Disaster Report: Lunar: Dragon Song (DS)

What would you call the opposite of innovation? Regression feels like the immediate word that comes to mind, but that implies a return to bad old ideas rather than the invention of new awful ones.

 

The Japanese role-playing game genre has been around since the early 1980s, although knowing the spotty early history of video games there’s probably an older game lurking around waiting to sprout up and claim it was the first to complicate such discussions. It did take some time for people to figure out how to make these games focused on character progression actually enjoyable rather than simply being battle after brainless battle to make your level go up so you can fight new monsters who will also help your numbers go up. Games learned to remove that grind or work it into plots, and those plots kept growing in complexity and actually told legitimate stories with endearing characters instead of just giving you an excuse to go to a new area and beat the new big dragon. By the 1990s you were starting to get JRPGs that could stand shoulder to shoulder with other amazing games in other genres and they were even managing to tell richer stories than most of their contemporaries.

It was during the 1990s that the Lunar series began, and while you can probably get people defending any JRPG series so long as it hit them at the right point in life and before other franchises reached their game systems, it did fly a bit under the radar. Part of that was because the first title was for the Sega CD which definitely limited its audience, but despite my somewhat dismissive tone it was well-regarded and got a few sequels and remakes. Some of those were untranslated or similarly released on the Sega CD to ensure obscurity, but come 2005, the series would get in on the ground floor with the upcoming Nintendo console, the Nintendo DS.

 

The first game in the series in ten years that wasn’t a remake and the first JRPG for a system that we now know to be the second best selling console of all time, it was like Lunar’s creators were being offered success on a silver platter. They could have put out something plain and likely sold gangbusters, they could have gone the extra mile and maybe set up things for the series to continue, but instead they decided Lunar: Dragon Song was to be a testing ground not for innovative ideas, but wild departures from the genre formula made it seem like they deliberately sabotaged their chances instead of learning from the 30 years of history they could have looked at for what worked and what did not. Problems emerge in most every element of the game, from obviously important areas like the battle system to areas that you didn’t even know could go so wrong like simply walking around areas, and with a plot that definitely doesn’t justify pushing through all the ridiculous concepts brought to the table, it ends up a hard game to suffer through.

 

So I suffered through it, and while I could lay out all the problems in neat little subheaders, perhaps the better way to impress on you the issues with its design is to take a gradual tour of the game’s progression. This won’t be a walkthrough or a text-based Let’s Play or anything and I’ll use broad strokes at parts because they are definitely necessary, but tackling the issues chronologically through a playthrough will better show how the pileup that makes this such a failure builds up.

 

RIGHT OUT OF THE GATE, THINGS GO WRONG

Entering the world of Lunar: Dragon Song you find yourself playing as Jian Campbell and Lucia, a pair of friends who work for a delivery company. They have that kind of obvious but unspoken affection for each other that makes their interactions slightly cute, and with Jian being the attacker and Lucia the healer you have two very solid choices for your first party members.

 

On a day like any other you wake up and leave your bedroom to go to work, and isn’t that nice you can hold B to run. Since the game is displayed across the DS’s two screens the top shows your character as they explore and the bottom has information like touchscreen shortcuts for different menus and your health… which is going down for some reason. Immediately you encounter one of the strangest choices made in Lunar: Dragon Song. If you want to get to anywhere in a reasonable time, you’ll see that running will drain your health gradually. Early on in the game when you have barely any HP this is definitely an issue, particularly because once you’ve hit about half health the game just denies you the ability to run anyway so you not only damaged yourself getting somewhere but then are stuck slogging along unless you can find the healing goddess statues to top off or wish to spend precious items and magic to undo the damage for simply wanting to get somewhere in a reasonable time.

 

Luckily there are points where instead of walking around you view a map and pick your destination to remove some of the walking, but walking rather than running is obnoxiously slow. Jian’s normal speed can’t be called a leisurely stroll because that’s far too energetic for how he ambles forward at a snail’s pace, the game maybe wanting to extend its runtime by making you putter along so slowly that you can’t beat it in less than 18 hours. I do, however, think there was at least one idea that wasn’t fully bonkers behind this concept. When you’re in an area with enemies they move around the same space as you and a battle will start if you make contact with them. Theoretically, the developers maybe thought trying to outrun them to avoid battle should have a price, that being the player sacrificing a little health to worm their way around a potential skirmish. Having your health drain when running around safe cities and the like would still be a bother, but there is something that doesn’t add up still if this was their intent. Even if you’re plodding along at normal speed, the enemies often seem to move at that speed too. If you and an enemy are moving in the same direction they won’t catch you, the run being an easier way of outpacing them of course but even if an enemy is blocking a road ahead you can lure them away and do a lazy circle to get on the other side of them and continue on without pressing down the B button.

What this amounts to is a nice time-saving feature that has been soiled by an unnecessary burden with each use, but as you get deeper into the game Jian will have so much health he can start to afford to lose some just for running… but that’s not as true for the rest of the party. Your entire party loses health when you decide its time to pick up that pokey pace. Lucia’s health remains low for a long time and as the healer you can’t justify unnecessary damage on her so easily, new party members join at level 1 with low HP as well and you need to account for that as you are once again forced to slow down to avoid practically killing someone who is already going to be vulnerable since you’ll be bringing them into areas meant for your level 20 party members as they work to catch up.

 

While this baffling run system damaged me enough that I kept forgetting I could run safely when I played another JRPG, Final Fantasy 7, a short time after, let’s not spend too much longer on it, as we need to join Jian and Lucia as they head off to do their delivery job. Going through the forest, they run into their first battle… and guess what?

 

It’s got ridiculously baffling ideas on how those should unfold too.

 

THE BRAINLESS BATTLE SYSTEM

First of all, let’s be honest with ourselves for a moment. Many role-playing games have plenty of fights where you don’t even need to think. You encounter some foes in a random battle and hold down attack with everyone until they’re gone. In a decent RPG this is just how you get things like experience points, money, and items that will pay off when you do start entering more difficult battles that require more thought to beat, special abilities and magic whipped out for those highlight fights while random battles are a negligible piece of the puzzle. Some games though can make those simple monster battles at least demand a little respect as the foes might be legitimately dangerous or the game gives you the option to actually use magic and abilities without draining your resources too much.

 

So, how did Lunar: Dragon Song choose to handle its normal turn-based fights? Well, they would almost be of the negligible type, but I would have to append so many qualifiers to that it’s best we just move right into the problems one by one. First, we have the complete inability to pick which enemies you target during a fight. When you choose to attack, you are leaving it up to your party members on who they want to hit. Even after beating the game I still can’t tell if there is any rhyme or reason to how they select their targets. It’s not the enemy who most recently damaged them, it’s not the enemy who is closest to death, it is not the weakest one or the strongest one. When they move forward to strike, they pick whoever they please and they have a very bad habit of not picking the strategic choice. They’ll let an enemy who has almost no health left stick around and keeping damaging your party while they whittle down something tougher, and the game makes another awful idea within this already poorly conceived battle system that makes this all the more aggravating.

Enemies not only steal items, but can permanently break them too. You won’t get your items back after they are taken, and the items are often involved in the game’s delivery subquests which are the only way to earn cash besides selling stuff since foes never drop any money. As such, earning money is made a sometimes excruciating process as you do boring errands to earn small amounts and the enemies you fight along the way can rob you of the items you’re collecting for those very subquests. The destruction is worse though, the player’s equipment able to break from simple enemy strikes from certain foes and there is no repair system in place. Later in the game having a piece of armor break can lead to stat decreases of over 100 when your total value for a stat is between 200-300 prior to the breakage, and if you go to try and buy a comparable replacement you’ll find it incredibly expensive. Unless you really invest a lot of time in the unexciting delivery service subquests you’ll find yourself often strapped for cash and bankrupt by making simple purchases, but at least one thing Lunar: Dragon Song does right is letting you save almost anywhere so you can save after every battle and reset if your equipment is broken! Which probably means saving about 200-300 times but hey, it’s better time spent than the grind needed to replace armor where you’d also be at risk of more armor breaking during that process.

 

Heading back to the functions of the battle system, you’re probably wondering what you can do beyond simply attack foes. Surely there must be some skills that let you better target foes or change things around? Well, you do eventually get new party members, a catgirl named Gabi having an ability where she can hit every foe. It costs 10 MP to do, her max MP will probably never reach 100 before the game’s over, and restoring MP in a dungeon is often fairly limited so using it on normal enemies is often a desperation move. A guy named Rufus joins with a similar attack but we’ll need to wait to discuss the wonders of Rufus later, so for now, those are the two skills your party gets that get around the lack of targeting ability by just hitting everything, and thankfully for pretty good damage. Lucia and a later healer named Flora have magic that can be added to the battle mix at least, although until the late game where you get equipment to lessen magic cost you need to be careful how often you use it. Healing and curing statuses will be their main applications, but you can cast spells that increase your party’s attack, defense, and speed, although sometimes the stat increases seemed to pan out where I would have rather just kept the magic to heal after damage rather than get a small defense boost that didn’t protect enough to avoid me having to heal anyway.

 

So the two human girls are mostly healing machines with very weak attacks so they’re not worth much in regular battles, and while Jian later gets black magic that deals some heavy damage, it uses up a good amount of a limited magic pool and actually requires him to equip an accessory so that he can only use one at a time. Plus, black magic just hits everyone so the tactical consideration is “will I or won’t I” rather than any deep addition to the action. However, there is one area the game attempted to inject strategy into these fights, and that’s the enemy card system.

Enemy cards can be used during battle to cause varying effects. Depending on the enemy on the card, you can use these both in battle or out. Many of these are pretty situational or not really worth the effort. Lowering enemy stats doesn’t often lower their efficacy in a fight, and confusing an enemy means they might miss a turn or two. However, there is a poison card you can get in that early game forest and it works in seemingly every boss fight, dealing almost as much damage as an extra party member every turn. Cards do have limited uses, although that limitation is usually a number between 10 and 20 and you can always go get a replacement after it is exhausted, so almost every boss becomes easier if you poison them to start with the common Shreeker card. Anything after that to up your chances feels like overkill, with many cards upping your own stats without draining the healer’s magic power, you can get cards that provide healing or magic refills, and ones that let you run away guaranteed from wild monsters. There are even cards that prevent your equipment from being broken, although while 10 uses of the Termite card sounds generous, in an area with equipment breaking foes you’ll fight more than 10 battles so that doesn’t remove that bothersome issue even if you use it every fight. The limited uses is why MP restoration is hard to come by as well, since you probably don’t want to be without your Hellbird card for a longer boss fight and the enemies holding that card only appear in four areas that are mostly spaced pretty far apart.

 

So, the monster cards threaten to add some variety to the fights but it’s essentially a few good ones and their use is often too simple to make things exciting. Boss battles quickly become trivialized by the cards if they’re embraced and at some point in the adventure you’ll probably be so strong that even the Shreeker card isn’t truly necessary, but there is one limitation hanging over the monster cards as well, and that’s how you get them in the first place.

 

In Lunar: Dragon Song, enemies can be fought in either the deceptively named Combat mode or Virtue mode. Combat mode allows you to earn items like the cards for beating a foe, and this is how you’d get the items needed for deliveries. However, Combat mode means you ONLY get items for beating foes, so you get no experience towards leveling up and increasing your stats, and since drops are random you can have fights where you take down six foes who threatened to smash your armor only to walk away with two items you didn’t really need and can only use for deliveries or sales where you get barely any cash. Virtue mode is the one you’ll want to fight most battles in unless you’re trying to get the good monster cards, but Virtue only gives you the experience points for leveling up. You won’t get items or money, leading again to the game’s big money problem, but at least your guys will become stronger and can finish battles faster down the line. There is also a fairly interesting idea where, if you beat all the monsters in a small area quickly enough in Virtue mode, you not only get a 30% refill of your health and MP but can sometimes unlock a blue treasure chest that usually contains some fairly good equipment to make up for your lack of income and inventory. The treasure chest idea would have been a great idea to encourage the player to fight more battles instead of skipping foes and the refresh means you can offset the cost of fighting a tiny bit, but the arbitrary split in rewards only leads to problems as you either ignore it mostly or spend more time fighting enemies but with less motivation for doing so.

To top things all off, battles are incredibly slow by default. While the battle screen looks pretty good, even spread across both of the DS’s screens and flying enemies float on the top before coming down once the enemies below them are wiped out, everyone takes their time executing attacks. I’m sure someone would argue that the Ice Mongrel needs to do a few small hops to reach Jian, attack, and do those same hops backwards for aesthetic reasons, but it’s another point where the game is dragging out its length while you’re left just staring and waiting. At least you can hold down R to speed battles up, although since there is never really a reason not to hold down R I’ve even seen people suggest rubber banding it down to overcome the game’s sluggish fights. In fast forward I’d say the fights have a decent default pace and hopping Ice Mongrels are easier to accept, but it’s another point where Lunar: Dragon Song is making a strange decision.

 

SO… congrats on winning your first battle! You’ll fight your way through the forest, make your delivery, and learn about a city of beastmen that Jian wants to visit without explaining his reasons for doing so for a while. We’ll continue to experience all the little problems with the fighting and the movement and pretty much any game mechanic along the way, but this is a good time to start and focus more on the story’s failings…

 

THE LOWS AND NOT-QUITE-AS-LOWS OF THE STORY

Lunar: Dragon Song’s story on the whole probably wouldn’t be too offensive in a more competent game. As said earlier I think Jian and Lucia’s dynamic is cute enough for the leads of the plot, and while the motivations for going to places are often simple and characters don’t have too much depth, it would have been a serviceable spine to hold up a game.

 

After your opening deliveries you head to Healriz and encounter the Beastmen, who are cat people whose main difference from regular people is they have cat ears. They also notably have darker skin than all of the humans, and this is the point where the game decides to introduce racism. Lunar: Dragon Song’s story set up involves a split in ancient times with Beastmen becoming the warriors of the world while humans head off to live lives of agriculture and trade, so when you head to Healriz every Beastman you meet is openly dismissive of the puny humans in your party. The lady at the weapon shop is even indignant at the idea that your weak human arms could even handle the weapons she sells, so Jian decides it’s time to end racism by entering the coliseum for a fight to prove humans can be tough too. When he is asked to explain his motivations though he tends to approach things with a naive heroism that leads to him bumbling into bad phrasing like how happy he is that he wasn’t born a Beastman, but the youthful enthusiasm and inability to explain his motivations properly actually makes him a bit closer to a real person than your typical protagonist. His thickheaded stubbornness would probably cause more problems than it would solve if the story wasn’t focused on him, but I could see this almost like an optimistic story from a high schooler who is coming to grips with their deeper thoughts on social matters without truly understanding how deep such issues go.

 

Unfortunately, part of proving himself is fighting in the coliseum alone, so his healer is gone and you’re left to just kick a lot and use items. You now participate in three consecutive battles where Jian can only just keep attacking enemies who can do things like break your equipment to make it even more likely you’ll die or run out of healing items just trying to buy yourself a few turns to kick some more. This is, unfortunately, the start of a less charming trend where Jian constantly tells his allies he needs to fight alone or go forward on his own so he’ll do many more of these fights where all he can do is kick a lot and heal with the game’s candy and gum items. At a few points the game has that expected moment where his allies say the battle matters to them too or they’re tough enough to handle it and Jian realizes his friends are right… only to do this same thing again later, each time the fear rising in the player that they’ll be reduced to their admittedly strongest fighter but also the plainest in terms of how they can handle a battle.

After winning in the coliseum the fussy beast king curses Jian so he’s weaker for a while, but you get your first new party member, the beastgirl Gabryel. Gabi is a decent attacker and has that “target all” attack, but she’s level one and you’re going to need to spend some time getting her up to speed. One nice thing is that new members do level up faster than your older ones, but it does mean Gabi’s attacks are fairly weak for a while. Her attacks consistently do damage around a third of Jian’s once he gets his triple kick back, and usually if a triple kick doesn’t kill an enemy Gabi isn’t going to be able to finish them off before Jian’s next turn in the game’s “everyone picks there moves at the same time and then things resolve” system. However, she probably is the best character in terms of depth in the story, Gabi soon revealed to be the Beast King’s daughter who was tasked with finding warriors to enter the evil Frontier that threatens to swallow the world with its dark influence. However everyone she picked to fight back the Frontier kept dying so that bums her out before it’s pushed aside for Gabi to mostly be either the first Beastman to say humans are alright and start that thread towards a conclusion or be the person who Jian can talk to after Lucia is captured. Lucia is, unfortunately, kidnapped and unable to do much more than be the damsel in distress for quite a while, setting Jian into the loop where he either can only talk about saving Lucia or how he should do the next area or fight alone.

 

 

After you fight the Beast King and head out to the Frontier to stop the Vile Tribe (who are sort-of purplish or pale white elvish folk who seem pretty alright beyond serving the game’s man baddie Ignatius), you find the previous team who left to try defeated on a bridge that has perhaps the game’s strongest music in an other wise still pretty solid soundtrack. I will note that there is no true Dragon Song anywhere in the game and it was a name selected after a fan poll for renaming the game from it’s Japanese name Lunar Genesis, but more importantly right now we find a Beastman, the earlier mentioned Rufus, currently face down and defeated by the monster that captures Lucia and takes her to Ignatius. Your healer is gone, but after you are saved from a bad fate, you find yourself in a mine where a girl named Flora talks to you for a little bit. She’s got some energy to her, but when Rufus offers to help take you to Ignatius’s castle to fight him and save Lucia, Jian gets mad at him for being a racist and insist the girl he just met, Flora, will be his guide instead. Flora is your new healer, she’s level 1 so you’ll need to spend some time leveling her up so she can learn her healing spells, but notably she never learns a revival spell meaning the game replaces your strong healer with many options with one who will lag behind the group and never learns to revive anyone. She uses a bow so that’s one difference, but you were already getting umbrellas with Lucia that made her about as comparatively competent at fighting as Flora will ever be, which isn’t much but still emphasizes the game is taking away a character only to offer you a worse one and a character who never becomes much more than an enthusiastic tag along story-wise.

 

Along the way to the castle Jian does his shtick of insisting he fights alone and encounters three boss enemies at once, but Gabi shows up to help and Rufus joins the party too! AND he’s level 15 to start! And he’s a strong attacker! And he’s going to die in the next area! Yeah, you get a third attacker for a short period who sacrifices himself after you get through an area or two, and then after Ignatius kicks your butt and Jian goes through a designate moping period, you settle into the last form your party takes: Jian, Gabi, and Flora. This is when you realize the combat really won’t be getting any deeper, and this is about the halfway point.

 

 

After ten hours of being ground down by bad mechanics and bad story choices, you start to settle into something more monotonous than offensive. After losing to Ignatius you learn he’s the Dragonmaster so you need to become the Dragonmaster to beat him, which involves traveling the world to fight four dragons. Technically you’re told to do four Dragon trials, but they all end in combat somehow and some of them are rather silly story-wise like the dragon saying you passed but the trial is to realize you didn’t and fight him instead. Some do involve fighting a lightly different dragon fight like needing to use your black magic before you just hold down attack and use the poison enemy card, or the one where you fight a copy of Jian who mirrors your attacks but you can still probably just keep attacking and eating the blows since your healing can handle your own damage output reflected back pretty well.

It doesn’t feel like I was just over-leveled and thus having such an easy time of things either, this was the part of the game where I started avoiding combat more and more, partly because the game had run out of unique enemy designs so they were all recolors and I couldn’t even remember if the latest enemy was a different recolor than last time I encountered them. I’d still go for blue treasure chests occasionally, but dungeon designs are usually rooms where you either pick an exit and see if that’s the way forward or flip a switch to potentially open up new doors that also might lead to more switches. Dragon dungeons tend to have unique nuisances like constant damage from heat or falling objects to avoid to add to any running-related health drain issues, but this portion of the game really settles into a dull but manageable “more of the same” mentality that is less irritating than the early portions of the adventure mostly because you’ve become numb to it or strong enough to just keep pushing through. And I do mean strong enough emotionally and within the context of the game.

 

Once you’ve puttered through the extra ten hours of areas that could have worked in a game with a better battle system and where the hero actually listens to the dragon’s lessons instead of seeming to immediately forget their intentions with the trials after they’re finished, you do get to the main villain’s castle again. Here you experience a part with multiple required rooms full of monsters to beat to build up your strength and practically ensure the final boss fights won’t be too difficult even if you did avoid battles too much to this point. If you can muster up the enthusiasm for fighting Ignatius, the monster that attacked you and Rufus on the bridge earlier, Gideon, comes in for a fight! And you beat him but then he’s fought again! And then you fight him once more in a more monstrous form, and now he’s well and truly down. You head towards Ignatius for a scene of Jian screaming for Lucia back and Ignatius saying the player can’t win and you get ready for a final boss fight… but you actually already fought the final boss. That third Gideon fight was the final fight, and Ignatius falls down a pit without a battle.

So, Lunar: Dragon Song does take place 1000 years before the other events of the series, and while the game never directly says it, it seems the game series is called Lunar because all of this is happening on the moon to the Blue Star (aka an Earth-like planet). This moon-like world is basically a fantasy Earth though, and while you do see some ideas featured in this game cropping up in the earlier Lunar installments, this prequel doesn’t seem like it was setting up too much. Mainly, Ignatius is not in the other games, so it’s not like he needed to live or die ambiguously. He just falls to his doom and you’re denied the big battle at the end. The game wraps up pretty quickly after with two characters your barely know chatting on a bridge and one was actually a fairy the whole time I guess and you get the hint of a happy ending but no really good epilogues for the cast. And so ends your Lunar: Dragon Song experience unless you want to really do all of the deliveries that don’t really have stories tied to them or you can find another unfortunate soul who owns the game to do Scratch Battles where you damage each other with those enemy cards in a different battle system.

 

But that was the annoying start, tedious back half, and underwhelming end of the adventure, and while it wasn’t always consistently awful, the upsides are few and far between. It did have a funnily named enemy called Gronk that everyone talks about like they’re a big threat before they’re just the latest similar big monster man…

The four Deuces you fight before Gronk are all monster men too, and Gideon is first a slightly altered and recolored Deuce and then a reworked Gronk recolor for his second fight, so for its final big battles Lunar: Dragon Song must’ve thought its big burly monster men were cool enough for a second spin on stage. Thanks to things like the soundtrack it can’t all be called awful and the game does a few nice things like reviving any dead characters after a battle, but a few good songs certainly can’t undo the incredible amount of damage so many poorly conceived ideas in both mechanics and story progression total up to. And so, it’s time to end this dragon song, whatever that might be beyond a way to make the title also have the acronym DS like the system it’s on…

 

THE CONCLUSION

If you looked at Lunar: Dragon Song, heard its music, and read the broad strokes of its plot, it would sound like a harmless run of the mill RPG. However with the health-draining running, almost strategy-free fights where enemies can break expensive armor, battle system where you pick either to level up or get the items needed for the repetitive errands needed for decent income, and a plot that repeats itself or leads to annoying moments like hoisting new weak party members on you that you need to train up to make mildly competent, there’s almost nothing worth latching onto if you actually play it. The back half is bland and far too easy but the frustrations never truly die even once you’ve become powerful enough to slog through most battles without too much worry. When it’s not baffling with a decision, the choice still just adds to the boring moments, this game offering neither story nor battle complexity to dull the constant stream of awful realizations of where the gameplay is heading.

 

This is unfortunately my first Lunar game but I’m sure many hearts were broken when this practically killed off the franchise by taking such unusual and mostly pointless routes with its plot. The best thing that can be said about it is that the back half is hollow, uneventful, and at least tries to make some deeper points about heroism before it forgets its own plot developments by the next dragon fight, but by then you’ve been beaten down into accepting that the fights are always going to be brainless affairs where you hold attack, maybe heal a little, and hope that eventually your characters will wise up and hit the right foes although they almost always seem to prioritize the wrong ones. There’s a bit of tension when so many equipment breaking foes are being left alive for no reason but since the outcome of the game-controlled targeting can lead to a reset or the agonizing grind of needing to get enough cash to replace important equipment that tension is more like hearing a tornado warning and hoping it misses your house rather than a thrilling bit of danger.

 

Some ideas like the blue chests do have a lot of promise and I’d like to see them in a competent game. Well paced RPGs often need you to engage in some smaller fights between the more involved boss battles and a chest that opens once you’ve killed a set amount of foes encourages the player not to flee from such battles, but everything else in the game really feels like it really wants you to hate fights. Card uses can remove some of the concerns with engaging in a battle but if you use them up going back to get a replacement puts you at risk of the things you wanted to avoid in the first place. Penalizing running, the default battle speed, needing to train up new party members, the soulless delivery quests to replace lost equipment where you can get the items you’re gathering for the quest stolen… it almost feels like Lunar: Dragon Song is contriving reasons to extend the experience even though later on it’s mostly offering repainted enemies and barely any plot substance to justify sticking around as long as it does.

 

I have played some Japanese role-playing games with almost no story or battle substance and even those you could at least turn your brain off and push through the grind. I was able to watch Solo: A Star Wars Story and Ant-Man and the Wasp on the side while doing the boring grindy parts of a game like Shining in the Darkness, and while those movies weren’t that great either, I still rate that game more highly as an experience than Lunar: Dragon Song because at least the problem there was more too much of the game spent doing mindless things rather than the game actively resisting efforts to even do the most basic of actions. I could target at least a grouping of foes in Shining in the Darkness even though I couldn’t pick who among them got hit, but I could prioritize foes and bosses did demand a bit more thought than Lunar: Dragon Song’s “use a card or two and then hold attack” approach.

 

I tried to find information on how the development went so wrong in so many different places, but all I could find was internet scuttlebutt beyond a possibly baffling Nintendo Power interview where the team thought the changes to the battle system would speed up fighting despite it doing the complete opposite. He might have been referring to the auto-battle feature where you can skip the process of pressing A on three different character’s attack option every turn, but you’ll need to exit out of that if you need to do the occasional heal and the risk of equipment breakage means you can’t just auto battle and look away while it resolves. Whatever the strange inspiration was behind so many poorly conceived ideas being mixed together, it ruined this title’s hopes of even just being mediocre. This game once called Lunar Genesis seems to have mostly killed the series besides a PSP remake of the first game that came and went with little fanfare, but looking at some of the other titles Lunar: Dragon Song almost got, they feel far more fitting. Lunar: Ashen Dawn would be a good portent of the awful realizations at the start, Lunar: Shattered Dawn would be your hopes of a fun JRPG shattering once you see how fights unfold, but Lunar: Dark Skies would definitely be the best pick, matching the gloom of trying to push through so many systems that seem to want to slow down the already unenjoyable action. Whatever you call it though, Lunar: Dragon Song is certainly a sour experience thanks to the game arbitrarily contradicting years upon years of game design knowledge and, more importantly, common sense.