Lunar: Dragon Song

"Bad Decisions Abound"

I realized my own first bad decision upon reading the prologue: I had payed money in order to do so. This game, like Lunar Legend before it, was published in the US by Ubisoft instead of the now-defunct Working Designs, and the difference in quality control shows. Someone hired to translate a game into English should have a firm enough grasp of English to do so properly, and the fact that Ubisoft decided against hiring someone that understood the basics of sentence structure and the use of quotation marks should have been the tip off I needed. If the localization team couldn't care less about the game, why should I?

My second bad decision was that I decided to not disregard the game immediately upon realizing Ubisoft's lack of effort, and completed it instead. Maybe reading this will save you the monotony.

Sound

Admittedly, I don't care for the music and sound effects in most handheld games. In most cases, I play handheld games while watching television or in open spaces where I would be scaring the people around me by carrying an electronic device that has characters grunting and yelling during a battle. It takes something very special in a handheld to get me to turn off the television or carry headphones, something this game did not have. Knowing that I would most likely write a review for the game, though, I listened despite this.

What I heard was slightly above average. The music follows the same tropes that most other RPG music does, and none of it is extraordinarily good or bad. The exception is Mother Continent, which plays when you are on the world map; I have it playing as I write this because I simply cannot get enough of it. Music carries over from one screen to another, so it doesn't annoyingly start over when you move from one shop to another.

The sound effects when going through menus are pulled from the same bag of annoying clicks and beeps that many other games employ, but just because other game developers do it does not mean that it's not unimaginative. The same sound effect is used when damage is done, regardless of the method. Fists, feet, arrows, claws, swords, umbrellas, and (I can only assume) magic do not make the same sounds when hitting things in real life, and the only reason they do in a game is lack of effort.

6/10

Graphics

Even though the game does not have any anime-style cutscenes like Lunar and Lunar 2 did, it does have some anime-style stills that pop up every once in a while. These look very good on the DS screen, and often serve as an introduction for new characters. There are also stills for many of the NPCs in the game, but most of them are simple palette-swaps of earlier NPCs you have met. Along that same line, there are only thirty-four different enemies in the game, and all other variations are palette-swaps. I noticed that one variation of the Treant enemy was the same as the last one, but with purple shoes instead of green. Some of the bosses are even pallete-swaps of current enemies or ones that you will meet a short time later in the quest.

On the plus side, the map screens are nice to look at. You get to move a chibi version of Jian that begins to fist pump the air when you place him over a location. The maps themselves have great detail: tiled streets, shingled roofs, stone walkways, etc. It is a shame that the detail and effort put into these maps was not shared with other sections of the game.

The dungeon backgrounds leave a lot to be desired, however. Most of them look like they were made with a slightly dated version of RPG Maker, and are bland beyond all reason. One forest late in the game was particularly horrible: the designers decided that the best way to show it was raining was to cover the screen with opaque diagonal lines that transition from dark blue to light. Honestly, if your graphic designers are turning out effects that look like they were produced in Windows Paint, it is time to fire them. As an added note, Jian's hair is gray for some reason when running around on these screens, but blue elsewhere. It's odd that they did not get the hair color of their own character right.

The battle animations for the PCs are okay, but nothing spectacular. For every good point, there are ten jaggies. The attack animations get stale very quickly, and the few magic effects there are look stock. The designers tried to simulate 3D battles by having the camera move around during battle, but the enemies and PCs are sprites, so they are always looking either left or right. This often leads to a character looking off into the distance while they attack an enemy that is to their side. Besides this glaring error, I noticed a few instances of background tiles not matching those around them. This was most apparent in a cave that had many cracked floors: the sections that were cracked were a bright blue, while those around that tile were navy blue. Because of this, it felt like I was playing a very strange game of checkers.

6/10

Gameplay

“But Gameplay > Graphics, right? Right?”

Although the principle point of a game is to play it, rather than stare stupidly at the pretty colors, if a company shows a severe lack of interest or ability in one aspect of a game, it is often safe to assume that other aspects of the game will be lacking, as well. For Lunar: Dragon Song, this assumption is safer than most.

The controls on the map screens are self-explanatory: you can either move Jian to a destination with the control pad, or tap the name of one of those locations on the lower screen to move him there immediately. This is the only part of the game that I found myself consistently using the touch screen, as the little glowing squares that signify destinations lack any identifying marks, which left me with the decision to either move Jian from place to place until I found what I was looking for, or flip through a couple pages until I found the name of the place and selected it. Even so, I rather liked this system of movement, as it saved me from running through endless screens of empty streets.

One thing that has set the Lunar games apart from most other RPGs is that there are no random battles. Instead, enemies are represented on the field by “symbols,” which are gray versions of different enemy types. This is welcome, as it allows you to bypass simple battles when moving back through areas you have been to many times.

However, when avoiding enemies, one of the worst decisions the developers made becomes apparent: holding B causes the party to run, but everyone in the party loses approximately 1HP per second while running. Not only that, but the developers did not want anyone to run their party to death, so they made it so that, when any of your party members' HP reaches 1/3 of the maximum, you can no longer run. So, you have the decision to either walk everywhere in a painfully slow manner, or cause your apparently chain-smoking party members to cough up their lungs. As your levels increase, this will become less and less of a problem, but it is simply terrible at lower levels. A stamina meter, or perhaps limiting it to small bursts of speed, would have been a much better and less annoying way of keeping the player from running from every battle.

Besides that, there are clipping issues in the field. Jian can run over certain larger rocks and stumps, but will get stuck on a pebble. There is really no way, other than experience and memorization, to know what will stop you in your tracks and what will not.

All of that could have been forgiven if the battle system was anything close to stellar. Unfortunately, the worst decision the developers made is that they gave the player no decisions, or at least meaningless ones. In battle, you can select Manual or Automatic settings. Automatic will cause your characters to attack randomly every turn, only stopping when the enemies are dead, they are dead, or you cancel Automatic with the B button. Manual does not offer much more than that, though, as your only options are to use an item, use magic (or the single skill the non-magic users have at their disposal), or select attack. If you manually choose attack, you will find that you are still not able to decide which enemy your characters target. More often than not, this means that your strongest character will overkill the weakest enemy, while your weaker characters attack different, stronger enemies, while those stronger enemies wreak havoc upon their HP. So, if there are seven enemies, it will normally take at least seven turns to finish the battle. Because of this, battles become extremely repetitive and outright boring. Start battle, set automatic, wait for the battle to end, use items to heal up, repeat.

Thankfully, you can speed the battle animations up to 2x with the L button, or 3x with the R button. My finger constantly held the R button down during battle once I became aware of this, making me wish that there was a permanent setting to always have the battles sped up instead of forcing my finger to develop a crick. Still, if it had not been for this feature, I would not have been able to trudge on past the three hour mark.

There are no save points in Lunar: Dragon Song, which is another of the few good choices that were made in its production. This allowed me to save after each and every battle. Why was this necessary? Because out of those thirty-four enemy types I mentioned earlier, four can steal sundry items, and a different four can break any equipment you currently have equipped, with certain bosses sharing this characteristic. Unlike in other games that share these aspects, killing a thief before it runs away will not return your item, and there are no smithies to reforge your weapons and armor. Whereas the thieves are only a minor annoyance, as most of the sundry items are worthless, anyways, the equipment breakers are truly taxing. Did you just spend 38k on that new weapon? Too bad, it's broken now and you are dealing next to no damage. Hence, the constant saving.

What makes randomly losing any piece of equipment at any given time even worse is the fact that you only have three ways of making money: selling items or old equipment, finding it in a chest, or completing endless fetch quests. Selling old equipment will not get you enough money to buy most of what you need, so it will really only provide you with little boosts to your monetary goal. There are less than ten chests in the entire game that hold money, so that is not a viable solution, either. That leaves you to complete the endless fetch quests. Jian is a courier, and you can accept delivery jobs at Gad's Express, which is similar to the post office as there is one in all but two of the towns in the game. The jobs entail you delivering a certain amount of certain sundry items to whatever person in whatever town the quest tells you to. The harder the items are to obtain, the more you are paid. If you decide to abandon a job, you must pay a ten percent quitting fee before you are allowed to accept another one. This is when the sloppy translation stops being a solely story issue and begins to screw up the gameplay: you can be told to deliver to one person, but that person is named something else when you actually speak with them. The Ubisoft translators seem to not be on speaking terms, as Timothy becomes Timathy and Raiban becomes Laban, among others.

In order to obtain sundry items to complete the jobs, you have to defeat enemies in Combat mode. You see, another glaringly bad idea that the developers implemented is to artificially lengthen the game by making the player decide to earn either items or experience from battle. In Combat mode, you are able to claim sundry items or cards from your fallen enemies. If you a battle in Virtue mode, which is apparently supposed to be fighting while praying, you will gain Althena points, which are simply experience points with a different name. There's a market a quarter of the way through the game where you can begin to buy sundry items, allowing you to complete jobs without fighting anything. At that point, the only reason to fight in Combat mode is to try to find a card, and the only reason to fight in Virtue mode is to clear an area of all symbols so you can open a blue chest and claim your prize, since leveling up causes the enemies and bosses to level up, as well.

Everyone leveling up with you also assures that you will have exactly one useful character throughout the entire game. Jian's attack hits three times, and a single hit from him will almost always be stronger than a single hit from any other party member. No one can even begin to match his damage output, since he is also the only character you will ever have that can attack more than once. That leaves every other character as either support, a meat shield, or both. Jian loses his ability to hit more than once in a section that took me one hour to complete, and that was the only time in the game where it was a help to have two other characters. Of course, that section would have lasted about ten minutes if it had not been for my characters attacking randomly instead of combining their attacks to eliminate enemies quicker.

In the beginning of the game, characters have very little MP. The first mage you acquire has less than twenty to start out, which poses a significant problem when the least powerful healing spell in the game requires ten. That, put together with the fact that not one store in the game sells anything that will restore MP, leaves the player to make frequent return trips to Althena statues to heal, use one of the very rare Mental Gums or Mental Drops that they may have found, or use an enemy card. When Jian learned his first skill, I quickly realized why MP restoratives are so rare in this game: Jian's skills are even more broken than his three physical attacks. Jian's skills can consistently deal more than five hundred damage to every enemy in a battle, often ending the battle immediately. At this point in the game, monsters are also reaching a level of HP that can last through one of Jian's barrages, and since you cannot manually select an enemy to attack, it can cause the battles to drag on even more than usual. This gives you the choice of watching immensely boring exchanges of attacks that may or may not end with all of your equipment being broken, or spamming the few MP recovery items you have on Jian to clear out entire rooms in a single minute. The gameplay is so broken that you are at once severely underpowered and severely overpowered.

1/10

Story

The story in Lunar: Dragon Song is derivative of the Lunar games that came before it. If it happens in Dragon Song, it was most likely done in one or more of the other games, and much better, at that. Dragon Song tries to replicate the simple, yet impressive stories of its predecessors, but fails on many levels.

The characterization is lacking, which is especially disappointing, since that was a major strong point in the other games. Most characters have no personality, and those that do seem to have more than one, behaving differently from scene to scene. Nothing in the story made me care the littlest bit what happened to any of them, seeing as how they did not seem to care about that most of the time, themselves.

Now, I cannot speak about the story in its original form, since I have only the most basic grasp of Japanese, and even that is slipping away the longer I'm away from my former Japanese instructors. However, where Working Designs excelled, Ubisoft utterly fails. Not only is the translation lacking humor, but it's also lacking coherence. Some dialogue is just so poorly translated that it is almost nonsensical. Not only that, but the twists are so horribly foreshadowed that calling it foreshadowing makes me feel like I am insulting anyone who has ever been able to successfully foreshadow something without beating the reader over the head with the idea.

Most of my other complaints with the game are spoiler-heavy, so I will refrain from going in-depth. Suffice it to say that the story begins cliche' and ends cliche', with nothing different in-between.

I gave the story a bonus point because it's not another JRPG with a protagonist carrying an oversized sword around. I took that point away again because it's another JRPG where a character with absolutely no battle training or experience is somehow able to outperform every other warrior on the planet.

3/10

tl;dr Breakdown

Sound: 6/10 – Illogical reuse of sound effects and slightly above average background music leaves a lot to be desired.
Graphics: 6/10 – Palette-swaps are used for too many NPCs, enemies, and bosses. The battle animations are sloppy.
Gameplay: 1/10 – Gameplay is broken, boring, and gives the player no room for strategy. Most of the game is spent watching the characters fight on autopilot at 3x speed as opposed to actually playing.
Story: 3/10 – Bad foreshadowing, an unsatisfying climax, and an illogical, cop-out epilogue set this Lunar game firmly in its place as the worst in the series.
Overall: 4/10 – There are worse games out there, but that is hardly a reason to play this one.

Buy, Rent, Borrow, or Avoid

I cannot, with a clear conscience, recommend that anyone pay any money to play this game. If you are a diehard fan of the Lunar series, Lunar: Dragon Song will only disappoint you. If you like just about anything that is an RPG and you happen to know someone who would be willing to let you borrow this, go ahead and see what you think. As a rule, though, I would have to say avoid.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 08/18/08

Game Release: Lunar: Dragon Song (US, 09/27/05)