I have spent more of my life on this game, than any other. Perhaps not in raw playtime, but in time devoted to its legacy; to the fandom it generated. Legend of Dragoon. It’s.. actually proving difficult writing the text for this page in particular. Let’s start with the game’s original release and impact.
Release (1999-2001)
Legend of Dragoon is a game full of experiments from a game design perspective – some successful, and some not. Sony had made a few games before but nothing so massive or ambitious as this. The project started small, but development and team members ramped up after being inspired by the release of Final Fantasy 7. They wanted to see if they could also make a blockbuster hit in the RPG space. The way I always describe the development context is this: massive ambition coupled with lots of inexperience. It basically means it could go very well or very poorly and the luck factor is pronounced.
LoD opened to lukewarm reception in Japan – it was not the big hit Sony hoped for. An English translation was released in North America with some adjustments to gameplay. This version happened to get many more sales and can be considered a success – it made the Greatest Hits list and most of the remaining fanbase is still NA-based. Another release came out in Europe – sales were about as lukewarm as the original Japanese release, and for whatever reason this version is way harder to come by / costs a lot more on resale markets. There are additional releases but we still haven’t tracked down all the details (Aus, NZ, Hong Kong).
Early Days (2001-2008)
By the turn of the century, the modern internet began taking shape. Websites were a hip new thing (unlike now), and the only way we could practically discuss as a fandom was through web forums. Imagine a bunch of kids doing their best to interact and it all being chaos anyway, haha. I was on one of these forums, and for whatever prophetic reason I settled on the name Ultimate_Dragoon_Fan (*shrug*). It was the same as most forums: random posts about what we liked, various questions, and a dash of caps lock. A typical day on the forums looked like this. At the time, it was the only way we could meaningfully congregate and keep a record of our history as a community.
Fansites were also a thing – here’s a shortlist. Some of them had forums, like this one, which helped us congregate in a dedicated space. General-purpose forums didn’t always have a section for gaming let alone LoD. As for creating our own content, there was a spattering of fanfic, art, and music. Blogs were incredibly rare. By 2005 Youtube launched, and we eventually had various gameplay videos.
Two short years later I started my first big campaign with the fandom via Youtube – the goal being to gather LoD fans and then do.. something? I was a naïve 18-year-old and the rest of us were similarly clueless overall. From September 2007 to ~June 2008, I was making motivational videos and speaking from the heart as I strived to bring us together. We got very excited and tried to figure stuff out but none of us had the experience or expertise to really channel our passion into a well-organized, centralized community. I don’t know if there were other movements before mine, except perhaps the LoD-Squared forum, but I was not aware of that community at the time.
Eventually, one of our community members made a custom Virage model in Maya. It was the coolest thing we’d ever seen, despite being untextured. My brain thought it would be cool to toss the model into a custom map for Unreal Tournament 2004, place it as a large statue, and shoot rockets at it. I guess I was just fascinated with the idea that that was even possible.
Cue the incredibly overzealous cease-and-desist letter from Sony! By today’s standards this would have qualified as a legal mod without question. However, I was sufficiently scared off, and that marked my pivot into game development (not for LoD, just in general).
The “Lull” (2008-2016)
This is a bit of a gap area in my knowledge. Our fandom generally grew over time, but I don’t recall much in the way of significant events. I’ll share what I can.
In 2012, Shuhei Yoshida wrote for the Playstation Blog about Legend of Dragoon. The game was coming to PSN for play via PS3 and PSP. Shuhei shared some background and confirmed a second game was in pre-production, but was canceled for unknown reasons. Our best guess is that LoD’s second game just wasn’t as good of a financial risk as other projects on the table at that time (and was probably decided before NA sales started coming in).
Toward the end of this period, activity in the fandom started growing at a faster rate. More posts, more questions, more hunger for a second game. Remakes and remasters were starting to become a regular thing, therefore most fans wanted LoD to get the same chance. It’s also the time I started getting more involved with the fandom on a deeper level.
Knowledge & Unification (2017-2019)
2017 was the year that I began turning my attention to the fandom in a greater capacity. I had participated as a member of the community in various ways, but nothing serious since the Youtube campaign ten years prior. A lot ended up taking place in a short time. I applied as moderator of the LoD subreddit, which had not been curated in a long time, and I also founded a Discord server so we’d have a place for live conversations. I also began aggregating resources for everyone to use, such as the Resource Archive full of documentation and legacy media. The goal was to aggregate known resources into a single repository and share that with the fandom, while also giving us a global place to call home. Thus, the website legendofdragoon.org was born.
The first big thing I put on the website was a 20th anniversary petition for a remake. It gained tons of traction, to the point of more than 1,000 signatures per day for awhile. It was covered in the news a little bit, but nothing major. We capped around ~25,000 signatures after awhile, with trickle numbers bringing it to about ~30,000 by 2024. Over time, more and more cool things would be added to the site: assorted downloads, game information, and most importantly a news feed of community goings-on.
(2020-2022)
Most of 2020 was the same as the previous four years. We were on our usual slow-growth pattern until the end of the year. That’s when a random new member in the Discord server – named Monoxide – proclaimed an intent to reverse-engineer Legend of Dragoon for the purpose of turning it into a native PC port. We knew enough about it to realize that would result in some nice improvements, but we also were used to the idea that reversing is super difficult. Many came before with similar big claims, so we somewhat dismissed it but wished this mystery person good luck. We kept doing our general growth and unity thing, until…
Bam. Almost two years later, in August, Monoxide returns with a somewhat playable version of the game. We’re curious and start checking it out right away. He reversed the game all by himself, using some software tools and his extensive knowledge of software engineering. It turns out source code is wholly unnecessary in the face of such skill! We begin a new community livestream series where we play the game start to finish, and in each stream the PC port gets a little bit better.
In the PC port, few things from retail worked, so the missing pieces got implemented and optimized bit by bit for many months. This culminated in the first Stable release of what would be called Severed Chains, a nod to the iconic quote in LoD’s opening video that was suddenly packed with meaning. It was getting pretty playable, albeit with missing sound and graphical bugs.
Our Golden Age (2023 & Beyond)
Suddenly, in late February, Sony announced that Legend of Dragoon would be included in the next set of PS1 games being re-released on PS4 and PS5 as a PS Classic. Many fans were happy and surprised, even if it’s not the news they really wanted. I began covering the news as it happened, including warning fans about the Dragoon Magic softlock and posting PSA sticky topics whenever a patch dropped. Thankfully the softlock was fixed in just four business days, but it was still a disastrous release.
Around this time, SC was starting to pick up more interest. My news posts were reaching people, and they were highly curious overall. Monoxide and I kept doing the livestreams as SC got in better shape. Due to that, we felt mostly disaffected by the PS4/5 release. In July, SC’s second stable release came out with tons of improvements. At this point SC rivaled emulators and was better in some ways. It gave emus and the PS4/5 release a challenge, as emus had pretty much hit their peak potential by then. By contrast, SC was just getting started and had tons of room for additional improvement.
Work on the third release (RB3) began right after RB2 was finished. However, this next release would take much longer than originally anticipated. The goal was to overhaul the graphics system with hardware rendering, in other words enabling use of players’ graphics cards. We all knew it’d be a big undertaking, though it would be well worth the time invested. Keep in mind, progress on SC was always second to RL – jobs, time with loved ones, et cetera.
Despite tons of work, the initial projection of being done around winter 2023-24 did not come to pass. More work needed to be done; such as a rebuild of the sound engine and creating functionality for texture replacements since RB3 was also meant to support the upscaled graphics mod.
With all of this in mind, we came together to make a video showing a teaser of what RB3 could look like in early February 2024. The main focus was 4K native resolution and 60FPS on submaps, but we also added in upscaled graphics for the background images as well as a custom breathing animation for Rose (the stock anim was too low-quality to include in the demonstration). This was literally just a recording of the intro sequence, but apparently it looked so good that it got more traction than we thought. Many, many news outlets covered our video – including PC Gamer. I was contacted with a short interview, answered what questions I could out of nowhere, and that was that.
A few hours later our video was included in an article on PC Gamer. The article quality felt mixed – it’s just that it was a weird string of words to follow sentence after sentence, but we couldn’t complain much given the platform we were given. Even though it was a small last-minute include alongside dozens of other articles and was not a main feature, we got a huge boost in visibility. The video now sits at about 50K views, nothing to sneeze it. Our Discord server grew, as did the subreddit, and website traffic increased a lot.
If we can garner all that attention just for recording a plain low-edit demonstration, imagine how attractive our other videos would be with high production value. So it became our mission to produce more videos and livestreams to keep interest relatively high. Also, as the video producer, I realized that I have real potential in terms of video content and editing. I don’t think I have a knack for it apart from my tinkerer background, but maybe that’s enough to get rolling!
The videos varied and were more sparse than intended, but there were some key successes. The first music mix made up of fan music was very well-received, and we had a hilarious misdirect on April Fools involving a goose. The latter would be revealed instead to be a rhythm minigame – as well as a real mod instead of a joke.
By late 2024, Severed Chains RB3 was still not finished. The in-progress devbuild became mostly stable, save for some bugs. To compensate for how long it took, additional niceties were included such as accessibility settings and a choice of whether submaps get stretched.
That is the story so far. SC RB3 is very close to completion, as is the 25th anniversary. We expect to have a celebration/festival of sorts as things continue to get more and more exciting in the fandom – be it SC or many other projects that have leveled-up over the years.