Sony somehow screwed up Legend of the Dragon on PS5, PS4

Here’s the news no one wanted to hear: Legend of the Dragon — that is, the emulated version currently available on PS5 and PS4 — has some pretty serious technical issues. We read about these problems first PSNProfiles Forum A day or two ago, but with no way of knowing how widespread the bugs were, we had no choice but to sit down and play the game ourselves.

And the unfortunate reality is that these technical issues do exist. The most prominent problem we’ve run into is that battles can softlock the game – something that makes you wonder if anyone has even tested this version of the title. These softlocks occur when you use a character’s dragon form – a core combat mechanic hours in the adventure – and unleash a handful of attacks.

For whatever reason, the game doesn’t agree with this, and if you keep using your dragon forms as the experience intended, the battles start to grind to a halt. The game still plays — the music still plays and the character models remain in their idle animations — but the command menu disappears and there’s no way to interact with what’s on the screen. You have no choice but to close the game or use the emulator’s rewind function to go back to a point before using the dragon mechanic – but this is only a temporary solution, as the softlock will eventually return. is

Shocking stuff, but it arguably gets worse. As discussed on the forums above, it also has some sort of memory leak to contend with. If you play The Legend of Dragons for long periods of time — say, two or three hours without closing the application — you start running into audio bugs and, again, battle system softlocks.

And on top of all that, you’ve got a sprinkling of minor issues, such as flaring of environmental details, clipping of character models, and faint blue outlines appearing on pre-rendered backgrounds. Simply put, it’s a bit of a mess.

Given how beloved The Legend of Dragons is in certain parts of the PlayStation community, this emulation status is a real kicker. We can only hope that Sony releases an update in the near future, because there’s no way this classic PS1 JRPG should have launched like this.