Whereas Sony‘s late-era PS1 JRPG The Legend of Dragoon turned a cult traditional, it was usually seen on the time as fairly direct imitator of the Ultimate Fantasy collection. Whereas the success of Sq.’s role-playing collection would possibly’ve helped persuade PlayStation to foot the invoice for its $15 million improvement price range, Legend of Dragoon solely occurred within the first place as a result of its builders genuinely wished to make it.
Former PlayStation Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida, who served as producer on Legend of Dragoon throughout his tenure with the corporate, felt so strongly in regards to the JRPG that he as soon as crashed a stream of the sport from gaming character Kyle Bosman. Bosman urged that Legend of Dragoon was meant to be Sony’s “personal Ultimate Fantasy 7,” and Yoshida appeared in Twitch chat to say “Nobody advised us to make any type of recreation. We wished to make this recreation.”
Yoshida remembered that second with fun in a new interview with Bosman, and he recounted a few of Legend of Dragoon’s early improvement historical past. “One of many hires that I did was from Squaresoft. It was earlier than the merger with Enix,” Yoshida defined. “This particular person, [Yasuyuki] Hasebe-san, was one of many battle designers for Mario RPG. That is an amazing recreation, proper? He designed the fight, like timing enter for the turn-based [battles]. So that you see the origin of Legend of Dragoon.”
Yoshida mentioned that he “did not poach Hasebe-san from Sq.,” the designer simply utilized to work at Sony. “When he joined us, I requested him ‘What do you wish to do?’ ‘I wish to make a brand new RPG.’ And that is how I began gathering much more folks to begin making The Legend of Dragoon.”
At the moment, Yoshida mentioned, “Ultimate Fantasy 7 was already already introduced and using 3D graphics for the fight and the pre-rendered 3D CG – lovely CG – for the backgrounds was wonderful to us. Like ‘oh, that is next-generation type of recreation.’ We had been younger and we had been naive, and fortunately I used to be given the project to develop the inner staff. I used to be assigned to make the studio bigger. I used to be given a free price range, nearly, to rent folks.”
The Legend of Dragoon’s $15 million price range and 100-person improvement staff was fairly an anomaly on the time, however Yoshida urged that it occurred nearly by chance with the clean test Sony left him. “I did not actually have a price range after I began, as a result of it was an inner manufacturing. So I used to be simply hiring folks, and in Japan, not many skilled folks left firms.” Hasebe himself was an outlier in that regard, and far of the remainder of Legend of Dragoon’s improvement staff was made up of “younger folks proper out of school, and even some online game colleges. That is how we assembled the staff.”
Whereas Legend of Dragoon has turn into fairly a fan-favorite, Hasebe left the sport business not lengthy after its launch. Legend of Dragoon’s PS5 re-release in 2023 proved simply what number of followers the PS1 traditional nonetheless has, so it appears Hasebe’s legacy within the recreation business has far outlasted his personal time in it.
