The Legend of Dragoon was recently celebrated online for its twentieth anniversary since releasing as a Sony exclusive RPG for the PlayStation, and fans are hoping to garner enough attention and petition signatures for a remake. December 2, 1999 marked the first release of the game and offered a unique take on the classic RPG combat system by making each fight dynamic by requiring constant timed input from the player to maximize damage through a string of hits.
Fans have organized a petition titled “Global Campaign to Remake Legend of Dragoon.” At the time of writing, nearly 16,000 signatures had been gathered towards the organizer’s goal of 20,000. The petition features a letter for Sony with a request that the classic RPG be remade to coincide with the release of the PlayStation 5, because otherwise, “If it were made for PS4, LoD would again suffer the fate of being released at the end of a console’s generation.” The letter continues with a number of other recommendations based on the first game.
As The Legend of Dragoon received generally favorable reviews and sold reasonably well following its release, it is certainly not out of the realm of possibility to see the game remade. As of 2007, the last available date with available data, the game had sold over 1.1 million copies worldwide and in addition in the top five PlayStation Classic charts upon its digital re-release online.
The game certainly looks to have all the necessary elements needed to launch a serious remake campaign. Sony could even treat the game as the first in a series of games, especially since a sequel was already in the works but later cancelled. Developer Bluepoint Games is being watched closely in this regard, as they have made several remakes from the catalogue of games that also controls access to The Legend of Dragoon.
While some players are clearly rooting for a remake, the entire notion of remaking games is one that has recently received mixed responses. Some players dislike the idea of devoting resources to continually remaking old content when there is so much to explore in narrative and game design structures. Nintendo spoke to this trend of remaking games by stating that while they see the appeal in nostalgia, they would prefer to devote the time and energy towards creating brand new experiences for players.
However, as mentioned above The Legend of Dragoon was released at an awkward time for the original PlayStation, and there may be a large new audience to experience the game for the first time. For now we can only speculate, but given that the original game was relatively successful, and there appear to be a number of signatures supporting the idea of a remake, we may be seeing The Legend of Dragoon again.
Source: legendofdragoon.org