Legendary, also known by the Working Title Legendary: The Box, is a 2008 First-Person Shooter developed by Spark Unlimited and published by Gamecock Media Group. The game puts you in the role of Charles Deckard, who is hired by the mysterious Orlando LeFey to steal Pandora's Box. Unfortunately, Deckard opens it instead, releasing horrible monsters. He and his partner, Vivian Kane, must get rid of the creatures and take down LeFey.
Legendary's main selling point was pitting modern weapons against mythical monsters.
Legendary contains examples of the following tropes:
- Action Bomb: Tsuchigumo (or Bloodspiders) are arachnids the size of a football with bloated red bodies: they can inflate them and explode in a shower of gore, damaging anyone caught nearby.
- Action Girl: Vivian originally appears to be the Voice with an Internet Connection, but turns out to be good with a gun as well.
- Airborne Mook: Nari are tiny flying monsters with huge talons and the irritating ability to become intangible and to possess items to throw them at you.
- A.K.A.-47: Used with most of the real weapons. For example, the UMP is now an SMP. The Desert Eagle and the M249 SAW have their correct names, though.
- Always a Bigger Fish: First you get to see an Alpha Werewolf tearing a smaller Limos Werewolf to pieces. Much later, you see a single grounded Griffon butchering three Alpha Werewolves like nothing.
- Apocalypse How: After Deckard opens Pandora's Box, it unleashes waves of destructive energy and swarms the entire planet with monsters, resulting in a Class 2 apocalypse. The ending implies that humanity endures, Deckard learning how to tame the beasts while the markings on his arm hold the key to rebuilding a working Box.
- Artificial Brilliance: The werewolves in the game are pretty smart, and will attack you from all directions and occasionally use squad tactics if there are a pack of wolves trying to shred you to pieces (for example, using one werewolf to distract you while the other sneaks up on you).
- Artificial Stupidity: The human allies and enemies aren't too bright in this game. It can get especially annoying when you see one of your allies toss a Molotov from behind cover, and have the Molotov explode on said cover.
- Attack of the Monster Appendage: "Echidna" is/are a sewer-dwelling monster which makes vaguely reptilian-sounding hisses and attacks by sending out a single green tentacle to snatch the player or other humans. It is encountered several times, but the main body attached to them is never seen, nor it's clarified if it's some sort of octopoid or if it's a single tail. An early artwork shows a large green monster which was possibly meant to be the full-bodied Echidna and a blink-and-you-miss it moment in the abandoned laboratory beneath the Cathedral reveals a dead humanoid monster resembling a woman with an apparent snake tail in lieu of her legs.
- Bad Boss: The introductory cutscene of the Werewolf Alpha shows one of them attacking and killing a Limos Werewolf in the room with him.
- Big Applesauce: New York is the location for the first and last part of the game, the rest taking place in England.
- Big Bad: Morgan LeFey, multi-billionaire and leader of the Black Order, who aims to use the Pandora's Box to take control of the entire world and of the monsters unleashed.
- Black-and-Gray Morality: Sure, LeFey is the villain, and his plan is to dominate a world of monsters and enslaved humans, but the Council is implied to be the same, willing to send hordes of mooks to their deaths to stop the Black Order and taking Deckard prisoner to make a second Pandora's Box using the instructions on his arm.
- Book Ends: The story begins in New York and ends in New York.
- Boom, Headshot!: A necessity for fighting werewolves, who will otherwise heal and get back in the fight if you don't.
- Boss Vulnerability: The Golem is completely invulnerable for most of the game. A part of the plot revolves around finding a way to destroy it with EMP.
- Bullfight Boss: The Minotaur is nearly invincible on the front side, so the best way to deal with it is to have it charge at you, dodge the charge, and unload onto its backside. Unlike most examples of this trope, the Minotaur turns around extremely quickly, so shooting it in the back after a charge is actually quite difficult. Fortunately, there are other ways to damage them, including explosives and the flamethrower.
- Combat Tentacles: Echidna and Kraken. The former can only attack by suddenly sending out a tentacle/tail to snatch Deckard or any nearby soldier. If you don't get rid of it before you're dragged into the water, you die. The Kraken uses them to tear whole buildings apart and smash people, but they also act as his weakspots.
- Damage-Sponge Boss: The one time you have to fight a Griffin without having a rocket launcher to one-hit-kill it.
- Decapitation Required: The only way to actually kill a werewolf, be it by cutting it off or blowing it up. Defeat a werewolf otherwise and it will come back to life and attack you again.
- Enemy Chatter: You can listen to a conversation between two Black Order members capturing a werewolf, and one taunting the werewolf. In fact, there's an achievement for it. For extra fun, shoot the lock off the cage while he's taunting the werewolf.
- Energy Absorption: You can absorb the Animus Energy clouds that you see either floating in the world or result from killing monsters, and you can use the energy to heal or release a burst of energy that flings objects and monsters back, stunning them for a little while.
- Game-Breaking Bug: In the PC version, the elevator that leads to the final battle will pass right through the player's body, causing them to fall through the floor and die. If you're affected by the bug, it will happen every time you try to play that section, and is impossible to get around without significant messing around with the game's .ini files. Publisher Gamecock's response was "Buy another computer, because we aren't fixing this."
- Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: In New York, Echidna appears to be a sewer-dwelling abomination who tries to devour you on your way across Times Square's underground. Then, a single specimen makes exactly one sneak attack on you from a random pipe in England, while you're trying to access the Cathedral. It's the only encounter with it there.
- Go for the Eye: To defeat the Kraken you have to shoot a rocket at the big glowing eyes on the tip of the beast's tentacles.
- Going to Give It More Energy: How you ultimately stop the Black Order, by feeding the device with the Box so much Animus it goes critical and explodes.
- Gorn: Werewolves do some pretty brutal stuff when they get a hold of people. There are also Nari crushing a police officer under a car or grabbing and tossing a poor sod in a working rotatory fan.
- Hand Cannon: One of the weapons in the game is the infamous Desert Eagle. Justified as the Desert Eagle is mainly used for taking out the various monsters (including werewolves, minotaurs, and griffons) you encounter, and one of the Desert Eagle's real life applications is hunting rather large game. Deckard even uses the trope name in his PDA entry of the Desert Eagle: "Definition of the phrase 'hand cannon'..."
- Healing Factor: Werewolves will recover from everything unless their heads aren't blown off. Also Deckard, who can use the Animus to heal himself.
- Heroic Mime: Charles Deckard never speaks, aside from grunts when he is hit.
- Improvised Golems: As soon as the Box is released, a massive surge of electromagnetic energy which gathers concrete, machine (and the Box itself) to form a colossal Golem, which proceeds to rampage across New York.
- Improvised Weapon: Minotaurs usually wield cudgels made from pieces of scenery, such as tombstones.
- Informed Ability: Charles Deckard was initially hired as an art thief, yet you never actually get to steal art in the game. The only part of the game that relates to his art thieving ability is his ability to hack through various control panels. Might be justified as no one in the game hires you to steal any art after you accidentally open Pandora's Box.
- Jump Scare: Echidna attacks are sudden and barely-announced by a splashing sound before a green tentacle starts dragging you underwater. In a few cases, it attacks from manholes while you're exploring the surface.
- Just Between You and Me: Subverted when Vivian asks LeFey why he wanted her and Deckard killed, and LeFey simply replies that since he didn't tell Vivian his full plan when they hired Deckard, why would he tell it to her now.
- Kill It with Fire: The Flamethrower. Also, the fire drakes try to do this to you.
- Kill It with Water: You can activate water pipes or shoot down hydrants to put out the bonfires spawning Fire Drakes, allowing you to get rid of their presence.
- Kraken and Leviathan: A gigantic Kraken emerges from the Thames and attacks you twice. You need to bring him down with a rocket launcher. It has both gigantic tentacles and a massive, reptilian head which combines traits of both monsters.
- Left Hanging: The ending of the game is obviously made with a sequel (that will never be) in mind. LeFey's plan to control the monsters is stopped but the Box is destroyed; however, Deckard's mark on his arm is the key to build a new one and seal the creatures. He's imprisoned by the Council but he escapes, and while we learn that Vivian isn't dead, Deckard is last seen using a newfound power: taming a Griffon.
- Made of Air: Nari are usually made of blue wisp-like smoke, and they only become solid when they're about to attack you or when you hit them with a surge of Animus. Upon reaching the Box in the remains of the Golem, a discharge of energy briefly makes the surrounding Werewolves intangible and translucent unless you blast them with Animus first,
- Magma Man: Fire Drakes are stoat frog-like lizard monsters made of magma, able to breath fire and curl in a rocky ball to move around, leaving a fiery trail behind.
- Master of Unlocking: Nearly every locked door you need to get by has one control panel near it, and can simply be opened by pushing two wires together. Lampshaded by an entry in his PDA that states that the control panels are only intimidating, because most do not know how easy it is to pry off the faceplate and rewire the inner workings.
- Mêlée à Trois:
- The game is Council of 98 (including the player) vs. the Black Order vs. the monsters running amok in the world.
- Several of the different species of monsters aren't big fans of each other, either. Most obviously, Werewolves and Firedrakes will fight each other if encountered in the same area, and Griffons can be seen eating Werewolves a couple times in the game.
- Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: Vivian doesn't give a damn about the Council's agenda, and actually fully expects to betray or be betrayed by them at some point down the line. She's only working with them for two reasons; revenge on LeFey for his You Have Outlived Your Usefulness betrayal of her, and the pragmatic fact she doesn't want to be eaten by monsters.
- Monumental Damage: Being the epicenter of the monster invasion, the entirety of New York is reduced into a post-apocalyptic wasteland in a few days. You confront a rampaging Golem in Times Square, and before the final assault you can see the head of the Statue of Liberty near LeFey's building. The English parliament is severely damaged by the attack of the Kraken, and the monster tears down the Big Ben before you confront it. In a cutscene, a Golem can be seen destroying one of the Egyptian pyramids.
- Mook Debut Cutscene: Each time a new monster is properly introduced, you get to see a cutscene in which they arrive and show off what they can do.
- No Flow in CGI: Painfully obvious with Vivian's hair, which moves but looks like a single compact mass of blond rather than hair.
- No-Nonsense Nemesis: All things considered, LeFey is quite an effective villain: he never puts himself in danger, when the creatures summoned by the Box start to wreak havoc he takes countermeasures to stop and control them, the only time he contacts Vivian and Deckard not only he keeps his lips shut about important matters but also fools them into an ambush. When the heroes recover the software containing his projects on the Pandora's Box, they find out that they contained a Trojan Horse which infects the Council's computers and make their base vulnerable to an attack which crushes them and almost wins by the end. It's only because of Vivian's involvement that he doesn't get his new world order.
- One-Man Army: Lampshaded by LeFey, who, in the final level, states that he either severely underestimated Deckard's skill, or that he should have hired more competent staff.
- Our Werewolves Are Different: The werewolves have little fur and look more like huge man-like starving stray dogs. Also, instead of silver bullets, these werewolves only die from decapitation. They're also their own separate species, instead of being transformed humans.
- Personal Space Invader: The Echidna and its tentacles. In the sewers you can guess its presence from the water sprouts occasionally emerging from the water.
- Pun: One of the achievement names is "DouBull TrouBull", which you get after beating two Minotaurs. Lampshaded by a secret achievement that you get immediately after you get the former achievement called "I owe you an apology", where the lead designer apologizes for making such a lame pun.
- Puzzle Boss: The Golem isn't fought by conventional means, but instead you have to locate (in one case, assemble) and load three EMP generators to disrupt the Golem's electromagnetic field and make it crumble.
- Redshirt Army: The soldiers who work for the order of 98, though Lexington's a bit tougher. Also, the NYPD constitute a Redshirt Army.
- Superhero Packing Heat: In addition to his firearms, Charles Deckard has his psychic powers.
- Super-Persistent Predator: The first Werewolf you come across will break through a door as the elevator's grate closes behind you, but not only he lunges furiously at you, clawing madly, but keeps trying to get you through the elevator's conduit (leaving claw marks in the metal sheets) and coming close to make the contraption stop. It serves as a taste of the Werewolves' tenacity in tracking you down.
- There Is No Kill Like Overkill: LeFey's death. First an Alpha Werewolf bursts into his room and tosses him around a bit. Then it throws him out a window where he's caught by a passing griffin. That griffin flies him up for a bit until it drops him and he gets impaled on a part of the machine he built which is shooting out loads of electricity from being overloaded. He then falls off the spike, slams off a railing, and falls down the rest of the skyscraper.
- This Is Gonna Suck: When Deckard and the order's soldiers first descend in the sewers, they see a massive green tentacle (Echidna) emerging from the murky waters of the flooded room they have to cross and drag a poor civilian to his death. One of the two soldiers comments on this, but they have no choice but to cross the monster's hunting ground. And they don't make it. Later, inside the headquarters of the Order, a scientist mentions that "something huge" is rising from the oceans while the monsters are assaulting all major cities.
- Too Dumb to Live:
- A policeman early on will give you directions on how to open the door to the safe room he's currently in, while you're in a large storehouse with Werewolves appearing frequently from outside. Once you do open the doors and come back you find him dead at the claws of a Werewolf.
- The soldiers of the Order of 98 who see the Echidna lurking in the waters below them comment on it... but still make a beeline for the exit passing through the waist-deep sewage which may contain a flesh-eating giant monster.
- In order to reach the abandoned laboratory under the cathedral, Lexington, Deckard and Vivian fly over there in choppers... without taking precautions for the aggressive Gryphons infesting the sky, losing two choppers in the process.
- Upon encountering a weird, organic-looking sac dangling from the ceiling, a soldier of the Order promptly pokes it with his elbow, which makes the Queen produce a Spider Swarm of Tsuchigumo to overwhelm and kill him.
- Tsuchigumo and Jorogumo: "Tsuchigumo" (erroneously translated as "Blood Spiders") are enemies in the game, taking the form of red Spider Swarm that will reform unless you find and destroy the Queen spawning them.
- Unexpectedly Real Magic: Deckard had no idea of the true nature behind Pandora's Box when he opened it.
- The Unfought: Sort of. The Echidna attacks you at least three times during the course of the game, but you only damages its tentacles and never get to see how she looks like.
- Unwitting Pawn: Deckard is duped into opening Pandora's Box in the beginning of the game, assuming that the box is simply another expensive and rare artifact that his client would like to put in a private collection.
- Villain Protagonist: Charles is a thief, at least according to the game information on the box. That being said, not even his allies are exactly saints themselves.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Both Deckard and Vivian have outlived their usefulness in LeFey's eye. However, murdering them proved harder than expected.
