Review: Lunar Dragon Song
The Venerable Lunar series has finally come up with a new game after a 9 year lapse. But can this new prequel hold up to the quality that fans of the series are accustomed to?
Story:
You are a young delivery boy in a world ruled by Beast men. Needless to say the beast men do not like the humans because they feel that they are weak and inferior. But could this delivery boy be the worlds only hope against a yet unseen menace?
Graphics:
The look is like you would have expected if the Suikoden series on the PS1 had a bastard child with the Grandia series you would have a general grasp of what the battle screens look like, the major differences are that the bosses are so big they can use both screens, and more enemies can inhabit the top screen as well as the bottom. All and all the graphics look excellent and are a nice transition from the 2D RPG's GBA users are used to by now.
Music:
The Music is not bad, and in fact is quite good. But after a while it starts to grind it's self into your frontal lobe and you will find your self turning the sound off completely just to keep yourself from going insane.
Game Play:
Control is simple like one would want in their RPG, and is made even simpler by the DS's touch screen. Banging out your commands through the touch screen takes a lot of tedium out of navigation through all of the menus and charts of your characters. All of the maneuvers you would expect from power packed Lunar game are here intact and this is a good thing because you will need a distraction from the design flaws inherent in this game.
Design:
Design is what single handedly ruins this game. And what really kills the game is the fact that you are forced to fight in any fights you encounter in the wild. There are no random battles which annoys many RPG Regulars, so you can see and avoid fights, but you loose life if you want to run around the fights, and the fact that you can only get items OR experience forces you to sit back and eat fights to get important items that you have to gather to make a delivery, or fight to level up so your party does not die while trying to get items, meaning you will be crawling dungeons over and over, just to get items or experience, so you can move on so you will not get killed by the next boss.
DS owners, there are many great RPG's on their way, unless you are a RPG Geek that must have your RPG fix, then I have to say rent it first. If there is anything I can take from this game is that looking at the graphics and the capabilities that Lunar Dragon Song does achieve, it helps me hold out hope that they could port the Grandia games to the DS easily.
Graphics 9/10
Game play 5/10
Sound 5/10
Fun factor 5/10
Tilt 7/10
Average score 6.8
Lunar: Dragon Song:
Pros:
Really Good Graphics
Good story
Good uses of both screens
Easy to use menus
Cons:
Music really needed to be more varied
Battle system gets tedious after a while
For Pete's sake why can we only get EXP or Items?