As some sort of vindication for those hours of my youth spent attempting to beat The Final Fantasy Legend, I decided to tackle the game once again. I kicked its ass.
Well, kinda. There was a reason I had such troubles as a youth. The game is a bit random at times and obtuse at others. There are basically 3 kinds of characters to make. Human, mutant and monster. Humans get their stats upgraded by, get this, quaffing potions related to the stat. So, you can kill hundreds of enemies, but not until you drop a few thousand gold can you see an upgrade in their stats. This includes hit points, which are a bitch because there are four classes of HP potions. Once the stat reaches a certain value, that level of potion only grants 1 HP. And since the game boasts an old style shop/inventory system, it can take forever to up HP.
Mutants gain stats similarly to the characters in Final Fantasy 2. Use certain weapons or skills increases your chance upping stats. Dandy! Except, each mutant has four of their inventory slots dedicated to skills (every character gets 8). Not a big deal until you realize you have no control over their skill growth. After any battle, any skill can be replaced with any other skill. All too often I ended up in situations like this. That ESP skill? Does nothing as far as I can see. There are also apparently healing skills in the game, but I never fucking saw one.
As for monsters, well they are pretty much static until you have them eat the bodily remains of your slain foe. Even choking down powerful monster meat doesn’t seem to guarantee the best results, so I avoided using them. Might in a replay, because having two Mutants was a fucking hassle.
The game itself is relatively short. There are four relatively small worlds to explore and a tower to climb in between them. Despite this, there are a few things that make the game drag. The poor interfaces of shops made buying and selling a hassle. Battles are so wordy that even I found them a tad grating at times, even on the fastest text speed. An interesting quirk to that is it seems the text speed also effects the in game dialogue procession. Cut-scenes fly by in a blink of the eye as there is no “Press a button to proceed” moment between lines.
In the end, for a portable RPG made back in ’89, I gotta give it props. I’m kinda hot and bothered to try the WonderSwan Color remake. If enough things were tweaked properly, this could be a damn solid game.
