Part 30: The End of Legaia
Chapter 29 – The End of LegaiaWhere we last left off, we had just defeated Avalon and appeared to have restored the Source Forge with the power of
Now, Lang awakens…
Now Playing – Seeing the End of the Earth
“One question at a time, please! I just realized you were here a moment ago.”
“Master…What…what’s going on?”
“However…, it does appear that we stopped it from being completely destroyed.”Remember the evil toxic mist from way back when we first came to Mt. Gabel? It was Avalon’s fault. Really makes you wonder, given his whole plan was to create a new world. How many people was he expecting to kill in the mountains?
“There’s no way for us to know…how much longer the world will survive…”
“The ‘Source Forge’ isn’t gone!”
“Somewhere”. What, did the sentient rock formation get up and move to Drokonia or something?
“And everything that lives in this world….has that power. The power of hope.”
“Emotions like that one…They must pool together and become the will to live. At least that’s what I think.”
“And when the feeling gets strong enough….The world will go back to the way it was! Right, Lang?”
Cue credits.
However, while the credits may be rolling, that doesn’t mean the game is genuinely over.
We get glimpses of what happened to the characters as we go. You can only really infer what’s going on, so it’s basically a matter of headcanon as to what really happened to them.
------------------------
Ayne and Spring Sapling went on to have numerous healthy children, who also went on to have children themselves. With each generation, they got bigger, to the point Jinga could no longer adequately house them.
------------------------
------------------------
After Lang departed, Bubba enjoyed a healthy career as the Phorchoon arena champion. He earned great fame and wealth.
However, after he was caught making out with one of the stabled monsters, he was banned from Phorchoon for life. He set out, remaking himself as a mysterious wanderer once again.
------------------------
------------------------
Sharon Blade went on to earn a reputation as a mighty pirate, restoring the legacy of Alphis’ crew in full.
Sharon eventually amassed enough wealth to buy Phorchoon for herself. However, grumblings of discontent arose when Sharon held elaborate ceremonies to award herself prizes for her own victories in the arena.
------------------------
------------------------
With the old order in Darakin having collapsed, the city formed an anarcho-syndicalist commune, and the social barriers that divided them crumbled.
It is said that the weeping and wailing of the upper class is loud enough to keep people up at night, but with Doplin gone, no one cares to assuage their woes anymore.
------------------------
Now Playing – Ending
------------------------
Kenjiro and his siblings promised the people of Darakin that they would properly account for all of Doplin’s ill-gotten gains and distribute it amongst the people fairly.
However, Kenjiro and co. instead absconded one night, taking the bulk of it with them. Rumours are abound that Kenjiro has formed a dragon-like treasure trove and swims in a pool of Doplin coins.
------------------------
------------------------
Kazan now lives the life of a wild man, living with and respecting nature.
It is only partially by choice, as there is now an ongoing manhunt for him within Darakin’s jurisdiction due to mass acts of voyeurism.
------------------------
------------------------
Maya retired to Yuno for some time. According to the villagers, she used her Kabel magic to prepare some kind of love potion. She never said who it was for, and departed the village soon after.
Faldo chased after her, screaming something about how she had been led astray by “that man”. He was never seen again.
------------------------
The credits now proceed for a while uninterrupted. There’s not a lot of information to be gleaned from them. I had wondered if I might find out who did what voice, but they’re not in there as far as I can see. I don’t even know how anyone knows Cam Clarke did Lang, aside from guessing.
This is the first time we’ve seen these two since before Drokonia, I think.
“Yeah…Always thought he’d take charge of the Vigilance Corps after me, though…”
That’s the “Fragment of Hope” Reym palmed off on Lang at the end of the last chapter. Guess distilled hope can shit water.
“…I don’t know what exactly, but whatever it is, this town’s not big enough to hold him back!”
“Of, of course not!!! I wasn’t thinking that at all! Besides…He’ll be back!” “That’s true….This is where he grew up. He’ll definitely be back….Even stronger and wiser…”
Now Playing – Inaccessible Road
------------------------
Lang “Cocky” Galvanson was remembered as one, if not the, greatest hero of Legaia. Everybody knows his story, initially because Lang made sure to tell every last person, insisting his legend lasted through the ages. It is said he personally created the Great Lang Memorial in Darakin by finding every Doplin statue in the land and melting them down to make his own.
After Lang faded from this world, historians would insist that some parts of his legend were fabricated for comedic effect. They insisted that the “sexy gorilla” was too absurd to be true, and portraits from Doplin castle prove that Lady Marienne was not morbidly obese. A handful swear that “The Chronicle of Dein: Sidejump Hero” proves that Lang was actually a charlatan who never left Nohl, but most agree that work is nothing but character assassination.
A recent archaeological dig insists they discovered Lang’s final resting place inside an ancient pirate vessel. Some academics still insist Lang was buried in either Yuno or Nohl. The truth may never be known for sure.
------------------------
Now, my goofy narration aside, let’s talk about the actual ending as we know it.
If you were to look up Legaia 2’s ending, you might find some forum posts from some years ago, claiming that there are multiple endings to this game. They claim there are endings where Lang goes on an adventure or stays in Nohl. They claim to have gotten endings where Lang hooked up with Maya, Sharon, or Nancy. They claim there’s an ending where Lang is crowned king of the arena, and you won’t get it unless you defeat Bubba.
As far as I know, all these claims are bullshit.
I even tried reloading the point we made an oddly fateful-sounding decision (where we could tell Sharon if we planned to adventure or stay in Nohl), picked the Nohl option, and then beat the game (that’s where the rushed version of Avalon comes from, FYI). Nothing changed.
I have even looked at as many videos on Youtube of Legaia 2’s ending as I could, and found nothing to suggest there is a different ending than Lang standing in Gale Canyon, staring at the sun.
I could engage in extensive testing of the game to see if any dramatic variations produce different results, but seeing as multiple sources suggest there are no multiple endings, I think I can safely say there are not.
This is all we get. Given the ending is a pretty simple set of in-game cut scenes, you wouldn’t think it would be so hard to make some basic variations, but they didn’t. I guess the money had just evaporated by that point. Sad.
----------------------------------
Final Insights
Before I end this LP entirely, I just want to share with you what limited insight I have into what actually happened with Legaia 2’s production.
To start with, I want to clarify exactly how Legaia 1 and 2 came to be. Contrail, the developers of Legaia 1, were a subsidiary of Sony. Prokion was also a subsidiary, and was incorporated to assist Contrail with programming for Legaia 1. Hidenori Shibao was a contractor hired to write the script. He was cut loose when Legaia 2 was under consideration, and in a way I find rather telling:
Shibao: “…I ended up on bad terms with the producer at Sony Entertainment, too. I remember I was in America working on some stories for Game Walker magazine, like covering the E3 show, and he contacted me to tell me he needed to talk to me, and when I returned he told me I was off the sequel, and I was like, "Why would you call me back from America to tell me that?" And we got in a big fight over it. <laughs>”
Contrail had been subsumed back into Sony before Legaia 2’s release date (no idea when it began production), so Prokion was the only subsidiary left with a link to the series. Thus we can deduce they were largely responsible for how it turned out. Shibao had this to say about them:
Shibao: “Legaia 2 was developed entirely by the studio that did the program development for the first game. We didn't get along too well because of issues like the ones I mentioned before - writing "inn" instead of pictures, adding in the anime voices - so ultimately I did not end up working on the sequel at all.”
What he said earlier reflects what other users in the thread have already commented on:
Shibao: “This is an aspect of Japanese game development I'm not fond of. There are so many things you "have to have". You have to have battle voices. You have to have a "moe" character (Cute with large eyes). It makes it hard to create anything original. There's always a lot of: "Well, this is very popular, so you have to have this." It ends up feeling like everything's a copy of such-and-such anime, or such-and-such game, and I find that terribly disappointing.”
So we can deduce that Prokion was the kind of studio that wanted to stuff the games with popular stuff from as far back as Legaia 1. In Legaia 2, Maya fits the bill of the “moe” character with her cutesy expressions and ridiculous eyes. I’ve commented on how much Kazan is like Master Roshi from DBZ, and I have no doubt they did that because they considered the “perverted old man martial arts master” a popular idea due to DBZ’s success. All the similarities to the Tales series? They were getting popular around this time, so Prokion probably thought they could follow their lead.
It’s not wrong to use tropes and such to build a story, but when you’re doing nothing other than stuffing your game with popular and recognisable ideas, you create the soulless experience that is Legaia 2.
Now, everyone’s already guessed that this game had budgetary issues, but I wonder: was that out of Prokion's hands? On this, I point to something Shibao said:
Shibao: “…And the game barely sold 1/10 of what its predecessor sold. The original Legaia sold very well in Japan. Sony pushed it quite heavily, with lots of TV commercials and such, but they didn't run any advertising for Legaia 2 - maybe just a few print ads in Famitsu.”
When Legaia 1 was in production, nobody could have been sure of how successful it would be, so Sony had to have some confidence in their subsidiary’s product. In theory, Legaia 2 should have been a surer investment as a sequel to a modestly successful game. That Sony would decide not to invest very heavily in advertising for it suggests a profound lack of confidence, as if they expected it to fail.
It’s pure speculation on my part, but I think it’s possible that Sony saw what Prokion was doing, assumed it would be a commercial failure, and decided to check out and invest as little money as they could into it. I may be no early 2000s Japanese corporate bigwig, but if I saw Marienne in my subsidiary’s product, I would have given up on their project right there and then.
-------------------------
We’ve reached the end of a long road. Well, not really. You can all tell the game was piss short, and this was much shorter than some other LPs, but it still took up a noticeable chunk of the last 2 months of my life. The game is well and truly over, and I need not come back to it again.
Thank you for reading.