A few years ago, FuRyu released The Alliance Alive HD Remastered for Switch—an upgraded port of a great RPG that was sadly missed by most due to its release on 3DS after most players had already switched to Switch. The Alliance Alive wasn’t the company’s first release on Nintendo’s old handheld, though; that honor went to The Legend of Legacy. This initial release debuted to mixed reception in 2015 (we gave it an 8/10 in our review), but apparently the Alliance Alive remaster did well enough to warrant giving its predecessor a second chance with The Legend of Legacy HD Remastered. While we’d still say this is the weaker of the two, FuRyu has done a great job of polishing up this overlooked 3DS dungeon crawler; it’s not a stellar example of the genre, but fans will certainly find a lot to love here.
Legend of Legacy doesn’t have much of a story, which might be a disappointment for many players. After choosing one of seven potential characters, you travel to the mysterious Isle of Avalon — a recently discovered landmass rumored to be home to a great, ancient treasure. Each of the seven has their own reasons for coming to Avalon, and as you explore its various dungeons, you’ll slowly uncover artifacts that reveal bits of lore detailing the civilization that once thrived there, the events that ultimately led to its downfall, and the unique way to which seven protagonists are related to him.
We’d love to see more plot than the relatively meager framework offered here—even titles in the Etrian Odyssey series have found ways to introduce fun and engaging narrative elements with their player-assembled teams—but the lore bits are still a cool way to tell a story, which somewhat reminds us of the way Chozo lore is handled in the Metroid Prime series.
The characters, however, are one-dimensional snippets of various archetypes you’ve seen in many other RPGs, and their relationship with each other and the overall story of Avalon feels superficial and random. The story here could use some work, but one good thing is that it mostly stays away from the gameplay.
Legend of Legacy follows a dungeon-crawling format reminiscent of something like the Etrian Odyssey franchise—there’s only one town, and you regularly return to it for supplies and upgrades in between diving into a nearby dungeon of your choice, and each attempt usually results in your party pushing a little deeper. Each dungeon has a unique theme and has set layouts, and much of the progression is focused on you mapping out each floor of each dungeon so that you can sell cards in town for big payouts. It’s a simple yet rewarding gameplay loop, as there always seems to be something new to do, whether you’re returning to town for fresh gear with your winnings or running back to the dungeon with a well-rounded team ready to take on its challenges.
Combat takes place in a typical turn-based format, but integrates an interesting and dynamic approach to group formation that gives it more of a tactical advantage. Party members stand in one of three rows, each providing different temporary buffs, such as increasing the character’s action speed or defense. You can program several formations in the pre-battle menu and then switch between them as needed during combat, a bit like Paradigm switching from Final Fantasy XIII. You can have everything in attack mode for a while, before moving your tankiest character forward to block the big attack, then switch your healer to the back on the next turn so they can patch everything up quickly. Most fights don’t depend on actively engaging this system too deeply, but there are enough tough encounters to keep you on your toes.
Adding more options to consider, there’s also a permanent elemental system that affects the types of actions you’ll choose in combat. In essence, the air around you is always charged with a mixture of four elements, and the one that is most strongly represented will give combat advantages to the actions and characters that correspond to it. Ideally, you should build a team ahead of time to take advantage of the most common elements in the dungeon you’re targeting, while still leaving yourself some options when the elemental balance changes. It’s a cool idea in concept, but we feel that too often it has resulted in us being forced into unique team setups and strategies, as choosing anything but optimal lineups can make fights unnecessarily difficult.
However, Legend of Legacy is incredibly forgiving in the way it handles health regeneration, which seems to make combat easier and harder in different ways. Your entire party is fully healed after each fight, and even if someone goes down in battle, you only need to cast a healing spell to bring them back — no need for a special revive skill or Phoenix Down. The only downside is that they lose more max health every time they get knocked out, and that can only be restored to a lot if you go back to town to sleep at the inn.
In many ways, this makes Legend of Legacy very easy, but it also gives the designers license to throw them out hard enemy gets in your way, leading to a very inconsistent difficulty curve. You’ll march through a dungeon, leveling any enemies that dare cross your path, only to enter another area to find that the boot is now on the other foot and you have to revive multiple party members several times in each fight. Then it can be frustrating when you’re making decent progress only to hit a wall that appears out of nowhere.
Character progression is managed in a very similar way to the SaGa series, meaning it is completely random and mostly out of the player’s control. There’s no such thing as experience or character levels here, instead your characters will occasionally receive permanent boosts in certain stats, such as HP or Attack, upon completion of battles. The same goes for expanding a character’s skill set—sometimes you’ll level up an individual skill, increasing its effectiveness in combat, while sometimes you’ll unlock an entirely new skill for whatever weapon that character wields.
This random upgrade system isn’t necessarily better or worse than the standard progression used by most RPGs, but it’s interesting how it gives a much different feel to the ongoing progression of a particular dungeon. Grinding for a boss fight is really a pointless strategy here, as it’s entirely possible that you could go through several battles in a row and have nothing to show for it. On the other hand, sometimes you’ll end up fighting a standard bunch of junk and each character will get a few stat and skill jumps at once. In general, progression still moves forward at a rate that’s more or less what you’d expect from a standard progression system. This variable-ratio power-up schedule ensures that every encounter, from boss to ruffian, feels equally rewarding—or perhaps worthless—given that you’re hypothetically always just one more fight away from another big breakthrough.
So the combat is satisfying and the character progression is fine, if random. Our biggest gripe with all of this is that Legend of Legacy quickly shows you that it’s a one-trick pony — it repeats its gameplay loop without any major additions or changes for dozens of hours until it just ends.
The dungeons are only superficially different from one another, usually sharing many of the same enemy types and not doing much to introduce unique gimmicks or level features to differentiate them, while the low enemy variety means your strategies and team compositions rarely need to be adjusted between fights. once you figure out the “right” settings. In that sense, Legend of Legacy is great as the kind of ‘second monitor’ game you play while only partially paying attention, but extended sessions with it eventually become tiresome and monotonous as you go through the motions with no new content to spice things up.
Visually, Legend of Legacy has received a nice resolution boost from its humble origins on the 3DS, and while it’s still clear that this is a title that was born on much weaker hardware, the art style is strong enough that the dated, chunky models don’t feel out of place. too out of place on Switch. The visuals have a painterly watercolor style that looks especially great on the Switch OLED, while we appreciated the Paper Mario-esque way trees, rocks, and other dungeon elements will pop up all around you as you roam the dungeon.
Aside from the visuals, there aren’t really any other changes or updates to Legend of Legacy, and this lack of iteration feels a bit disappointing. Legend of Legacy has aged relatively well in the seven years since its first release, but FuRyu missed a great opportunity to address some of the criticisms of that original release, such as adding new enemies to bring more variety. For better or worse, this is basically the same game that was released on the 3DS, just cleaned up to give it that HD sheen.
Conclusion
Legend of Legacy HD Remastered is a decent, if unspectacular, dungeon crawler that does a good job of defying some traditional RPG tropes. Mechanics like the elemental system and random character progression help this one stand out from the pack, while its simple dungeon crawling format carries basic but satisfying gameplay for dozens of hours. Still, it doesn’t take long for this one to feel like it’s overstayed its welcome, and more could have been done to polish its rougher edges. Legend of Legacy may not be the best example of the genre, but it’s still an enjoyable release for connoisseurs of dungeon crawling.
