| “ | I don't have a means to speak with vulgar men. | „ |
| ~ Albert |
Albert (アルバート, Arubāto) is a major protagonist and playable character in the 1999 video game The Legend of Dragoon. He is the the King of Serdio and of Basil, replacing Lavitz after his death. He is a well-educated person and a swift fighter. Usually referring to historic facts and his love for knowledge such as libraries, he knows quite a bit of information regarding Dragoons, Winglies, Virages, and other things.
He was voiced by Shinichiro Miki in the Japanese version of the game and by David Babich in the English version.
Appearance[]
Albert has long brown hair of a lighter color that he always has in a ponytail, as well as matching brown eyes. He is mostly dressed in green and brown, with his cape being a dark green one and his tunic being a more pale, lighter green, while both his gloves and boots are dark brown and his pants are a lighter more beige brown. He also wears bits of silver armor with gold trimmings on his upper body and around his waist.
When he was first visited at the capital city of Bale by Dart, Lavitz and Shana, he was dressed in a relatively similar manner, but his clothing was overall a little more elaborate since he was wearing more royal green along with black gloves, black boots and white pants along with wielding a royal staff, appropriately giving him a more formal look than when he's travelling abroad with the party later on.
While being held captive in Hellena Prison, he is seen topless with his only his usual pair of pants and boots on.
Finally, as a Dragoon, he pretty much has the same attire as Lavitz, wearing mostly jade green armor and wielding a brown, ancient-looking Dragoon spear in battle, with one of the few differences being that his physique is less bulky than Lavitz's and more on the slender side, which reflects how the two already differed in that respect.
Personality[]
Despite being a king since he was only six years old, Albert is very modest, as shown when he travels with the group and repeatedly insists early on that he only wishes to be treated both as an equal and a friend by everyone else. He is also shown to be both a compassionate person and a competent ruler who can balance that out by making level-headed decisions that are likely to everyone's benefit. He cares very much for the citizens of Basil and the soldiers under his command, who all highly respect and adore him in turn. While he is a driven person who stand firmly by his beliefs, in a somewhat noticeable contrast with both Dark and Lavitz, who are both more openly passionate and can be more wrathful to the point of becoming vengeful when someone does them or those they care about wrong, he rarely, if ever truly loses his temper, even when confronting some of his biggest and most personal enemies like his own uncle, Emperor Doel, who previously killed his father, King Carlo, and Lloyd, who killed Lavitz, which makes him come off as comparably more mild-mannered. His even-tempered nature makes him a good mediator at times, such as when he breaks up a fight between Rose and Miranda while the party is travelling through the Death Frontier.
Albert is also very intelligent and well-educated, having a distinct love for reading and learning about history, to the extent he gets very enthusiastic and excited when he learns about the Mille Seseau National Library while the party is visiting the nations' capital, Deningrad, and is given the chance to visit it. Because of this, along with Rose (in her case, due to having lived so long and personally experienced many periods that have become a bit part of Endiness' history), he tends to be the one in the party who educates the others on historical facts, and even speaks in statistics at times, like talking about the exact probability of Dart and Haschel being related at one point.
While traveling in Tiberoa with the party and visiting the Twin Tower castle in Fletz, he quickly shows interest in Princess Emille, whom he had heard good things about, though he quickly becomes shocked and put off by her extremely rude mannerisms. However, he's later very relieved when he and the others later confirm it's really an imposter posing as her, specifically a Wingly named Lenus who's aligned with Lloyd, and that the real one has been imprisoned in a magic pocket dimension. Not long after meeting the real Emille, he quickly becomes enamored with her, and the two get along very well with each other, with him even sharing stories with her when they return upon dealing with Lenus and her dragon, Regole. He vows to return to her when their journey is done, and the epilogue even confirms that they later got married, presumably uniting their respective kingdoms in the process.
Abilities[]
Thanks to training with Lavitz from an early age, like his friend and subordinate, Albert is very competent at fighting with a spear. Later when he inherits the Jade Dragoon Spirit from Lavitz, he gains the ability to use wind magic, mostly in the form of offensive spells, but he also has a very effective defensive one called Rose Storm which shields the party for three turns, cutting all damage in half. Stats-wise, he is the same as Lavitz in that he has high physical attack and defense stats, as well as high HP, giving him a lot of resilience against physical attacks, but he also has low magic attack and defense along with slow speed, meaning he has less turns than other party members and is quite vulnerable to magic attacks. However, despite technically being slow, he attacks far more swiftly than Lavitz, likely due to his less bulky physique, which makes his additions/combos a bit more challenging to pull off since they require faster reflexes. Despite that, another upside of his is that all of his main additions are available very early in the game, making it easy to level them up quickly if you can get used to the timing, and they have great damage output when pulled off, especially Gust of Wind Dance and his final addition that he gets when all of the others are fully leveled up, Flower/Blossom Storm.