Game: The Legend of Legacy HD Remastered
Genre: RPG
System: Nintendo Switch (Also available on Steam (Windows), PS4, & PS5)
Developers|Publishers: FURYU Corporation | NIS America
Age Rating: US 10+ | EU 12+
Price: US $49.99| UK £44.99 | EU €49,99
Release Date: March 22nd, 2024
Nintendo Switch review code was used, with many thanks to NIS America, Inc.
The Legend of Legacy was originally released in 2015. Its lush backgrounds, super-deformed characters, and old-school gameplay garnered comparisons to Square Enix’s current crop of neo-retro RPGs. While it found a niche as a cult classic, it’s a divisive game that felt content to be what it is.
A spiritual follow-up, Alliance Alive, built on what The Legend of Legacy started and added a deeper story and a more complicated overworld. While that game was better received, a few hardcore fans continued to defend The Legend of Legacy’s, er, legacy. Now, their efforts are rewarded with The Legend of Legacy HD Remastered, available on PC, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch.
The Legend of Legacy’s New Features
The Legend of Legacy HD Remastered is upfront about one of the biggest new features: It’s the beautiful HD resurfacing the game has received. Blessed with faster load times, the lush forests and dusty deserts are brightly rendered and ready to explore. The castle town no longer suffers from that slight 3DS blur, and even the generic NPCs wandering the streets look lively and cheerful.
The other new feature is improved accessibility. Legend of Legacy looks like fellow RPGs Bravely Default and the Final Fantasy remasters, but it plays closer to a blend of SaGa Frontier and Etrian Odyssey. Those games make obliqueness a feature. Now, a heavily expanded set of in-game manuals makes it clearer to new players how its various systems are meant to work. Notably, the game’s magical system and elemental interplay get a better explanation that’ll help you get your dungeon-crawling legs under you that much faster. It’s definitely less difficult and more straightforward than other games NIS is known for, like the Makai Kingdom remaster from 2020.
The Story Behind the Legend
The Legend of Legacy HD Remaster introduces itself with a series of narrated introductions. It tells you a portion of the legend of Avalon, the mysterious island you’re about to explore, and, once you’ve selected which character you’re going to start with, walks you through their origin story. New locations you uncover also get narration, and there are short skits between your party at certain checkpoints. Other than that, the story is as slight as ever.
The core of Legend of Legacy is the mystery of what really happened on Avalon. As explorers come to the port town at the behest of the local lord, the rest of the isle is veiled in mist and besieged by monsters. Its elemental balance is, apparently, out of joint, and the first thing you’ll do is stumble through a slip of forest, interacting with barely-functional ancient structures and collecting a Singing Shard from a weathered statue.
Your characters will offer additional clues as to the overarching story, from the adorable frog knight Filmia, who believes his people are still hidden away on the island, to Bianca, whom I picked to start with. She’s an amnesiac girl who wakes up deep in the island’s interior, stumbling her way to the town to start her quest to find out what happened to her and who she really is. Others, like Eloise, are obsessed with obtaining a magical artefact, and Meurs, a young man who seeks the Elementals themselves, offer additional story beats.
However, like Etrian Odyssey and its predecessor, Wizardry, the game leaves much of the story up to you to noodle together. The monsters you fight and the environments you explore tell most of what’s left to say, and this aspect of the game left some critics and players frustrated with its silence. That’s not been changed much by the remaster, as it’s part of that old-school style the game is emulating.
The Legend of Legacy Wants You to Level It Up
The Legend of Legacy has a lot more in common with some niche games than new players would guess. While it is a third-person turn-based RPG, and it looks classically cute, it boasts Final Fantasy II’s (and the aforementioned SaGa franchise) unusual levelling system. Your party doesn’t gain levels in the traditional sense. Instead, as you battle, new skills will unlock based on how you fight. Have your knight use defensive skills while in block position, and his stats will grow accordingly. Shield skills, as well as his ability to mitigate damage, improve. The same works for a supporting healer.
HP and SP will level for everyone, and new weapon skills will gradually unlock. SaGa fans will know the old tricks of fighting tough stuff that you can just barely handle, until the coolest weapon skills are yours and your stats are beefed up. This makes for a game that’s both a little more complicated than a traditional turn-based RPG but also capable of offering a comfy grind. But watch out! In the early game, entering a once-familiar area filled with purple smoke means there’s a temporary invasion of new, deadlier foes. If you’re not ready to tangle with that, just sneak back out and go somewhere else for a little bit.
Magic is a little more complicated, and it involves those shards you find in ancient statues. Equipping a whispering shard and then using the skill it offers will teach you that skill, similar to learning equipment skills in Final Fantasy IX. That shard can then be given to someone else to teach them. But to do this, someone in the party also has to invoke your Singing Shard and its elemental contract in each battle. It makes magic feel more like recovering and struggling to use ancient mysteries, but it may be a source of frustration for some.
Exploring the Isle of Avalon
Exploring the game is also intended to be a feature, not a chore. Here we come back to that Etrian and Wizardry connection: You’re meant to be rediscovering forgotten lands, and you’re incentivized, by both the duke and the local shopkeeper, to make the most detailed maps you can. Fortunately, this is as easy as making sure you’re walking around to clear away the fog on your mini-map. Some will lurk at the map’s edges, even around the entryway you came in. Each individual screen is fairly bite-sized, with a few wrinkles, like climbable platforms or alternate entryways, to keep you on your toes.
You can’t lose progress, and if you’re just trying to explore, not fight, you can run away from almost any combat. The only downside is that this will take you back to the entrance of the entire zone, and you’ll have to trek your way back to where you were. On the bright side, this makes skill grinding, exploring, and experimenting with new skills less stressful because it’s not easy to lose hours of progress.
An always-available quick save and the Switch’s speedier load times compared to the original edition make the journey even smoother, letting you focus on the pretty yet almost post-apocalyptic environments around you.
Gearing Up Is An Improvement
One other tweak from the original makes gearing up your party less of a pain. The original release utilized the StreetPass system in a unique way, setting up trading vessels that could interact with other StreetPass users and earn you goodies. Unfortunately, in the West, the odds that you were going to pass another Legacy player anywhere were… not great. The Legend of Legacy HD Remastered replaces the StreetPass system with a simple investment option: put money into a boat, and items come out after a period of time. Hurray!
This means that paying for even a simple 300 St cog ship will easily net you a new weapon or equippable relic or enough valuable sellable items that you’ll probably earn money, if not at the very least break even. It takes a lot of hassle out of the equipment and money grind that comes with games like this one, and I found myself rolling in thousands after just a handful of hours.
Conclusion
The Legend of Legacy HD Remastered is what it is, definitely, and nothing about its remaster changed what the game was like on release. With its unspoken story and non-traditional levelling system, this is not going to be a game for everyone. But its refreshed accessibility and the fact that there are plenty of in-depth guides out there with oodles of still relevant information makes this an interesting way to find out if you’d enjoy similar, harder games like SaGa Frontier. Or if you’d enjoy Alliance Alive, which was also remastered several years ago for the Nintendo Switch.
This is where I admit I’m an old-school gamer, and this is my kind of thing. I grew up on obstinate, mapless, pain-in-the-rear dungeon crawlers, and this pretty, cosy (and low on fan service) homage to the genre is just the right kind of game for me to laze on the couch and play. It’s asking for patience from its players and a little investment to figure out how to make your party strong enough to wear down bosses. It requests your imagination to fill in the gaps of its story, giving you the freedom to think pretty much whatever you want of your journey through this ruined isle.
If you’re like me, this is a special treat, a game that’s both different than anything else currently on the Switch and familiar to those of us who grew up with graph paper and clue books you had to mail away for. That’s why I’m rating this game so highly, as I’m the exact audience this game is seeking. Its quirks may not be for you, but if you’re willing to give it a try, whether on Switch or on Steam, both of which I prefer for this style of game, it’s doing its best to help you out. And it’s looking good doing it.
Final Verdict: Two Thumbs Up 