to say a few bucks or even get the ultimate weapon or armour, it would have to be done through customizing. Inorder to customize your equipment to a higher upgrade, you will need the required materials to do so. Most of these materials can be brought from shops. While other materials can only be gotten from monsters that dropped them after battles. There is one advantage that you can get from customizing your own equipment that you can't get from simply buying new equipment in shops. The ability to transfer the skills of one accessory over to another accessory. This is a very huge advantage to you when you can have one accessory with the best skills possible. Nothing worse then leveling up a skill and loving that skill but to only lose it when you need to buy a new accessory. This is true for weapon and armour but with accessory you don't need to lose it. Just combine it with another accessory and still maintain that skill. It will take awhile to get the hang of customizing your own equipment but once you do, you'll be best to stick with it as your main source of equipment upgrade. Cooking. The last of the key feature. Throughout the game, there are many, many recipes to be learned. Once you learn a recipe, you can cook that dish and have your party consume it. Each cooking dish will give some sort of stats boosts to all your party members for a certain period of time. Now these stats boost may be limited for a certain period of time but they can be very helpful while you are in the period where the stats boost are in effort. With so many different dishes, try to find the dish that you think is most helpful to your party. Ingrediants can be brought from shops or from monsters. Thus we conclude the key features in this game. Gameplay overall isn't something that will "wow" you but it is pretty good that you won't have any problem enjoying the game. Using Arts is pretty cool. Downside is that it tends to drag the battle a little too long at times. But in terms of gameplay, I had a pretty good time. It's not like the previous Legaia game where you have to try and steal magic from monsters inorder to have magic or that you have to defend to actually defend attacks from monsters. I can honestly say that gameplay have improved in this game for the better.

Score: 8/10

Am I dead? The only thing that this game lack is replay value. There are no multiple endings or anything but with the enormous amount of extras and sidequests, it help makes up for the lack of replay value. There are many small mini games throughtout this game. Some are easy and some are hard to complete. Mini games to win items can range from auctions to planting to playing in a casino. These mini games are pretty good and will give you decent extra game time for you to spend on in getting some good rare items. Besides the mini games there are other sidequests that are bigger and provide more meat for extra gameplay. The arena tournaments is one of them. You can enter various tournaments to battle bosses and sub-bosses to win extra money and prizes. Note that these battles are very hard as the enemies here are much stronger than in game enemies. Completing these arena tournaments will take some time to do and lots of leveling up. And if case you manage to survive the arena tournaments, you can try your hand on the Centurion Challenge where you have to fight 100 battles straight against enemies that are super strong. Taking this challenge alone will probably have you playing the game 4 hours straight with no save point or game break in-between. And lastly the Hunter Guilds side quests where you can accept various jobs to complete. Each job will net you huge amount of money as well as super extra bosses to do battle with. There's also other mini side quests that you can do to get various rare items as well. But the shear size of the mini games to tournaments to Hunter Guild Quests is quite worth an extra 10 hours of gameplay. A great bang for your buck there.

It's kind of funny. I brought this game at full price in September and didn't really get a chance to play and review this game until now. 7 months later. That pretty much tells you how important of an rpg game this is if this reviewer decided to review this game after 7 months of it's initial release date. Do I regret buying this game? Not really. I do regret having to pay for full price of a brand new rpg game at it's release date. Now you can get a brand new Legaia 2 for half the price that it was initially going for during it's first release. If you can get a brand new copy at a cheap price then this game is worth the buy. It's not the top ten best rpg game on the Playstation 2. But it's a game that can give you some good rpg playing time for a cheap price once you try out all the other rpg game. So go ahead and get this game if you having no other rpg game to play and have some extra small cash around. It'll give you something to chew on until a real big rpg game comes by. Final Score: 7.2/10 Time to complete: over 50 hours with all sidequests and mini games done. Difficulty: Meduim Favorite character: Sharon Cutiest character: Maya Best fighter: Lang Most useless character: Maya Best music theme: Ending Battle theme (Avalon theme) Coolest feature: Customization of accessories Best advice: Learn your art moves Best defensive skill: Full Force Best offensive skill: AP Max Also try: Legend of Legaia Up next: Hack

STORY A decent story but not very in-depth when compare to other rpg stories. 7 CHARACTERS Game provides you with enough information on the characters. But nothing too deep about them. 6 GRAPHICS Good graphics but need better use of colors to accompany it. 7 MUSIC/SOUND Provides good battle music but that's about it. 6 GAMEPLAY Not exactly cutting edge but provide a nice balance for the rpg lovers out there. 8 EXTRAS/REPLAY Lots of mini games and sidequests to be enjoyed. 9