Welcome To storyview the review show that appraises a video games’ story. Today, were looking at Legrand Legacy: Tale of the Fatebounds. This Video will contain spoilers from the first two hours of the roughly 30-hour game.
Legrand Legacy is a self-proclaimed love letter to classic JRPGs, while it’s visual style and world is up to that task, it’s longwinded writing is not.
Plot
Finn is a slave, forced to fight in an arena for entertainment. After seeing him fight, a man purchases Finn to protect him on a dangerous journey to return to the man’s home. After being ambushed by bandits, Finn’s purchaser is killed, but Finn himself is saved by a woman named Aria. In exchange for her help, he agrees to escort her through explore old ruins where he learns that Aria is the Flame of the fate bound. She’s tasked with retrieving four legendary weapons from across the land to stop an invasion from an evil realm. Finn agrees to join Aria and they set off to obtain the four armaments of Lir.
The stakes unfortunately always feel too low in Legrand’s plot. You don’t care much about saving Legrand because you never so much as see a ‘Fir Bolg evil invader’ till the end of the game. That makes it hard to feel like they’re a real threat. The main villain also feels too abstract a threat because he doesn’t show up much in the story. Most times it feels like your fighting small battles instead of for the worlds survival.
Apart from that, I understand that Legrand Legacy is trying to emulate RPGs of the past - but the story ends up a little too stereotypical RPG. Items that you must gather throughout the world, warring kingdoms, amnesia, the “chosen” heroes – all the troupes are here. One moment even feels like it was lifted straight out of Final Fantasy X. Now, all this isn’t necessarily a bad thing (for people wanting to relive the adventures of older JRPGs) but I would have liked to see Legrand build on that foundation a bit more.
My other problem is that the plot twists of Legrand’s story fall into one of two camps: too predictable, or not impactful. Some of the twists, while I might not have seen them coming, just made me say “alright” because it doesn’t affect the main story. The other twists I saw coming a mile away. Only one event (near the end of the game) really surprised me and made me say “whoa”…but that one moment isn’t enough to carry the rest of the plot and that includes the ending - which is lackluster to say the least.
Now, with all of that said, at least the story is well thought out and nothing is too confusing. You shouldn’t have any trouble understanding what’s going on and honestly there are some cool ideas in the story, but there just isn’t the suspense that a ‘Save the world’ story needs.
Writing
The problem with Legrand Legacy’s Writing is that there is simply too much Dialog. Characters tend to talk in circles and it feels like only a tenth of the dialog is necessary.
For example: you’ll tell many characters throughout the game of your quest to find the legendary weapons and far too many characters don’t believe you. That means you have to sit through 7 or so textboxes of the party trying to convince the character of their quest, the character refusing to believe it’s real, then the party says “I promise it’s true”, the character finally believes it and the actual conversation can finally begin.
Even among party members the conversations are much too long winded. Party members will change their feelings towards other members on a dime, then they talk in circles of “I’m mad, I don’t trust you” to “I didn’t mean to do it or I don’t know what you’re talking about” until they’re all friends again. The one upside to the amount of dialog is that you do get to know the characters personalities well and in a non voice acted game like Legrand Legacy, that can be a tough thing to do.
There’s some other small issues too. Finn as a character is much too oblivious about women. It’s that frustrating pre-teen “I don’t know anything about women or their feelings” kind of naivety which is grating. The silver lining is that it at least sets up some – let’s call it playful writing – which was my favorite writing of the game.
Another issue is that Legrand sets up interesting dynamics, then fails to do anything with them. conflicts between party members feel like they’re over in an instant. For Example: Legrand sets up a Love Triangle, which I found interesting, but then quickly abandons it for much of the game.
Immersion
Legrand Legacy’s world is where it succeeds the most in mirroring classic JRPGs.
Man seeing the beautiful hand drawn backgrounds for Legrand Legacy really made me realize how much I missed the look of classic JRPGs. It’s a 2d backgrounds with 3d characters – very similar to Final Fantasy 9 – and boy does it look good. I do imagine that how much you like the art style will also hinge on how nostalgic you are of ps1 era JRPGs. I say that because at times the art style can start to show its age, particularly how muddy it looks in close up shots. The 2d backgrounds are still a really smart choice for indie game that probably doesn’t have the biggest budget.
There are also some pre-rendered scenes, just like ps1 era games. Even the art style of these pre-rendered scenes looks remarkably similar to what the pre-rendered scenes of famous JRPGs looked like. Each party member even gets their own pre-rendered intro scene, just like ps1 era games.
I also enjoyed the visual novel style dialog. It’s certainly a lot better than just reading boring textboxes and the character models for the dialog look modern and great. If I had one critique of it, I would have liked more clear expressions from the characters. Sometimes they’re a bit hard to read.
If lore is what you’re after, Legrand Legacy has that in spades. It’s full of different people and towns and civilizations all with their own motives and backstory. You can tell the writers really sat down and charted out the civilizations of Legrand. There’s races that hate each other for actual reasons, secret deals between nations, and characters from different parts of the world will actually speak differently - it just feels like a real adventure across an entire world.
Conclusion
Your enjoyment of Legrand Legacy’s story will largely depend on your nostalgia for older JRPGs. If you love them, you can probably put up with the writing and enjoy the plot for what it is. However, it you don’t, you will enjoy Legrand’s world, but it may be harder to look past it’s flaws.