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Lunar: Dragon Song Review
Mar. 9th, 2006 12:15 amI just finished the game "Lunar: Dragon Song" for the Nintendo DS. I was rather disappointed.
First, let me go over the good points of the game, because they did exist:
-Music: the music was very well done; sometimes I had the urge to turn the game on just to listen to the music on the in-game jukebox, which itself was a very nice edition
-Concepts: not all of the concepts for the game were brilliant and original, but some were pretty nice. The jukebox, as I mentioned, was a good inclusion (though I'm not certain that counts as a concept). Also, I liked that the game started pretty humbly - you're couriers and some monsters steal a package. The courier system itself was very fun, thought after a while it got a little annoying (if I hadn't been determined not to cheat and use online item location charts, it probably would have been less so). I also loved the beast/human relations. Usually in videogames the beast-people are tribal, non-technology people that get oppressed by the humans. In this one, the beast-people are the rulers of the world, own all the big cities, and somewhat oppress the humans (you even personally experience some of this when you win the tournament and meet with the beast king).
The dragons, also, were very well-designed. I love when you go to one of them (I'm not saying which) and he announces that he's not going to fight you because he feels you've done enough to get the post. I also thought it was cool the way they were modeled after the four Japanese mythical beasts (Byakko the white tiger, Genbu the black turtle, Seiryu the blue dragon, and Suzaku the red phoenix/bird/thing).
Some neutral stuff:
The gameplay was... unique. In order to understand everything, I actually needed to read the instruction manual for this one. Twice.
There's two modes you can fight in, one of which gives you experience ("Althena Conduct" points), the other of which gives you items that you can either sell or deliver as a courier. If you cleared a level in the experience-gaining mode (you can't clear levels in the item-gaining mode), you gain back somewhere around 1/3 of your HP and MP (though not exactly a third, which confounded me often when trying to calculate how much MP I could use per room without losing any overall). There's a simple AI that makes your characters use normal attacks every turn, and is rather easy to get out of and can be used tactically rather well; its usefulness is improved by the fact that you can't choose your target, anyway, a concept I'm not quite certain I agree with.
There's three kinds of attacks you can use: normal, magical, and cards. Normal attacks are just physical attacks; for some reason Jian for most of the game gets to hit the monster three times each turn, and Flora with her bow has the special ability to hit flying enemies. Apart from Flora, however, a normal attack can't hit a flying enemy. Instead you have to wait until they land, which they do after the monster below them is defeated. Magical attacks (I'm including beast special attacks in this generalization) hit all the enemies for a lot more damage than normal attacks, and generally use about 10 mp. In the beginning of the game you have no magical attacks, and then you acquire Gabryel with her special beast attack, and eventually Jian gets items that allow him to use magic. Sometimes when you defeat an enemy in item-gaining mode, they'll drop a card. These cards are especially useful for the boss battles, and allow you to do all sorts of things that any reasonably intelligent game designer wouldn't allow you to do. You can hit the monster with poison that'll do more damage per turn than Flora can; you can heal your entire party back to full HP or MP... several times over. Basically, you can use the cards to pull all sorts of shit that means your boss battles end when you totally don't expect them to be anywhere near over.
Other interesting quirks... running eats away at your HP little by little (maybe 1 point every couple seconds), though later on in the game you should have enough that you don't really care, but early in the game it means that you have to walk... veerrryyy... sssslllloooowwwwllllyyyy. It's somewhat troublesome. Also, Magic Gums and Magic Drops, incredibly useful items that restore MP, cannot be found in shops. There's no inn system, instead you heal yourself at Althena statues for free. Weapons and armor can break or be stolen - bats and skeletons tend to thieve a lot from you, though generally they just take your Sundry Goods (the items most monsters drop). Also, since Jian uses an accessory for his magic, he can't equip any other accessories and still be able to use magic. So, if you get the magic ring that reduces MP usage to 1/3 of the normal spell requirements, Jian can't use it for his own spells. Not necessarily a bad idea, but... I didn't like it. This game has a bad habit of removing choice from your actions, and I personally would have liked to choose as to whether I'm going to save on the healer's MP or the main firepower's MP.
Okay, time for it, we've named the good, now for the bad and the ugly:
The plot, though it starts out decent, swiftly becomes entirely unoriginal. I'm one of those odd people that cried at the end of the Sword of Mana remake; I do not have high plot standards (at least not according to the reviewers at GameFaqs.com). But this plot was so simplistic that I could effectively summarize it in a few sentences and plot-spoil you on nearly the whole shish-kebab. The ending was impossibly choppy, to boot: after the point of no return (from which you can save no more), I was confused half the time because they'd pick random times to cut to five seconds, five minutes, or five months later. One second you're about to run out a door, the next instant two guys you've never seen in the game are chatting (granted, they may have been from one of the other Lunar games, which I haven't played, but that doesn't change the choppiness).
The gameplay was not that good. Battle animation was very slow, even when you held down the R-Button (and killed your fingers) speeding it up. I used to do work and watch TV while playing this game just because as long as I hit the AI function and checked every so often to make sure my characters' HP wasn't too low, I could spend a good 5-10 minutes doing something else while waiting for the battle to finish. The absolute worst thing I found, however, was the way you could skip through the end-game. While playing I was very meticulous to get no more experience than necessary; that is to say, though I would try to clear every area, I would absolutely refuse to fight even a single monster in experience-gaining-mode in an area I'd gone through before. I skipped through the last two dungeons without fighting anyone but the sub-bosses and final boss (I must admit, I did clear the first room in the second-to-last dungeon before getting bored), and with the sub-bosses and final boss I would just be warming up my attacks when they'd suddenly die on me, leaving me blinking like a supervillain who's just defeated a superhero with the aiming laser on his doomsday device.
Overall, thumbs up for some interesting concepts, thumbs down for an unoriginal and poorly executed game.
First, let me go over the good points of the game, because they did exist:
-Music: the music was very well done; sometimes I had the urge to turn the game on just to listen to the music on the in-game jukebox, which itself was a very nice edition
-Concepts: not all of the concepts for the game were brilliant and original, but some were pretty nice. The jukebox, as I mentioned, was a good inclusion (though I'm not certain that counts as a concept). Also, I liked that the game started pretty humbly - you're couriers and some monsters steal a package. The courier system itself was very fun, thought after a while it got a little annoying (if I hadn't been determined not to cheat and use online item location charts, it probably would have been less so). I also loved the beast/human relations. Usually in videogames the beast-people are tribal, non-technology people that get oppressed by the humans. In this one, the beast-people are the rulers of the world, own all the big cities, and somewhat oppress the humans (you even personally experience some of this when you win the tournament and meet with the beast king).
The dragons, also, were very well-designed. I love when you go to one of them (I'm not saying which) and he announces that he's not going to fight you because he feels you've done enough to get the post. I also thought it was cool the way they were modeled after the four Japanese mythical beasts (Byakko the white tiger, Genbu the black turtle, Seiryu the blue dragon, and Suzaku the red phoenix/bird/thing).
Some neutral stuff:
The gameplay was... unique. In order to understand everything, I actually needed to read the instruction manual for this one. Twice.
There's two modes you can fight in, one of which gives you experience ("Althena Conduct" points), the other of which gives you items that you can either sell or deliver as a courier. If you cleared a level in the experience-gaining mode (you can't clear levels in the item-gaining mode), you gain back somewhere around 1/3 of your HP and MP (though not exactly a third, which confounded me often when trying to calculate how much MP I could use per room without losing any overall). There's a simple AI that makes your characters use normal attacks every turn, and is rather easy to get out of and can be used tactically rather well; its usefulness is improved by the fact that you can't choose your target, anyway, a concept I'm not quite certain I agree with.
There's three kinds of attacks you can use: normal, magical, and cards. Normal attacks are just physical attacks; for some reason Jian for most of the game gets to hit the monster three times each turn, and Flora with her bow has the special ability to hit flying enemies. Apart from Flora, however, a normal attack can't hit a flying enemy. Instead you have to wait until they land, which they do after the monster below them is defeated. Magical attacks (I'm including beast special attacks in this generalization) hit all the enemies for a lot more damage than normal attacks, and generally use about 10 mp. In the beginning of the game you have no magical attacks, and then you acquire Gabryel with her special beast attack, and eventually Jian gets items that allow him to use magic. Sometimes when you defeat an enemy in item-gaining mode, they'll drop a card. These cards are especially useful for the boss battles, and allow you to do all sorts of things that any reasonably intelligent game designer wouldn't allow you to do. You can hit the monster with poison that'll do more damage per turn than Flora can; you can heal your entire party back to full HP or MP... several times over. Basically, you can use the cards to pull all sorts of shit that means your boss battles end when you totally don't expect them to be anywhere near over.
Other interesting quirks... running eats away at your HP little by little (maybe 1 point every couple seconds), though later on in the game you should have enough that you don't really care, but early in the game it means that you have to walk... veerrryyy... sssslllloooowwwwllllyyyy. It's somewhat troublesome. Also, Magic Gums and Magic Drops, incredibly useful items that restore MP, cannot be found in shops. There's no inn system, instead you heal yourself at Althena statues for free. Weapons and armor can break or be stolen - bats and skeletons tend to thieve a lot from you, though generally they just take your Sundry Goods (the items most monsters drop). Also, since Jian uses an accessory for his magic, he can't equip any other accessories and still be able to use magic. So, if you get the magic ring that reduces MP usage to 1/3 of the normal spell requirements, Jian can't use it for his own spells. Not necessarily a bad idea, but... I didn't like it. This game has a bad habit of removing choice from your actions, and I personally would have liked to choose as to whether I'm going to save on the healer's MP or the main firepower's MP.
Okay, time for it, we've named the good, now for the bad and the ugly:
The plot, though it starts out decent, swiftly becomes entirely unoriginal. I'm one of those odd people that cried at the end of the Sword of Mana remake; I do not have high plot standards (at least not according to the reviewers at GameFaqs.com). But this plot was so simplistic that I could effectively summarize it in a few sentences and plot-spoil you on nearly the whole shish-kebab. The ending was impossibly choppy, to boot: after the point of no return (from which you can save no more), I was confused half the time because they'd pick random times to cut to five seconds, five minutes, or five months later. One second you're about to run out a door, the next instant two guys you've never seen in the game are chatting (granted, they may have been from one of the other Lunar games, which I haven't played, but that doesn't change the choppiness).
The gameplay was not that good. Battle animation was very slow, even when you held down the R-Button (and killed your fingers) speeding it up. I used to do work and watch TV while playing this game just because as long as I hit the AI function and checked every so often to make sure my characters' HP wasn't too low, I could spend a good 5-10 minutes doing something else while waiting for the battle to finish. The absolute worst thing I found, however, was the way you could skip through the end-game. While playing I was very meticulous to get no more experience than necessary; that is to say, though I would try to clear every area, I would absolutely refuse to fight even a single monster in experience-gaining-mode in an area I'd gone through before. I skipped through the last two dungeons without fighting anyone but the sub-bosses and final boss (I must admit, I did clear the first room in the second-to-last dungeon before getting bored), and with the sub-bosses and final boss I would just be warming up my attacks when they'd suddenly die on me, leaving me blinking like a supervillain who's just defeated a superhero with the aiming laser on his doomsday device.
Overall, thumbs up for some interesting concepts, thumbs down for an unoriginal and poorly executed game.
