I remember it like it was yesterday.
June 2000, I was 9 years old. Little me and his modded PlayStation 1 received a copy of Legend of Dragoon from his older sister.
“Since you like playing with knights and soldiers, I think you’ll like this one,” she said.
Up to that moment I played mostly whatever I managed to get my hands on, be it games brought by the rest of my older siblings or stuff found at my cousin’s house. At that time I was fixated with Tekken 3, which was the first PS1 game I’ve ever had.
I never played an RPG before that moment, aside from briefly watching one of my childhood friends playing the Final Fantasy 8 demo. I feel super old just saying that, jeez.
Why Legend of Dragoon Was Not a Game For Kids Like Me
Booting the game for the first time was a groundbreaking experience for me. Legend of Dragoon was not some childish game like Crash Bandicoot or Spyro the Dragon.
The game started with an army destroying a village and kidnapping some of the inhabitants. One of the first lines of dialogue had the word “Bastard” in it, which was a curse word for me, and you find yourself leading the main character, Dart Feld, examining corpses and fighting enemy soldiers.
Needless to say, I loved it. And that was just the beginning!
How Legend of Dragoon Helped Me Make Lifelong Friends
Some time after I started playing the game, I had to move house with my family, and I found myself alone in a new town and school. After meeting some of the kids in the new school, I shared that I was playing Legend of Dragoon and I gladly discovered that one of them was playing it too. He told me that he did not understand how to save the game, so we decided to see each other after school so that I could explain to him how to do it.
Because of it we became best friends. Damn, we still are, and we are now 33 years old.
Yeah, thinking about it, how could he not know how to save? Come on, let’s give him a break. The sparkly save spots were just making a sound, but not really explaining what the hell that was supposed to do. At 9 years old with little gaming experience and no internet, it was not really that easy to understand.
The Worst Team I Used in Legend of Dragoon
I still remember my first team: Dart, Lavitz/Albert, Kongol. Yikes. It took me a week to defeat Melbu Frahma, because I was getting nuked by magic out of existence. I never managed to get a Legend Casque because I spent my first hard earned 5000g on a Dragon Shield, which halves melee damage, and did not grind at all afterwards. I was not the sharpest tool in the shed.
Random: I still wonder why we didn’t get the super cool version of Kongol with that cool armor and the claws. Whatever.
My favorite character in Legend of Dragoon was Lavitz, and I still remember how similar his mother and mine were. My second favorite character was Lloyd, because he was so cool and strong and yadda yadda. After the tournament in Lohan I waited for him to join my team. Boy, was I in for a disappointment.
Yeah, if you played the game you know what I am talking about. That sannavabich kills Lavitz, and we get stuck with Albert and his super high-pitched voice.
The Hilarious Voice Acting in Legend of Dragoon
That reminds me that the voice actors for the game were just terrible.
I had an Italian copy of Legend of Dragoon and let me tell you, you are not ready. Get this video with all the additions voiced in Italian:
I hope you will appreciate how bad they are as I do.
Getting Stuck for Two Months in Legend of Dragoon
Oh, another random memory! On my first playthrough I got stuck for 2 months because of my CRT TV.
Let me give you some context.
In my parents’ house we had a single 15’’ CRT TV. That was one tiny TV, which was in our living room. The remote was very simple, with buttons only for channels and volume. The other settings were in a faceplate on the TV itself, and were made of rubber.
The button to access the settings was completely destroyed, so it was impossible to change anything related to the brightness or the contrast. This last one was set to be very, very high, which made dark colors very, very dark.
A particular place in Legend of Dragoon’s Marshlands, the screen with that big weird tree and the boat, had a road going up. After getting on the northern part of the screen we get the cutscene where Shana hurts her feet and Dart has to carry her on his back.
Well, I could not see that road. I was sure it was a wall. TWO MONTHS stuck like an idiot because of that. Again, not the smartest tool in the shed.
I explained to my aforementioned friend that I was stuck and he said that he had no such problem, but he tried to tell me about the road and I couldn’t understand, because again, I was sure it was a damn wall.
Once I went to his house to get to the bottom of the problem, I noticed on his cool tv the road. That moment also marked the beginning of me using the F word on a regular basis.
Share your thoughts!
For whoever reads this post, I have so many questions: What was your team? What are your best memories of this game? Did you manage to finish it? Are you still hopelessly waiting for a remake as I do?
In the end, I consider Legend of Dragoon as my favorite game of all time. Sure, there are better games, with better writing, graphics, and whatever else you want. But this is a corner of nostalgia, where video games are not only stuff we have to judge or approach unbiased. I just hope that some of these memories of mine resonates with you somehow!
Oh, and I advise you the Legend of Dragoon community on Reddit! I don’t post, but I love to read other’s people there sharing their experiences playing the game!
I have so many other video game-related memories I want to share with you, so stay tuned for upcoming posts!
In the meantime, you can enjoy my other posts, most of which are dedicated to video game lore!
