Collection essentials #508: Tales of Legendia (PS2)

Even more Tales, huh? Yeah, and this isn’t even the last one. In an incredibly prolific stretch, within just three years and one month, Namco released FIVE completely new Tales games. Legendia released just eight months after the previous game, Rebirth. The development schedules for these games largely overlapped, and Namco was big enough that they were able to have slightly different teams working on each one. For Legendia in particular, some members of their fighting game division that made hits like Tekken and SoulCalibur were dedicated to Legendia. It’s really impressive that all five of these games in this stretch were all quite good.

Legendia’s story feels pretty familiar. You play as Senel Coolidge, who is very protective of his sister Shirley. And of course, Shirley is viewed by other groups as some sort of “chosen one” and keeps getting kidnapped, giving Senel the drive to pursue her along with the friends he makes along the way. The world of Legendia is largely covered in water, with two main groups of people who are surface-dwelling and underwater-dwelling, respectively. And surprise surprise, there are tensions between these people groups. If you’ve played other Tales games or even just read recent blog entries about them, that probably sounds really familiar.

While the story technically doesn’t feel too original, Legendia is notable for its strong cast of characters as many Tales games are. You’ve got some very amusing personalities in this game, such as the peppy treasure hunter Norma who nicknames other party members and gets on their nerves. There’s Moses, a colorful leader of a group of mountain bandits, and he frequently and amusingly clashes with Jay (the intellectual of the group), who can’t stand him. For the first time in an English localization of a Tales game, the skits are now fully voiced, which helps bring them to life a little bit better. The game also features an extensive epilogue after defeating the final boss which focuses on character-specific storylines to help flesh them out even more.

The game’s soundtrack is pretty strong, with pieces performed by the New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra. There is extensive use of a stringed instrument (violin I think) in many of the game’s tracks in a style that’s unlike I’ve seen in any other RPG, and I dig it.

Gameplay-wise, Legendia is a little unusual because the graphics are 100% in 3D other than character portraits, yet the game’s battles take place in a 2D gameplay style, from a side view and only the ability to move left or right. Gameplay is frantic and fun as it usually is with Tales games, though Legendia does often feel a little too much on the easy side. I actually changed the difficulty to “Hard” for most of the game because otherwise there wouldn’t have been much challenge at all.

There is a real obvious, perplexing flaw with Tales of Legendia. That is, bafflingly, there is no way to play co-op multiplayer at all. You’re able to freely choose which characters are in your party, including who you play as…but as for letting friends control the other three characters present in battle, that was completely omitted. This is incredibly strange since every game in the series since Destiny years earlier had this capability. There’s no rhyme, reason or explanation, it’s just a feature that really should be there and simply is not.

Legendia was a fairly late PS2 game, arriving on American store shelves in early 2006. That was a very welcome site, as we had missed out on Tales of Rebirth and many fans like me had felt like we deserved more English Tales after the success of Symphonia. I got it soon after it came out, and I don’t think I played it right away but I know I played it before too long while still in my later teen years. Unfortunately I don’t have a whole lot else to say about the game, as it’s been very many years since the only time I played through it. The game to this day has not seen a proper rerelease, which is a little unfortunate, but at least the game’s price on the secondhand market has always been quite reasonable. Being one of the classic Tales from the series’ most prolific era, it definitely deserves a spot on my essentials list.