I hate The Final Fantasy Legend. It sucks. It can go die, because I hate it. The story is fine I guess, but it goes on for way too long. It recycles its own assets, stores, shops; game mechanics are never made clear; and the soundtrack is the worst video game soundtrack I have ever heard in my entire life.
Okay, that’s a lot of hate in the first three sentences so let’s just start with the story. This game is super long so I might be wrong about this but the game introduces the story with text, so we’re already off to an iffy start. In Oracle of Seasons and Ages, two other story-heavy games I’ve played, they introduced the story with characters, cutscenes, and drama. Suddenly you’ve got a mission, you’ve gotta go save everyone!
Not so here.
Instead, the game’s just like: “Alright so there’s a door to paradise that needs some magic orbs to unlock, now go choose your party members, but like we’re not gonna explain what they do or anything just guess as you go.” So I’m just like, “Alright, we got some different class types here, male and female humans and mutants, and some skeletons and goblins or whatever. Looks decent to me!”
So I’m walking around town, talking to some NPC’s, and the dialogue just feels so off. It actually felt like something unofficial at first, and in fact, it’s not a Final Fantasy game in Japan. It was branded as one in the U.S to boost sales. You should also know that RPG’s back then were not very well translated, so we’ve already got some awful music, mechanics that were not made apparent to me in any way, iffy dialogue, and an opening story that was told to me through text in what is literally an already black and white world.
However, when I leave town and start fighting some monsters, they actually look cool! It feels like they really put time and effort into making them look nice! But the more I progressed the more I discovered that more and more of these sprites are reused for completely different enemies. But hey, I get it you know? But then there’s more and more tiles and stuff that are reused. Every town has the same building designs and the same music. Locations just don’t feel distinct at all. It’s fine to reuse assets, but every environment here feels so extraordinarily bland… and it only got more routine as I played on. And the more I needed to strategize, the more I needed to understand how to play, the worse it got. Because I was never told how to play.
So, I literally just now googled this and it makes perfect sense to me, but the game teaches you about the mechanics in the manual. So if you were someone looking to get your hands on this game back in the swingin ‘80s, you would know exactly what you were doing. So plot twist, I can’t be as salty as I’d like to be with this game. However, after a certain point I just got so royally fed up with this game that I actually just pulled up a walkthrough not because I was stuck, but because I wanted to just get through it and be done. So that is still a huge blow to the game but, it’s not as awful as previously thought.
Soundtrack is an actual flaming dumpster fire and is literally 15 songs for the entire game. If you don’t believe me you can suffer through it yourself on Spotify.
Okay, so in all fairness this game is a “Final Fantasy game” made for the original Gameboy during it’s first year of, well, existence I guess. However, I actually wanted to stop playing it. I did not want to complete this game and I will certainly never revisit it. In my opinion a game fails when you look up a walkthrough so you can be done with it. The Final Fantasy Legend is a game that dragged on for far too long without changing up the gameplay at all. It felt overly repetitive, and overall is just not a fun game to play from start to finish.
Gameplay ★★☆☆☆
Story ★★☆☆☆
Visuals ★☆☆☆☆
Soundtrack ★☆☆☆☆