E3 2019 Hands-On IMPRESSIONS: Re:Legend

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Re:Legend, born from Kickstarter and currently a SQUARE ENIX Collective title, begins when you wash upon Vokka Island without any memories of your life. As a result, you have to start anew on the island as you work to recover your memories by making new friends, growing the village, farming/fishing/mining/etcetera, and capturing and raising island creatures called Magnus. There are more than 300 Magnus available in Re:Legend, with five areas comprising the land of Ethia and twenty-five to thirty maps per biome that transition through all four seasons. In other words: this is a really big game with a lot of content to explore. With my Re:Legend E3 demo, I focused mainly on Magnus taming and combat uses, as there had not really been a lot published online about this aspect of the game previously.

In this simulation and RPG title, everything is tamable, from the regular Magnus you see walking around to Magnus in the boss battles that you fight. In order to tame a Magnus, you have to find the correct food that it likes, throw it at the Magnus, and then complete a mini-game (press the directional key as it flashes and changes quickly on the screen until the meter fills up) to tame the Magnus and have it become one of your allies. When it came to finding the correct food, I was stuck guessing to figure out what each Magnus that I wanted to tame liked, and Re:Legend purposefully does not tell me in order to encourage exploration and trial/error. I was told that backers for the game have made wikis for the alpha-version that are dedicated to figuring this out and listing what each Magnus likes, and I can believe that. I tried different foods on different Magnus until I could finally get the opportunity to enter the taming minigame. With certain Magnus, the arrows start to flash and change way too quickly for me to keep up, and I ended up spamming the buttons at random until I filled the meter up to tame the Magnus. You can also evolve your Magnus as well if you have the right items to do so. Finally, you can ride your Magnus if you wish through the landscape.

If I chose to not tame a Magnus, I could instead fight it in Re:Legend. Combat itself is pretty simple: Press a key and attack. The health bar goes down and eventually the Magnus is defeated and disappears. If you have Magnus with you (you can have up to two at once), they can attack too, even if you’re currently riding one. It is also important to dodge enemy attacks as well while fighting so your health bar doesn’t get depleted instead. This was a very rudimentary combat system, and I kept waiting to see if the Magnus attacks could build off of each other to become an even greater attack depending on the Magnus that I had around me, but that sadly did not happen. I took two of the Magnus I tamed to fight a Dreadclaw boss battle, and I literally just kept hammering away at the boss and avoiding its attacks until it died. I am not saying that that was easy by any means, but for Re:Legend to have such a deep Magnus taming system and evolution system, I was a little surprised at how simple combat was.

Aside from the combat and taming, the music and landscaping in Re:Legend is amazing. I was told that the orchestra who is performing the soundtrack for Re:Legend is the same orchestra who did the music for FINAL FANTASY XV, and I can believe it with just how rich the music is. The landscape is stunning to look at as well, and I found myself staring more than once at the environment around me as I played. The final thing I noticed about this game was that in order to transition between areas, I simply couldn’t walk across an ‘invisible’ line between maps. Instead, I had to approach it and actively press a button in order to move onto another area. This was a minor annoyance, but it didn’t take away from the overall gameplay for me. I also experienced mining and fishing, and they were both relaxing to play with easy-to-grasp mechanics.

Re:Legend is a Kickstarter-born and SQUARE ENIX Collective title that comes across, at first glance, as something cutesy and colorful with no depth to it. With my time exploring just a fraction of Ethia, however, I found that this initial impression is simply not true as there is so much depth and secrets to unlock in just the Magnus taming experience alone. Re:Legend is coming to PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch at a date that has yet to be announced.

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Did you back Re:Legend on Kickstarter? What aspect of the game are you most excited to explore?