I have a hunch that there is a subset of JRPG fans who will enjoy sinking dozens of hours into The Legend of Legacy HD Remastered. For those craving a traditional JRPG experience with turn-based combat and open-ended exploration, it may well prove to be an enjoyable adventure. But sadly, my playthrough was more frustrating than fun. The wafer-thin story and excessively grindy combat gradually killed my enjoyment of the game after the first few hours.
As you probably guessed from the game’s title, this is a remaster of an older game, which was originally released on Nintendo’s 3DS handheld system in 2015. In this new HD release the graphics have received a noticeable upgrade, with character models looking especially sharp. Still, there’s no way anyone will mistake this for a modern game releasing in 2024. The visuals adopt a painterly, cell-shaded style similar to Bravely Default (also on the 3DS), with many objects in the world outlined in black ink. It’s a style I like, although there are some areas that would have benefited from more of a glow up in the remaster. The hub town of Initium (which you’ll return to often) is full of blurry textures, and while I imagine it looked nice enough on the 3DS’s small screen, it just doesn’t hold up when viewed on a PC monitor or a flat panel TV. On the other hand, there are plenty of environments that look much better than Initium, with bright colours and a good variety of landscapes from dense forests and caves to windswept deserts.
You’ll start the game by picking from one of seven characters before setting out to explore the magical island of Avalon, which appeared out of nowhere ten years ago. Each of the seven characters has a simple motivation for going to Avalon, such as a mercenary who is being paid to track down apostates to a frog prince searching for clues to his mysterious origins. After a brief visit to Initium, you’ll be given a map and sent to explore the island.
Each map has several sub areas, all of which display a percentage which ticks up from zero to 100 as you explore. You can sell your maps in Initium at any time, but you’ll get a lot more money for them if you wait until you’ve completely explored an area before turning it in. Monsters don’t drop much cash, so you’re incentivised to reach 100% whenever possible. As a result, you’ll find yourself hugging the edges of the screen a lot as you chase those last few percentage points that will allow you to sell the map for maximum profit.
The exploration mechanic works fine, although I’d hoped there would be a bit more to it than just watching a percentage counter tick up. There are various exits and connections between maps, and a few caves and hidden chests to find, but overall the exploration wasn’t as interesting or as varied as I’d hoped.
As you’d expect, maps are filled with monsters who are eager to cut short your expedition. These aren’t ‘random encounters’ in the sense that you can see the monsters roaming around the world and can usually avoid them if you wish. Combat is turn-based and will feel familiar to anyone who played RPGs in the ‘90s. You’ll select abilities from a list and watch animations of your party (of three) unleashing their attacks on the enemy.
There are a few wrinkles to combat that make The Legend of Legacy HD Remastered stand out from other JRPGs. Avalon is full of elemental spirits, which you can make a contract with during battles to unlock powerful abilities. These elementals fall into familiar categories like water, fire, air, and shadow, and certain areas in the game have more of one type of elemental than others, leading to stronger effects. You can find and activate pillars throughout the world which dial up the strength of specific elemental effects within a small area around the pillar.
Every battle begins with you selecting a formation for your team. For easier fights, you may want to use an aggressive formation to maximum damage. For trickier encounters, you can select a formation that allows one character to block all incoming attacks, which allows you to use the tankier members of your party to protect the squishier ones. Skills are tied directly to the weapons you wield. If you equip one of your party with a new weapon, you’ll start off with only one relatively weak attack that doesn’t cost any SP to use. You’ll gain new abilities with that weapon as you use it, but it seems to be impossible to predict how long this will take. You might gain a new ability almost immediately, or you might spend ages whacking enemies with it without any new skills appearing. Likewise, characters will gain HP and SP after battles seemingly at random.
Although I liked the way formations and elemental skills worked, the somewhat random way the game handles levelling up and acquiring new skills left me confused and a bit frustrated. There’s a guidebook in the game, which is apparently a new feature in the remastered version, but it didn’t go into as much depth as I would have liked. To be fair, once I got into a rhythm with combat, it was quite enjoyable, and the best encounters felt like teasing puzzles to be solved.
Far more for a problem was the game’s story, which was surprisingly thin on the ground. The focus is on exploring the island of Avalon and discovering its secrets. I liked this set up, but the story never really takes off and the characters don’t develop much throughout the adventure. Much of the story is relayed to you by ancient monoliths tucked away in distant corners of each area. When you find them, these statues give you a brief snippet about the history of the island. The problem is, these snippets are rather vague and the story they tell in a roundabout way isn’t that compelling. Worse, it doesn’t seem to have much bearing on either the main character you chose at the beginning or any of the companions you acquire along the way.
In the end, the story and characters felt like an afterthought to the exploration and combat, which was a big disappointment for me. Even the process of recruiting new personnel into your party feels oddly truncated. You’ll find new party members wandering around Initium, and they ask to join you after literally a couple of lines of bland dialogue. There’s no sense that any of them are real people with anything more than boilerplate motivations. Even the sense of exploration is dulled somewhat when you realise that Initium is the only proper town in the game. I understand the story reason for this—Avalon is largely unexplored, and Initium has been set up on the coast as a base camp for explorers—but I was still disappointed that there were no other towns to explore. Initium itself feels small and lifeless. It’s like the developers added the basics—a shop, an inn, a place to save the game and swap members of your party—then stopped there.
Although the combat can be enjoyable, this is a very grindy experience overall. You’ll be fighting many of the same enemies again and again, so a sense of monotony sets in fast. I appreciate the fact that you can (sometimes) avoid battles when you want to, but most of the time your best move is to fight every encounter, because if you don’t you’ll soon find yourself underleveled. Battles against common foes are often trivially easy, but there are some brutal difficulty spikes that frequently took me by surprise. You’ll want to make frequent use of quick-saving to avoid losing progress.
To be honest, I don’t have a high tolerance for grinding, so for some this may be less of a headache than it was for me. If you enjoy the combat system here and don’t mind working your way through a lot of repetitive battles, you may have a good time. I think I’d have felt more positively about the grind if the story had provided compelling reasons to keep going, but it rarely did.
One bright spot was the game’s soundtrack, which I enjoyed a lot. It’s full of cheerful orchestral tunes that perfectly capture the feeling of a band of fearless adventurers striking out across a magical land.
Overall, The Legend of Legacy HD Remastered is a competent remaster of a game that is polished in some respects and severely lacking in others. Outside of its original context on the 3DS, it’s hard to recommend this when there are some many wonderful JRPGs, new and old, that can be enjoyed on modern systems. While there may be some willing to overlook the phoned-in story, I sadly couldn’t. For me, this is one game whose legacy is best left in the past.
