"What Went Wrong With Dragon Song!?"

WHAT WENT WRONG?!?
First off let me make clear that I am a huge fan of the Lunar series and I've been in love with it ever since I got the original game for Sega CD. I was expecting a whole lot more for a Lunar title. Had this not been a Lunar game, perhaps I would have looked at it a little differently, but since it carries the Lunar name, there are certain expectations that go along with it, and Game Arts/Ubi Soft really goofed in that department...since practically nothing about the game resembles any of the other Lunar games. Gone is the wry sense of humor and sexual tension and innuendos that made the Lunar games on the Sega CD and PSX so funny, and the characters so endearing. Gone is the depth of character development that could make a player laugh and -yes- even cry. Not a lick of humor or emotion to be found. If anyone from the original game design team worked on this title, it must have been after they gave them shock therapy and a lobotomy. Aside from the name of the game, I can find nothing in common between this game and the ones from the past. Even the blander version of Lunar SSS on the GBA, Lunar Legend, had some semblance of its namesake; Dragon Song has zilch. In fact, it hardly has anything to do with dragons, and the only reason they called it "Dragon Song" is to utilize the gimmick of having "DS" in the title.

Secondly, I also want to make a point of saying I judged this game on its own merits, despite the fact that I am a Lunar fan. The scores reflect the game itself, standing alone (mostly), and not in comparison with other Lunar titles. It's just that when a game comes out as part of a series, of course there are going to be certain expectations - otherwise there'd be no point in using the franchise name to begin with. If they're going to call this a Lunar game then it had better be in keeping with some of the traditions of the Lunar series. Regardless of this, on its own, it is still a poor specimen of an RPG, as you are about to find out why.

GAMEPLAY - 1 - WRETCHED
Ugh...just...ugh. I would make this category a zero, or better yet, a negative number if I could. Any game that makes your health drop just while you're running around town, already has a very bad point going against it. There are some things about RPGs that are assumed...trivial things like, your character(s) probably make bathroom stops, wash themselves, pick their noses, eat 3 meals a day besides just the heal-foods you chuck down during battles, and they sleep 6-8 hours a day despite the fact that you occasionally drop in on an inn for health replenishment. If you had to keep track of these little details yourself, you'd never get anything else done, or you'd be playing The Sims. So why does a game developer ever think it's necessary to burden the player with diminishing health just running around a town or forest?! Of course in real life you'd be getting tired, somewhat, but not dying! Watching your health diminish right before your eyes as if you're bleeding to death is ridiculous. If they wanted to put a limit on how much running you could do, all they had to do was make it so that after running for a certain amount of time, you're forced to walk. Not that you're nearly dead. God forbid you try running through a dungeon, and you're already two thirds dead by the time you bump into a random encounter...yeah that makes sense.

Using the stylus to point & go places is cool, but you can't run with the stylus, so there's one cool aspect brought down with a lame one.

Then there are the battles. First of all the battles are interminably s--l--o--w. If you want to speed them up to the point where they're not inducing sleep, you have to actually be conscious to constantly push shoulder buttons. Even so, it's STILL slow torture. Secondly, you can't target enemies. WHY NOT?? What invisible force prevents a character from picking which monster to attack? I could see if, for example, it prevented a character in the back of the group from attacking a monster in the rear of its group, or if it took a turn or two for them to move up, but this is not the case; you simply cannot control who your character attacks.Lame. No tactical ability whatsoever. Of course your best & biggest attacks will inevitably land on the smallest monsters. Why bother even giving me any control to begin with? It's not like I can alter the outcome of the battle. Half the fun of RPGs is using strategy in defeating enemies (well, the harder ones)...if this is absent then what's the point? Well, there's no point anyhow; none of the battles provide any real challenge anyway. Spells are minimal & nothing special, and it doesn't take long before you're so bored, you won't even bother watching battles. I actually played another game simultaneously on my GB Micro, just to kill time! Battles vs. bosses are even more hair-pullingly frustrating, they're hardly worth watching. Having auto or a macro feature do the battles for you is a nice aspect for most RPGs, since it can get you through the wimpier, lower-level battles that can be somewhat repetitive and frequent, where you're not really required to do any strategic thinking. But it's not something that should be on the entire time. If you can get through an entire RPG with the battle system on auto, then something is terribly wrong.

As if this wasn't bad enough, monsters can steal and break your equipment. I hate any game where you can lose equipment, especially when everything is so damn expensive that you can't afford to replace them! Again this is something that I prefer to just think of as assumed in a game; weapons probably break, get lost, need to be sharpened and/or reworked from time to time...but it's not particularly something I want to WORRY about. It doesn't add to the realism of the game, it simply adds to the frustration. Besides, if you have a magic-imbued weapon, the idea is that the magic keeps it from breaking or losing its edge, anyhow. If I wanted that level of realism I'll go cosplaying dungeons & dragons. Not that I do. *ahem*

Oh but it gets worse. You don't get money, items, AND experience fighting monsters, no. That would make too much sense! You can fight for items, OR experience, but not both! Why? Who knows! So you have to go through the same dungeons fighting the same monsters twice just to pad out the gameplay, perhaps. Strangely, your stats are kept secret from you, and judging from the gameplay it would appear the game designers felt that while they were doing everything else for you, and since it was so impossible to really lose, you needn't be concerned with such things like stats to begin with. When you learn new spells, you're not even informed of this. Again, what difference does it make, if the computer is automatically fighting for you anyhow? You couldn't make a spell hit the monster you intended, anyway, so don't fret over that much. To make things suck even more you don't even get money at all from fighting; the only way to make money is to run around doing delivery errands. A LOT of them. YAAAY!! More unnecessary "realism" to muddy up the continuity! Most people play video games to roleplay a character that is better than what you can be in real life, to be a hero or heroine. If I want to feel like a "go-fer" I'll go get a minimum wage job! So you go around working your ass off for a little bit of gold to buy weapons you can't afford that are just going to break or get stolen when you go to use them. Believe it or not, there IS a storyline in here somewhere, after you get done playing UPS courier...

STORYLINE - 3 - SEMI SPOILERS
...and the storyline is absolutely average fare for a Lunar game. Instead of coming up with something different, they simply recycled the old SSS story with different characters. Been there, done that. More than once already, thanks - Eternal Blue went down that road too. But even if you've never played a Lunar game before, the story is nothing new; young adventurers-to-be, coming of age, find out they have to save the world from evil...and omigosh one is a goddess. The formula was never anything special, even in the other games, but at least they had depth of character going for them back then. These characters never really give you much to identify with or feel any empathy for, so using a blah formula and mixing it with blah dungeon crawling and even more blah fetch-quests as a delivery boy, equals a story that's practically worthless. It would take you about an hour to get through the story aspect of the game if you didn't have to drag yourself through the misery of walking places, coma-inducing battles on auto pilot, and ridiculously repetitive dungeons collecting crap items to sell for crap prices that barely make you enough money to get the good stuff.

GRAPHICS - 6
The Good...
Nice character designs, they about the only thing that is true to the series. 2D sprites (which is what I prefer to 3D), the animations of the characters look a tad wooden, they run like they have rigor mortis or something, but nothing major. Backgrounds are nice, everything is clean, bright, and colorful. They go into superdeformed mode during battles and utilize both screens, which (visually) is kinda cool, if not a little blurry. Unfortunately a game that looks good does not always play good, and this is where I got suckered in. It does, in fact, look like a Lunar game and is very deceptively packaged. How unfortunate, too, that such good-looking characters never get emotionally fleshed-out.

The Bad...
I'd give the character & background design a 9 but this brings the whole category down a few pegs: sprites for NPC characters get reused repeatedly throughout the game, which is really cheap. You talk to one NPC in one town, and talk to an identical version of the NPC in a different town. What is this, Pokemon? How hard is it to kick in a little diversity so it's not SO noticeable? Shee. For a game so anal about depicting 'realism' that it has you losing life while you run, there sure are a lot of doppelgangers & unknown twins around.

MUSIC/SOUND - 6
Music sounds good, probably the only real asset about Dragon Song aside from the graphics. The music has always been a focus of the Lunar series, the boxed sets providing all the music on CDs...obviously with the DS it's limited what they can do, and it's above-average for most DS games. It really sounds good with headphones. But it gets stale quickly, especially the battle theme, and there's not enough variety. Sound effects are bare minimum and un-noteworthy, bringing the score for this category down a few notches.

GIMMICK - 5
I made this category up only for my reviews of DS games because the DS has the touch screen, and I think it's important to the game's overall score how well it utilizes (or doesn't) the touch screen & other aspects of the DS. It did make good use of the touch screen, and yet there were times where I mistakenly went to move by touching the upper screen with the stylus. Sometimes the screens should have been switched around. Using the mic to run from a battle was kind of cute...if you're alone. Kind of embarrassing if you're not.

FINAL SCORE - 2
Overall/Final Word
I bought my NDS just for this game. I was excited about it, even when I read some not-so-shining reviews before it came out, even knowing Working Designs didn't have a hand in it. I should have listened to those reviews, and my instincts. Even the inferior Lunar Legend on the GBA blows Dragon Song away. Fans of the Lunar series should be outraged that this game used the name at all; those who have never played a Lunar game prior to this one will just think this is a bad, bad RPG...and hopefully it doesn't turn them away from playing any of the other titles. If you are reading this, please, take my word for it - this game does not, in any way, represent the other games in the series. Give them a chance and don't judge them based on this game. If you can, find yourself a copy of Lunar: Silver Star Story and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue for the PS, find out what all the fuss was about, and try to forget Dragon Song exists.

The average of all the scores is actually 4, but even that is being too kind, considering how gameplay is such a huge part of the game. Even nice character designs and good music can't save a game that is practically unplayable. I've had migraines that were more fun getting through than this game. Rent or buy? NEITHER. Run away.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 03/02/06