A game with potential is just that...
The story sets up like most other RPGs with two characters. The problem is that there is little to no back story and just as little character development. Other than a few words here and there, it is quite difficult to ascertain who the characters are. I played the game and didn't really know who they were and as a result, it was difficult to find any connection to them.
The battle system is unique in that you must choose either to gain experience or items, never both. This may have worked well if the game gave you some reason to go through areas twice with bonus areas or prizes, but the only carrot is in experience mode. If you defeat all the enemies in a certain zone, you are able to open up the one blue chest in the area usually holding a very useful item. Unfortunately, there is no way to tell which zones have these treasure chests so you end up in virtue mode most of the time.
Personally, I had used virtue (experience) mode through the entire game and had very few items as a consequence. Now, my characters were extremely high for most of the areas but this was barely an advantage because the monsters get stronger as you do. Another issue with the game is the fact that running causes you to lose life. This is fine for realism but if they wanted to make it really real, they could have added a stamina bar or stamina attribute in addition to strength, dexterity and luck. For whatever reason, they chose not to so much of the time, you have sweat animations coming out of your characters heads to signify that they are getting low on life.
In the battles, the game runs at quite a slow pace but you can use either shoulder button to increase the speed by two or three times but there should have been an option just to lock it on at all times. While all of this is going on, you will notice that there is auto attack mode and manual attack mode. Unfortunately, they are more alike than dissimilar because when you choose to attack, you can not choose who to attack. This can be extremely frustrating because of the loss of control. There is little strategy and even less reason to not enable auto attack mode for most battles. It doesn't help that there is no A.I. or preferences for how you want to attack, as everything is random and usually tactically unsound.
If you're a fan of the 16-bit era of music, you should get a hoot out of this as the tracks are quite smooth and pleasant to listen to. the graphics are of a similar nature and the game is definitely easy to look at. Also, there are various points in the game with pictures on the top screen that are drawn quite well but are never animated while the battle animations are smooth but repetitious because you have so few choices of what to do.
In the end, I enjoyed this game much more than the score I'm giving it but I can see a poor design when I see it and this is just one example of the plethora of poor games waiting in the bargain bin for the DS. It is really unfortunate because the game had such potential coming from the prestigious Lunar series. If the game play was better and a few more animations were added, this game would easily be one of the better games on the DS. Instead, you can see the rushes and patch jobs where the potential was just gleaming but never materialized into anything memorable. If you're a hardcore RPG fan or Lunar junkie, then this game might be for you, but by odds alone, I would stay away from this game, even at 19.87 CAD.