Its old, but I have been trying out The Legend of Dragoon on PSX. I typically drop turn based combat JRPGs pretty quickly because I find the combat boring and repetitive (and simply too often random battles), but so far The Legend of Dragoon has been respectful of my dislike of those.

Random battles are not obnoxiously too often, mostly because it happens in small areas that are between towns or story areas which have more scripted battles. Though I wish I could have zero random battles, this is a fine compromise.

The combat is enough to hold my interest with the QTE (shockingly) for bonus damage. Though since I am playing on an emulator, the timing is out of sync and I have to press the button a little earlier than the game shows. Regardless, this is a nice mechanic. Same for the button mash bonus damage on magic.

The story is quite interesting so far. I don’t believe I am too far into the story yet, as I just saved the town of Hoax. Pacing also doesn’t seem too bad. I don’t like grinding and I don’t feel like my character is morbidly underleveled, and I haven’t really been doing side quests or grinding yet.

My gripes with the game so far:

• No journal or text log - normally I don’t mind this. But sometimes I don’t play for a while and then I forget where I was supposed to go. Some games used to be pretty good with this by making every NPC have some dialogue that would hint at where you need to go next but I havent found this to be the case in this game.

• Random battles - as mentioned, I wish there were zero random battles. But I understand this game came out at like, peak random battles time, and it hasn’t interrupted me too much yet.

• Combat arenas - have good variety, but when you fight in the same area it is always the same arena. It would have been nice to have maybe two or three variants of arena per area, for some more variety.

• Combat Moves - I wish the game allowed me to use any combat move my character knows by pressing different button combos. For example, if there are two moves: XXX and XXOX, on the third attack I wish it would allow me to press either X to end with the first move or O to continue with the other move. Maybe the game does this and I just am not into the game far enough yet, but the UI makes it seem like this is not possible. It could give me more variety in not hearing Dart say “VOLCANO” (text you can hear) in the same way every single time.

• Camera distance - for whatever reason I really wish the characters could be bigger on my screen. The prerendered backgrounds look really good, but in some cutscenes the character models get close to the camera and they have pretty good looking texture detail. I wish the game was a bit more like Brightis in this regard, but I can understand why that is not the case. This is only a minor desire.

• Enemy Combat - I wish all the enemies would take their turns at the same time instead of one at a time, if they have consecutive turns. Since the end result would be the same as there doesnt appear to be a turn interrupt mechanic.

So far I like it though, and I do plan to continue playing.