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So what does the Ball of Beginning do? If you add it to your inventory via shenanigans, I mean.
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Jun 7, 2021 12:53
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DACK FAYDEN posted:So what does the Ball of Beginning do? If you add it to your inventory via shenanigans, I mean. Unfortunately, I'm not entirely sure how to do that, and Gameshark codes for this game seem pretty hard to sift through. However, just googling it turns up some info, and the answer is: loving nothing. The item apparently has no description and as one of those items with a white icon, all it's good for is selling. If they had plans to do anything with it, they never got to complete them.
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Jun 7, 2021 13:12
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From the name it probably was supposed to be a new game+ item - like if you have the ball in your inventory in a save file, you can new game+ off it, but they never got round to any part of the system besides the item. Given the non-discoverability of Mystic Arts I guess they had to give the boss the kind of numbers that would be reasonable to someone who didn't know how to use them, so he's not going to be too difficult for anyone reasonably levelled, on the other hand if you do he's going to be kind of a joke (there's a speedrun which finishes with level 28 Lang and level 48 Sharon that simply drops a pair of 300,000-damage Sharon Mystic Arts (via some combination of buffs) to one-shot the second and third forms).
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Jun 7, 2021 22:08
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No wonder the original Legend of Legaia dev was (understandably) upset by this garbage using the first game's name. This is like Suikoden Tierkreis levels of bad game design.
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Jun 8, 2021 02:36
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Legaia 1's final boss isn't as much of a joke iirc if you play normally, I think the Point Card also caps at 9999 damage so you can't just take off a third of his health in one hit, plus he starts spamming Juggernaut when he gets low on HP which deals pretty heavy damage (and can just straight up one shot Noa due to her low HP). Since levels are much harder to come by in the original and there's not a ton of side content like in this game, it'd be hard to be super leveled for Cort. I guess if you grind to level 99 so you can get the Juggernaut summon you would be, but nobody has ever done that legitimately (I'm sure someone has but I refuse to accept anyone would grind mindlessly for that goddamn long).
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Jun 8, 2021 08:11
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Twelve by Pies posted:I guess if you grind to level 99 so you can get the Juggernaut summon you would be, but nobody has ever done that legitimately (I'm sure someone has but I refuse to accept anyone would grind mindlessly for that goddamn long).
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Jun 8, 2021 12:58
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Apparently, there was a way to get Juggernaut without getting to 99. https://youtu.be/4GLU4XcxBME It does involve a little bit of of door shenanigans, but hey, early Juggernaut!
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Jun 8, 2021 13:26
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Final Cort is pretty easy to cheese even without overt grinding. The plot Ra-Seru spells that become available right before the final dungeon are hideously overpowered.
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Jun 8, 2021 15:26
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Eh, at least they gave Cort Mystic Barrier to halve damage from summons. Yeah it goes away when you get his health down low enough but it's something.DACK FAYDEN posted:Level 99 Reactor Core happened, there's no way that some bored teen didn't manage this. Now I'm reminded of the guy who was trying to reach the end of a Minecraft world, I think the game started breaking when he got close to it iirc.
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Jun 8, 2021 21:18
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Chapter 29 – The End of Legaia Where we last left off, we had just defeated Avalon and appeared to have restored the Source Forge with the power of Now, Lang awakens…    Now Playing – Seeing the End of the Earth  “One question at a time, please! I just realized you were here a moment ago.”      “Master…What…what’s going on?”  “However…, it does appear that we stopped it from being completely destroyed.”Remember the evil toxic mist from way back when we first came to Mt. Gabel? It was Avalon’s fault. Really makes you wonder, given his whole plan was to create a new world. How many people was he expecting to kill in the mountains?   “There’s no way for us to know…how much longer the world will survive…”  “The ‘Source Forge’ isn’t gone!” “Somewhere”. What, did the sentient rock formation get up and move to Drokonia or something?  “And everything that lives in this world….has that power. The power of hope.”   “Emotions like that one…They must pool together and become the will to live. At least that’s what I think.”  “And when the feeling gets strong enough….The world will go back to the way it was! Right, Lang?”  Cue credits.  However, while the credits may be rolling, that doesn’t mean the game is genuinely over.   We get glimpses of what happened to the characters as we go. You can only really infer what’s going on, so it’s basically a matter of headcanon as to what really happened to them. ------------------------ Ayne and Spring Sapling went on to have numerous healthy children, who also went on to have children themselves. With each generation, they got bigger, to the point Jinga could no longer adequately house them. ------------------------   ------------------------ After Lang departed, Bubba enjoyed a healthy career as the Phorchoon arena champion. He earned great fame and wealth. However, after he was caught making out with one of the stabled monsters, he was banned from Phorchoon for life. He set out, remaking himself as a mysterious wanderer once again. ------------------------       ------------------------ Sharon Blade went on to earn a reputation as a mighty pirate, restoring the legacy of Alphis’ crew in full. Sharon eventually amassed enough wealth to buy Phorchoon for herself. However, grumblings of discontent arose when Sharon held elaborate ceremonies to award herself prizes for her own victories in the arena. ------------------------  ------------------------ With the old order in Darakin having collapsed, the city formed an anarcho-syndicalist commune, and the social barriers that divided them crumbled. It is said that the weeping and wailing of the upper class is loud enough to keep people up at night, but with Doplin gone, no one cares to assuage their woes anymore. ------------------------   Now Playing – Ending ------------------------ Kenjiro and his siblings promised the people of Darakin that they would properly account for all of Doplin’s ill-gotten gains and distribute it amongst the people fairly. However, Kenjiro and co. instead absconded one night, taking the bulk of it with them. Rumours are abound that Kenjiro has formed a dragon-like treasure trove and swims in a pool of Doplin coins. ------------------------    ------------------------ Kazan now lives the life of a wild man, living with and respecting nature. It is only partially by choice, as there is now an ongoing manhunt for him within Darakin’s jurisdiction due to mass acts of voyeurism. ------------------------       ------------------------ Maya retired to Yuno for some time. According to the villagers, she used her Kabel magic to prepare some kind of love potion. She never said who it was for, and departed the village soon after. Faldo chased after her, screaming something about how she had been led astray by “that man”. He was never seen again. ------------------------ The credits now proceed for a while uninterrupted. There’s not a lot of information to be gleaned from them. I had wondered if I might find out who did what voice, but they’re not in there as far as I can see. I don’t even know how anyone knows Cam Clarke did Lang, aside from guessing.    This is the first time we’ve seen these two since before Drokonia, I think.  “Yeah…Always thought he’d take charge of the Vigilance Corps after me, though…” That’s the “Fragment of Hope” Reym palmed off on Lang at the end of the last chapter. Guess distilled hope can poo poo water. “…I don’t know what exactly, but whatever it is, this town’s not big enough to hold him back!”  “Of, of course not!!! I wasn’t thinking that at all! Besides…He’ll be back!” “That’s true….This is where he grew up. He’ll definitely be back….Even stronger and wiser…” Now Playing – Inaccessible Road    ------------------------ Lang “Cocky” Galvanson was remembered as one, if not the, greatest hero of Legaia. Everybody knows his story, initially because Lang made sure to tell every last person, insisting his legend lasted through the ages. It is said he personally created the Great Lang Memorial in Darakin by finding every Doplin statue in the land and melting them down to make his own. After Lang faded from this world, historians would insist that some parts of his legend were fabricated for comedic effect. They insisted that the “sexy gorilla” was too absurd to be true, and portraits from Doplin castle prove that Lady Marienne was not morbidly obese. A handful swear that “The Chronicle of Dein: Sidejump Hero” proves that Lang was actually a charlatan who never left Nohl, but most agree that work is nothing but character assassination. A recent archaeological dig insists they discovered Lang’s final resting place inside an ancient pirate vessel. Some academics still insist Lang was buried in either Yuno or Nohl. The truth may never be known for sure. ------------------------ Now, my goofy narration aside, let’s talk about the actual ending as we know it. If you were to look up Legaia 2’s ending, you might find some forum posts from some years ago, claiming that there are multiple endings to this game. They claim there are endings where Lang goes on an adventure or stays in Nohl. They claim to have gotten endings where Lang hooked up with Maya, Sharon, or Nancy. They claim there’s an ending where Lang is crowned king of the arena, and you won’t get it unless you defeat Bubba. As far as I know, all these claims are bullshit. I even tried reloading the point we made an oddly fateful-sounding decision (where we could tell Sharon if we planned to adventure or stay in Nohl), picked the Nohl option, and then beat the game (that’s where the rushed version of Avalon comes from, FYI). Nothing changed. I have even looked at as many videos on Youtube of Legaia 2’s ending as I could, and found nothing to suggest there is a different ending than Lang standing in Gale Canyon, staring at the sun. I could engage in extensive testing of the game to see if any dramatic variations produce different results, but seeing as multiple sources suggest there are no multiple endings, I think I can safely say there are not. This is all we get. Given the ending is a pretty simple set of in-game cut scenes, you wouldn’t think it would be so hard to make some basic variations, but they didn’t. I guess the money had just evaporated by that point. Sad. ---------------------------------- Final Insights Before I end this LP entirely, I just want to share with you what limited insight I have into what actually happened with Legaia 2’s production. To start with, I want to clarify exactly how Legaia 1 and 2 came to be. Contrail, the developers of Legaia 1, were a subsidiary of Sony. Prokion was also a subsidiary, and was incorporated to assist Contrail with programming for Legaia 1. Hidenori Shibao was a contractor hired to write the script. He was cut loose when Legaia 2 was under consideration, and in a way I find rather telling: Shibao: “…I ended up on bad terms with the producer at Sony Entertainment, too. I remember I was in America working on some stories for Game Walker magazine, like covering the E3 show, and he contacted me to tell me he needed to talk to me, and when I returned he told me I was off the sequel, and I was like, "Why would you call me back from America to tell me that?" And we got in a big fight over it. <laughs>” Contrail had been subsumed back into Sony before Legaia 2’s release date (no idea when it began production), so Prokion was the only subsidiary left with a link to the series. Thus we can deduce they were largely responsible for how it turned out. Shibao had this to say about them: Shibao: “Legaia 2 was developed entirely by the studio that did the program development for the first game. We didn't get along too well because of issues like the ones I mentioned before - writing "inn" instead of pictures, adding in the anime voices - so ultimately I did not end up working on the sequel at all.” What he said earlier reflects what other users in the thread have already commented on: Shibao: “This is an aspect of Japanese game development I'm not fond of. There are so many things you "have to have". You have to have battle voices. You have to have a "moe" character (Cute with large eyes). It makes it hard to create anything original. There's always a lot of: "Well, this is very popular, so you have to have this." It ends up feeling like everything's a copy of such-and-such anime, or such-and-such game, and I find that terribly disappointing.” So we can deduce that Prokion was the kind of studio that wanted to stuff the games with popular stuff from as far back as Legaia 1. In Legaia 2, Maya fits the bill of the “moe” character with her cutesy expressions and ridiculous eyes. I’ve commented on how much Kazan is like Master Roshi from DBZ, and I have no doubt they did that because they considered the “perverted old man martial arts master” a popular idea due to DBZ’s success. All the similarities to the Tales series? They were getting popular around this time, so Prokion probably thought they could follow their lead. It’s not wrong to use tropes and such to build a story, but when you’re doing nothing other than stuffing your game with popular and recognisable ideas, you create the soulless experience that is Legaia 2. Now, everyone’s already guessed that this game had budgetary issues, but I wonder: was that out of Prokion's hands? On this, I point to something Shibao said: Shibao: “…And the game barely sold 1/10 of what its predecessor sold. The original Legaia sold very well in Japan. Sony pushed it quite heavily, with lots of TV commercials and such, but they didn't run any advertising for Legaia 2 - maybe just a few print ads in Famitsu.” When Legaia 1 was in production, nobody could have been sure of how successful it would be, so Sony had to have some confidence in their subsidiary’s product. In theory, Legaia 2 should have been a surer investment as a sequel to a modestly successful game. That Sony would decide not to invest very heavily in advertising for it suggests a profound lack of confidence, as if they expected it to fail. It’s pure speculation on my part, but I think it’s possible that Sony saw what Prokion was doing, assumed it would be a commercial failure, and decided to check out and invest as little money as they could into it. I may be no early 2000s Japanese corporate bigwig, but if I saw Marienne in my subsidiary’s product, I would have given up on their project right there and then. ------------------------- We’ve reached the end of a long road. Well, not really. You can all tell the game was piss short, and this was much shorter than some other LPs, but it still took up a noticeable chunk of the last 2 months of my life. The game is well and truly over, and I need not come back to it again. Thank you for reading.
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Jun 8, 2021 23:10
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Thanks for enduring this lame game! I'm kind of glad I never finished it, it's nowhere near as interesting as the first game. It feels like, well, a dull and cheaply made anime, and I guess given Hidenori Shibao's comments that kind of makes sense. DBZ was definitely popular at the time so I can imagine that the game was heavily influenced by that. And it definitely feels unfinished, from how short the main story is to things like Ayne basically having no reason to exist outside of as a puzzle solution. He could have been an item or a power up for Galea and it wouldn't have changed anything. quote:You have to have battle voices. You have to have a "moe" character (Cute with large eyes). It makes it hard to create anything original. There's always a lot of: "Well, this is very popular, so you have to have this." It ends up feeling like everything's a copy of such-and-such anime, or such-and-such game, and I find that terribly disappointing. The original Legaia had battle voices (that were even kept in Japanese for the English release, which I think was pretty unusual at the time) and Noa definitely fit the bill of a moe character. The first game definitely doesn't feel that much like a generic anime (some Noa shenanigans aside) and feels different from games of the time too. That's no doubt due to Hidenori Shibao doing some good writing, but I wonder if the battle system being wildly different from other JRPGs (I think the back of the game case in the English release even advertised as it being based on fighting games, which is true to an extent) also helped it forge its own identity and feel more interesting. Maybe not, since this game had the same battle system and it still feels derivative, but maybe that's because at this point it had been done before, whereas it hadn't at the time of the original's release. At any rate, all in all a very disappointing sequel. Give us Legend of Legaia on the PS Store you cowards.
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Jun 9, 2021 00:10
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”the credits” posted:I’m not sure who the third person here is but uh. Wow, this game did not deserve Mitsuda (of Chrono Trigger fame) or Sakimoto (who’d later do a lot with Basiscape for games like Odin Sphere and 13 Sentinels).
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Jun 9, 2021 02:14
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Some deity really saw me almost finish this game six times, me thinking about what amazing things this game had yet to show past the Aerolith dungeon, and said "Corrupt that kid's save card again, he needs to keep his sense of wonder for at least a little while longer"  I think part of it was just the fact that most RPGs I had played at the time were multi-disc PS1 games, so when I saw a single-disc PS2 game I thought it'd be just as long. So long, LoL2. I love 80% of you as a teenager, and cringed at 95% of you as an adult (the arts system still loving slaps fight me)
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Jun 9, 2021 02:29
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AweStriker posted:I’m not sure who the third person here is but uh. Wow, this game did not deserve Mitsuda (of Chrono Trigger fame) or Sakimoto (who’d later do a lot with Basiscape for games like Odin Sphere and 13 Sentinels). Michiru Oshima was the main composer for Legaia 1. As far as I can tell, she hasn't done much in terms of game soundtracks since. There were a couple of tracks towards the end of this game that sounded very Chrono Cross-esque, so I wonder if that's where Matsuda came in. This game has some pretty good music, but so much of it came from Legaia 1 that it can hardly take credit for it. Thanks for getting through this extremely underwhelming game. It's an extraordinary archival effort for a game that probably doesn't deserve it. The Shibao interview gives some insight to how it fell apart and I agree with what he says, but I feel like there's a directorial aspect that's also missing from Legaia 2. Legend of Legaia was a pretty tightly crafted game. The way its story was divided up had a natural sense of progression. The palette swaps also tended to occur with area/story changes without being as prevalent as they are in this game. Legaia 2 feels like a bunch of assets from Legaia 1 taped together with anime/JRPG tropes and no sense of how any of it should fit together.
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Jun 9, 2021 04:14
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Well. The ending is nothing if not inline with the rest of the game
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Jun 9, 2021 05:46
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thecluckmeme posted:So long, LoL2. I love 80% of you as a teenager, and cringed at 95% of you as an adult (the arts system still loving slaps fight me)
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Jun 9, 2021 08:39
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Nothing wrong with formulas if theyre applied correctly. Goodbye legaia 2, you were painfully mediocre. Good Lp. Rigged Death Trap fucked around with this message at 11:19 on Jun 9, 2021 |
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Jun 9, 2021 11:14
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I wonder if Mystic Arts existing but with no indication of them or how to pull them off was also something they copied from the Tales games. IIRC, in Symphonia on Gamecube you had Mystic Arts for a couple of characters and the game never told you about them or their requirements. Meanwhile Abyss was like "here are mystic arts, they rule. Also there are even better mystic arts with bigger character cutouts and much more damage but have a much stricter requirement to unlock."
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Jun 9, 2021 16:15
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Evil Fluffy posted:I wonder if Mystic Arts existing but with no indication of them or how to pull them off was also something they copied from the Tales games. IIRC, in Symphonia on Gamecube you had Mystic Arts for a couple of characters and the game never told you about them or their requirements. They're designed primarily so you fiddle with inputs long after you have tried out random combinations and unlocked new arts just trying them out. Some arts just require trial and error to discover at first, they aren't all listed or given to you. My early game up through the first boss fight was trying random encounters and seeing what I could unlock by random combinations. Mystic arts seem like a continuation of that in the late game?
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Jun 9, 2021 16:51
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thecluckmeme posted:They're designed primarily so you fiddle with inputs long after you have tried out random combinations and unlocked new arts just trying them out. Some arts just require trial and error to discover at first, they aren't all listed or given to you. My early game up through the first boss fight was trying random encounters and seeing what I could unlock by random combinations. Mystic arts seem like a continuation of that in the late game? It does make sense, but the problem is that people would probably give up by that point, because it will seem like there's not a single thing to discover after the 5-block techniques. You will only discover Mystic Arts naturally by happening to put in the exact correct combinaton at a moment where a character has less than 50% HP (and 100 AP and MP), and that's an absurdly small chance given it has to be a specific 7-block combination (and ONLY that combination) and even if you think there's something to discover, you might think it's a longer combination.
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Jun 9, 2021 23:25
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Evil Fluffy posted:I wonder if Mystic Arts existing but with no indication of them or how to pull them off was also something they copied from the Tales games. IIRC, in Symphonia on Gamecube you had Mystic Arts for a couple of characters and the game never told you about them or their requirements. To be fair, that's a problem that the first game shared with their Miracle Arts. At least in this game they were a lot more cinematic - in the first game, it was just ART ART ART ART ART HYPER ART!. Also, one thing I'd like to point out: while many people might argue that Vahn could be somewhat expressive, at least Legaia 2 didn't commit the cardial sin of making the main character a freaking silent protagonist.
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Jun 10, 2021 00:47
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I've heard that there's hints for the Miracle Arts in the Japanese version of Legaia but there definitely wasn't any in the English version. Also I don't know if you can classify Vahn as a silent protagonist when he talks just fine in battle. I feel the same way about Rudy in Wild Arms Alter Code F since he also talks in battle (in the Japanese version anyway). Dragon Quest VIII on the other hand, the main character doesn't talk even during battle, despite the others doing so.
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Jun 10, 2021 01:10
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Dragon Quest protagonists are all clones of Black Bolt.
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Jun 10, 2021 23:02
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Man, I wish I had noticed this earlier. I had a really difficult time with the first LoL as a kid. I don't know how, but I couldn't beat the first boss with Noa and Vahn in your party. So after several *days* of grinding, I leveled Noa up in the training area where she has her wolf bud to heal up until she could execute her super arts. I'm pretty sure I went up to "Love You". Because I didn't want to beat the boss. I wanted to erase it. And then it died in one hit, with no arts firing off, because for whatever reason it's fine for regular enemies to tank 100x their HP or whatever then die, but bosses need to die immediately. To say I was crushed is an understatement. It made the rest of the game a breeze, at least! Up until I got far enough where the severe underleveling of Vahn and Ozma bit me and I trapped myself in a dungeon with too few items to either beat the boss or make my way back out, softlocking the game. I wasn't very smart in RPGs back then... So with that as my backdrop, I really wanted to like LoL 2. I never beat LoL, but it was such an *experience* for me as a kid that I wanted to capture part of that with the sequel. I don't think I 100% completed it, but I did do the arena, the Centurion Trial, got almost all the characters to like me (even though I didn't like Sharon much as a teen for some reason, I got along with her the most according to the teller?), beat the minigames (even the rice planting one!) and crafted all the endgame stuff. So many memories... and yet I can see it wasn't a good game now. Hell, I couldn't even remember Ayne's name until he was introduced. No wonder, when 3/4 of the main story after he's in the part forgets he's there. The story is by-the-book, the grinding you had to do for Elfin was atrocious (and led me to grind for a lot of the game out of paranoia that never bore out), and if it weren't for the internet I would have lost my mind trying to 100% it. I'm glad to have seen you do this LP, LJN92. I normally prefer completionist LPs, but having experienced this game I can say this is better. Actually trying to do all the grind to complete everything is far, far too much work for what amounts to fluff.
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Jun 11, 2021 02:04
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OneWingedDevil posted:
Honestly, between Stiel and Ayne, I feel like there were meant to be a much more expanded roster. Stiel is a character who has an extreme backstory that could have easily joined us as a pseudo-Magus kind of antihero-turned-friend party member, but maybe wasn't developed enough mechanically to be a late-joining party member. At the same time, Ayne feels like a character that had a good part of his mechanically-related stuff carved out, but just shoved him out into the game when it was time for launch instead of polishing him off as an individual because they had already designed his introduction + town/general setting for backstory, without much of a personality. So Stiel would have been the Mary-Sue Dark Character that never got properly implemented mechanically, and Ayne was another party-member that got put in as the token character for a new settlement to be a party member. I also think the lack of an Origin for Ayne may have been intentional, but for how little development he gets and how many more options there are for "elements" that could have been translated to Origins, I think they probably just said "he just has a unique connection to the whole world, no magic ghost for him" so they didn't have to design on. Stiel probably would have had some anti-hero "EMBODIMENT OF DARKNESS but not necessarily evil! He's from a different world!" that would have explained away that. In retrospect this game is a hot loving mess of RPG and Anime tropes that act as the tape and glue that holds this whole game together. There may have been ambition in its creation by the people involved, but there's so much that feels barely tacked on compared to its peers of the time that I really wonder what the development of the game was really like.
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Jun 11, 2021 02:25
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Stiel just casually dropping that he's an immortal monster-turned-human from another world who just wants to get home, die, or at least leave the current world will never not be hilarious. A random side content character has a more interesting backstory than the game's actual story and characters.
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Jun 15, 2021 02:03
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Personally I would've enjoyed Stiel using some cracked-out element that nothing in the game is strong or weak to. Because he's from another world, see? Like Juggernaut and Cort's "Evil" element from Legaia 1.
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Jun 15, 2021 02:26
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MarquiseMindfang posted:Personally I would've enjoyed Stiel using some cracked-out element that nothing in the game is strong or weak to. Because he's from another world, see? Like Juggernaut and Cort's "Evil" element from Legaia 1. Or the whole Comet-style spell from Final Fantasy. It's outside of the rules of elemental synergies, but it hits hard. He's not DARK, he's Celestial.
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Jun 15, 2021 03:21
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 20:32 |
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This thread is now archived. In case you're feeling masochistic or really like bad JRPGs, come check out my LP of Ephemeral Fantasia.
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Jul 10, 2021 03:23
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