sharks + planes as formerly seen on Twitter

With that said: let’s start with not the plot as our first discussion point.

The Tactical Arts System of Legend of Legaia feels a lot like a near-perfect marriage between a fighting game, a bit of a puzzle game, and a turn-based RPG, and the results speak for themselves. The system itself, while not perfect, scales relatively well throughout the actual game proper, and both manages to convey something about the characters that use it AND is especially rewarding to players who can think creatively and puzzle things out.

Every character has 4 inputs to choose from when they perform a regular attack: Up, Down, Left, Right (or as listed in the game, High, Arms, Left/Right/Ra-Seru, Low), and an action gauge to fit said commands into. Individual hits, as well as taking damage, all generate Art Points (AP); by putting in specific input strings, an Art can be used at the end of said input string to do more damage at the cost of some AP. For instance, the main character Vahn can do Up, Down, Up to perform two hits into a Somersault Normal Art if he has at least 18 AP after the Down attack hits.

Where this begins to really get intricate is that the majority of Arts can be—and are expected to be—combined together to create powerful combo techniques; if an Art ends with a certain sequence of inputs that begins another Art, even if the second Art only gets one shared input from the end of the first, it’s possible to chain them together and use both Arts back to back without needing as much space. An example of this that I used fairly often in my playthrough is combining Vahn’s Power Punch (Left, Left, Down) with his Charging Scorch (Down, Right, Up): simply inputting Left, Left, Down, Right, Up with 36 AP available will have him do the first two hits, Power Punch, the next hit after that, and then finish with Charging Scorch. While certain Arts, such as Hyper Arts, cannot be used to end such combo strings, they can be used as starters for said combo strings, and different Arts naturally have different features in terms of the hits that they do and even in some cases what status effects they add on.

To assist with setting these combos up, the Spirit command acts as a double-layered feature; using Spirit will halve any damage taken that turn (even if the character doesn’t do the actual Spirit animation before they get hit), adds on about 30 AP for that character, and increases the length of their action gauge. This is where the particular genius of the Tactical Arts System comes fully together—rather than going with a traditional Defend command and slowing down the pace by forcing players to commit to full defense, Spirit allows the player to convert their defensive action to an offensive one as a reward for anticipating the opponent’s next action. A sort of tempo is established in this way, especially during boss fights, and the game makes a point of teaching this through example—oftentimes the only way to get through a boss’s big damage move is to pay attention to the tell and Spirit up before that move comes out, or to play it safe with less predictable bosses and Spirit more frequently with characters who won’t be able to soak up as much damage unprotected.

Where this system begins to also characterize the characters is how they interact with it. Vahn’s action gauge is of average length, and he mostly starts out using a lot of the standard 3-length Arts, working his way up to longer ones with the occasional use of the Spirit command early on until his gauge grows enough to eventually do 4 and 5 length combos without it, and many of his Arts strike a balance between damage and multiple hits. Similarly, he is stats-wise the middle of the road character between the three major party members. By contrast, Noa, your second party member, has a long enough action gauge to string together two 3-length Arts after using Spirit almost immediately after you get her at level 1, and many of her Arts past the 3-length level hit multiple times—her individual strikes are not as strong, but she is incredibly fast and will consistently be the one most capable of putting together combo chains for most of the game. Gala, the last party member, moves slowly, has a short action gauge, and has Arts which don’t combo together very well at first, but he does hit very hard, and with the right supplemental equipment he can get around his limitations to both do damage and act as a powerful healing and support character depending on what your needs are.

The other nice part about the Tactical Arts System is that in a general sense it doesn’t require a lot of explanation to understand, and even without grasping some of its more esoteric aspects right away it’s entirely possible for a player to organically stumble across the majority of the Arts that a character can use and still finish the game even if they’re missing some. While certain Arts are literally never discussed at all (such as the Super Arts, which are specific combinations of a character’s Normal Arts that are not saved in the in-battle Arts menu, and the powerful but expensive Miracle Arts, which require 9 inputs, use up 99 AP by default, and are never hinted at in the game), you do not need them to excel at battles if you understand how to combo together your Normal Arts and use Spirit accordingly—strings of Normal Arts and Hyper Arts are just as effective as using a Super Art and sometimes may even be slightly more economical in terms of AP cost than using a Miracle Art. It’s very much a system that rewards mastery, but makes the skill floor relatively low so that it’s not nearly so intimidating to do so. It was clearly crafted very carefully and very deliberately, much like the plot of the game itself.

Many reviews of Legend of Legaia at the time of its release called its plot predictable and not particularly groundbreaking, but the main thing these reviews overlook is the fact that this very “orthodox” story allowed Contrail to focus on keeping the story itself very tightly plotted and focused on its main themes. Hidenori Shibao, the lead writer of Legend of Legaia’s script, stated in an interview that the team very deliberately wanted to tell a story that started in a ruined world instead of one that was being threatened by an apocalypse like in most JRPGs, and Legend of Legaia does a great job of setting this up: humanity once relied on artificial creatures called Seru, which bonded with humans to let them fly, cast magic, and generally do all sorts of wonderous things, but the arrival of a mysterious substance called the Mist about 10 years or so before the start of the story caused the Seru to go berserk and possess any humans they were attached to. Vahn, the main character, gets swept up in a quest to drive the Mist from the world when a mysterious man known as Zeto attacks his home village of Rim Elm. In the chaos, the Genesis Tree at the heart of Rim Elm produces a special Seru, a Ra-Seru called Meta, who is capable of talking with Vahn. Together, Vahn and Meta fully revive Rim Elm’s Genesis Tree, drive back the Mist from the area around the town, and venture forth to continue reviving Genesis Trees, destroying Mist Generators, and saving Legaia. It is along the way that they meet Noa and Gala, as well as Noa and Gala’s respective Ra-Seru, Terra and Ozma, and the group ultimately manages to succeed in confronting the true architects of the Mist—Prince Cort of Conkram, his former royal advisors, and his former royal bodyguards, the Delilas siblings.

The atmosphere of “a world already ruined” saturates the entirety of the game’s story, and has a significant effect on the backstories of each main character; none of them are strangers to pain or loss. Vahn’s mother became ill after giving birth to his sister, and tried to brave the Seru in the Mist to get her a cure; Vahn’s father Val risked his life to get Vahn back, but took a severe leg injury in the process. Noa is an orphan raised by Terra on an isolated mountain, and after joining up with Vahn, begins to receive dreams from her birth parents; she eventually learns that her parents were the rulers of Conkram, and that Cort—her older brother—turned the entirety of Conkram into a living Seru, assimilating every human still living there and leaving them in living agony for the last decade. Gala is an orphan as well, raised in the Biron Monastery which forswore Seru even before the Mist came—his childhood friend and rival, Songi, despises Gala’s prowess and drugs Gala to defeat him in a competition, only to become more enraged when Gala forgives him for his deceptions.

Despite all they’ve been through beforehand and even what they go through over the course of the story, none of the main characters or most of their allies allies stop believing in hope, nor its transformative powers in a world without it. In towns freed from the Mist, people are grateful for what the heroes have done, and thank them profusely at every turn. Hari, an oracle who is capable of seeing the past, present, and future, continues to encourage the heroes to move forward even after his own prophesied demise, reminding them that humans will decide the future even in the face of fated events. Kings, lords, and scientists alike profess their own belief in Vahn, Noa, and Gala to drive back the Mist, never once doubting them, and even those people who have lost hope entirely find it rekindled after Vahn, Noa, and Gala get involved in their lives.

While many of the twists and developments in the story are “standard” fare for a fantasy narrative (One of your party members is a long lost princess! The Mist Generators are made from Ra-Seru Eggs, the very power that gives you the strength to fight!), Legaia knows this and uses them without pretense. It is this commitment to presenting things as they are, combined with a pretty strong translation for a 90s JRPG, that helps reinforce the sincerity behind Legaia’s themes. No matter how “cliche” it is, there is something brutally but starkly effective about watching an old man, bereft of his family because of the Seru killing them and obsessed with destroying them, give up the last of his lifeforce to revive a Genesis Tree and giving up his hatred so that no one else will suffer the way he did. As much as it hurts to see Noa lose her birth parents after destroying the Mist Generator keeping Conkram alive—especially realizing that they knew they were going to die by helping the heroes get rid of the Mist Generator, and deliberately kept that fact a secret—it helps re-iterate that they, like Hari, understand that hope requires sacrifice sometimes. Songi’s death in the world of the Seru because he couldn’t let go of the past is grim, but underscores how his inability to let go or have hope is what brought him to ruin.

The final sacrifice of the Ra-Seru to restore Rim Elm and its inhabitants after Rim Elm itself is consumed by a giant Seru the way Conkram was brings everything full circle: with the death of the Ra-Seru, and the destruction of the world of the Seru and the Great Genesis Tree when Songi died, what few Seru remain in the world will also stop working in time. This loss will change Legaia forever, as they lose some of the most convenient aspects of Seru-based technology, but now humanity is free to continue making their own future free of the Seru and free of the Mist.

Hope—belief in tomorrow—has its reward. Even if it means letting go of the past and accepting that some things cannot stay the same if you look to the future, your faith in what will come next is the most important thing to preserve.

The impact of these plot points might have been completely lost in a more “complex” story, and could have diluted the game’s atmosphere and mood by forcing players to try and untangle all the other elements going on in it on top of parsing the story. The elements of the plot being familiar, even predictable, helps give players the breathing room to analyze the actual events at face value (because what you’re seeing is what you’re getting) and think about what the game is trying to say.

All that said, the really unfortunate shortfall for Legaia isn’t in the “simplistic” plot.

It’s in the tuning of other parts of the game.

The US release of Legend of Legaia saw a number of changes—not to the story or the Tactical Arts System, but the game’s experience and money economy. In a general sense, many enemies and bosses were adjusted to give less experience and money on defeat, and some bosses in particular had their general stats boosted, making them stronger overall than they were in the Japanese release.

This presents a problem for Legaia in several ways.

First and foremost, equipment strength is largely the great equalizing factor between the player party and the enemies; the Tactical Arts System may allow you to string together intricate combo chains, but a large part of your damage output is predicated on your gear. Because the amount of money obtained from enemies was generally decreased while the prices of equipment and items remained the same, it became significantly more of a time investment to get new weapons and armor in new regions of the world, and even staying stocked up on curative or restorative items became challenging because of the need to basically bite the bullet on either keeping your party geared up or having enough items to heal through worst-case scenarios.

Secondly, the statistical growth of the party is notably slowed down with the changes to experience gain, which affects the Tactical Arts System and the gameplay experience on a different vector than equipment does. The only way to raise the Agility stat in a consistent manner over time is to level up, and the Agility stat dictates the length of a character’s action gauge during fights. On top of that, Noa and Gala both join the party at level 1, and Gala in particular doesn’t get lengthy solo sequences like Vahn and Noa do, which puts him behind the curve for a significant amount of time because of how experience is divided between multiple party members. With everyone’s growth slowed down and some bosses’ strength being amplified, this gives Legaia a reputation for having several hard stopping points that have dissuaded players from continuing onward, particularly the boss battles against Caruban, Berserker, and the Delilas siblings. The Delilas siblings are especially grueling because each party member is forced to fight solo against one of the siblings in a back-to-back set of 3 fights, and if you’re not caught up with equipment or levels, there is a very good chance that you will have to grind in order to win.

Finally, these changes impact the overall pacing of the game even beyond concerns about boss battles or equipment. There’s a midgame segment where the player is required to get 8 pieces of Soru Bread in order to progress—and while Soru Bread can be bought with money, the cost to get all 8 is prohibitively expensive and greatly hinders the ability to get new equipment or items later on, which makes playing the casino minigames (and spending a significant amount of time doing so) the only viable way of getting enough casino coins to get Soru Bread. The grind to get stronger makes it harder to appreciate what’s going on because there’s a good chance that you forgot since you had to divert from the main plot for so long to get up to punching weight for the areas you’re in. Additionally, using the game’s style of magic is a lot harder of an ask for most players because the high MP costs of certain spells are harder to offset when you can’t afford MP restoring items consistently, at least without, again, jeopardizing your ability to get new equipment. Considering that new magic spells are already relatively difficult to acquire in-game and need to be used repeatedly and often in order to get stronger, this winds up making magic feel so much weaker than it really is in Legaia, at least without specific equipment setups that mitigate those costs.

This is one of the critical reasons why, from a design standpoint, “statistical difficulty” settings are generally the least helpful way of actually balancing a game out unless large chunks of the game are readjusted alongside the numbers changes. While this wasn’t exactly what happened with Legaia (in the sense that you can’t pick an Easy/Normal/Hard type experience), there are some aspects of the same flaw in some games where this does happen—making enemies tougher without giving the player some concessions for that change just puts the player on the back foot in a way that doesn’t feel “fair”, especially if the enemies’ behaviors don’t change in any meaningful way on higher difficulty levels. During my own playthrough on stream, before learning of the changes in the US version, I said that the game probably needed everything to cost half as much or that enemies needed to drop twice as much gold—the only real benefit to the costs being as high as they are is that it gives extra value to a special item called the Point Card, which accrues power as you spend money and can be used on an enemy to damage them profoundly, but if players aren’t encouraged to spend money then what’s the point?

It says a lot, though, that this is the sticking point of Legaia even among its fans—not the story, nor the battle system, but the balance of the game in and of itself. And, at least to me, it says a lot in a good way that everything else pretty much carries the game so strongly that with some preparation you can more or less make your way through the chokepoints of the game even if you have to struggle a little bit to get there.