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Beloved PS1 JRPG Legend of Dragoon wasn't meant to be a Final Fantasy 7 killer, Super Mario RPG's battle designer just said 'I want to make a new RPG'
The Legend of Dragoon, a PS1 JRPG, wasn't a Sony-mandated Final Fantasy clone; it originated from developers' passion, led by Shuhei Yoshida, and its unique battle system was influenced by a designer from SquareSoft. Despite its cult following and recent PS5 re-release, the game's key designer left the industry soon after its launch.
While Sony's late-era PS1 JRPG The Legend of Dragoon became a cult classic, it was often seen at the time as pretty direct imitator of the Final Fantasy series. While the success of Square's role-playing series might've helped convince PlayStation to foot the bill for its $15 million development budget, Legend of Dragoon only happened in the first place because its developers genuinely wanted to make it.
Former PlayStation Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida, who served as producer on Legend of Dragoon during his tenure with the company, felt so strongly about the JRPG that he once crashed a stream of the game from gaming personality Kyle Bosman. Bosman suggested that Legend of Dragoon was meant to be Sony's "own Final Fantasy 7," and Yoshida appeared in Twitch chat to say "No one told us to make any kind of game. We wanted to make this game."
Yoshida remembered that moment with a laugh in a new interview with Bosman, and he recounted some of Legend of Dragoon's early development history. "One of the hires that I did was from Squaresoft. It was before the merger with Enix," Yoshida explained. "This person, [Yasuyuki] Hasebe-san, was one of the battle designers for Mario RPG. That's a great game, right? He designed the combat, like timing input for the turn-based [battles]. So you see the origin of Legend of Dragoon."
Yoshida said that he "didn't poach Hasebe-san from Square," the designer just applied to work at Sony. "When he joined us, I asked him 'What do you want to do?' 'I want to make a new RPG.' And that's how I started gathering even more people to start making The Legend of Dragoon."
At that time, Yoshida said, "Final Fantasy 7 was already already announced and the use of 3D graphics for the combat and the pre-rendered 3D CG – beautiful CG – for the backgrounds was amazing to us. Like 'oh, this is next-generation kind of game.' We were young and we were naive, and luckily I was given the assignment to grow the internal team. I was assigned to make the studio larger. I was given a free budget, almost, to hire people."
The Legend of Dragoon's $15 million budget and 100-person development team was quite an anomaly at the time, but Yoshida suggested that it happened almost by accident with the blank check Sony left him. "I didn't even have a budget when I started, because it was an internal production. So I was just hiring people, and in Japan, not many experienced people left companies." Hasebe himself was an outlier in that regard, and much of the rest of Legend of Dragoon's development team was made up of "young people right out of college, or even some video game schools. That's how we assembled the team."
While Legend of Dragoon has become quite a fan-favorite, Hasebe left the game industry not long after its release. Legend of Dragoon's PS5 re-release in 2023 proved just how many fans the PS1 classic still has, so it seems Hasebe's legacy in the game industry has far outlasted his own time in it.