I’ve been spending a good amount of time lately playing old PS1 games, either by getting them on eBay or, if that proves too expensive, resorting to emulation. It’s given me the opportunity to go through games that my stupid 10 year old mind couldn’t appreciate, or in some cases couldn’t even bother to finish. I’ve gone back and spent some time with the likes of Legend of Dragoon, Chrono Cross, and Legend of Legaia. What really kicked off this classic gaming binge was the cancellation of Mega Man Legends 3, which sparked a desire to play the first two games since I hadn’t done so since I rented them when I was a kid.
Fortunately enough, copies of Mega Man Legends aren’t horribly expensive on eBay. Well, not for the first one at least. I’ve yet to see a decently priced copy of Mega Man Legends 2, and have resigned myself to the fact that I’ll have to emulate that one and will never actually own a copy of it. But I have the first one at least, so that’s a small victory.
Mega Man Legends mesmerized me as a kid. It presented a massive world open to exploration, and there were characters and narrative and (pretty bad) voice acting. It was an entirely new creature, unlike anything I had played at the time. There were other adventure games, with the obvious example being Ocarina of Time, but Mega Man Legends was the first time I encountered a game with one sprawling dungeon that you could freely explore. It was a whole new experience for me and something I remembered fondly, so I was eager to go back and see what I thought of the game today.
