The Legend of Dragoon has an extremely dedicated fanbase that has been begging Sony for a reboot for years. When they were met with decades of silence, fans just started remaking the game themselves, first in RPG Maker, and then with a remaster project that upscaled the game's graphics. There's even a petition for a full Final Fantasy 7-style remake.
So when Sony threw them a bone with a PlayStation 5 port earlier this week, many were delighted at first but were soon crushed to discover that the new Legend of Dragoon port is quite possibly the worst example of emulation on the PS5 to date. The game crashes, is full of bizarre audio and visual bugs, and new features in the port can cause it to freeze up.
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A Reddit thread over on the JRPG subreddit (with thanks to Eurogamer) collates The Legend of Dragoon's issues pretty well. We'll start with the small stuff, like "jittering blue lines around objects in the background" and random ASCII characters following after character names. Then there are the audio issues, where sound effects or voice lines will clip halfway through or just not play at all. That appears to be due to a memory overflow issue that can be mitigated by changing the game's audio to mono instead of stereo.
These glitches could be ignored by dedicated fans, but there are also several crashes that you'll need to be aware of. Using Dragoon magic at all causes the game to lock up, either not allowing the battle to progress, freezing, or presenting the player with a black screen. Using the new rewind feature can sometimes get around this issue, but others on the Reddit thread report the rewind feature can also cause the game to crash too.
YouTuber BltzZ showcased some of these issues in a video posted to his channel, and also directed fans to a post on the PlayStation forums to ensure the devs have as much information about these crashes as possible. Comments on the post assure angry fans that the engineering team has been informed of all the bugs and is working on a patch, but there's no time frame for when that patch will be available.