Legaia 2: Dual Saga is a Playstation 2 game developed by Prokion. I don't expect you'll expect to know who they are as they don't even have their own Wikipedia page. This game is a JRPG in which you control a single character through the game and you have the task of trying to find and destroy another evil character who wants to take revenge on humanity in favor for his own "special" race.
Legaia 2 had a lot of nice features that felt new if your only source of JRPGs were the (in)famous Final Fantasy series.
Among them were a nice crafting system that unlike in the Final Fantasy games actually worked! And that's because the items needed for crafting new weapons and armor were actually somewhat common and dropped occasionally. You didn't need "recipies" either because you weren't so much crafting new weapons as much as upgrading your existing weapons... so I suppose the correct term would be perhaps upcrafting. But I'm getting off-track here...
The story is pretty standard for an JRPG. You come from a village that lies in the side of a great canyon. They can survive there thanks to a blue crystal that produces water in a lake. One morning while Lang is gone rescuing some friend of his the bad guy walks right into the village and steals the crystal. The entire village is unable to stop him. Lang takes it on himself to go and recover the crystal again. He eventually finds others that in some ways share his goals.
The gameplay in Legaia 2 differs from other games in how combat works. Instead of just giving your party orders like Attack, Magic, Summon, ect. your main way of dealing punishment is using arts (arts are martial techniques) and these arts can be linked together so that you follow one art by another art. You can also learn new arts by accidently tapping in a combination of attacks so that it produces the specified art. This means that you take all the arts you know with you from one game to the next and it's also much easier to cheat.
Your characters also use magic but not by evoking magical powers, instead your characters summon elemental entities that does one attack and then disappears. These entities aren't that important in combat but they serve a somewhat greater importance during the story.
All in all this was a pretty decent game thanks to it's features, the length, the surplus of different minigames and the fact that it wasn't Final fucking Fantasy. (4/6)
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