The time has come. The demon Azutura is returning to life and he needs to be taken care of. The kingdom of Izuka sends the warrior Jordan out to fulfill this task. This one small task turns into one massive journey across the land.
The Book of Legends follows Jordan, a man who is both extremely strong and pretty stuck up. You start out as he’s just travelling through a forest. It’s there that the jar he’s carrying gets stolen by thieves and he has to get it back at all costs. This jar is needed to help deal with the demon Azutura and thus he has to get it back.
The Book of Legends is a not-so-short RPGMaker title. Your goal of taking care of Azutura turns into a quest to slay all of the demons. To take on this quest, you will need to recruit allies. Thankfully there are a lot of allies to choose from. The game features a total of 31 recruitable characters, each with their own backstory, as small as the backstory might end up being.
You’ll need these extra allies. While Jordan may seem extremely strong when you start, and in fact strong for most of the game, you don’t want to end up relying on him. You’ll want to build a team of strong characters as the game ramps up the difficulty. Another reason you want to recruit is because the game likes to make your parties split up, and each team will need good characters to take down what is waiting for them. Your options for people to recruit vary from a chicken to a celebrity to a dragon, and while the chicken may turn out to be a bit disappointing, the dragon sure doesn’t.
Speaking of splitting up your parties, this game did a lot to remind me of how much I dislike party splits. It felt like practically every boss past the halfway point was some sort of party split up. This forces both a bit more leveling and more equipment purchases. I say a bit more leveling as members who aren’t in your active party do receive a cut of the experience, though they did still seem to be behind my “main” team of four. This really does come in handy with how many party splits there are though, as you can still generally just focus on your main team of 4.
Combat in The Book of Legends is fairly typical for most RPGMaker titles. You input each character’s moves in a turn based fashion. Those with higher speed will act first. While it may not seem like it at first, methods to allow you to hit multiple times turn out to be really fantastic. Methods to help give fixed damage to characters who might not be able to normally reach that much are also fantastic, especially when combined with multi-hitting techniques. I did enjoy the combat system overall, though it did get quite frustrating to just get constantly wrecked by area attacks from regular enemies.
The Book of Legends definitely gives the player a lot to do. Along with 31 playable characters there is 28 side-quests available for you to do. I didn’t really do too many, only about 8 of them, but they definitely send you all over the world. This is both good and bad. Good because it gives you a wide range of awards to get, ranging from some money to entire new dungeons. It’s bad because there’s limited quick travel options for getting around so you’ll be stuck doing a lot of backtracking to get these completed. There are also time limited quests available, and this really drove home the lack of decent quick travel to me.
There are SOME quick travel options available, and there may have also been some I just missed. There are some horse routes available in a couple towns, and boat travel also lets you get between certain other villages. Your best friend for getting around, however, is going to be the horse you can recruit after you beat the first boss. Once you activate Travel mode on him, movement speed goes from a slow crawl to actual movement speed. I unfortunately didn’t discover this handy party member until I’d defeated several demons already, but even then he proved to be extremely useful.
The Book of Legends has some issues, such as the constant backtracking that is made only worse with a limited supply of quick travel routes, but it does come through with a generally enjoyable combat system and fairly good story. The party members each feel fairly diverse and bring their own strengths to the battlefield. The constant need for party splits did get exceptionally old though, but not old enough for me to give this a decent recommendation if you’re a fan of RPG games.
The Book of Legends Review
3.5/5
The Book of Legends is available now on Steam.
