Tales of Legendia impressions. 27 hours in. Beat the game.

And yes. A Streetcar Named Desire parody
is included in the game.

So I've finally "beat" the game. Well the main game at least. For those of you who don't know,
Legendia is divided into 2 halves. The main story is the first half, and the second half is called "character quests", which further develops the party members unfinished back stories.

So how does the "black sheep" of the series stack up. Well, its reputation is somewhat correct. The game does kinda suck.... but it's also kinda really really good. The characters are all developed really well, have a distinct personality and (all bar 1) are very likeable. I would even compare the character interaction and their relationships to (I'll get shot for this) Persona 4. WHAT?! The legendary Persona 4? Yes. The characters are that good. Well maybe Persona 4 Lite. But the creators certainly did something right. The characters are unique and memorable. They feel like friends and they feel more than "dial a personality" pixels on the screen, and go beyond troupes like "the girl who is bad at cooking". Norma in particular is very enjoyable. She is all about comedy relief, except she doesn't annoying. I've had many laugh-out-loud moments with this game. Not to mention she is voiced by my favourite voice actress Tara Strong.

For the 200th time, just GTFO already!

So what about the other half of the game? It's a chore to play. It's how I feel about Persona 4. Love the story/characters/cut scenes, while the actual "gameplay" is just mediocre. The problems I hate with it:
1) World map travelling is so sloooooooooow and painful. Often you are given very vague clues on where to go so you are wondering around for a long time trying to get there. While the random encounter rate isn't horrible, because how long it takes to get from point A to B on the world map, it feels like the encounter rate is so high. It can sometimes take half an hour just to travel to the next point on the world map.
2) Dull and repetitive dungeon designs. 95% of the dungeons consists of forks, leading to more forks, leading to more forks. The forks will lead to A) treasure B) dead end C) more forks, which leads back to ABC ad nauseum. There are rarely any landmarks or anything interesting in most dungeons. This essentially pads the game to make it seem longer, again, the random encounters feel extremely frequent due to the dull and repetitive dungeons. I beat the game in 27 hours. Could have easily been 20 hours if the world map and dungeons are more streamlined. I think it would actually improve the overall experience by making battles seem less like a chore, cutting out the boring and tedious bits and get to the interest bits (cut scenes) sooner.
3) The magic system. Magic is called crystal eres in this game. When a mage get to a certain level, the obtain the eres (spell) but to actually be able to use it, they have to obtain a certain number of Eres Stones of various types, which are randomly dropped by certain types of enemies. This facilitates even more grinding, because to actually use the spell you have to grind on enemies, which may or may not drop the stones, which facilitates even more boring grinding. Even worse, some types of enemies you need to stones from may not appear in your immediate vicinity, and maybe 2-3 dungeons ahead of behind you, so there's no guarantee you'll actually be able to get them in a timely manner either. For example, I never got to use Norma's Resurrect, which as you maybe able to guess, is a very important spell, because I didn't get enough stones from the spider type enemies. I spent about half an hour trying to grind them in one dungeon about 2/3 of the way into the game, didn't find a single one (they were rare) so I gave up and thought "I'll get it eventually". Those spider enemies never appeared again.

Backstabbing wench! She's even
worse than Heidi Range of the Sugababes!

4) Shirley. Almost everyone hates her on the forums. She is the protagonists' wimpy little sister, with a grating voice actress, she spends half of the game being kidnapped by everybody and having to be rescued. Then she turns into a backstabbing wench in the second half. The game tries to make you feel sorry for her, but I just wanted her dead

As for battles, yes this game is a little light on features but I didn't actually mind it. The fights were reasonably fun, although having to repeatedly fight the same fights over and over due to longer dungeons is a bit of a pain. And when I don't feel like fighting? Running away takes about 10-12 seconds of actual time, so by the time the timer counts down I would have won the fight anyway, so that was useless. I feel like people wouldn't complain as much about the battle system is there were less fights overall, with shorter dungeons and smaller over world, one wouldn't have to fight as much and everyone would be just a little bit more patient.

Where do I stand with the game now? I would like to continue with the story as the characters are so much fun (minus Shirley) but I just don't think I have the fortitude of trudging through another 30 hours worth of "game" for 20 hours worth of content. That's at least another 2 weeks for me. Well.... we'll see.