Final Fantasy Legend is not a true Final Fantasy game. It is actually the first installment of the SaGa series, called Makai Toushi SaGa in Japan. Other SaGa games you may recognize are the Romancing SaGa series for Super Nintendo, or SaGa Frontier for the Playstation.
FF Legend offers a unique character selection and growth then other RPGs. You may select up to 4 characters in your party. You then have a choice of what you would like your characters to be. Choose their name, their gender, and their race. Your race selection is very important; you may choose from Human, Mutant, and Monster.
Humans require the most work, but are also the most versatile, and can be your strongest characters. Instead of traditional leveling up, you must buy the human's hit points, strength, and magic. However, they can equip any weapon or armor, and have a lot of space in their inventory.
Mutants don't require a lot of maintenance at all. Their hit points and strength go up by themselves, and they learn abilities that come and go. They have half as much inventory space, but do not need armor, though you'll probably want to give them a weapon.
Monsters need no maintenance at all. After killing some monsters, they may leave behind their meat. If you feed the meat to your own monster, it may change into a different monster. It's all about luck with these characters, and they have no inventory space, as each monster has his own separate attacks.
Your quest is to climb the seemingly neverending tower to Paradise. You'll explore 4 different worlds, travelling by foot, airship, and floating island. You have to bring light back to the four orbs, one in each world. Sound familiar?
Final Fantasy Legend was created in 1989 for the Gameboy by Squaresoft. It was released in America as a Final Fantasy game, because they believed it would help market the game, though it has little to do with the real series. FFL has two sequels for Gameboy, Final Fantasy Legend II and Final Fantasy Legend III.
The graphics are pretty cool, keeping in mind the age of the game. Looks a little better than Final Fantasy I, with very little animation (2 frames) for each sprite.
The music is alright, very forgettable however. Nothing fancy, nothing awful.
Gameplay is good, the game is easy to learn, and the controls are simple. Fights can be really fast, and a lot of time will probably be spent in one place stockpiling money.
The plot is nothing to wow over, the translation is pretty shoddy. But depite this, it's still a very fun game, since it's one of the few RPGs available for Gameboy, and will probably take you around 10 hours to beat.
Final Fantasy Legend is available at many used video game stores, and you can probably pick it up for around 10 dollars. A remake of the game was released for the WonderSwan Color in Japan, but you'll have to look into your local import store for that.