Tales of Legends

Immediately upon starting the demo, I am greeted by a character name input screen, for a protagonist with the default name of Ar t hur. In order to test out if the naming screen is bugged, I try a custom name. Upon trying a bunch of things like filling the name screen with lowercase m's, I notice that they all overlap each other, so does the m overlap any other letter that happens to be next to it. Not a good first impression, definitely needs work there!

Ar t hur is joined by his friends Fal kor, Cal a and Vi nc e nt, whom you can also rename, but the default names are good enough.

The plot seems to be very early Final Fantasy-esque, with great heroes of yore sealing their powers in elemental crystals and four descendants of great heroes banding together to save the world from evil or some such. Oh well, it works and this sort of throwback certainly seems to be deliberate. This includes the old-school style minimap, which is a very nice touch, as well as all the characters moving in place. I appreciate the various effects that make the mostly RTP world feel more alive, such as the shadows of clouds passing overhead. The menu is very nicely customized as well and the maps are overall pretty solid.

Story wise, there's not much to talk about. Arthur, Falkor, Cala and Vincent are just thrown onto the world map with no explanation as to how they ended up together or who they even are, beyond what was said in the intro, yet another throwback to oldschool JRPGs. They are also of the mute protagonist variety, which is just fine with me. The NPC dialogues are deliberately cheesy in a charming sort of way and serve mostly to explain game mechanics to the player. There are dungeons, but again, no real reason as to why you are going to them beyong the short blurb in the intro.

Combat is pretty standard, save for more retro stylization and the welcome option of Auto Battle. The encounter rate on the world map feels just right, the actual dungeons look like they are going to use visible encounters. However, the monster sprites roaming around are just harmless critters with standard random encounters being the norm. Combat seems pretty hard from the start, with limited number of skills and a lot of monsters thrown at you at once. The monsters themselves don't seem to be very interesting, mostly just throwing basic attacks at you, though they do get more interesting later on.

The class system evokes the early Final Fantasy games, particularly Final Fantasy 3 and 5 with their Job System. You have magical crystals, which unlock particular new classes for your party members to change into. The demo starts with the Warrior, Knight, Thief, Mage, Cleric and Monk crystals in your inventory and all your character start as level 5 Freelancers.

The following part has been rewritten to take into account recent findings:

Changing classes seems to reset the character level. At first, I originally thought they lose the accumulated XP even if they change back to their previous class, but that is false. Each character has their own separate level for each class. Now, whilst not as bad as it seemed at first, I still don't like it. It makes some sense that each character starts from the scratch in each new class, however, they should keep some base stats like HP and leveling the class should be more about unlocking new skills and passive abilities for it. It is really fun leveling up a bunch of different classes on each character and switching between them depending on the challenge ahead, however in the demo if you wish to experiment with different classes, you will have to grind a bit to level the new one to a useable level. It does however atleast offer some XP boosting items to lessen the pain a bit.

Still, the most glaring issue I see so far is the painful grind. The new classes starting from scratch is one factor contributing to this, making you feel weaker as you experiment with class combination (especially if you change the wrong character's class by mistake and don't remember who had which one, like what happened to me a lot). There's also no heal on level up, meaning you will frequently find yourself way below max HP simply because you leveled up too much. Being able to atleast keep the same amount of percentage of current HP would be nice. Money is also very scarce, you have a problem to equip more than one character.

Now, the game so far shows care put into it, but where it succeeds is mostly in the superficial details. It needs a lot of work before it becomes anywhere close to the classics it tries to emulate. There's promise there, but too many issues that spoil it so far. However, it seems to be on the right track to become something great.