Legionwood: Tale of the Two Swords is probably what you'd end up with if you took someone's first serious RPG Maker project, polished it up and then stretched it out to the length of a shorter Final Fantasy game. The game is certainly an archievement and a solid template to build on. But is it worth playing? Well, yes, but only if you either really like traditional JRPGs or you've never experienced one and want to see what it's all about.


Presentation

The game seems to use mostly RTP, the mapping is solid in a lot of cases and does show a lot of effort in certain places. By far the best mapping is seen with the various towns and cities, each feels distinct from one another and they are full of detail. The capital city of the Kingdom of Charn in particular deserves praise.

The one major exception when it comes to mapping is most of the dungeons (and probably even outdoor "combat areas" in general). Their layouts generally feel like they were created by a Dungeon Generator, then changed slightly and filled with random debris that blocked off certain passages. Now, I don't know if VX has a Dungeon Generator, I think it doesn't, but it doesn't change the fact that a lot of the dungeons and even outdoor combat areas feel too blocky and unnatural. Certain dungeons manage to make it work somehow, like the Mythril Mines, which look and feel pretty great and the layout works. The ship "dungeon" was also quite good. Others, however, are pretty bad in comparison.

The one major letdown are the Ascog Dungeons.

MINOR SPOILERS: Ascog Dungeons are located below the royal palace, and the main characters get thrown in. Even before that happens, the dungeons are hyped up beforehand as this terrible, very scary place, where both monsters and dangerous prisoners roam the corridors and the text based cutscene describing the party's brief stay there before they decide to break out certainly hypes you up to expect a lot more than what you get.END OF MINOR SPOILERS:

So, what do you get? A mostly empty series of very wide, bright corridors. And when a random encounter gets triggered, the monsters are pretty lame. It's also pretty small, probably because you are on a time limit there, which only further served to make it even more pointless. Considering that an early optional dungeon (sewers below the well in the hero's hometown) was very maze-like and featured limited visibility and darkness, one would think that the dungeons would atleast be the same.

The arbitrary roadblocks also grow a bit too annoying, as it becomes quite hard to tell where you are supposed to go with all the random rock and scrap piles blocking your way. Even treasure chests block your way and those can only be opened from one direction, so you better find the right path around the rubble.

Later in the game, you reach probably the pinnacle of annoyance. The dark, ruined castle you visit shortly after acquiring the ship. That's where you are likely to start wishing for linear corridors or atleast a better indication of where you are supposed to go. Combine this with a plethora of rock-pushing puzzles, unreachable areas that look like they could be reachable, but in fact are just part of the scenery and frequent random encounters and you will seriously start contemplating, if the game is worth it.

Another great annoyance concerning dungeons is a gimmick that shows up in the later part of the game and gets repeated more the closer you are to the end. Meaning, you need to backtrack from one side of the dungeon to the other to activate a switch that opens the way to another switch on the other side of the dungeon from your current location, so you need to backtrack again to activate the new switch to open the way to another switch you need to backtrack across the whole map to etc. and all that until you get to the end of the dungeon.

It was probably seen as a good way to extend the dungeons and play time and maybe ensure the player isn't underlevelled, as you get into a lot more random encounters this way (unless you use Warding Glyph like you should). In practice, it's one of the most annoying things in the game and eventually devolves into the player likely just activating Warding Glyphs to turn off random encounters, then running back and forth, bored out of their mind.


Story

The story is alright, reminiscent of early Final Fantasy titles. There are a few issues. For one, a lot of the dialogue is simply a series of overlong exposition dumps, not helped by the fact that the developer added pauses in the text: That was probably there to make the dialogue seem more natural, but pretty annoying if you are a fast reader or you just want to skip ahead.

Two, there are a lot of potentially interesting plot threads that either go nowhere, aren't really explored or go the simplest way possible. If there ever was some semblance of shades of gray in the story, it won't be long until it disappears from the story altogether.

Three, the very worst part of it is the very start. It just doesn't really draw you in or provide any incentive to stick around for a good while.

Now, SPOILERS for the prologue of the game:

So, the main character and his sister (Lann and Liana by default) live together in a small village. There's also a shady masked guy planning evil stuff and the main character wakes up after having a nightmare. There's some kind of special holiday going on, so everything's all festive and the RPG siblings go to the market to buy some delicious Sweet Apples, because that's how they celebrate this every year it seems. Unfortunately, some nobles bought out all of the Sweet Apples in stock for their fancy celebration in the Capital City and apparently, peasants are welcome to join. The main character doesn't want to go at first, but his sister nags him until he changes his mind.

Our heroes arrive to the capital city after travelling through an ogre-infested cave that seems to be the only way through the mountains to the rest of the kingdom from their remote village and fighting the first boss. There, they discover that the celebration is in honor of the new peace treaty between the kingdom of Charn and the nearby nation of Treveille.

Unfortunately, the guards don't let Lann and his sister to attend the celebration, because there are already too many people there. They also meet
another man who can't attend the celebration: Ark, an important Trevellian general, who needs to be there, but the guards don't let him inside anyway. They are all sent to talk about it with the captain, who promises to let them in after they do him a favor and they all accept.

Presumably, after they are done with doing whatever the captain wants from them, the celebration would most likely be over or atleast all the delicious Sweet Apples they came for would already be eaten, but they don't seem to realize that. Ark in particular is also said to posess the unique ability to mind control people. For whatever reason, he doesn't seem to think of employing it on the guards so they let him pass (even though he show's he's capable of it later on).

Anyway, the thing that the Captain wants help with is that he suspects someone snuck inside the castle through the sewers and he doesn't want anyone else to know, because it could spark tensions between Charn and Treveille. The main character is immediately super-invested and together with his sister and Ark, they go through a long dungeon crawl through the sewers and castle, one that definitely goes on longer than it probably should.

Eventually, they discover the masked man from the intro, and this leads to one of the most hilarious lines in the game:


Do you really need to ask, Lann?

Anyway, Merces, greatest assassin in the world of Legionwood predictably wants to assassinate the king of Charn. Immediately after he does it, he leaves through the window and the main characters follow, pausing to stand on the parapet after Merces vanishes.

They don't think that it might be a bad idea to stay on a parapet that overlooks the celebration packed with people, especially Ark, who is a recognizable public figure from the enemy nation. Anyway, the heroes predictably get blamed for something they tried to stop, Ark gets declared a renegade by his countrymen and the two nations go to war. So the main characters go on a quest in order to clear their names and also stop the evil masked guy from completing his plan. It's afterwards when the story picks up and starts getting interesting, although it never really reaches the "great" category.

The character interactions are pretty nice. Even though none of them have much depth (except perhaps the main character, Ark and maybe Thyrra), they certainly have charm and personality. Except Zanthus, he seems to only be in the game to justify the horrible party-switching interface. Well, that and that probably-bugged mandatory Tetris minigame. The siblings refreshingly aren't of the "constantly bickering" variety, although as the game goes on, Liana becomes increasingly irrelevant until the very end.

End of SPOILERS

Gameplay

For the gameplay, Legionwood: Tale of Two Swords is a pretty oldschool JRPG. The battle system is a classic turn-based, sideview one. A large part of the charm of this game is experimenting with different ability combos and learning how to break the game and get the most overpowered combos or defeat bosses in unconventional ways.

For example, there is a spell that drains the SP (basically MP, used for skills) of the target. If you drain all the SP of a boss, they eventually start using a skill that restores a large portion of their SP (but costs them a turn). With a character that exclusively raised their Magic stat, they can keep using the Osmosis skill to effectively stunlock the boss, while the rest of the party can just whack the boss until he runs out of HP. Bosses also aren't immune to (vast majority of) status effects, they are merely resistant to them, so they either have a large chance to resist the status effect or they are affected by a weaker version. This encourages experimentation and ensures that Status inflicting skills don't become useless.

The bosses themselves also use tactics like this. For example, the latter bosses seemed to effectivelly need for your whole party to be equiped with status immunity gear, as their spammed attacks that stunned your whole party while dealing damage. Or instantly KO'd them outright if they weren't immune to it.

Eventually, the balance breaks down, once you realize what you works and what doesn't. There are many stats you can choose to increase at each level up and freely switch the point allocation out of combat. Yet eventually, you realize that the only ones that really matter are Attack, Defense, Magic and maybe HP, after you max out the first three (and there's too little AP to spread it among more stats than that). You discover that there's not really much reason for your physical fighters to do anything but use Pirouette (does great damage to all enemies, stuns them AND does it twice if you are Dual Wielding) or Double Strike (a rare example of a starting skill that is one of the strongest in the game).

You discover the Osmosis trick or one of the other ways to beat bosses and enemies easily. You learn Dual Wielding, which not only allows you to equip a second weapon to get more passive abilities from it and also more stats, it also allows you to attack twice, with SKILLS (called Techs) no less (WHY?), meaning that if your Pirouette doesn't stun someone the first time, they will most likely be stunned a second after.

Enemies also have elemental weaknesses, although this didn't seem to matter as much as it probably should. Most enemies also seem to be weak against light or atleast take neutral damage from it. A lot of the time, it's also pretty hard to tell what element would a particular monster be weak to.

For example, what is a centaur's elemental weakness? If you guessed Wind, you are correct. I don't know why, but that's how it is. Atleast the dungeons pretty much follow one element theme, so if you correctly guess the elemental weakness of one enemy type, chances are most everything in the dungeon will share it too.

There are also summons, acquired through gameplay, that give you a temporary fifth party member and earn XP on their own. But pretty much the only thing they are good for is as a HP sponge. Compared to how overpowered your party can get, they are useless.

The game starts pretty open ended, but after you reach the capital city, the game shatters those expectations and becomes pretty linear for a long time. This only changes after what seems to be the 3/4s of the game, when you gain access to a ship and thus can revisit all the old locations, plus new, optional ones for sidequests.

Yet despite your new vessel being ostensibly a ship, it's more of a boat, as you can only use it to traverse the shallow coastal waters. Perhaps the royal navy couldn't spare an actual ship, what with them being suddenly in war and all, though the queen-to-be should really have a better flagship than this. A lot of the time from that point onwards will be spent trying to navigate through shallow waters blocked by flotsam and reefs to get to your vague destination, with only an artsy map with no "YOU ARE HERE" sign to help you.


Conclusion

Legionwood: Tale of Two Swords is a fun game for those who wish for an oldschool JRPG. It includes a lot of frustration, but overall, it's certainly worth playing.