After having played this game, a player would wonder how Capcom handles its in-house quality assurance, or development cycle, for that matter.
Chaos Legion appears to have a very new and refreshing premise. The player character appears to have powers and responsibilities that are beyond the ken of other mortals and are hinted to come at a dark price. Similarly, his nemesis appears to have made pacts with terrible powers to bring about a calamity as retribution against the world and the protagonist for some wrongdoing that is not immediately apparent.
Such designs for a premise would appear to be rather different (if not new) from those of so many other Japanese high-fantasy games at the time, so it would give the impression that Capcom may have come up with something good. Unfortunately, the actual story-writing just isn't as good as the overarching premise; this is not the only setback that this game has.
There is no explanation for the player character's supposedly dark and sinister powers, or any delving into how he has obtained them. His nemesis is just as poorly fleshed out, and appears to be little different from the typical bitter, morbid and sociopathic character archetype that Japanese designers were quite partial to at the time. The same complaints can be directed at a third character that is introduced into the story shortly after the prologue, only that she seems even shallower than the others (especially if her visual designs are considered).
Every level ends with flashbacks to the time when the main characters were at better terms with each other, but the flashbacks repeat a lot, only giving a few new scenes each time. As a result, the story feels slow to develop. A rather convenient plot twist that weakly explains away the truth behind the enmity between the protagonist and antagonist also leads to the impression that the story is a throw-away, especially if the player has – somehow - gained an interest in knowing why the protagonist has such an almost insufferable sense of remorse.
Such lousy story designs would still have been bearable if the gameplay is good. At first glance, it would appear to be.
The protagonist's barely explained mastery of glyphs that can summon otherworldly creatures that demand the sacrifice of souls (including a portion of his own soul) would appear to make for some interesting gameplay, especially when one considers that they are named as the titular "Chaos Legion". Unfortunately, the actual gameplay is far less than what it promises.
The player character can only have one type of creature summoned at any one time, and more importantly, only two types out of several can be selected for use throughout a level. This can be rather disappointing if the player had expected to be able to control these creatures like actual legions of yore.
The other major cause for disappointment is how the game requires the player to find the artifacts (called "Crests") that are needed to unlock the use of the creatures (called "Legions" in-game), despite the player character having been described as having been bestowed with the power to control them long before the events in the story started. That the protagonist loses his most powerful Legion early on and have them broken into pieces that are scattered throughout the other levels may also seem like a narrative contrivance that was introduced to have the player hunting around for hidden collectibles.
Then after getting these Legions unlocked, the player has to grind replays of levels for the experience needed to upgrade them. No narrative reason was given for this either.
Such contrived designs that are poorly supported by the story-writing are not new and have been done before many times in games, but that does not excuse Chaos Legion, which is supposed to be a new IP, from not doing anything different.
It is very unfortunate that these flaws over-shadow the more interesting and better-implemented of the game designs. These concern the consequences and benefits of equipping Crests, having Legions actively summoned and how their AI-scripted assistance in battle can be controlled.
As mentioned earlier, the use of these otherworldly entities comes with a cost to the player character. While he has the Legions locked away wherever they are, he can move around normally, e.g. run, and he can make attacks at full power; not surprisingly, this mode is named "Assault". When he summons them into being - thus switching to "Force" mode - he loses the capability to run and thus have to rely on the assistance of the Legions to distract and defeat his enemies with. The player can summon and dismiss Legions rather easily, allowing for versatility in battle.
In either case, the player must manage the player character's "Soul" meter; there is one for each Legion crest that the player equips on the player character. As the player character defeats the inhuman enemies that oppose him, their souls are absorbed by the Legion crests, thus filling the meter. In "Assault" mode, the meter acts like a special attack reservoir, which can be expended to briefly summon the Legions, which will execute powerful and unique attacks on a targeted enemy. In "Force" mode, they act like a health meter for the Legions.
When any Legion type is active, its members (there can be more than one of the same type) can be set to either one of two stances. In Passive stance, they obediently await orders from the player and will not act on their own other than to follow the player character around. When set to Active stance, they seek out nearby enemies and wail away on them. If the player has been upgrading them regularly, they are powerful enough such that the player can leave them to defeat their own opponents, so there is not much hand-holding to be done.
If the Soul meter is depleted while they are on the battlefield, i.e. they took too much damage from enemies, their presence will be dispelled and the player is prevented from using the special attacks associated with them, much less summoning them again. To restore them, the player will need to collect enough Souls to reach a threshold in the Soul meter.
Fortunately, breaking a crest does not mean that the player character completely loses all benefits associated with the Legion. A Legion also grants ever-present benefits when its crest is equipped; these are known as "Enchants" (sic), which are usually modifiers to the player character's combat capabilities. For example, equipping the Guilt Legion crest gives the player character the ability to pop enemies into the air. Another example is the defense buff that the player gains when the Arrogance Legion crest is equipped.
Another ever-present benefit from equipping Crests is special moves that are associated with certain Legions. For example, equipping the Hatred Legion Crest allows the player character to shoulder-ram past bunches of enemies, pushing them aside or even tossing them into the air. This is an important design decision, as it prevents the player character from becoming too vulnerable from suffering a depleted Soul meter. Most importantly, this benefit can be upgraded to the point of being permanently bestowed on the player character without the need to equip the associated Crest, though the act of upgrading can be a chore, as will be elaborated on later.
The Legions themselves are rather varied in design and have different capabilities in battle. For example, the Malice Legion is equipped with long-range attacks, while the Flawed Legion is airborne and attacks with swoops and swipes of their claws. Another notable example is the Blasphemy Legion, whose explosive attacks are so powerful against bunches of enemies that their balancing design has them consuming soul energy when they attack.
The Legions have very striking visual designs. They have a slight touch of the baroque, while the rest of their thematic presentation has them looking very otherworldly and creepy, fittingly enough. They are also well-animated, though it has to be mentioned here that the developers conveniently have them all floating above the ground like feetless ghosts to reduce the animations. All of them are surprisingly silent most of the time, however; although this contributes to their creepiness, the lack of voice-overs for them also give an impression that they are more akin to machines than otherworldly creatures. This is in contrast with their postures and stances, which give them character, hence giving another impression, which is that they haven't been fully designed.
On the same note, some of their other interesting properties are sabotaged by poor implementation of the other aspects of the game that are associated with these. For example, some of the Legions are effective against "organic" enemies, some are effective against "non-organic" ones and the rest are effective against both. Unfortunately, the designation of enemies as "organic" or "non-organic" is not clear. Some enemies that do not visually seem to have fleshy parts are considered "organic", while some that appear to have bits of exposed muscle here and there are considered "non-organic". More importantly, there is no in-game listing of the bestiary, which should have been included if the player is expected to make use of these properties.
Having "experience"-gathering mechanics and upgrade systems that require the expenditure of accrued "experience" is nothing new in games, of course, but how the player makes use of these can spell the difference between a game being praised for having ingenious gameplay and it being lambasted for repetitive grinding. Unfortunately, those of Chaos Legion appear to fall more into the latter sort than the former.
As mentioned earlier, the player character can only equip two Legions for each level. To compound this limitation further, only these two Legions will benefit from the experience that is gained through completing the level. Therefore, if the player wishes to upgrade a fledgling Legion, he/she has to use said Legion, which is perhaps only suitable for the earlier levels (which can be replayed after being completed). This can lead to a lot of grinding, which could have been avoided if the player had been allowed to spend EXP in whatever way that he/she likes. Moreover, to unlock the option to upgrade Legions to the next level, the player must progress through the story, meaning that he/she cannot grind in order to prepare for the next level (though this is not necessarily a bad design, debatably enough).
Perhaps worst of all, to unlock the option to grind for the highest power level for any aspect of a Legion – and not the highest level itself, just the option – the player has to obtain special artifacts that have to be spent on this aspect of the Legion. These artifacts can only be obtained from killing certain bosses, thus increasing the need to grind some more.
Therefore, one would have the impression that the otherwise great designs for the Legions have been scuttled by design decisions that do not have the same creativity as that which went into the former.
The player character has a health meter, which has the usual designs: keep it as filled up as possible to keep playing, or suffer a game-over when it completely depletes. To keep his health up, the player can do one of two things: defeat certain enemies that release health pick-ups when they are slain, or use "Gems" to restore them. Gems can often be found lying around in levels, or obtained from defeating certain (usually powerful) enemies.
The former method is rather risky and is meant to encourage finesse on the part of the player, but the convenience of the latter option makes the goal of this design moot.
That is not to say that Gems are a poor mechanic though. They are perhaps the most reliably implemented mechanic in the game, but they also happen to be rather mundane because similar mechanics have been in many other games for a long, long time. On the other hand, some of them, namely the Experience Gems, allow the player to circumvent some limitations on the improvement of the Legions. Moreover, once a player has no longer any use for a kind of gem (namely those that raises stats, up to a maximum level where they can go no further), it is replaced by an Experience Gem of the equivalent size, which helps alleviate the grinding somewhat. (The same also occurs for Legion Crests that had been collected.)
The camera by default generally has the player character in the bottom middle of the screen, but does not consider his/her current orientation: the player may have the player character running away from a mob to where he came before coming across them, but the camera will not turn to show where the player character is heading. There is a mini-map, but it only shows the locations of enemies relative to the player character, and not the obstacles, twists and turns of the levels that he is in.
Of course, one can argue that the levels are very linearly designed and quite drably simple so bumping into things should not be a problem, but such designs on their own are not actually a good thing; they make the game look boring, and waste the otherwise good artwork that went into the levels. Most importantly, such an obtuse camera would definitely not have been a problem if the player can have the player character shooting away at enemies while moving away backwards. Unfortunately, the player character can only use ranged attacks while standing still.
(And even then, ranged attacks are something that only one of the Legions grants; otherwise, the player character can only resort to close combat. The other player character does not have the same limitation, though she is not necessarily a better player character; there will be more on this later.)
Most of the models in this game belong to creatures whose looks are far removed from humans' or any actual earthly creature. Most of these in turn belong to the enemies that the player has to face and defeat. They have been described as vicious beings that either came from another dimension or were once native denizens that were corrupted into something else, so they look appropriately hideous and almost indescribable. There appears to be a common trait to them though, which is that their designs are centered around a weapon, either one that they are wielding or one that grows out of them like a limb; this emphasizes their creepiness, which is a good thing.
However, there isn't much narrative reason for their being in the game, other than the aforementioned descriptions. This gives an impression that they are just nuisances in the way, and this is further bolstered by the archvillain's portrayals of them as obstacles that are meant to delay the protagonist's progress. There are a lot of them too and many are palette swaps of each other. A lot of enemy types are repeated as well, and this makes the grinding even more unbearable.
The same complaints can also be made about the sound designs. As mentioned earlier, the Legions are disappointingly quiet dudes. The enemies are not so, but as they are inhuman things, there is not much of any voice-over to be had from them. They mostly grunt, groan and growl in ghastly ways as befitting creatures as creepy-looking as they are, but that there are only a handful of enemy archetypes in the game means that they can get repetitive rather quickly.
The pivotal characters and bosses could have compensated for these inconsequential and troublesome extras with their very unique looks (with the exception of the other protagonist), but as mentioned earlier, they are thrust into a rather lackadaisically composed story that only highlights their shallowness.
The developers have originally designed this game for the PS2, so it may seem understandable that its graphics and controls are not exactly what a PC user would expect from a PC title (albeit an obviously ported one). There is some effort at fine-tuning the game for the PC, such as higher resolution textures and models as well as particle effects not seen in the PS2 version, but such effort does not put this game above so many other ports of PS2 games that did no better or worse.
The game unlocks additional content when the player has completed the story mode, but these may not seem like worthwhile rewards when the player checks them out. Some of these content pieces include the usual higher difficulty modes, which lead to nothing more and are really only there for those who are especially infatuated with this game (for whatever reason). The most disappointing one, however, is the other playable character.
The other player character uses guns instead of summoned entities. While such a thematic design certainly leads to very different gameplay, she does not have as many options for advancement as a consequence, if they are compared with those for the main player character's Legions. Most importantly, her limited moves mean that she just does not have the same versatility as the main player character. Finally, exchanging the main player character for her only highlights a deficiency in how the storyline dictates the gameplay: the two of them are supposed to be travelling and fighting together, and yet there is ever only one of them for the player to mind throughout any level.
Perhaps the most convincingly well-done aspect of the game is its musical soundtracks, which are moody and usually appropriate for the current moment. They are a mixture of orchestra and (Japanese) metal (the latter often being used for fights), though the most memorable of these are the hauntingly beautiful main theme song and the one used for the intermission screens. Unfortunately, the music may not be enough to have the player forgiving the rest of the game.
In conclusion, Chaos Legion is a result of wasted opportunities. It is sad that such promising settings and backstory designs were dwarfed by the deficiencies of this game, but this game being consigned to the largely forgotten annals of Capcom's history is a fate that is not undeserved.