Legrand Legacy: Tale of the Fatebounds Reviews
A game that is nearly the sucessor of Final Fantasy serie, a great RPG that will make you stay hours playing it.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Legrand Legacy offers enough fun to be worth your time, but the writing is mediocre.
More importantly, each character has left a lasting impression on me and the growth that they experienced during the story makes the game feel even closer to the timeless stories of early RPGs. Legrand Legacy: Tale of the Fatebounds expertly brings the PlayStation era RPGs to 2018 with an attention to detail that brings the genre to modern consoles and satisfies that nostalgic itch.
Legrand Legacy: Tale of the Fatebounds is an enjoyable JRPG which brings back features that are difficult to find in modern games, such as a turn-based combat system enriched by action and tactical elements, mini-games and more. Sadly, SEMISOFT didn't bring anything truly new to the table and, as such, fails in being more than just a well-crafted tribute to the golden era of JRPGs.
If the final product doesn't hold together, then the key components are irrelevant.
Quality “old schooled” RPGs are becoming fewer and farther between as the more open world and “immersive” styles take over. Semisoft’s kickstarted Legrand Legacy: Tale of the Fatebound is a nod to that previous level of quality which should make fans of the late PS2 / early PS3 era feel right at home alongside those of Mistwalker’s Lost Odyssey.
Nothing Legrand Legacy: Tale of the Fatebounds does is particularly revolutionary, and I'm not sure quite what merited it "Most promising game"- perhaps simply because it's a Kickstarter title that isn't complete garbage. However, the thing that kept me playing was not the combat, soundtrack or the exploration elements; it was the story. I wanted to know what will happen next, to Finn, Aria and every other character you meet; through the dialogue alone you get a certain impression of each unique personality; Finn the newly-released, albeit blindingly subservient and confused, slave, partnering with a rather snobbish noblewoman and a studious and reserved Norn; each significant personality is quite memorable, and that alone is what has kept this game on my "things to play" list. Eventually- the list is already rather long.
I love that Legrand Legacy challenges itself to be something a little bit different while also reaching for a long-lost emotional connection to the games that it loved.
It's a shame, because the bones of a great game are there. They're just too bogged down in a shaky delivery to be enjoyed in the manner that they deserve.
Fans of JRPGs, classic and modern, would be doing themselves a disservice in passing on this title. It has a few noticeable quirks and stumbles, but Legrand Legacy is an excellent way to kick off one of my favorite gaming genres in 2018.
Legrand Legacy is a strange proposition: it’s a love letter to JRPGs, produced by a small indie team with AAA ambitions but a small budget, capable of providing over two dozen hours of classic gameplay brought down by some rough edges and bland writing, all priced at what you’d expect for a AA game.
An engaging JRPG with many new concepts, albeit a bit rough around the edges
Fans of difficult RPGs will enjoy Legrand, but with so many tactics required for normal battles, rigging encounters in your favour or stockpiling items, any player might feel like the game was against them. Against other “difficult” games like Dark Souls that allowed skill to prevail over stats, Legrand feels too narrowed into numbers or the single path allowed for victory.
We had some great expectations for this title, but sadly Legrand Legacy wasn't quite able to live up to them. We strongly suggest to download the free demo on Steam before buying this title, to see for yourself what you're going into.
Review in Italian | Read full review
There is so much about this game that left me feeling that it was close to being the love letter to old school RPGs that it aspired to be. However, it manages to come up just short with its best features while going way overboard with its worst. LeGrand Legacy will provide you with about 30 or so hours of gameplay, but you can stretch it out to 40 if you care to comb through limitless walls of text to find the deepest details of the history of LeGrand. There is a respectable amount of content here that will only cost you about $20 USD, but unfortunately, I simply can’t recommend the Switch version at this time.
Legrand Legacy is a pretty but otherwise generic RPG. It's beautifully hand-drawn world gets lost beneath mountains of dialogue and a plot so weighed down by tropes that it barely stays afloat. It's a passable to good title, but none of its elements come together to create anything new, exciting, inspiring, or terribly memorable.
Legrand Legacy: Tale of the Fatebounds spends a little too much time reminiscing over the past than looking forwards and carving out its own journey, and as a result, it doesn't really bring anything new to the table at which its inspirations sit. Still, while its random QTEs do make battles more of a game of chance than they need to be, there's enough heft to the story, the characters, and the beauty of its setting to help save it from disappearing into obscurity. With a build that runs well on Nintendo Switch, this is still a worthy adventure for '90s JRPG fans.
Legrand Legacy is, in the end, a very playable JRPG. Sadly it's also one of marginal appeal, even to those who grew up playing old JRPGs back in the 32-bit era.
Legrand Legacy: Tale of the Fatebounds is a perfectly good, functional flashback to an earlier time in JRPGs. Aesthetically it is really pleasing, the combat is a nice mix of turn-based while requiring you to stay engaged with it instead of just mashing through menu items and while early on the narrative looked like it was going to travel some well-worn, overly familiar tropes, the characters and world are more interesting than they might initially appear.
If Legrand Legacy was on the original PlayStation, it would have a small cult following but in this day and age, you'd expect much more originality from a retro-style RPG.