Mega Man Legends

Mega Man Legends exists alongside Half-Life and Shenmue as those series with fanbases eternally waiting for a conclusion and probably never getting one. It's hard to say which one suffers the most. Half-Life with a developer with piles of cash and willing writers who just doesn't do it because they don't think they have anything innovative to do (or it just isn't another infinite money machine), Shenmue that had its chance but ended with a deluded director deciding to continue to stretch it out instead of just giving an ending, or Mega Man Legends with its cliffhanger ending that is probably permanently torpedoed out of spite for a creator leaving the company. I have no idea, I just didn't know how to start this review.

Really looks like a dungeon crawl from a distance

  For years I thought Mega Man Legends was some kind of vaguely actiony but grid-based dungeon crawler, based on screenshots in magazines depicting very blocky dungeons. I though it looked cool but, you know, sometimes it takes decades to get around to a game. It turns out it's actually a third-person shooter rpg with a mix of dungeons and action set pieces. It's also wrapped in the bluest skies of low poly anime aesthetics, depicting a flooded world dotted by ancient ruins that sky faring treasure hunters plunder for the only remaining batteries in the world. The bulk of the story is actually just Mega Man and a group of pirates fighting to get the motherload of batteries located on one such island. And it uh. It pretty much doesn't progress past that until the very end, which reveals a bit about the world while teasing a sequel. How foreboding.

The happiest warzone

For whatever reason I don't really associate PS1 era RPGs with third person 3d. Most games gravitated towards pre-rendered backgrounds, and the few actual 3d ones still tended towards some flavor of overhead or isometric. So in that regard I find it to be a real novelty, maybe even more so today since the choice makes it much closer to the modern reality of every other single player game being an action RPG hybrid of some sort. But it's also a third person game released before Ocarina of Time, so that means it controls like garbage. While it does feature a lock on system, it also doesn't let you move while locked on- that just controls where you're aiming. This results in some awkward start/stop gameplay where you move, stop to shoot until the enemy's bullets (or body) is about to hit you, and then move again. Yet for as bad as it is, what makes it remain playable is that the developers also understood how clunky it is. Most enemy attacks are designed around the start/stop, and the game plays a warning sound any time you're near an enemy to minimize getting hit from unknown enemies while slowly swinging the camera around. Even the final boss that moves around a whole lot more, resulting in having to dodge off-camera attacks, does at least have smart sound design where you can hear the current attack even if you can't see it. In a weird way I actually found it quite refreshing because no one builds action games like this now that camera and targeting controls are a solved problem. They're bad controls, but good designers managed to make them work (with some terrible boss exceptions and don't get me started on the impossibly awkward L1/R1+X dodge roll).

Bit of a lack of confidence when you have to tell players how to fight a boss.

 The bulk of the game alternates between dungeons and set piece action segments. The latter involves a variety of situations- shooting at an airship while ontop of one, defending a town being destroyed by tanks, shooting at boats while ontop of a boat, fighting a giant robot in a city, general boss fights, etc. They're conceptually fun, but are also the place where the controls are at their worst fighting wide open spaces and having to aim at things. The dungeons meanwhile are quite streamlined with minimal branching paths and few puzzles, focusing more on the resource management of not exhausting too much health before reaching the end. While visually blocky and repetitive, I found them to be the better part of the game since they have a decent amount of enemy variety, traps, and just enough navigational complexity to be satisfying to explore without being easy to get lost in. Plus the constrained areas worked well with the limited lock-on targeting. 

There wasn't the budget to animate a kiss with a random NPC.

 The one really clever bit of the dungeons is that they're secretly one big dungeon- as you get upgrades you find ways to shatter the barriers between them, letting you metroidvania poke your way into new parts. Doing so is rarely required for the main progression as it's more of an optional way to find new weapons and an excuse to grind more money for the game's wonderfully stingy economy. That said, while I was thrilled by this system at first, by the end of the game I really couldn't be bothered to scour the remaining areas. The game's map system doesn't allow viewing any area other than your current area (and every dungeon consists of multiple areas), so finding the final secrets becomes a real chore.

Fighting a giant robot in a destructible city where you can jump onto the building's roofs still feels kind of next gen.

Between the two main action bits you can go to the town to buy upgrades, develop new subweapons from junk you found, donate to the museum, and do some pretty basic sidequests. There are things to appreciate here, but it really feels like they were struggling between trying to make a 3d town feel appropriately scaled while also not having enough stuff to put in it. The solution they landed on was to simply allow talking to NPCs by knocking on doors, while major public buildings (bank/police station/library/etc) can be entered to find the sparse number of side quests in the game. The end result is mostly an empty chore to walk around with suboptimal fast travel options, but it's not a complete bust as a break from the action.

 Misc Notes:

• Game has a lot of weirdly ambitious bits to it. There's a single fight where buildings in the town can get destroyed. They stay destroyed until you donate enough money to repair them, and the repairs seem to take time.
• There's also a bomb threat side quest that can get buildings blown up again, forcing you to rebuild.
• And there's a morality system where you can take money for yourself instead of giving it back along with a few other actions that can make yourself look evil. I didn't mess with it, but the game only vaguely mentions it as an option in the library.
• I despise games that do the "items/money spill out of enemies" thing because it just creates a chore out of a desire for visual splendor, but to this game's credit money despawns so fast and you can have so much range that it can occasionally tempt you into dangerous situations before it despawns. So good on it for at least using the system to interesting effect

Things to ask a dancing monkey.

• There are like a billion subweapons you can get, but you can only change them in town so I barely got to use half of them (more so from some of them being required to unlock areas, making you afraid to switch off). 

• Money is the primary way to progress your stats, and the game does a surprisingly good job being stingy enough with it that you constantly want more. I've played so many games lately with economies you can break long before the halfway point that it was quite delightful to reach the final boss without being able to afford everything, even when doing lots of optional stuff (indeed that morality system actually makes some sense here in that being the good guy gets you way less money rather than banal equality). That said the subweapon upgrade system might be a bit too much, as they cost ridiculous amounts and I could barely touch them while still getting armor/health upgrades (and considering how hard switching is, investing in them was hardly tempting). I ended up grinding money for maybe 15-30mins to round out my upgrades for the big ol' difficulty spike final boss (even the health potion system, while instant, is limited enough to not break the game balance like a whole lot of modern action rpgs).

One of the more interesting credits in a game

 So should you play Mega Man Legends? Yeah, probably, it's a delightful time and only takes like 12 hours to beat. It's a little disappointing how little the relationship between Mega Man and the pirates evolves despite how many voiced cutscenes they devote to it, but whatever they're cartoon villains that never learn. Provided you can see the charm in awkward early 3d controls and can stomach a big empty town, it's a good time.