It's new to me: Last Legion UX

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Unlike with its predecessor, the SNES, the majority of the Nintendo 64’s lineup was published worldwide. Whereas 1,448 titles were released for the Super Famicom compared to 717 in North America, for the N64, just 85 of the system’s 388 games remained exclusive to Japan. There are quite a few hidden gems in those 85 games, which in many cases weren’t localized not because of concerns with the quality, but because producing anything for the N64 was expensive given the whole cartridge cost issue: if you weren’t absolutely sure that Americans or Europeans were going to buy up 150,000 copies of your arena-based mech battler or your Mystery Dungeon game that didn’t star a Pokémon or your game where you get to pretend you’re a train engineer, then you simply did not release those titles abroad. Otherwise, you run the risk of being stuck with up to 150,000 unsold cartridges that you paid for regardless, or, around half-a-million in lost funds you’ve converted into plastic. Not that this sort of thing ever happened to any company out there or anything.

The arena-based mech battler in question is Last Legion UX, which released in Japan in May of 1999. While there were overtures towards a North American release, with Japanese publisher (and co-developer) Hudson Soft negotiating with Mindscape to get that done, those talks didn’t end up going anywhere, leaving Last Legion UX exclusive to its home region. And this despite the fact that IGN had reported it as a done deal at one point.

As said, Hudson co-developed the game, along with Yuke’s. You probably know Yuke’s best from their work with various wrestling or MMA games, or their more recent involvement with Earth Defense Force spinoffs if you’re a particular kind of gamer, but back in 1999, when they were only a handful of releases into their existence, they worked on a mech combat game. As was pointed out at Ephemeral Enigmas last summer, the roster Hudson put together to assist on this game is wild. Hidetoshi Endo has had a hand in various Mario Party titles, Mario Golf, Bomberman games, Robopon, Blazing Lazers, and more. The game’s composer, Yoshitaka Azuma, is known for his work on the Panzer Dragoon series. The director, Shuichiro Nishiya, is “the Mario Party guy,” while sound programmer Masakatsu Maekawa started at Now Production, a near-constant partner of Hudson’s. As said at Ephemeral Enigmas, “Between Yuke’s fighting/wrestling game experience and Hudson Soft’s vast experience with multiplayer gaming, it’s really no surprise that Last Legion UX is as solid as it is because this game is the perfect example of playing to the strengths of the people involved.”

Now, in this time period, you might think of those wild twin-stick controllers that Sega would release for their systems. You know, the ones that supported a small number of games but you know you want one, anyway, because how cool would it be to play Virtual on: Cyber Troopers with twin sticks so you feel like an actual mech pilot? You don’t need that for Last Legion UX, which is meant to be a more approachable mech combat game, for one, and also because it was designed very well for the N64 controller and its many inputs.

Which is not the same thing as saying that playing Last Legion UX on an N64 pad is as inherently cool as playing anything on a Twin Stick, but the point here is really that Last Legion UX was meant to be more approachable and also less expensive to play. A lower barrier to entry, another kind of combat game from a company already known for them. Only this time there were mechs instead of New Japan Pro wrestlers.

You move around with the analog stick, and hold down the R button to strafe, and fast, in any direction. You can’t turn while using this strafe, though, since you’re hovering while you do it, but, you can get pretty good at stopping and turning and strafing again, especially since there’s no limit to how much strafing around you’re doing here. Between having an analog stick for moving around the 3D environments and the ability to strafe like that, you’re not quite looking at something as smooth as Armored Core VI, by any means, but you can certainly get the job done all the same.

You can jump (and double jump) with the A button, and the B button is for your primary weapon — hold it, and, depending on the weapon in question, you can also fire off a charged attack. The left and up C buttons are for your secondary weapon, while the down C button is for locking on to your target. The Z button is used for blocking incoming attacks, which you can do with a shield of your choosing, selected during the loadout period. Beyond these basic maneuvers, you also have access to some higher level ones. Pressing A and B together allows you to melee attack, which is very useful for not just damaging an opponent but also getting them the hell away from you when they swarm you up close. You can use your special attack with the Z and B button pressed at the same time: this charges up over time, the progress shown in a bar at the top and center of your screen, and can be used anytime after it’s fully charged. You should be able to access this once or even twice per battle, so long as you’re getting enough hits in to feed it.

The absolutely coolest thing you can do in Last Legion UX, however, is the attack performed with the Z and A buttons pressed at the same time. This only works if you’re close enough to pull it off, and if you’re not being interrupted by a melee attack or getting shot or whatever other desperation move your opponent is going to attempt to stave off what you’re trying to do. You can straight-up rip out the power core of your opponent’s mech, instantly ending the battle. Now, it’s not going to happen often, because everyone involved knows that this possibility is there. What it does do, however, is create this incredible tension between your desire to get close to an opponent to start wailing on them with melee attacks or to close the distance between the two of you in order to increase the accuracy of your ranged attacks. Someone who knows what they’re doing can block and strafe their way right to the heart of your machine and then tear it out, if you’re too busy standing around trying to get the perfect shot off at the perfect distance. And knowing that could happen is going to keep you from standing around like that. This instant kill doesn’t need to happen, basically, in order for its potential to happen to influence the feel and structure of a match.

Last Legion UX has a campaign mode as well as standard 1v1 player-vs-player matches that you can play endlessly, but the two are connected. The campaign features various unlockables that you can access once you’ve beaten the story mode a certain number of times, and then those unlockables — weapons, other mechs — that can be used in the regular battles against another human player, or the computer. There are six mechs available for you to use in the story mode, and the other six are solely for multiplayer. Sorry, you can’t play as a Bomberman mech in the campaign, but hey, you can pit a Bomberman mech and a mech of a metal Bomberman statue against each other in multiplayer, at least. Once you’ve unlocked them, anyway.

While the story mode is pretty short — think of it like playing through the story mode in a standard fighting game in the 90s, a series of progressively more difficult one-on-one battles — it’s meant to be replayed a bunch of times to unlock everything, and to experiment with the new weapons and such that actually are available in that mode. It’s easy to do since there are plenty of mechs to choose from with customizable loadouts/strategies relating to which mechs you picked, even if you can’t utilize the additional six you unlock. Again, it’s no Armored Core VI or anything in terms of customization, but it’s not meant to be that. You do still have to debate what kind of weapon is going to serve you best against specific mechs and their most notable characteristics, for instance, your heavier weapon isn’t going to do well against a fast opponent who can just dodge everything, but if you’ve got something weaker and faster or with a homing element, you can eventually catch them more often than they can get away. Or, if you’re fast, too, and confident in your lateral movements, equip a melee weapon and chase them down before beating them down.

The story is always the same, as is your character and all of the dialogue you’ll read. You are controlling the titular last legion — that’s what mechs are called in this game — as he attempts to stop a much larger force of mechs from their plan to… well, you don’t know what it is when you start, but your character is pretty sure it’s nothing good. While said dialogue is not going to win any prizes, the overall arc of the story is neat, in that it’s revealed that, by traveling backward in time to stop a particular catastrophe from happening, you actually locked in said catastrophe as the future. You’re caught in an endless loop, forever, which fits the whole idea of replaying again and again well.

The story mode begins with a lone mech pilot realizing he’s been pulled away from the base where time travel technology is stored, in order for a terrorist group, Light Raid, to utilize said time travel. He follows them back through time, and meets a whole bunch of bored mechs who aren’t taking any of this as seriously as you are, at least outside of combat. Over time he learns that the terrorists are after a massive power stone, the asteroid from which the power cores used in their mechs came from, and goes about trying to keep them from bringing it back to the future and upsetting the delicate balance of power that currently exists between these warring factions. There’s a bit of a twist there that ties into the whole time travel loop thing, and it’s fine and all, but again, the dialogue doesn’t really rise to the same level, so you’ll probably find yourself skipping it all the second time around. Which is fine, really. You’re here to pit mechs against each other and eventually unlock a Bomberman mecha, and Last Legion UX lets you do that whether you read the dialogue closely or not.

If you’re looking for something as emotionally gripping or as complicated as Armored Core VI, you won’t find it here, but that shouldn’t be a surprise. You aren’t going to find that anywhere. If you just want an early-ish 3D mech combat game with plenty of difficulty options and choice in what kind of mech you’re going to pilot, and what it’s going to be equipped with, then Last Legion UX has got you covered. It only had the one release in Japan, however, so the only way you can play it is by (1) importing the Japanese cartridge, which will cost you about $40 as of this writing, or (2) emulating it or its unofficially translated English-language version. Considering how much of the game is already in English — story mode aside — either plan works, really, if all you want to do is look at a chart that tells you a gun is more powerful or slower than the other option, and this mech is faster, and so on.

Last Legion UX is basically the perfect kind of game to end up Nintendo Switch Online, given it has no previous re-release or international presence, and English isn’t required to get into it. The problem with that thought is that, like with everything else Hudson, Konami has rights to this game, and they aren’t very interested in NSO as a concept outside of some NES titles.

You should read Ephemeral Enigma’s feature on Last Legion UX in full. It’s exceptionally detailed, and with a lot more screenshots of the actual gameplay, which is something that’s missing from the internet as a whole, and not something I could help with since I played on actual N64 hardware through a CRT.

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