The graphics in Legend of Legaia’s town and dungeon scenes are great. They’re fully real-time rendered 3D, a la Xenogears, but you can’t rotate them. At first, this seems like a hindrance, but it allows for much more detail because you don’t have to worry about coming up with textures for all the sides of the buildings, or even rendering them. The map designers spent a lot of time making gorgeous towns and castles to roam in. The character graphics are simple, with a minimal number of polygons, and the characters are super-deformed, but that’s pretty standard RPG fare. In the game-engine cut scenes, the characters have facial expressions, which really add to the atmosphere. Now, the overworld map is extremely basic, with a minimum number of polygons and a not-very-detailed character running around REAL slow, but it’s just a map. The in-game battle graphics are superb. The characters are proportioned instead of super-deformed, and they look great. The enemies have a biomechanical feel and complement the atmosphere.

The music is good. It’s not terribly memorable, to be honest, but it’s not droning and annoying. The battle music is actually rather catchy. Sound effects are great, ranging from realistic thumps and whaps when people are beating up on each other to screamed Japanese and Japlish (Japanese wannabe-English) phrases when special moves are executed. It’s atmospheric and good.

Legend of Legaia plays pretty much like any other RPG, except that for the first time in a long time, battles are actually HARD. You can’t just wade through hundreds of random battles and expect to not have to heal. In fact, some of the random battles can rip you to shreds, and this is mere hours into the game. Be forewarned. The ability to learn new moves, using a battle system somewhat similar to Xenogears where you press the directions on the digital pad (or analog stick) and chain them to make combos, makes the random battles worth playing. You gain spells in a unique way, too. Instead of learning them at level-ups, you get them by capturing certain enemies, the Seru. The spells can level too, and gain new abilities as they get better, whether it be a stronger attack, curing poison, as well as damage, or whatever. The plot is pretty standard RPG fare, and there are only three people in your party, but the game simply oozes atmosphere. The entire world feels like it’s on the verge of death, and this is played out extremely well through the game, with the Mist and the Seru living in it giving it all a dark, dreadful feel. It more than makes up for the generic characters.

Legend of Legaia is hard, which is an extremely refreshing change of pace from the recent breeze-through RPGs. Expect to spend time figuring out just how to kill the various bosses. Leveling up takes a long time, so that won’t really help. There’re patterns to exploit, spells to use, and combos to attack with that will all combine to make it possible. Hard, but possible. The difficulty makes the game eminently more enjoyable, and raises it from the pack of rather generic RPGs nowadays.

Not since Metal Gear Solid has a game used Dual Shock so effectively. You feel every thump, kick, and punch in this game; you feel the earthquakes, you feel it all. The game is just not the same without Dual Shock. The digital control is more than adequate, though, although the fact that the buttons are mapped to the right analog stick makes it possible to play the game without touching either the digital pad or the buttons. A novelty, but one that’s pretty fun to mess around with for a bit. Your character moves around like a runner during the end scene of “Chariots of Fire” when on the world map, though, so be ready to spend many minutes running from place to place until you have the ability to warp anywhere you’ve already been. Random battles are frequent, but not so frequent as to be annoying. The mechanics are quite solid, despite a bit of annoyance from the world map, and the battle mechanics are smooth enough to make it all worthwhile.