An “Ordinary” Difference: A Fan Treatise on The Legend of Heroes
If you can look past the name, what you’ll find in The Legend of Heroes series will surprise you: the worldbuilding and character development in this game are unlike anything you’ll find anywhere else. While it does have a really solid core story, with this series the devil truly is in the details. Whether you’re talking side stories, in-world hobbies, character writing – playable or otherwise, and even the government systems and structures, every detail is lovingly and painstakingly crafted to create an immersive and relatable world that draws you in and leaves you craving more. Sure, there are a lot of games out there with interesting cultures. And a lot of Role-Playing Games (RPGs) have fantastic worlds, but the Legend of Heroes still manages to stand out by focusing first and foremost on creating a world that works regardless of your existence.
One key way that The Legend of Heroes stands out is that Falcom, the games’ creators, recognizes the importance of the ordinary. This series makes brilliant use of mundanity to help you better understand the people and the world. Yes, I know, the mundane is exactly what so many of us are using games as an escape from, but in the Legend of Heroes games, you’re put into the shoes of characters who have reasons to help people in a variety of ways – ranging from the ordinary to the extreme. These ordinary experiences have the unique side effect of helping you connect to these rich, well-written NPCs while also giving you a much deeper understanding for how the various countries in this world work because it helps you to understand people’s real day-to-day problems more.
The ordinary moments in the Legend of Heroes give a truly fascinating perspective on characters. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of ‘go kill this’ or ‘go find this’ quests in these games, but there are also some that go beyond what you’d normally expect to see in an RPG. One of my favourite silly examples is a quest where you are given the opportunity to take over a fruit stand in an open-air market. The owner decides to pit your party against each other in a contest to see who can sell the most. It’s a simple quest where you have to choose to offer discounts to people to convince them to buy, but you get to interact with so many NPCs that it creates a lovely opportunity to get to know the ordinary NPCs in the town better.
Quests like that give you a reason to talk to characters – because you never know when a quest is going to reward you for knowing NPC personalities. In order for that to work, the game needs these side characters to have enough writing for you to actually get to know them. This is where another of Falcom’s design decisions comes in handy – they have a tendency to change nearly every NPC’s dialog every time the story moves forward. And as you get to know characters better, it makes those normally throwaway “I lost my item; go retrieve it” quests take on a different meaning. When you’ve spent two full games watching two NPCs start out as strangers and gradually build their relationship, having one of the two characters tell you ‘I just bought a ring and a bird stole it out of my hands – please help me find it!’ suddenly means something. Or after spending seven (or more) games watching a character have the worst luck imaginable, it made me cheer out loud to see him finally get a chance at happiness. And I guarantee you every Legend of Heroes fan knows exactly the NPC I’m talking about right now, too.
I can name dozens of NPCs, describe their personality, and even tell you their personal story because when making The Legend of Heroes, Falcom didn’t just build video games, they built a world with countless stories attached. That is, if you’re willing to open your eyes and pay attention. This world even has its own written works. Each game has literature just waiting to be found: from children’s stories to legends of past deeds, books of (relatively accurate) prophecies to in-world non-fiction works, including both technology manuals and factual records detailing the rich history of this continent, and even a variety of newspapers.
The newspaper articles in the Trails of Cold Steel games – the third sub-series in the Legend of Heroes chronology – are particularly interesting to me. They give a window into the current events and culture of the Erebonian Empire, which is the nation the Cold Steel games primarily take place in, and the world at large – told through the lens of government-censored journalism. And the newspaper articles usually don’t focus on what you’re doing as the main character, even if some of your deeds occasionally make their way into the paper in some form or another. It’s fascinating how much thought they put into the concept of “How would this event be written about, given that the Erebonian government is calling the shots on what the paper prints?”
All of this world-building has an interesting side-effect. In a lot of games, you really only know that weird things are happening because the game tells you. But, in a series like this, where you get to really know people and what their lives are like, you become instantly and intimately aware of the changes that happen to them. This familiarity does a few really important things, like allowing Legend of Heroes to avoid some of those awkward RPG staple conversations where the NPCs try to convince you that what’s happening is not normal. But it also has a really big impact on your appreciation of the core story.
Very few games have ever made me cry for minor NPCs or villains – but Legend of Heroes has done both on multiple occasions. They accomplish that remarkable feat by making every character have a story or a place in the world. All those little things I’ve been talking about all contribute to making nearly every NPC feel like they have as much importance as most games give to their protagonists. And when you care this much about every character, it’s hard not to become invested and immersed in the world every time you step in.
This, I think, is the heart of what makes Legend of Heroes fans so ravenous: the love and care put in by the series’ creators to build a cohesive, connected world full of people who actually have opinions, lives, and stories — not just hints as to your next objective. The fact that the writers didn’t ignore little questions like “What might have happened to this character we mentioned off-hand as being ‘missing’ five games ago?” and instead had their story be written back into the world in another place and time. Their attention to detail was able to make NPCs so beloved that minor bit characters make peoples’ ‘favourite characters of all time’ lists alongside the protagonists. And their writing prowess made me spend four games cheering for the romance between two minor side characters to the point where a sidequest at the end of the fourth game involving them held nearly as much importance to me as the game’s apocalyptic main story.
And I hope that after reading this you don’t let yourself get deterred by the series’ drab title and give it a second look, as taking the leap into this world on a whim all those years ago has proven to be one of the most rewarding gaming decisions of my life.
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