As could be expected, matters are well in hand for Tales of Legendia. I've handled the 'main' quest and now moved on to the 'character' questlines. The final series of boss battles proved to be just plain mean this go-around, to the point that I believe that my party wound up underleveled somehow. This wasn't that much of a problem, but thanks to the GRADE scoring system, I managed to get punished pretty good for daring to use healing items in combat, on top of being punished for succumbing to Final Boss Death Moves of Cheese. But I got to throw and body slam the embodiment of the damn ocean, so it's all good.
The character quests...well, they're far from bad, but they feel like they've been tacked on more than anything else. I've heard the reasoning. They didn't have the budget to get everything polished just right. They didn't think this was going to be primary plot material for a while. They had deadlines. Yadda yadda. But what is comes down to that the character quests are by and large a series of sidequests, with attendant sidequest characteristics. They're primarily unvoiced (outside of nice little animated cutscenes at the end of each). They take you the all the same dungeons and locations you've already harvested your way through for often flimsy reasons. While the final payoff is worth it, I can understand why a lot of player frustration comes from here.
It takes a wonderful, quirky and thoughtful PS2 RPG and reduces it to a dungeon crawl from two or even three consoles generations prior with PS2 production values. I happen to like old-school dungeon crawling, and I'm still getting my fun out of it, but I admit that it cheapens the experience somewhat. At least I get all sorts of sweet shinies to play with and eventually get to beat the snot of out a goddess of despair. The Harvest Never Rests!
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