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Sacred Reviews: Legionwood - Tale of the Two Swords

Introduction

I suppose it's a bit odd to come back and review a game months after beating it, but this game has been loitering around in the back of my mind for sometime now. I'll be upfront in admitting that I played this game at the request of the youtuber Terror Chan. So, I may have not had the best motivation for diving into this game in the first place, but even so I found this game to be a rather mixed affair of good ideas and wasted potential.

Story

The story starts out well enough with two fish out of water protagonists getting dragged into an effort to stop a dark plot. Of course, this wouldn't be your standard RPG if you didn't fail to stop that plot and get blamed for being the ones behind it. This is all well and good and I found the early parts of the game to be relatively engaging, but as things went on the game began to feel like it was dragging it's feet in order to shove as many epic RPG cliches as possible into a single game. And what was worse is all of those cliches about powerful warriors being sent to the future, or reincarnated gods and lovers is that it was all build up for an ending that didn't happen.

While the forces of good ultimately reached the final boss and took him on. They were unable to kill him and simply sealed him away in another dimension. This in turn just feels like a complete non-ending in my opinion. What was the point of getting a weapon capable of killing the final boss if we were simply going to seal him away? It's not like the developer was under any sort of obligation to utilize the same boss in the sequel. Heck, you probably had a natural villain you could have brought back in the form of the final boss's second in command.

Gameplay

On the gameplay side of things the game does better, but it still suffers from a lot of issues in my opinion. One of the more obvious problems is that only the character's being used in combat get any experience. This in turn forces the player to occasionally switch party members in order to keep them all around the same level or to ignore certain party members entirely. And if you take the game's advice and keep all of the playable cast around the same level then your basically tacking on several hours of grinding onto this game. And, in my opinion this makes the decision to not give character's being used in combat experience a rather ham-fisted attempt to pad out the game. A game that is already in excess of a dozen hours in length even if you don't switch out party members.

I'll also admit to finding a lot of the bosses in this game to be rather easy. I will admit that a few of them proved a temporary challenge, but for the most part I could easily cleave through them with a party comprised entirely of hard-hitting, glass cannons. I pretty much disparaged magical and physical defense in favor of high strength or intelligence depending on whether the character was going to spam melee attacks or magical attacks. In fact, this ability to breeze through the game for the most part with little regard to strategy or technique was rather disappointing since the whole goal of the game was to make the player focus on customizing their party to fit the situation.

Graphics & Sound

I will admit that I did enjoy the monster designs in this game. So, at least the game has a sold visual presentation going for it. Though, I'll admit my memory of the soundtrack is pretty fuzzy at this point.

Conclusion

Legionwood: Tale of the Two Swords had a some good ideas going for it, but the execution just feels sloppy in my opinion. The story just starts to drag after a while and I found it be a rather boring and tedious chore to get to the end. And while the idea of distributing the character's stat points was a good idea. The game doesn't do enough in my opinion to make the player think strategically about how to customize their various party members. I suppose, it's an old RPG cliche to grind until you can over-power your enemy, but is a game that is meant to make you think strategically about how to build your character's meant to reward such a simple strategy?

Maybe I'm being a bit to harsh on this game, but I found it to be one of the most boring games I ever played through. And, I've slogged through quite a few horrible games over the years.