### Resources [[Legend of Legaia - Arts List]] ## 2024-12-28 Heard a lot about this game from the JRPG subreddit so I figured I'd check it out for myself. I'm about two hours in and it's pretty neat. The key gameplay conceit is that instead of just pressing "attack," you instead have your characters do inputs like in a fighting game. It's not real-time or anything, it's just the inputs themselves. Down-Down-Up gives you one move, Right-Down-Right gives you another. Pretty much none of these moves are taught to you, you just have to figure them out yourself. In the first hour I thought it was neat, but also struggled to see the point. Every move I had unlocked had the same MP cost, so I couldn't tell what made one move differentiate from another. What I realized is that there are two reasons to pick specific moves. The first is another fighting game staple - highs vs lows. I used a combo with Down inputs on a ghost enemy with no legs. My character completely whiffed every down input as a result. So that's a good reason to be more mindful! The other is that you can take a turn to focus. This increases the amount of inputs you can do on your next turn. And when you do a move that ends with the beginning input of another combo, you can do more damage. So for example, if I have a Down-Down-Right combo, and a Right-Left-Right combo, I can do "Down-Down-Right-Left-Right" and get even more damage in. So that's all pretty cool! I'm curious to see if the concept expands deeper into the game, but it makes battles pretty cool and a bit more thoughtful than your usual "mash Confirm to delete enemies" affair. Besides that, the game isn't super graphically impressive compared to other 1999 PS1 games, but the 3D models in battle are expressive, and one very cool detail is that characters' weapons and armor show up on their character models in battle, which I don't think I've ever seen in a PS1 JRPG up to this point? Let me know if you can think of any. Probably the game's biggest selling point is its atmosphere. It has a very strong post-apocalyptic feel, which I'm again not super used to from JRPGs, especially from this era. Everything is mired in gloominess. The world has been taken over by Mist, and there are only small pockets of civilization that are surviving. The main character is on a quest to get rid of the Mist with a Ra-Seru, basically a magical companion. One of the first major dungeons takes place in a castle where the King and all of his subjects lock themselves in their own prison to not hurt anybody after they realize there's nothing they can do to stop the Mist. It's pretty dark, when you think about it! More than even the unique combat gimmick, the plot is what's driving me to play it some more. ## 2024-12-29 First two main characters have now linked up. The first major boss was pretty difficult and I can easily see myself having to grind soon. The good thing is that I am playing this on an emulator, and can crank the speed all the way up to inhale a few extra levels. I didn't mention it, but I'm also using the *Restored Balance* patch for this game, which is how the game originally came out in Japan. > [!Quote] From the Restored Balance Patch on Romhacking.com > The USA release of Legend of Legaia has modifiers applied to the EXP and Gold rewards after battle, 75% and 50% respectively. Presumably this was done in an attempt to mitigate losses to rental stores, which aren’t really a concern 24+ years later. I don't know what exactly procced it, but my Protagonist now has another space to do an input, giving him 4 in a turn pre-Focus. So now I'm layering on his 4-sequence Arts. I don't really feel like discovering the full list, so I just made a little table with all of them in my [[Legend of Legaia - Arts List]] page. This will be especially useful for Super Arts, which don't stay recorded in the game.