Lunar: Dragon Song
Prequel to Lunar: The Silver Star/Silver Star Story Complete
Platform: Nintendo DS
Year: 2005
ESRB: E 10+
Rating: 4 out of 10
Lunar: Dragon Song starts out strong, throwing you right into it. The concept of having a job as a delivery boy was great. I liked that, pretty cool to be able to do a job and get some cash. The only problem was that the jobs did not pay well, and were your only source of income, aside from the odd treasure chest that might throw some silver your way.
If you play your cards right, you can do a minimal amount of spending. In most areas there is a blue treasure chest, which only opens if you defeat every enemy in that area, in the allotted time. It does get annoying, but you'll have to do it to get the levels anyway, so why not get the goods too? The blue chests usually contain a good piece of armor, so it'll save you time and silver. Good concept, definitely went well with the job idea.
The battles were completely half-assed. You might as well turn on the AI and never turn it off. You get three options in battle. Attack, magic and items. That's right, there is no option to defend, even though your enemies can. It's a good thing they can too, because when you get to having 8 of them on your screen at once you could be dead before the second turn.
You cannot target an enemy. Who you attack is completely random. Making pretty much every character useless (attack wise), but for Jian. The hero of the story, and of course, the strongest. As a fan of the genre myself, I like a certain amount of strategy with my battles, that just can't be achieved without being able to choose a target.
You don't learn new magic attacks, except for Jian and that's just a hassle. His counter is not worth sacrificing for one magic attack.
Item use is one of the key points of this game's battle system. Unusual, but advantageous. As you progress through the game you can obtain cards. Most of them have a special ability that can aide you in and out of battle. They were the only real strategic aspect of the game. Which was desperately needed. Another idea that could have been great.
You cannot receive both items and experience from the same battle. You pick, before you go in, which you get. Which makes getting silver even harder. The best armor in the game is going to run you 45,000 silver, so you better save up.
Oh, and did I mention your armor can break? That's not so bad, only certain enemies can do it, and once you figure out who they are you can prevent it easily enough.
Another slightly irritating, but not bad enough to stop playing, aspect of the game was running. It costs you valuable HP to run. It really was where the game was heading. In the first game you always ran, and enemies were easy to avoid. In the second game you got to run in short bursts, which made avoiding enemies quite difficult. So it only made sense that the next step was to make it even harder. Although they made it plenty fair in that the enemies are all really slow. Plus there's a Goddess statue in every town where you can heal yourself for free.
The killing blow to this game, though, was the story. It started out in usual Lunar fashion. Average guy gets thrown into a crazy adventure because he has big dreams and a significant companion, but at some point in the game, it's almost like they stopped trying. Some of the characters are stale. One of the main characters was never really even developed, and almost felt left out. Not to mention one of the characters displayed on the title screen hardly even makes an appearance. The game completely disregards the the events the other games. Of course, you can argue that they're allowed to do that, because it's a prequel, not only that, but a prequel 1000 years in the past. Even looking at it like that, it's a stretch. They really couldn't do too many memorable things in the game, because it would affect the two following, but I think it could have been executed a lot better.
However, if you're not comparing this game to its predecessors, the story is probably pretty good.
While I admit this game did some things right, those things were far out numbered by its bad points. I would have loved to see Dragon Song be another great addition to the Lunar series, as it's one of my favorites. It just didn't live up to its name. As its own stand alone game, it would have been average.
If you're looking for a relatively cheap time killer, pick it up and try it out for yourself, but if you're looking for a great game in this genre check out the first two for the Play Station. They may be hard to find, but it's well worth the search.
Platform: Nintendo DS
Year: 2005
ESRB: E 10+
Rating: 4 out of 10
Lunar: Dragon Song starts out strong, throwing you right into it. The concept of having a job as a delivery boy was great. I liked that, pretty cool to be able to do a job and get some cash. The only problem was that the jobs did not pay well, and were your only source of income, aside from the odd treasure chest that might throw some silver your way.
If you play your cards right, you can do a minimal amount of spending. In most areas there is a blue treasure chest, which only opens if you defeat every enemy in that area, in the allotted time. It does get annoying, but you'll have to do it to get the levels anyway, so why not get the goods too? The blue chests usually contain a good piece of armor, so it'll save you time and silver. Good concept, definitely went well with the job idea.
The battles were completely half-assed. You might as well turn on the AI and never turn it off. You get three options in battle. Attack, magic and items. That's right, there is no option to defend, even though your enemies can. It's a good thing they can too, because when you get to having 8 of them on your screen at once you could be dead before the second turn.
You cannot target an enemy. Who you attack is completely random. Making pretty much every character useless (attack wise), but for Jian. The hero of the story, and of course, the strongest. As a fan of the genre myself, I like a certain amount of strategy with my battles, that just can't be achieved without being able to choose a target.
You don't learn new magic attacks, except for Jian and that's just a hassle. His counter is not worth sacrificing for one magic attack.
Item use is one of the key points of this game's battle system. Unusual, but advantageous. As you progress through the game you can obtain cards. Most of them have a special ability that can aide you in and out of battle. They were the only real strategic aspect of the game. Which was desperately needed. Another idea that could have been great.
You cannot receive both items and experience from the same battle. You pick, before you go in, which you get. Which makes getting silver even harder. The best armor in the game is going to run you 45,000 silver, so you better save up.
Oh, and did I mention your armor can break? That's not so bad, only certain enemies can do it, and once you figure out who they are you can prevent it easily enough.
Another slightly irritating, but not bad enough to stop playing, aspect of the game was running. It costs you valuable HP to run. It really was where the game was heading. In the first game you always ran, and enemies were easy to avoid. In the second game you got to run in short bursts, which made avoiding enemies quite difficult. So it only made sense that the next step was to make it even harder. Although they made it plenty fair in that the enemies are all really slow. Plus there's a Goddess statue in every town where you can heal yourself for free.
The killing blow to this game, though, was the story. It started out in usual Lunar fashion. Average guy gets thrown into a crazy adventure because he has big dreams and a significant companion, but at some point in the game, it's almost like they stopped trying. Some of the characters are stale. One of the main characters was never really even developed, and almost felt left out. Not to mention one of the characters displayed on the title screen hardly even makes an appearance. The game completely disregards the the events the other games. Of course, you can argue that they're allowed to do that, because it's a prequel, not only that, but a prequel 1000 years in the past. Even looking at it like that, it's a stretch. They really couldn't do too many memorable things in the game, because it would affect the two following, but I think it could have been executed a lot better.
However, if you're not comparing this game to its predecessors, the story is probably pretty good.
While I admit this game did some things right, those things were far out numbered by its bad points. I would have loved to see Dragon Song be another great addition to the Lunar series, as it's one of my favorites. It just didn't live up to its name. As its own stand alone game, it would have been average.
If you're looking for a relatively cheap time killer, pick it up and try it out for yourself, but if you're looking for a great game in this genre check out the first two for the Play Station. They may be hard to find, but it's well worth the search.