by The number of RPG Maker games with “2” in the title that I’m reviewing is beginning to concern me. This time it’s…
Unlike Deadly Sin 2 Legionwood 2 is pretty damn-well made. Whereas Deadly Sin focused on unique visual assets and dropped the ball on design, Legionwood’s game design is great. The pacing is far better, the mechanics are much more exciting and the overall design of the game feels way better built. To be honest, I was a little worried at first when “GAIA STUDIOS” sat on my screen during the introduction for what felt like an eternity, followed by an equally dull and lingering “LEGIONWOOD2.” As it turns out though, the dev studio had a pretty good grasp on the fact that a lot of people aren’t going to be interested in something moving as slow as molasses, especially before they have any context for what the game is about. I greatly appreciated that they offered a clean out for people like me as shown in the bottom pic.
Hey, it might seem silly, but at least they were open about it and didn’t make me feel like I had to sit through 10 minutes of boring crap I don’t care about yet. Mechanically, it’s roughly your standard take-turn combat system with a “wait” ATB system. In other words, if your characters have a higher agility, overall they’ll take more turns than their opponents but you have as much time as you want to choose your character’s actions. What really struck gold for me though was the ability to freely select and change not just one class, but two classes for your characters. It didn’t take me long to set myself up as a Gun-Mage which made pleased me probably more than it should have. (Just saying the word “Gun Mage” makes me feel awesome for some reason.) Apparently, if the NPC I talked to is to be trusted, there are many other classes that you’ll get as you play the game, which gave me a great tug to keep playing to not only discover them but also the wacky combinations I could set my party up as. In addition to classes, there’s even a morality rating that sets the party down the “good” or “bad” path which changes certain events within the story. True, it’s binary, but it’s a lot more than most tileset RPGs give you.
A majority of Legionwood 2’s assets are taken straight from RPG Maker but given how well they are used in combination with the believably written dialogue, characters that are at least trying to be distinct from one another, decent music and aforementioned design, this game nets a high Tier 2 for me. It’s definitely something I want to check back into after I’ve cleared out my Tier 1’s–it might be the best RPG Maker game that I’ve seen yet.
