Legrand Legacy: Tale of the Fatebounds Reviews
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
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.
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.
Fans of the JRPG genre are the target audience here, especially those who have an appreciation for titles from a couple of generations back. The good news is, this is a genre that generally ages rather well, and Legrand Legacy: Tale of the Fatebounds is a welcome throwback to that era. Still, a bit more effort put into developing the characters and steering away from some of the overly familiar tropes of the genre would have gone a long ways toward making Legrand Legacy a more memorable overall experience. It is fun while you play it, but falls short of the unforgettable games of the past it tries to emulate.
Legrand Legacy is a JRPG developed outside of Japan but with full respect for the genre, with many elements that will be familiar to those of us who live the 32-bit generation, and that despite having a plot riddled with cliches, will know how to maintain interest with several script twists and a pretty solid character build. That and a classic playable system but with certain characteristics that refresh it, and several extras to take into account. Too bad it only came to us in English, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese, but if language isn't an issue and we like the genre, the game deserves a good shot.
Review in Spanish | Read full review