OMG RPG.com

One of the most important, and often taken for granted, features that accompany each new game title that hits the shelves of your local video game outlet is an abstract concept we like to refer to as "Innovation". Innovation exists in all genres - it is the genetic stairway that has evolved our gameplay from simple black and white blocks bouncing a square ball to and fro. Each game is subconsciously expected to innovate in some way, bring something new to the table or do something differently enough so as the stand out, and often improve upon, other titles. It is a splash of refreshingly chilled water to the face, breaking us from the hypnotic trance of the old and making us embrace the new with a resurgence of zeal.

That is, however, when it is not completely botched. Which brings us to Lunar Dragon Song.

In its hasty attempt to deliver this refreshing dose of innovation to its audience (i.e. me), Lunar DS managed to miss, and clumsily spill its pail of icy cold "innovation" directly on my lap, lowering the chances of me ever having little Arturises running around in the future by a substantial 1.74%. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Read on, and I shall present the facts before you so that you may wince along with me and understand my pain.

I picked up a used copy of Lunar DS for a paltry $10. "Ten dollars for a new RPG for my DS? How can I go wrong?" I thought to myself. To my chagrin, it turns out that I could go wrong in many, many ways. The majority of their attempts at innovation seem to have backfired. Here, let me list them out for you, so that you may share my pain:

Hit something! Anything!

In a typical turn based RPG, a player's turn in the combat cycle consists of two very specific steps - you select your characters action, then you select the target of your characters action. This is repeated multiple times for each character you have in your party. Well, not in Lunar DS!

Apparently the designers felt that a two step process is way too tedious and time consuming, so they have removed the ability to chose your target. You tell your character to attack, and you hope and pray that he or she will decide to beat on the something that is actually an immediate threat to your party. More often than not, this isn't the case, and your character will randomly attack whatever happens to be around. The do allow you to choose the target for your beneficial spells, however, but the moment it is offensive in nature, your target is left up to the will of Lady Luck.

I'm sorry, you wanted progression?

After a few successful rounds of Drop the Random Creature, you will eventually find yourself vanquishing your foes. Good for you, you deserve a reward! Would you prefer items or experience? Because you cant have both. Thats right,Lunar DS implements two separate "modes" as you adventure through the game. You can chose to have combat yield items to sell or equip, or experience to work towards leveling your character, but never both. You want to talk about artificially inflated game play time, here is the biggest offender I have yet to see, and this feature alone single handedly doubles the amount of grinding you need to do in order to get through the game.

Be vewy vewy quiet - Im hunting monsters

This is assuming that you can complete your battles. As it turns out, the designers stuck upon the brilliant notion of integrating the DS microphone into game play. By blowing on the microphone, or shouting in to it, you can cause your characters to flee the battle. In theory, this sounds like it would be a fun little bit of innovation. Shout "Run the hell away, you little chibi headed dumbasses!" and they would scurry away at your command. In practice, however, it turns out that any noise can set this off, and attempting to play the game in public (or worse yet, with the constant background noise of a commuter train) and you will quickly find your battles being interrupted either randomly or, in the most extreme cases, consistently. As with the other features mentioned, someone did not think this through.

The really sad part is, despite the flaws mentioned above (and the myriad of others I haven't bothered to mention) the game itself has plenty of potential. The story, what little I have managed to see, seems sound, and were the combat issues fixed, I could see playing this one through to the end. As it stands, Ill most likely take another handful of masochistic tries at it before banishing it to the bottom of my DS pouch, never to be played again, unless I feel like being an evil and sadistic father to those previously mentioned offspring that I may never actually have.

• << prev
• next >>