Haha, I remember actually laughing at how bad the graphics for Legend of Dragoon were when I played it for the first time a couple of years ago. Seriously can't believe something like that was ever considered good. :'D Though I wound up abandoning the game near the start of the fourth disc for other reasons anyway. Still regret it a little given how far I was and how much I was liking the vibe it had (it was essentially Sony attempting to make a Final Fantasy game in the style of that era, so it was a big nostalgia rush, and felt like playing a big budget PS1 Square game that I had missed~

), but it's one of the most poorly balanced games I've ever played in its Japanese incarnation. Most of the game is exactly the same except that everything has hugely inflated HP totals over the English version. And since it's a slow battle system as is, random encounters drag on and on, and bosses in the second half of the game can take well over an hour to finish. Which would be fine if they were actually more challenging and you were even at risk of a game over, but generally speaking they're not, and you're not. So it's just turn after turn of slowly chipping away HP totals that are set waaaaaaay too high. And god help you if you mess up and get a game over. :'D
By the time I reached the fourth disc, my game timer was around 62 hours, and I had pretty much proceeded in a straight line through the game without any levelling. Just didn't seem worth it eventually. ._. I've seen people online complaining that the US version "dumbed down" the difficulty for a US audience,
but I don't think most of them actually played it in Japanese, as those HP totals made the second half of the game, in particular, painfully unfun and slow as molasses. Suffice to say there's a reason that it isn't remembered as fondly over there as it is in the west.
