Tales of Legendia is part of the “Tales of” series from the company Namco. It’s had many sleeper hit rpgs due to poor marketing of the mostly great rpg’s that are the “Tales of” series.
I’ll start right off the bat with this game’s best quality:
Music: 10/10, some of the best scores I’ve ever heard in gaming. Compared to many other games, it sets a record of how outstanding music can be if given enough time and effort. This game’s music is by far, it’s most innovative and absolute best quality. Other Tales game’s should take a page from the music composer responsible for this game’s music.
Story: 1/10, Unfortunately, the story isn’t that great. Even compared to old super nintendo games, it isn’t all that great. The characters have “unique” weapons, some would say, and that it shows “originality” but really, I won’t mince words, it’s just tacked-on to make the characters seem more interesting than they are. And, really, what’s a mage doing with a hammer if he doesn’t know how to use it properly? The story degenerates to saving a mary-sue character. The entire plot and purpose for over half the game is saving a mary-sue character who, while has great development admittedly, is just talked about how great and awesome she is throughout the entire game. It comes to the point where she’s literally the most important person in the entire world and it gets a bit ridiculous how much emphasis goes into her entire importance to…. everything.
Worse yet, important kingdoms in the story are… mentioned rather randomly and just seems to be for plot progression purposes. It’s as if you’re expected to know about everything in the outside world of the ship when you’ve only first started out in the game and don’t know what’s going on. You’re stuck on a ship…island for the entire game so you have no understanding of the outside world and it’s never clearly explained to you… at all during the main story. It’s… pretty bad in my opinion… I personally found a certain character’s map which had no details on it and just had big blobs of orange with red markers for where you needed to go next insulting to my intelligence.
Characters: By far the worst cast of characters on any Tales game.
Senel, an apparent “alliance marine” goes from being excessively brash (and I mean brash to the point it’s one-dimensional) to generic RPG protagonist later with no real details or explanation on his change in behavior.
Will, the apparent Mayor of the town, is nothing more than the generic “teacher” archetype and is by far the most obsessively used for Japanese anime comedy in the game. Of which, there is an overabundance of.
Chloe is a one-dimensional “knight” character…, her excessive need to see justice is literally explained in one sentence, that being: “She’s a knight”. She’s apparently from a well-known family of knights and everyone on the island accepts the fact she’s a knight. Guess what you find out later, thus making no sense of anything? She’s not a knight, after all!
Norma: Completely random tacked-on character that is just an excessive use for mindless slapstick comedy that serves no real purpose and stops being funny after you see similar antics in almost every other scene.
Moses: Makes absolutely no sense. He’s from a tribe seeking a sacred power, thinks Shirley has the means of giving it to him (since she’s the most important thing in the world ever apparently) and later states the sacred power comes from fighting dinosaurs…. begging the question why he kidnaps Shirley during the entire first chapter of the game. He’s just tacked-on for gameplay purposes, really.
Grune: Random stereotypical “no memory” character that is tacked on for gameplay purposes and has no real story.
Gameplay: 2/10, The gameplay lacks compared to other Tales games. First off, ignoring the 2D plane, it really has nothing to offer in comparison to other Tales titles. 2D tales games have multiple finishers and combo potential. Other 3D Tales games like Abyss and Symphonia have customizable stat or move set items. Among Battle systems, Symphonia had party attack and party combos, Abyss had fields of elemental power that changed attacks and made them more powerful, and Legendia has… Climax… which is just a cheap “Time Stop” ability so you can combo enemies when they can’t fight back….
The name itself is… questionable regarding it’s meaning.
The game is linear, worse yet, it makes itself FEEL linear. You go run around to whatever specified location, constantly get a skit where Senel says to open up the “duct” outside of whatever dungeon your going to so you can immediately warp back to the city, heal, save, and come warp back outside that cave to fight enemies. This game is by far one of the easiest games ever made. There is simply no challenge to it at all. Worse yet, you don’t even need to open up the ducts like the skit tells you to since it opens itself up, which makes one wonder why the game pauses just to keep replaying the same (unvoiced) skit every time you’re near a dungeon.
Moreover, if you’re ever confused on where to go next or forgot because you haven’t played the game in so long, you can’t open up your map to see your current location, it’s on the right hand corner of your screen showing the small location you’re on in the ship but you can’t take your time to see where you are on the map and where you need to go. It gets irritating when you have to double-back behind mountain passes.
Overall: Not an enjoyable game. You’ll probably like purchasing the OST of the game though.
In conclusion, it’s unremarkable compared to other games in the series (and lacks in all forms compared to them) and quite forgettable even if it has an excellent soundtrack. Any atmosphere that could have been gained with it was shot down due to poor characters that only display cliche slapstick comedy that’s common in Japanese cartoons.
Final Score: 4/10.