Customer Reviews

Final Fantasy Legend

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

First off, two things can be said about Final Fantasy Legend

1) Final Fantasy Legend is OLD. Heralding from 1989, it breathes the antiquity of NES RPGs. If you cannot handle dated graphics, aged gameplay, or simplistic plots, you need to avoid this game.

2) Final Fantasy Legend is NOT Final Fantasy. It was originally a game called SaGa in Japan, and has nothing to do with Final Fantasy whatsoever. If you are looking for Final Fantasy on the Gameboy, again, you need to look elsewhere.

With that out of the way, FFL is pretty good fun. The graphics are absolutely terrible by any standard, with even the player sprites used over and over. But the basic gameplay is unique. weapons wear down as you use them. Humans require maintenence through potions, mutants randomly learn and forget abilities, and monsters can steal the power of opponents through eating them (eep!) However, it's very aged feeling, and sometimes it can be annoying that you can't just "pass" in order to not wasted your weapons limited usability. The story is, to be blunt, is pretty simple. But when compared to other RPGs of its time on the NES, like Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior, it shines. It has lots of fairly neat moments for such an old game, and all of your characters, despite being chosen ala Final Fantasy at the games start, will get (relatively) meaningful dialogue.

Final Fantasy Legend is a game you can have a lot of fun with if you can overlook its flaws. Old school gamers looking for something a bit fresh from the standard draw will love it. New gamers who were brought up on Pokemon and Final Fantasy VII should take this review with a grain of salt.

The very first RPG for Gameboy is one of great depth! It completely adds new depth to the Final Fantasy games, with new features to quicken the pace of the games, such as now rather than spending hours earning experience points and going up levels, you can now purchase levels, spells, weapons and stuff like that. To quicken the game, it now has it where when you buy a weapon, you can only use that weapon so many times before you lose it, so the game makes you drive forward to new goals, places and even worlds. Speaking of worlds, the real depth of the game is that there are dozens of worlds, to which you and your party of four travel to one world after another before facing an evil Goddess herself. Another depth of the game is that you can now control monsters as a part of your band of warriors, and you can change the monster into different things by eating meat left behind from dead monsters. With all of this being said, the graphics are very simplistic, and reused over and over again.

Final Fantasy Legend is a versatile, robust RPG that i would liken to the Diablo of its day. the story line, which i grant you is occasionally flat, is more than made up for by the generally innovative game interface which involves limited weapon uses, versatile, randomly developing characters (mutants), mutating monster characters, a scalable party (you can have anywhere between 1 and 4 characters, and add more, up to four of course, at any time), etc., etc.... If you liked Diablo I and its randomly generating levels and weapons scheme, and thought that these aspects more than made up for its light plotline, I think you will appreciate the (admittedly less honed, more hidden) sense of replayability that Final Fantasy Legend delivers. Both Diablo I and Final Fantasy Legend also share a classic sense of item-fetishization: the idolization of the elusive, sought-after item, whether it be a platonic ideal "perfect" item in Diablo, or the glass sword in this game. If you, like me, are a rarity finder, a scourer of levels, in short, an item-fetishizer, you will love this game.
I digress. I think that in this situation, an opinion may prevail over an argument: my favorite aspect of final fantasy legend is its quintessential old-school feel and general sense of mood and peculiar, veiled beauty. I say that there is no sweeter song than that played on a square wave synthesizer and know that there are those of you out there who agree with me. I believe, also that when one creates a game, one should leave room for the player's freedom of choice, as well as his/her imagination. which this game does, i feel, with a little room to spare. If you are looking for another of square's recent, heavy-handed disneyesque cine-RPG's, buy (the totally unaffiliated) Final Fantasy 17 or 20 or whatever number they're churning out. But if you want an old-school hand-crafted game that makes the absolute most of its limited hardware, get Final Fantasy Legend.

This was first Final fantasy game, and my first role playing game ever. Well, my first for the 100$ Gameboy (back when it game with a free game - Tetris). This game pretty much set the standard for me in turns of music, story and depth, in fact - the industry!. While our characters were our own creation, they were still an integral part of the story. And I loved the story!. Now, I've found Final Fantasy VII and a new standard. This series has had it's up and downs, & it's telling that players in the 21st Century judge this game harshly without realizing that games back in the 80/90's most of time games were just fun & often/sometimes required thought. Not the eye-candy, 3D-fest, kill everything in site, war-this/war-that that plagues us now. Graphics NEVER made a game back then, playability was what mattered. And this game was playable, in fact I played it twice, wait many times and I'm still playing FF7! Games like this are hard to come by, and with "The World Ends With You" Square *finally* went back to what they do best: strong characters, engaging plot! 3D is great, but what's the point if all you are is great to look at?

I bought this game because I thought it was FF. But its not! It actually SaGa or SagGe or something.

Gameplay:3.5/5, The gameplay gets slow and often repetitive. Weapons don't do much. Evolving monsters and mutants in the party are wayyyy better than standard humans (unbalanced).

Plot:2/5, There's a plot!?! WOW! The plot is so corny I didn't realize it was their! The dialogue is short and choppy, and it often doesn't make sense.

Graphics:4/5, Good for its age!

Replay:4/5, Like any RPG, it has replay value.

Ingenuity:2/5, Not much new here, except for the "monsters evolve when they eat enemies meat" concept.

Overall:15.5/20, Average, if its really cheap, check it out.

Final Fantasy has quite a few games, and a couple of little series spun off the main franchise, such as Final Fantasy Tactics, and Legend is another one. It's unique in that you can customize your party, and power-ups work differently. Personally, I say that if you're starting out, you want 2 Humans (one male, one female) and a Mutant (I chose male) along with one Monster. Mutants level up on their own, but you can buy stats for your Humans, and you can change your Monster by feeding it the meat of other monsters so it's a different way of playing the game but fun.

This game is a little short - you can finish it within one day, or a total of 24 hours spread out however long (even with working on leveling up) but for a Game Boy game and the debut of one of the Final Fantasy miniseries, this was actually a pretty decent game as a debut and laid out the groundwork for the rest of the series.

I rate this game well not only because it is a good game, but it also started my favorite Squaresoft series (SaGa). Give the game a chance if you can. It does not have great graphics/music/story, but it is an older game so be forgiving. Besides, the gameplay more than makes up for that.

This game was so interesting and fun that I just couldn't take my eyes off it! This game started the Final Fantasy series and led to a great saga.

A fairly good game, although it didn't truly deserve the name of Final Fantasy. It simply didn't catch essensce of the FF games, It lacked the engrossing story.It was too...

Simple.

But, when I started playing, I was hooked. A fun game to play when BORED.

All in all, a game to play when you are tired of those annoying car songs on road trips.

There is no doubt that Final Fantasy Legend (SaGa in Japan, billed as Final Fantasy in the United States to boost sales) was a highly advanced game for its time (1989). However, it offers nothing that its sequel doesn't offer, and the game is, shall we say, very poor. Not having the advantage of color that its contemporaries (Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy) had, the graphics are so poor that they were actually bad in 1989, which says a lot. The story is about as simplistic as they come, and you should be able to beat this game in a few hours no problem. Considering its limited availability now, I doubt anyone will really want to play this game - trust me, you aren't missing anything. My fellow "old school" RPG players will call me a heretic, but this game has nothing memorable to offer. Skip it.