Legion: The Legend of Excalibur Review YouTube Video

Legion: The Legend of Excalibur Review YouTube Video Description

Legion the Legend of Excalibur was an ex-Westwood studio’s answer to Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance, and creating this review has convinced me it may be a malevolent entity.
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Intro – 00:00
Background – 00:16
Issues & Fixes – 02:04
Game Premise – 02:33
Visuals – 05:35
Music & Sound Design – 08:35
Gameplay Mechanics – 12:39
Story – 23:16
Conclusions – 25:26
Credits – 26:37
Forbidden Pig – 27:40

#ps2 #ps2games #gaming

Legion: The Legend of Excalibur Review Automated Transcript By Speak

This way nights, the maidens may perish this day, but their sacrifice shall not have been in vain.Onward to the grail,

our hero, right? I’d wager. Most people know the basic story and characters from the King Arthur legend, which is good because this game isn’t going to tell you much. Which is ironic with a big title like Legion, The Legend of Excalibur, it was created by seven studios, founded by Westwood developers. And naturally, it was going to be a strategy game which it still kind of is by the time it came out exclusively for the PS two, it was more of an action RPG, it actually looks very similar to the Boulders Gate Dark Alliance game. And I mean, the one from 2001 that actually got a pretty nice re release a few years ago, not the standalone dark Alliance game. That one is already bad, but it does have one of my favorite game trailers. See the old peak for desperately trying to make nerd shit look cool was the Marilyn Manson trailer for Dragon Age. This is culturally significant enough to risk playing the music was strong enough to hold the crown for nearly 15 years until dark alliance broke out the go pros.

So I think that I’ll be the champion for a good long while, but I am not immune to propaganda. And especially when I was a kid legion held the power that the other two were trying to tap into. And it was through the cover pop culture. King Arthur usually meant Monty Python or a cartoon or Rutger Hower and Sam Neil getting really annoyed. So in my little brain sees in the video store for $5 this and then saw it was rated M which means it’s for adults and must be good. I had to buy it and that was taking a risk too because this would be contraband. Eventually the box was found. I got in trouble and I saw it again, but I don’t remember feeling that sad about losing the game. But as the years went on and I played other stuff, the image of the Cool King Arthur continued to haunt me what a great design. I also still had flashes of dark, high budget cut scenes in some atmospheric levels that were incredibly hard to beat. Why had no one I’d spoken to played or even heard of this game. So I figured I’d emulate it, give it a spin and put the whole thing to rest. It turns out not many people did that either. And the one pioneer left a note reading, it isn’t very good. So testing time was low. Oh God. Well, if you run it in anything other than software mode, the ground becomes soup. But software mode emulates the game pretty perfectly as far as I’ve seen.

And I mean, perfect as an accurate, like the first campfire also slows down the PS two version. So this is accurate. Ok. So all that done, let’s start the game.

All right then right there. Chaos raids. The House of Pendragon is Morgan. The sorceress of the underworld has taken up arms against her father king of England.

Ok. I’m not gonna do. It wasn’t like the legend or else we’d be here all day and the Arthur legends did come in all kinds of versions even back in the time period. It’s still worth noting that this might be the most heroic Lutheran Dragon portrayal. I don’t want your,

I want your

king Morgan has been gaining power through a dark sorcery and Uther pen dragon could put her down. But in this case, he is held back by his love and instead sends Excalibur into the famous Palan, which of course allows her to wolverine him. Oh, there’s not much context to this and not in the manual either I checked, but it sets up the villain quickly and better than that establishes the dark tone. The setting is going for for 2001. This is an impressive opening which makes the transition into the main game. All the more jarring

I, I must have been dreaming. I watched Morgan la Slay King Luther and Caliber was there

Excalibur a good Omen. You may bring luck to me

yet. Arthur has been sent to Squire for his brother Sergei in an upcoming tournament. Arthur has no skills. No charisma. He’s the kind of guy who’s had you crack open to look for candy in and learn the

fight before you go on your way. Morgan’s army moves closer by the day and you still hold your sword like a

girl. Yeah, girl, King Arthur that would never catch on after some arguing and saber rattling from Kay, you get the tutorial, you hold that sword like a girl. Here’s a tip, pressing the X button will execute a basic light attack. I did love that line in the book but I’ll skip over this shit. There’s not much to see in camp except for Excalibur. If you approach it, the wizard Merlin will telepathically tell you that you’re not ready for Excalibur, but you will be one day. So instead talk to the local drunks.

Hey Arthur ally still allow.

How can we be loyal to a dead man who won’t take his place? Is that you or something like

I think he has a little,

you’ve witnessed two drunks being pulverized by indirect artillery. You are now worthy to wield its Cali apparently it’s also a super sentai transformation and I didn’t expect that. But what’s done is done? You are now the king of England and must defeat Morgan Lafaye and her evil armies.

So let’s start with the graphics. I know people who have never touched one, like to say it looks like a PS two game is an insult, but this kind of looks like what they’re imagining. They’re not horrible for the console, but definitely on the lower end of what it was capable of in 3D, this was likely done to give you more character models on the screen for a bigger fight, which is good, at least on paper. Sometimes the environments do have more detail in them or effects like a frothing waterfall or just anything to add a bit of richness to it. Like the mysterious rolling fog effect in Avalon is nice, but it’s an effect that works better here because the rest of the game is already murky for rendering purposes while the cut scenes have of interesting direction and color to them. The game itself looks incredibly dull.

There are a few times when lights and shadows can create interesting contrasts but they happen so rarely, I cannot actually find an example to put in here. It is such a muted looking game and even in areas that look like they should be brighter like these lava pits, it’s still just nothing. It was reminding me a lot of a VP extinction except even that game could do the environment, it could still be dull, but legion never looks exciting the character models and little animation bits like the cape or the standout. They’re pretty decent for an overhead game. And while playing can be sliced apart in a few ways. The pure over the top of the gore is the funnest thing in the game to look at. It’s also the only time I feel anything from the combat, sometimes a bad man will stumble backwards or maybe wobble a bit if he’s blocking you. But besides an air freshener, spritz of blood, you’re not getting more until they’re dead. You have three levels of zoom to go through with the last being a direct overhead view. In theory, this would be for something more strategic like using your squad mates and allies.

But instead, I mainly use it when things get too busy because the camera has a life of its own. Sometimes it will snap to a large object. Sometimes it wants to look for tardy grades in the soil outside the fight, you have to manually wrangle it, which is annoying when this happens. But the camera is mainly moving on its own. I’ve been editing it to make the video less painful. But without that, this is one of the most jittery asymmetric games I’ve ever played. Sometimes it follows you but also has snap points. It’s triggered to pan over to. So you’re barely trying to move a few feet and suddenly you’re inside of a tumble dryer. Then the opposite can happen where the camera follows you along fixed points, but it can be so slow in catching up with you. There are so many times the camera doesn’t feel focused correctly, you have to cycle zoom levels like you’re trying to discover a new fucking star system instead of just watching the funny man hit people. It’s atrocious. And while you can cycle through some other characters, the camera makes them virtually unplayable. One of you here has a bow which you have to hold down the attack button for which already slows things down. But the aim nearly always locks the enemies off screen.

So the forces of darkness end up caving your head in while you’re fumbling around with a protractor. Even if they’re not, it’s still dizzy as hell and not worth it. The view bounces between being fixed or following you for no clear reason. It makes the act of just getting around so disorienting and awful. It makes sense. It was once a proper strategy game since Sun Panning and those doesn’t bother anybody. But having this weird hybrid combo vet in an A RPG where you have no control of the panning makes you feel insane. The camera is attached to a drunk seagull and he hates me. It’s so nice when the world goes still or smooth. Overall, I give the visual experience of legion of this set of 10. This brings us to the sound which in a nice surprise is incredibly tolerable. The enemy has arrived. It’s not great. It’s generic and repetitive, but it’s not attacking me and that’s where the bar is now. The combat sounds are lacking and the timing of some effects like the gore and screams do seem off not all the time, but sometimes you see a man explode and three seconds later here and that’s clearly incorrect.

Ok. Mm. Mm.

You may have also noticed that to save on some voice budget. They’ve just pitched one guy’s voice around

you.

Ok? I take it back. They’re not around all the time, but the random foot soldiers are incredibly grating. The stock battle sounds are serviceable and the ambience is fine too. It is basic and wouldn’t not stand up on its own. But the music does cover for it. The soundtrack is something you would pick out of a jar called adventure fantasy game. Lots of strings and horns, very upbeat. It’s what you picture a kid humming in his head when he’s brandishing a stick in the woods. Some tracks are a little catchy but there’s nothing that’s a stand out. Can you shut the fuck up during the music section? Yeah. When I said nothing was the standout, I meant no music in some levels. There’s still sound just barely, I don’t know how this happened. And yes, it’s like this on Native Playstation as well. The music is not amazing but you don’t realize just how much weight it’s carrying for the soundscape until it’s completely gone. Three of the 13 missions are like this including the final mission which is bizarre on its own.

But you double that because this reuses a lot of the previous level which does have ambient sound and music. You would think this would be simple but with how complicated video games are and how troubled this development clearly was. Maybe having music here made the game kill you.

What else can you say about it? I guess the highlight is the voice acting. You hear that

boy? What block is we in transit? Do you bite your thumb at me, sir? What I try to be a hero. You little girly boy. Last chance to clear the way I haven’t time.

Another little fun fact, the camera whiplash happens in the cut scenes as well. The performance of the main cast is all over the place from good to terrible, but the writing can be so clunky that I can’t imagine a lot of it being delivered. Well, no matter what,

I don’t take orders from you, I’m the king. I can’t,

well, I didn’t vote for

you. You don’t vote for, never mind, find some cover and I’ll defend the north wall.

The good news is that between the writing, the delivery and the awkward gaps in the cut scenes, they’ve accidentally made King Arthur extremely pathetic. Maybe I was losing my mind, but this got more and more entertaining. The cut scene. Timing isn’t wrong. It’s just that everyone hates him.

Be careful. My Lord, he would like nothing better than to destroy you.

You have to get in line. I fear it’s a trend. Sure. Oh,

I,

I, and who are you? Exactly.

My name is not important. I just fucking hate this. The sound design is also somewhere down in the lake, but despite everything can the fun of the game play, salvage it. Well, no, going back to the basics combat is simple as we all know, hitting X is your light attack and square is your heavy attack hit both at the same time and you’ll use a dragon attack which drains a lot of your stamina. All characters have an ultimate move like this, but it’s usually just the same kind of a oe spell casters also just use stamina and don’t have magic with a K or something like that. So the combat is kept simple. You also have a block which you can kind of time with early enemies and it’s actually a lot better here than on the Playstation. Some enemies can be jitter and it’s hard to time the attacks, especially when there’s like eight of them. But the PS two S frame rate was all over the place which made timing this even harder. It won’t matter too long because legion becomes a lawn mowing adventure that said there are combos, but it’s not mixing your light and heavy attack instead you do it by light attacking. If you attack and sit a moment, your sword will flash.

If you hit X on each flash, you do more damage. And eventually a girly twirl characters have their own version, but it’s always matching the X button as you go through the campaign. Enemies will drop gold or you can find some hidden throughout the levels between missions. You can spend it at the treasury for all kinds of items for your party or just find items out in the world. These can give you all kinds of stat buffs and there are even some elemental damage types, you know, wholly damage is slightly more to the undead. That kind of deal. There are plenty of character or class specific items and with all these options, there could be fun, build potential in here. Despite everything, there’s really not, the items are spread so thin that you don’t have many options and it’s obvious what you should maxing in sight of that. Plus it boils down to how much damage do you deal when you mash X, the combat feedback already isn’t great. You don’t have a huge variety of enemies, any benefit that could make this work in another game. Just isn’t here there. One ace in the hole is that you have a party of characters eventually getting up to four, you can command them or directly control them with the shoulder buttons. So they should give you more options. You get new fighting abilities and Arthur’s legendary friends.

You, I’ve seen you at the tournament, you fight like a go. The first issue is death because in some missions, a party member can die. But as long as Arthur is alive, you can keep going. There are plenty where other party members dying makes you lose too. But it’s the first safety net. There’s no in mission saving either. So if you die, you go back and that can mean losing a lot of time. If you do decide to play legion, you can expect seeing this cut scene a lot leaving Arthur unattended is generally a bad idea. Your A I companions are going toe to toe with bacteria. When it comes to decision making, they fight slowly and poorly and you constantly have to summon them over to you and sometimes for reasons they don’t understand. In certain missions, companions can’t use the summon command, which is a problem when they like to stare at the walls.

But even if they’re booking it to you, they can get stuck on all kinds of things or just flat out stop for no reason out of the games. Missions one is completely optional. You can free a bunch of dwarves from Morgan’s slave mines and this will give you more items, money, experience. And the dwarf companion anguish. The mine certainly has anguish. I have suspicion. This mission was made optional purely by how often everyone gets stuck inside of the hallways.

Even Merlin tries to TCL his way out but he can’t do it. You can get stuck inside crowds of your party members and NP CS and this can and will happen on many more missions. Jesus Christ, get me out. This is not an adventure. This is hurting cats. The chairs at the round table need roller coaster restraints for them. Like take Percival, you meet him. He’s your holy healer. So he should heal the party. Dear lord. I see dead people. Instead he never does it even at full stamina when everyone including him is injured. So you have to manually grab him sometimes and force him to do a heel which is like a ranged attack and this is assuming he’s not stuck somewhere. You’re getting them all slowly through the campaign as well. So they won’t be as level as you or your first party members. So you have to find areas to grind to love them up if you want to play them to have a chance. But some missions you can’t take them along or the companions are already chosen. And again, you’re mainly still hitting X unless you have some magic and most magic is ranged and ranged sucks. So it’s not even a murder hobo gang. You can’t have a murder hobo gang. If half are shuffling around to a different bus stop. I mean, who are we kidding? The game is fucking terrible. But here’s the thing, right? I can’t even fully blame the NP CS for getting stuck because I do too.

There are several bosses that I’ve lucked out on because they’ve gotten stuck and you could be saying, oh, that’s a shame. If it was polished up, it could be fun. But no, no, these missions, oh my God. To be fair. Some are simple, unremarkable, clear out the bad men ones, but some are so bad that they left an imprint on me. Even if I couldn’t remember the mission itself. The prime example is on the second level. You’re supposed to destroy a bridge before Morgan Lafaye army crosses it.

But I remembered I should go into this corner and start grinding the bad men come in waves forever here. So you can rack up some easy levels. I remember to do this because they had to restart the entire campaign back in the day. Since you only get one save slot. I learned it through a walk through and couldn’t remember a lot of the game but could remember this. It was because I had been stuck in a black night mission and couldn’t reliably grind it back then. So I just restarted the whole thing. So I thought I was preparing for that. But a few missions later, you have to defend a village from Bandits. You need to travel the map and hunt down the bandit king. But if a bell rings, it means the town is under attack again and you have to go help because if you don’t, they’ll all die and you lose. Yeah, the bell goes off endlessly and there are so many parts of the map to get stuck in. I also can’t leave here in town because she’ll die. But look, this is the correct way to go and for reasons, I cannot understand, I can just not get across. Sometimes it works just fine. Not this time, I’m almost across. You can be fighting the boss in the village gets attacked and you lose which I thought was the peak of it. But no, I was so quick on this time.

I thought I had him,

you know,

do I skip the cut scene? How do I even respond to that? The game has such a habit of making you do tedious mundane things. And at the very end, there’s some kind of instant lose scenario waiting for you. The black knight is not who I ended up stuck on and is by far not the worst to start. You have to fight everyone who has ever died while Percy purifies three churches. This takes a while. And when you do get the honor of fighting the black knight, you learn about his beams of instant obliteration, which means doing the whole thing over again to get back to him. I have heard there’s a way you can lead him far through the level to a purified church and he will instantly die there maybe from an exploit, but I never got him to follow me. So I’d sit far outside the arena healing everyone up like it’s some kind of MMO boss fight. He did get stuck at one point, which helped, but it still took ages to whittle them down. What I was originally stuck on was the fourth king of Camelot. Each one gives you a trial and they’re tedious and annoying but not too terrible. Like the first king will heal if you hit him at the wrong time. The second king is always running away from you spawning archers and the third makes the quays of himself.

The final king is the greed king and he spawns in gold all around you. If you touch any of it, he grows more powerful. This is tricky since he keeps teleporting around it and eventually he can just kill you. I cannot stand doing the duel with Lancelot and doing all the trials again. Just to get back to this point, I could pull it off now. And there were some new challenges like the red knight. He can kill you instantly at random. But allegedly, this is a bug. There are plenty of moments similar to this but none come close to the green night. How convenient. Now, I can have the grail and dispose of Morgan’s enemy. Not sound like much, but this is one of the worst boss fights I’ve played in a video game. So for context Gallahan has joined the party in the previous mission. Naturally, he’s seeking the holy grail, but I’m seeking some levels on him. You can grind him up a bit in that mission. But to make him even would take hours. And I’m not doing that. At first, I tried a new party figuring Lancelot would take care of in the castle. But then I went back to my usual Gwen Percy gang. Now with first you have to travel around the map and rescue several knights templar. They could be getting attacked by creatures or have also gone crazy, which is convenient since there’s a priest who deals with psychos.

So that takes a good chunk of time and then you head to the beach, but you’re attacked by Morgan’s forces and have to hold out against their waves for a while and you’re also waiting on the ocean waves to recede back, you can cross but it won’t cross all the way and the water is freezing.

So you have to time your party crossing the water and the water hit boxes are not too accurate and they will take damage. And if you try to do it one at a time, someone will run into the water on their own or die to soldiers. There’s also a chance they just run into the water and die before this, which you could keep going if it’s not glaad, but you need everyone. If someone dies last second, you go back when you finally pass the beach that makes you cold. Only Glaad can the building, he will then undertake several solo combat trials against hordes of ghosts or soldiers or the spirit of evil Galahad who will try to trick you into dying instantly. And if you don’t do that, you face him in a duel and all the while you have to switch back to the main party which is fighting an onslaught of soldiers who can make it through the cold water just fine. Then when Gallahan finally gets the grail, the green night shows up and God sounds like a metal head, the power of the grail is fantastic. But once you tear through the green knight’s bodyguards, this is where it goes to hell, only the grail can make him vulnerable. The grail that Gallahan is carrying. So Gallahan has to grind up on him with a cup of Christ to make him vulnerable to damage. But he teleports constantly.

If he’s not in grail vulnerable mode, the attacks heal him and the green squares he’s on, heal him and damage you. And the more damage he’s taken, the faster he teleports and the faster he regenerates this fight feels like a genuine insanity test. I thought there was a chance I wouldn’t be able to beat the game or else I’d have to start over and really grind up Gallagher because his class is a cleric. So even with great items, he doesn’t do a ton of damage. I also tried moving the entire party away so only Gallagher could do damage to him, but his output is so low, there’s no chance of doing any meaningful damage to him before he teleports and starts sealing it up again. And if you somehow luck out and do, he starts faster and you’ll never catch him where the Green night is running doesn’t always mean he’ll teleport there. And even if he does, you’re not going to do much. You need the whole gang to lay into him. But only when Gallahan is close and he’s constantly moving around and he’s still dishing out damage. So sometimes you need to retreat and heal up your own guys and he’s already healed by then. And if you die, you go through everything all over again. Good God. I eventually built one of your ups so she could have a higher chance of stunning him. Even then the close calls were all over the place. It took many, many attempts to get the pure dumb luck in teleportation to finally kill him. This was miserable.

I didn’t know a game could still make me feel this way. He’s spiritually the final boss and embodies everything this game stands for. Lots of tm with an occasional death ray. You may wonder why I’m brushing over the story. And I would say what story character wise after many adventures, I guess Arthur learns how to hold a conversation with

did anyone ever tell you that you hold a bow like a girl?

Never mind. It’s a collection of missions with barely any context connecting them. Kill the next person. The next location, the round table sure seems important. But what is it? It gets one mention

people of Camelot. This castle has been restored. Morgan’s tyranny goes no further. My knights now have a place to call home. We have a base of operations. We now have a round.

Does he know how that sounds? That’s meaningless good people. We have a castle. We own an ottoman. I don’t care. And the game doesn’t either because when you finally do get to Morgan, she has no voice acting, at least until she does fine. Then I’ve opened the way come face your death. She dies so quickly. After all these years, I didn’t think it would end quite this badly, but that’s how things go sometimes. Oh

bastard. Bye. Give me another chance. I have them now.

And finally, our ending, what’s happening to his arm, then it sends you to the main menu. There are no credits. Your save is wiped. Enjoy your day. The extras menu has cut scenes that never appear in the game likely made for the old strategy version, which do look great, but there’s no telling how the game itself looked at this point, especially when it took such a big shift. There’s also a trailer for the defender reboot and I’m realizing that’s why I bought the Defender Reboot. But I remember that game being fun, wasn’t it? They also have an entire sequence telling the story of the sword and the stone, just not the one they used in the game or anywhere. I’m ok with this being a mystery. Everyone has that bad game they have fond memories of and this one is mine with a very large gap between those two. It can still be fun and satisfying to mash a button and watch someone die. But there are far better games for that. This is a miserable, terrible broken game but will remember it until the day I die.

I guess this is my chance to read about other people who also played it because in itself, the only remarkable things are a striking design for a suit of armor and the level of pain it can dish out everyone has their own unheard of not needing to be dug up game. And this was mine. It feels like a long brain itch taken care of anyhow. There has been a lot of fantasy lately and I don’t want to get back into the Warhammer stuff yet. So come back next time for a sci fi turn. Do I find nostalgia to be a blinder towards past favorites? Well, apparently not. If something I liked as a kid wasn’t actually very good, I’m not going to get defensive over it. It won’t change how I felt then or cheap in the memory of it so I can let that go. What are my thoughts on Devs being scared of balder’s gate three. All the ones I know are playing it and really excited and happy about it. So, maybe I missed something, but I’m not sure where that’s coming from. I found that lots of people who work on video games also tend to like them. Any opinions on Tim Kaine’s new channel. Yeah, it’s excellent. Tim Kaine’s youtube channel is great. It’s not always pure game stuff, but he’s great at telling stories. And that’s what he does. When does the reclaimer Glyph brain poison end? Sadly, I think that is there to stay.

I’ve had people ask about lots of background details and non bungee videos where they think they’re seeing it and I’m not sure most of them are there. I could be wrong though. You never know the battle

was at hand.

Legion: The Legend of Excalibur Review was transcribed automatically by Speak. We apologize for any inaccuracies in the transcript. All rights and credit are given to the creator of the video.

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