JRPG fans are making their disappointment known with regard to the sorry state that the emulated version of The Legend of Dragoon has launched in.
The emulated version of The Legend of Dragoon launched earlier this week on PS4 and PS5 via the PS Plus Premium Classics section of the PS Plus library and has been plagued with issues since it dropped. Reports of the plethora of technical issues present in The Legend of Dragoon has been appearing in various forums over the past few days, but the feeling of discontent is only becoming more and more palpable among retro JRPG fans looking to revisit the game on Sony’s current gen console.
The original version of the title launched for the PS1 in Japan back in December 1999, with the game launching in Europe two years later in 2001. Upon its release, it never quite lived up the Final Fantasy series, which was considered The Legend of Dragoon’s main competition at the turn of the millennium. It certainly never took off in the west in the way that Final Fantasy did. With that said, the game has become something of a cult classic in the years since, carving out its own niche following and so there were a number of gamers excited to hear that Sony was reviving the title for its current and previous generation consoles.
The most prominent issue that has been causing frustration for The Legend of Dragoon players, is frequent instances of softlock occurring following the game’s battle sequences. For those out of the loop, softlock is the name given to a situation where a game remains in a playable state, but progressing further or past a certain point is impossible for a variety of reasons. Often, soflock is caused by the game autosaving at an awkward point where the player character has very little health or ammo left and has to take on a challenging adversary who keeps repeatedly killing them due to their vulnerable state.
As frustrating as inconvenient autosave points can be, they don’t hold a candle to games which softlock through no fault of the player’s. Such is the case in this new version of The Legend of Dragoon. At a certain point in the game, the player is encouraged to make use of a character’s Dragoon form during battles. However, in this new version, upon repeated use of the Dragoon form attack, the battle will lock up. The background music will continue to play and the various character’s idle animations will continue to play, but no controller inputs will be recognized due to the onscreen command menu disappearing following the use of the Dragoon form attack.
Beyond this game-breaking issue, players have also reported problems with the game’s audio desynchronizing and visual flickering and clipping issues. Hopefully there is a patch on the way to resolve all of these issues as this is a title that is beloved by certain corners of the PlayStation community and to see the updated version launch in this state is rather sad.
The Legend of Dragoon is out now via the PS Plus Premium Classics on the PlayStation Store.
Source: Push Square
