Just over a week ago, the 1998 scrolling beat’em up Legend quietly arrived on the Antstream Arcade service. Due to its obscurity, you’d be forgiven for not having heard of it before. Even searching Google brings up a dozen other PS1 games with ‘Legend’ in their title before showing a result. A paltry single result, no less.
Developed by Toka and published by Funsoft, the PS1’s Legend for was a remake of an equally obscure SNES game, of the same name, from 1994 – which made it to modern consoles last year via the QUByte‘s Beat ‘Em Up Archives.
This 32-bit rendition leaps into 3D, featuring motion-captured characters on simple 3D backdrops that scroll from left to right. As it’s of the medieval variety, with pig-men and other fantasy elements, describing it as Golden Axe 3D isn’t off the mark. Our heroes Axel, Tara and Karo can pick up swords, axes and knives, and perform a few different attacks, including a long-reaching kick that’ll strike a few enemies at once. Five stages feature, each with a boss, and there’s a CGI intro to set the tone.
Legend launched in 1998 – when most developers had a firm grasp on the PSone hardware – and the visuals reflect this, with a decent variety of textures and large detailed characters. However, this also came at a cost – the engine can only handle a few enemies on screen at once, making for a predictable and repetitive experience. You’re essentially ushered from one small area to the next, fighting no more than three enemies. It mixes things up with different backdrops and new weapons, but it isn’t enough. Neither is it a particularly technical brawler, with blocking far too delayed to be useful. You’ll also quickly notice how zoomed in the camera is, to the point where it’s so close to your chosen pugilist that the action is often obscured.
Legend isn’t terrible, though. It’s fun in a mindless way. More so if you visit the options menu and crank up the amount of gore. This doesn’t just make enemies spurt more ketchup, but rather causes them to be sliced in two – it’s quite the sight the first time you see it.
Most reviews of Legend were around the 6/10 mark, which seems fair. It has some glaring faults, but most can be overlooked as the difficulty level isn’t too high. Word has it THQ was looking to secure a US release under the name of Knights of Carnage, but for whatever reason this never happened, limiting it to Europe and Australia only. Physical copies can be expensive to acquire nowadays due to its rarity. It appears it had a very small print run.
I definitely feel Legend is worth thirty minutes of your time; it’s a pretty deep cut of PSone history, and interesting to see that 3D remakes of 2D games were a thing back in 1998.