The Legend of Legacy HD Remastered

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The world is a dark, cold and chaotic place, but thankfully there’s a point of light in the shadow: remasters! HD remasters of old games! You name it, chances are it’s got a remaster! Slap that baby on Steam and we’re in the money! The latest game to receive the remaster treatment is The Legend of Legacy HD Remastered, a relatively obscure JRPG on the 3DS whose sequel, The Alliance Alive, also got the remaster treatment a few years back.

The island of Avalon was once home to an ancient civilization, and if we know our RPGs, we know that’s enough to get adventurers to come a-callin’. You’ll choose one as a protagonist, from an up-and-coming spiritual medium to an amnesiac lady to a talking frog, and get to work plumbing Avalon for all its work. As you’d probably expect, there’s more going on with the island than initially is clear, and the heroes’ journeys will lead them to uncovering some of the mysteries of Avalon. Well, assuming they can live long enough.

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The Legend of Legacy’s closest relative would be Square-Enix’s SaGa series, and as in that storied franchise you can expect some nasty difficulty spikes here. It starts off relatively mercifully, opening with a dungeon that hovers at around the level of difficulty you’d expect from this sort of game, but every so often you’re just going to get stomped out of nowhere. A cautious, slow approach incorporating incredible patience is necessary to get anywhere in this game.

You’re facing daunting odds at every turn: random encounters often consist of enormous groups of enemies, each of which are wholly capable of wrecking your face. Sometimes those random encounters are actually enormously powerful mid-bosses in disguise. While you can see battles coming on the map screen, dungeons are absolutely saturated with foes, so you’re going to have to master the fine art of running away – but even then, sometimes collectible items are actually monster ambushes! Discretion is the better part of valor, and it’s often helpful to retreat back to the dungeon’s entrance.

To try and beat back the endless tides, you’ve got a party consisting of three characters, including a main character you’ll select at the start of the game which affects the plot to some extent. You should probably pick the frog. What’s more, the plot is a relative afterthought compared to dungeon crawling and exploration, so, seriously, just pick the frog.

You can switch characters in and out of your party of three, but The Legend of Legacy rewards persistence, so you’ll want to assemble a team you like and stick with them whenever possible. Character development is also very similar to the SaGa games; you’ll gain more of whatever you use, so characters who focus on attacking will become better at it, for instance.

Statistics are a bit unusual for the genre, with characters being ranked on three main categories: Attack, Guard and Support. These do pretty much exactly what you’d think, with Support focusing on healing and speed. Your party selects a formation during combat with each party member choosing a category to focus on. Typically, you’ll want at least one character concentrating on Guard and using shields, since enemies hit extremely hard and you’ll need some means of damage mitigation lest the whole team get wiped out. Properly managing your characters’ formation is key to both success in combat and effective character building. Having a healer and buffer with a lot of points in Attack won’t be much help, for example.

There’s a little more to it than this – skills themselves can increase in the three categories, for instance, which affects their power, defense and priority – but the underlying systems are relatively arcane and intended for careful players to unravel. Certain bits of information would have been useful to have in front of you, though, like what sort of weapons and magic characters are especially good at. You’ll learn new skills by using what you’ve got, causing a random Awakening that results in a new skill which can be used whenever later on; likewise, magic is learned by equipping charms and using the spells attached to them, eventually leading to an Awakening that allows the spells to be used without the associated charm. Characters with an affinity for a given weapon or magic type will see Awakenings occur much more frequently than they otherwise might.

Given the focus on gear, finding new equipment can be a bit of a pain. You’ll collect plenty of salable items to make gold (dealing with ambush after ambush as you do so, of course) as well as selling completed dungeon maps, but the gear available in shops isn’t especially great. For the real hotness, you’ll want to pay gold to send off trading ships and wait for them to return in real time; this is, thankfully, much quicker than it was in the 3DS release of The Legend of Legacy. When a ship returns from a trading expedition it comes back packed with goodies that are often far superior to what you can normally buy. Ship early, ship often.

Speaking of changes that came along with this remaster, there…well, aren’t a huge number of them. The visuals have been upscaled nicely and looks pleasantly crisp, but The Legend of Legacy remains locked at 30FPS, which is increasingly more irritating as time goes on. What’s more, The Alliance Alive ran at a buttery smooth 60FPS, so what’s the deal? If you can overlook that, though, you’ll appreciate the fresh new coat of paint slapped onto this one.

That’s really the story of The Legend of Legacy, both its 3DS original and its HD remaster. It’s a decent dungeon-crawling romp that fans of the genre should enjoy if they can overlook its quirks and quibbles. Being able to play as a frog makes it pretty easy to do that. If you’re hurting for some old-school SaGa-style adventures, you could do a lot worse than The Legend of Legacy HD Remastered.