The Legend of Dragoon - Research, Analysis & Opinions

SPOILER WARNING!!! If you haven't played this classic PS1 title but you know you're in the mood for an overdramatical, trope-filled J-RPG with a slow battle system, scroll down at your own risk.



I highly recommend that any TLoD fan check out the videos of YouTuber Ongansan. He has uploaded fascinating videos showing unused content, version differences, demo contents etc. I'll probably highlight some of these videos along the way.

The plan with this thread is for me to share my observations as I play through the European, American and Japanese versions of this epic game.

Feel free to share your thoughts about- and experiences with The Legend of Dragoon.

I need to replay this. The thing I most remember is how Rose's Death Dimension attack basically sucks people into her vagina.

One of the best games on the PS1. My top lists usually went Xenogears , followed by LoD and then what ever after that lol (Dont worry FF7 is in there somewhere )

One of my favorite memories of this game has to do with the Boss fight with Kongol.

My first time playing through LoD I'm not sure if I was under leveled or if Kongol was just legit super strong (lore wise he absolutely was at least lol). Anyway the fight starts and his first hit on me takes off soooooo much HP.


Up to that point in my life playing other RPG's and games I had become conditioned to think boss fights like this were ones you were meant to lose lore wise. Like you "lose" but you don't game over it just goes to a cut scene , queue deus ex machina we all get away.

So I half assed it and let him wipe my team. My heart sunk so much when I got the game over screen and it clicked the game completely expected me to legitimately beat him on my own.


Finally beating him felt so good though. LoD had some really tough fights lol.

My first save file actually is 100% stuck and might as well be considered "soft locked" due to how hard this game can be lol. I forgot which boss it was, I suspect one to do with ghosts though that i started. I had no more potions in the (limited) inventory and the save point is locked past a no return portion of the game


edit:

It was this fucker right here who soft locked my first play through lol

http://legendofdragoon.wikia.com/wiki/Polter_Armor

Interslicery said:

The thing I most remember is how Rose's Death Dimension attack basically sucks people into her vagina.

Click to expand...

The attack you are thinking about is Demon's Gate. It is one of the game's two most embarrassing special attacks.

Demon's Gate starts out with Rose spreading her legs and then black stuff falls right between her legs. Because of the camera work it looks like Rose just took a shit. o___O

Ongansan shows that in the Japanese version, the black stuff is red and is supposedly Rose's blood. ...So depending on the version, the player will either think that they are seeing Rose take a shit or drop menstrual blood on the ground

The speculation that Rose was meant to stab herself, causing her to bleed, when beginning the Demon's Gate spell makes sense but I haven't yet looked for official confirmation on this.


@Gabriel

The boss battles of TLoD are indeed very unforgiving if you don't level up and don't master the strongest Additions. In my first playthrough I sucked at performing Additions and I never did any grinding apart from what you get for following mostly a straight line. The game was tough as nails and I would often use up all my healing items and be desperately clinging to life during boss battles. If not for the Dragoon move Rose Storm, which boosts defense for three turns, I would not have cleared this game.

Because of that first, stressful playthrough I always take my time nowadays to overlevel. Levelling in TLoD takes a longass time but the increase in strength for each level is VERY noticeable.

I am now about to enter Hellena Prison near the end of disc 1, to save Albert, and I already have three Legend Casque equipped (the game's best helmet for boosting MAT and MDF, which cost 10000 gold each in the Lohan weapon shop and will usually be a way too expensive purchase for players at this point in the game). The rest of the game is going to be a cakewalk now even if I stop doing the extra grinding.

I remember this game. Have a copy. Never finished it. It came out during that post FF7 RGP boom, so many came out and there wasn't enough time to play them all to completion.

The thing I remember most (because of frustration), was the timing needed for the battles. It was kind of like the various Mario RPGs where you did more damage if you time a button press just right, only Legend of the Dragon require much more exact timing to pull it off.

I downloaded this on PSN, I have played precisely an hour of it. I've always heard good things, but that it was grindy.

"Demon's Gate" in the Japanese version.


ヘルズゲイト
"heruzugeito" or
Hell's Gate


@Abortedj
I only ever played a few hours of Super Mario RPG (the first one) and I found that the timed input was more difficult there because a lack of a clear indicator as to when a button should be pressed. TLoD shows you when to press a button.

I don't even remember why I never finished this game or how far I got in it, but I do remember genuinely enjoying the hell out of it.




X

Shademp said:

ヘルズゲート
"heruzugaato" or
Hell's Gate

Click to expand...

I'm sure it was just an accidental mistake, but ゲ=ge, ガ=ga. heruzugāto would be "Hell's Ghat", or the meaningless "Hell's Gart". :p

I really loved the hell out of this game. I was absolutely terrible at it though, for some reason Lavitz's/Albert's combos just lost me. Which meant I tried to use him as much as possible. Ah well.

My friend lended me Legend of Dragoon a few weeks ago! I had long ago seen some of the cutscenes in a FF/LoD AMV (that I downloaded from KaZaA! I think it was to Linkin Park's "In the End")

ANYWAY

I had been looking forward to playing this classic and. I. HATED. It. I didn't get past the first five hours. The central character has ZERO personality, the controls are clunky, the battle system drags, and it's sexist as hell. First of all, waify magic chick is okay if her personality is interesting (Aeris, Terra, River Tam) but in Dragoon I am expected to care about saving this girl with exactly zero knowledge of her. There's a flashback in the woods of like, the good times? She says NOTHING. She exists for HIM. Fuck that. Anyway, there are two bland as hell male characters in my party. We bust her out of prison, and then get into a fight with some guards. She isn't in the party.

"PUT HER IN MY PARTY IMMEDIATELY!" I screamed at the television. They were treating her like a prop! After the battle, she picks up a bow and is like "I can take care of myself!"

Oh, I think. They were saving it as a startling reveal? That's stupid but it was the 90s, I guess maybe Girl-Power was still kinda new?

One of the bland male characters (the lead) is like "A-buhhh?"

The other guy says something like no wonder they locked her up. Then he says this:

"She was alone in such a hell like place. If she was a regular woman, she wouldn't have been able to survive."

I turned the game off. Fuck this game.

JBedford128 said:

Shademp said:

ヘルズゲート
"heruzugaato" or
Hell's Gate

Click to expand...

I'm sure it was just an accidental mistake, but ゲ=ge, ガ=ga. heruzugāto would be "Hell's Ghat", or the meaningless "Hell's Gart". :p

Click to expand...

Thanks dude, I now realized as well that I had also transcribed the wrong symbol. Wrote ー when it was meant to be イ.

@Ite

If one is looking for a game with deeply written character, The Legend of Dragoon is certainly not the place to look. That much I can agree on. TLoD is extremely derivative of J-RPG tropes and as such one can expect the typical clichés of "bland" sword-wielding guy, the guy's childhood friend who will surely become his girlfriend, the guy's best friend and so on.

Without knowing the Japanese script however, I must remain cautious in criticizing the game's English script. Lavitz's does indeed have the line "If she was a regular woman, she wouldn't have been able to survive." but for now I'm mostly curious as to what a retranslation of the Japanese line would show. The game is filled with grammatical errors and typos and it seems reasonable that the game should also be filled with poor translations.

I feel that it would also require a deeper analysis of the game in order to deduce if the game as a whole is sexist, or if one or two characters simply happen to act in a way that conforms to stereotypical/old-fashioned views of men and women. Lavitz shows the most signs of being in this aforementioned way and it would make sense for a King's knight in a medieval-type fantasy setting to view women as weak creatures.

First of all we have the aforementioned line by Lavitz in Hellena Prison. Then in Lavitz's home, if you select a specific option, Lavitz will tell Dart to "act like a man". After this there is an exchange in the Dragon Nest forest, which I am sure will rub you in a bad way Ite.




However, even if it turns out that the Japanese script is "sexist" and we somehow figure out that the writers of this game were sexist as well, I will not be angry and damn this game. It will be just another flaw with (and behind) the game.

All fair points, but to me, that kind of stuff is fun-destroying. A woman's frailty?

Emulating The Legend of Dragoon is not as straightforward as emulating Final Fantasy VII. So far I have not managed to find or create an image file of the English PAL version that works on pSX. Like me, you'll likely be treated with this screen if you try to run the PAL TLoD on it:



I downloaded ISOs of the NTSC-US version and while it did function on pSX, there were still bugs like the game running about 10fps too fast (70fps when it should be 60fps) and music not playing when it should. I'm certain more bugs would have popped up had I continued playing the game in pSX.

This annoys me because I quite prefer taking snapshots in pSX. The snapshots will always be properly named according to version AND they are printed in the native resolution of whatever part of the game is being played.

Compare this to ePSXe, where the name of snapshots do not distinguish between versions. They are always named after the current graphics/video plugin being used, in my case "Pete's OpenGL2 Driver 2.9". The snapshot names are "PSOGL2_XXX", where XXX represents a number from 001 to 999. If your "snap" folder reaches its 999th snapshot, PSOGL2_999 in my case, no more new snapshots when pressing F8 will be registered.

I just lost about fifty snapshots because I didn't notice I had maxed out the number!


On the upside, being forced to use ePSXe, as it is the best emulator for when playing TLoD on the computer, has made me more accustomed to this emulator. There is still the issue that I can't switch discs live, which will become a problem starting on disc 3 (if I recall correctly) as one must switch discs when moving across certain borders on the overworld. Or maybe I'm remembering that wrong...

Anyway, thanks to the ability to save when the plot progresses from Disc 1 to Disc 2, I can at least start a playthrough with any disc although I can't change it live. It reminds me of how my PlayStation couldn't switch discs (without resetting the console that is) in Final Fantasy VIII. Maybe my PlayStation was too old?

In 2-3 weeks I will receive a Japanese copy of TLoD and I will create ISOs out of it. At some point, when I have more money, I will also buy the US version. I am not satisfied with downloading ISOs online, seeing also as I can't confirm if the files I downloaded have been modded in any way. Keep that in mind whenever I post about supposed differences between the PAL and US versions.

I think it sounds hilarious tbh. Though if it's hard then I cba. I remember trying to track this one down to emulate ages ago, but I dunno if it's just those screenshots but the pre-rendered backdrops look grainy as hell, or at least compared to FFVII. Thats usually what keeps me going on these kind of games if the environments look all lush and detailed.

Everybody can relax. I found the hipster!

Octo said:

I remember trying to track this one down to emulate ages ago, but I dunno if it's just those screenshots but the pre-rendered backdrops look grainy as hell, or at least compared to FFVII.

Click to expand...

Compared to the backgrounds of the PS1 Final Fantasy titles, the pre-rendered backgrounds of TLoD doesn't have as much color popping out and there is definitely some graininess going on. There is IMMENSE detail in the TLoD backgrounds, no doubt about that, it just can't always be appreciated to its full extent due to a low picture resolution and a lacking color contrast.

However, I still consider the backgrounds to be beautiful enough to pull a player in. The animation effects in particular, be they of flowing water, lava, light from a lamp etc are monstrous in their high quality and beats most of what you will see in the FF titles. If only the backgrounds had been of a slightly higher resolution and had there been more color contrast, TLoD would have totally beaten the pre-rendered backgrounds of the FF PS1 games.

Here is a dump of snapshots taken when you roam the pre-rendered fields. All but the last pic are from the first disc alone. There are a ton of backgrounds that you will only see when you play through the three remaining discs.

One might wonder what it is that makes some people deeply enjoy TLoD, despite its many flaws. As my previous post revealed, there is a lot of eye candy to revel in when you roam the pre-rendered backgrounds. It compensates greatly for the low-poly 3D models and the not-so-polished battle backgrounds. Another reason is the game's soundtrack, which does cover the typical range of J-RPG music emotions, but its greatest feat is making you feel pumped in battle even when said battles can be slow and monotonous. The game compensates additionally by having absolutely epic camera work and sound effects for the attacks and magic spells that become available with your Dragoon powers. You truly FEEL the energy when Dragoon Dart slashes his enemies or sends an explosive FLAAAAAAAME SHOT at them. Even when you eventually get annoyed with the length of these battle animations, you are still so happy that these animations exist at all.


If you're like me when I first played this game, the title got me curious from the moment I booted it up and I wondered what the game would have in store. After a few hours though I was getting anxious and I felt unsure as to whether I would bother with playing the whole game. Then the game throws this scene at you...and you're officially hooked. You are EXCITED to see what is to come.





I recommend anyone who is trying out this game to play up until and through the battle of Hoax. If you're still waiting for something to pull you into this J-RPG experience after that then you have no reason to play any further.

While on the overworld, if you hold down the Start button name tags will pop up above the locations in view (though sometimes even a name tag for a location not currently in view will still pop up on the screen). It's a superfluous but still fun-to-know-about feature. When you zoom out to show the current "World Board" you are roaming, this feature is still present. Zoom out further to show the entire known world of TLoD (referred to as the Continent of Endiness, but we never see how far to the east that this continent stretches) and only the location in your closest vicinity will have a nametag over it, regardless of what button you are holding down.




There is another "feature" of the overworld that is easily missed. I thank Ongansan for this discovery and for sharing it with everyone.



Sadly however, the list is only just that: A list. It doesn't actually grant quick-access to shops and hotels, contrary to what I initially assumed. Wouldn't it have been super-awesome if you could access the shops and hotels without having to enter the city?

Even so, kudos again to Ongansan. I never would have guessed that holding down the Square button reveals this list. The TLoD game manual is kind enough to mention the Name Tag feature you get from holding down Start, but it doesn't speak a word (at least not the PAL Manual) about what happens if you hold down Square when you're deciding on whether to enter an area or not.




TLoD lacks a proper "Beginner's Room" where every feature of the game is explained so it's not surprising that both the Hold Start and Hold Square functions of the overworld is never mentioned in-game. These useless features highlight to me yet more aspects of TLoD that could be improved. The Name Tags should have been linked to a Fast-Travel feature and the Location Facilities feature should have allowed quick-access to said facilities. Imagine how much better the game would be!

- At first I was proud of having discovered on my own that when a Crafty Thief (in the Home of Gigantos) steals 50 Gold from you, you will never get that money back even when you defeat the Crafty Thief and the game claims that you receive said money.


Then I took a look at the wiki page on the Crafty Thief to read about the glitch, and learned that in place of the 50G you instead receive a Bastard Sword! That explains why there were so many Long Swords in my inventory all of a sudden!

Yes, there is a version difference here!
US: Bastard Sword
PAL: Long Sword

It boosts my ego (and I'm not ashamed to admit it) that this version difference doesn't seem to be present in the Dragoon wiki.

In the PAL version, the Battle Spoils menu doesn't actually show that you receive a Long Sword, ergo why I had no idea that I was piling up Long Swords. I don't know if the same is true for the US version. Hmm, makes me wonder what would happen if you already have a full Equipment Inventory, and then receive the Bastard/Long Sword this way... But that's for an experiment in the far, far future.



- When I began this playthrough I avoided the TLoD wiki like the plague because I didn't want it to infringe on my feeling of exploration and surprise. When the surprises piled up in the form of unexpected item drops from enemies, I eventually caved in and I now look up the drops of every new monster encounter. Many enemies have drops with a 2% or 1% chance (some pages contradict themselves here and I have found no source for this percentage number), usually giving the player some weapon, armor or accessory earlier than they otherwise would have. To grind for these items plays more on the player's obsessiveness, rather than the item being so awesome and powerful that you absolutely HAVE to get it early. If you know beforehand about these rare drops and want an excuse to grind in one place or another, you might actually appreciate the added incentive for grinding.

NOTE: When using the Dragoon wiki, be aware that many pages are incomplete. For example, the armor and accessories lists like to omit that said items are available as drops by enemies, listing only shops and treasure chests instead. A different, specific example is that in the Weapons list, it is not mentioned that Haschel's Beast Fang can be found inside the Black Castle of Kazas, but if you click to read the Beast Fang page you will find this information.

I was led astray at first, believing that the armor "Energy Girdle" was an item you could ONLY get as a rare drop in the Home of Giganto(s), so I spent four hours grinding for that effin' armor. -___- Then it turns out that you get it later on disc 3. I don't really regret having done this grinding though, as it's pretty cool to have this great armor for Haschel midway through disc 2 instead of one disc later.




All this adds to one clear conclusion in my head: TLoD would have benefitted greatly if it had a Bestiary accessible via the menu! Most players will go through the game, never having any idea about these (and other) rare item drops because they are so frickin' unlikely to be triggered. The only reasonable way to know about them all is to use a guide. BUT if the game had its own bestiary that told you about an enemy's item drops and drop rates, as soon as said enemy was added to the bestiary, then that would be a fair deal for the player!

EDIT: I misremembered. It is called "Shirley's Shrine" or "Shrine of Shirley" in TLoD. Not Shirley's Temple.

The feeling of joy when you FINALLY get that Bemusing Arrow, after countless hours of trying! This 2% drop rate is absolutely ridiculous. In a re-release of this game they should totally up the drop rate to at least 4%.


A version difference revealed in the Dragoon wiki is that in the Japanese version, enemies have more HP and grant less Gold after battle. With some of the "Unique Monsters" the difference in battle spoils is staggering. Yellow Bird grants 300 Gold in US & PAL but only 100 Gold in JP. So in the Japanese version you are definitely going to struggle a lot more if you want to afford all the special Accessories in the Bale shops and it is WAY less reasonable for you to farm gold here and get the total of 10000 Gold necessary to buy the game-breaking Legend Casque(s). Equally, because gold spoils are so much smaller in the JP version, even hours of grinding for those 2% drop rate items may not be enough for you to accumulate enough gold to buy Legend Casques (or the equally expensive, greatly useful accessories like Phantom Shield or Ultimate Wargod).

I expect that when I play the JP version, battles will be even more annoying because the higher HP of enemies only increases the length of battles but not the actual difficulty in any engaging way.

In my heavy grinding and research, I keep making observations that I may or may not have made in my previous playthroughs. Seeing as before my current TLoD binge I last played this game back in 2009, it wouldn't surprise me if I'm rediscovering some facts due to poor memory.


- Ladies can't equip the accessory "Bandit's Ring" which increases the wearer's SPEED by 20 points. While the motivation might be that it would be "unfitting" for a lady to wear the ring of a bandit, another possibility is that because the ladies already have such great SPD stats, making it possible to boost their speed would be overkill. From slowest to fastest, these are the agility stats of all the characters:

30 - Kongol
40 - Lavitz/Albert
50 - Dart
55 - Rose
60 - Haschel
65 - Shana/Miranda
70 - Meru

As you can see, the slowest woman is trumped by the fastest man, but beyond that women rule here in the agility department.


- The Dragoon who uses the SPECIAL icon to transform receives a boost in their Magical Attack (MAT) strength! Reminder: The SPECIAL icon is the yin-yang symbol that appears when all three characters have full SP bars.


Everybody gets MAG ATK boosts but for some reason I have only seen Dart, Rose and Kongol receive boosts to the maximum strength of their physical Dragoon attacks as well. Shana, Albert and Haschel showed no such increase in ATK strength. Because I have not yet received Meru's Dragoon Spirit, I can't perform these stat tests with her yet.

The boost in strength can be quite formidable. For example when fighting the Magician Bogeys of the Phantom Ship, Dragoon Dart's "Red-Eyed Dragon" spell caused 912 DMG when it was he who used the yin-yang icon, thus killing all the Magician Bogeys in one hit! When he transformed normally or if somebody else had pressed SPECIAL, the damage was merely 609, leaving all three Magician Bogeys bruised but alive.

Another bonus from using the yin-yang symbol is that the character who used it will by default perform their maximum strength Dragoon attack, thus not requiring the five timed-input button presses to trigger a full strength physical attack. This bonus is obvious to anyone who has ever played the game though. However you may easily fail to spot the aforementioned stat boosts that I never discovered before today.



- Speaking of the Magician Bogey foe, I thank the wiki for telling me that this enemy has a 2% chance of dropping a Magical Hat which is an item that you won't be seeing again until Disc 4. This hat is second to Legend Casque in terms of magical stat boosts. In particular if you don't have Legend Casques, the Magical Hat is worth getting so you can feel somewhat overpowered in MAG ATK and MAG DEF. The 50% increase in MP also ain't too bad of a bonus!

There's a bigger catch though. The Magician Bogey foe only appears in TWO one-time battles on the Phantom Ship. After that you won't be seeing it again!

First battle formation has you fight 1x Magician Bogey and 2x Skeletons.
Second battle formation has you fight 3x Magician Bogeys.

The second battle formation is obviously the one where you might easiest acquire at least one Magical Hat. The probability of receiving the hat in this battle is roughly 6%! (No, not EXACTLY, 6% because probability calculations are a little more complicated than that...I think.) By The Legend of Dragoon standards, this is a generous drop rate!

If you're crazy like me though, you will want to receive two Magical Hats and not just the one. That is why I kept resetting the game and redoing the first battle formation until I finally got a Magical Hat! With the 1/50 chance of getting the hat, the game was kind to me and delivered the hat after only about 30 tries! I then saved the game so I could move forward by triggering the second battle formation against the Magician Bogeys.

With the second battle, not too many restarts should be expected due to the roughly 6% chance of at least one of the three Magician Bogeys dropping a Magical Hat. A 3/50 chance is pretty nice. Now you may wonder why I keep resetting the whole game and not using save states? Well, so far my research indicates that the RNG of TLoD likes to decide on certain values very early. For example, after a battle is over it is already decided what the next battle formation will be! It doesn't matter how long you wait, how many times you enter and leave the menu, where you walk, where you run, the game has already decided what the battle formation will be AND whether or not you'll get any item drops.

Due to the game's tendency of deciding these values early, making frame-manipulation via save states less useful than in games like say FFVII, you might as well reset the whole game.

I'm needlessly obsessive and going for two Magical Hat over the course of these two battle formations is pretty overkill. But not nearly as overkill if you tried to get two or three Magical Hats at once from the battle against three Magician Bogeys! To get two hats at once, your chances are 1/2500, or 0.04%! To get three hats at once...your chances are 1/125000 or 0,0008%!
Are you in the mood to reset your game thousands of time just to get even two Magical Hats from a single battle? I HOPE NOT!

Do correct me if I'm wrong about the math here. Probabilities are highly confusing.

- Thousands of snapshots and days worth of hours later, I am finally on Disc 3 of The Legend of Dragoon. My binge-playing is gonna cease for at least this weekend since I'll be away. Oh yeah, I've taken snapshots of *almost* all of the game field script on Disc 2. Why? Because I can and because it's a cool reference to have for later.

Over the course of Disc 1 and Disc 2 I have also accumulated 105 save files over 7 memory cards, so that I may have quick-access both to scenes and to a huge variety of character level progressions.


- The Dragoon wiki contains a really neat high-resolution map of Endiness. Some locations on the map are not even named in-game as far as I'm aware. The names on the map matches those of what is considered to be the official localization of TLoD.

I bring this up because Disc 2 really messed up with the names. The worst Disc 1 did was when NPCs on three-to-four occasions spelled "Volcano Villude" as "Volcano Vilude". One NPC message misspelled Lavitz's name as "Lavtiz" even.


So what mistakes/inconsistencies were made on Disc 2? In the list below, "correct"/official name to the left, mistaken/alternate/inconsistent translation to the right.


Fletz -> Frettz. The error only appeared once.

Valley of Corrupted Gravity -> Valley of Collapsing Gravity. This alternate translation is probably reasonable but it is inconsistent with the name that keeps being used elsewhere in the game.

Fueno -> Feuno. NPCs use the name "Feuno" a total of SEVEN TIMES on disc 2! It may actually be so that Feuno is written more often than Fueno. I prefer "Fueno" however because it rolls off the tongue more naturally, it is the name used in various menus and it is used in the official English worldmap provided earlier in this post.

Illisa Bay -> Elisa Bay. The worldmap will read "Illisa Bay" but when you enter the menu, it reads "Elisa Bay". The NPCs use the name "Illisa Bay" all the time, with ONE exception... The King of Tiberoa, King Zior, writes it as Elisa Bay.

Lidiera - Ridiera. The same NPC in Fueno says "Ridiera" twice.

Apart from these errors we have countless misspellings, misuse of commas, capitalization, punctuation, apostrophes and so on. Disc 1 was full of these type of errors as well.


During Disc 2, the port city of Furni is mentioned half a dozen times. When you set foot on it right at the very start of Disc 3, we even see Albert using the correct name. So... What do you think the menu calls the city?


*applauds The Legend of Dragoon*

- When Meru uses SPECIAL (the yin-yang symbol) she only gains a boost to her Mag Atk, not to her physical Atk. Thusly it is only Dart, Rose and Kongol who receive a boost to their physical Dragoon Attack.

- Escaped from battle for the first time when somebody was in Dragoon form. All they did was just glide backwards. XD It looks really silly!

- It came to my attention that I was using an old version of ePSXe. I was using the 1.7.0 version, but in February 2016 version 2.0 was released.

Curious to check this version out I downloaded it. I encountered an error however that made me accidentally erase six hours worth of intense grinding in TLoD. >___> When you switch between playing versions, in this case 1.7 and 2.0, the emulator will use the memory cards attached to the previous version you played, unless you manually change the memory cards attached to the emulator. This led me to believe that I had erased my PAL saves on ePSXe 1.7.0, when in fact 1.7.0 was using the memory cards from the 2.0 folder. I realized this too late however and I had already deleted the PAL save that I assumed to have been deleted by ePSXe itself.

Needless to say, I am not happy right now.


- In 1.7.0 you can't switch discs live, unless you employ some really complicated tricks. Fortunately I learned that TLoD doesn't require you to switch discs live even if, say, you want to return to Lohan when you are on Disc 3 or Disc 4. The world map exists ON ALL FOUR DISCS, so all you have to do is save your game on the world map, exit the game, load the disc that contains the areas of interest (Lohan for example) and load your save from there.

I have heard that the disc-swap bug is not present in earlier and later versions of ePSXe however, which was one reason behind me deciding to download the 2.0 version.


- Disc 1 of TLoD contains an FMV that plays before you get to the "New Game - Continue - Options" menu. A version difference I have observed here is that in the US version, you can only skip this FMV by pressing Start. In PAL, both the Circle button and the Start button can be used to skip the FMV.

I now have the Japanese version of The Legend of Dragoon in my hands! *fanfare*

- The cover of the manual shows neat (albeit slightly confusing for the eyes) concept art depicting a Dark Dragon eating through a Virage. Here is my scan of the front and back of the JP manual.

I reckon this concept art came first and later the scene was realized in the Disc 2 FMV that shows the end of the Dragon Campaign.

The JP manual is kind enough to actually mention the "Hold Square to show Facilities" function when you are deciding on whether to enter an area or not.

The manual's snapshots of the game's menu shows the pre-release version of Dart's portrait. This artwork is also used for the Japanese TLoD demo. Ongansan brings this up both in his Beta Screenshots video and in his recording of the JP demo.


- Using the software jPSXdec I have ripped all the FMVs from all three versions of TLoD. It is the same program I use to rip FFVII FMVs. In addition you can use jPSXdec to listen to- and rip the Dragoon Magic sound clips. Thanks to this program I have now spoiled myself with all the Japanese TLoD FMVs. Yes, I could have looked them up on YouTube, but I wanted to feel that sense of exploration you get from ripping the files yourself and then viewing the videos on your computer.

The TLoD movies of the JP and US versions all contain the same number of frames so it appears that nothing was cut or added between releases. Obviously the voice acting is different. Upon first viewing, it appears that only the pre-menu montage FMV of Disc 1 was changed from JP -> US. At some point I will compare every frame of these FMVs to make 100% sure whether any effect or other detail in the images were changed between versions.

Using VirtualDub I was able to rip an image sequence of all 1359 frames of the pre-menu montage FMV, known in the game files as "DEMOH". Like most TLoD FMVs in the JP and US game, the video has a resolution of 320x192, and so each frame has that size in my image sequence.


Image dump and analysis in the spoiler tag below.


That's enough of the image dump. How about viewing the two FMVs side-by-side in video format?


Though it is the Japanese audio that's playing, the JP and US audio here are so identical that you won't hear anything odd if both play at the same time. All that will happen is that the volume is amplified because the two tracks match so well.

To end this post I can mention that the DEMOH video can only be skipped in the JP and US version by pressing Start. It was only for the PAL release that the option to press the Circle button to cancel the FMV was added.