Lunar: Dragon Song
Jan. 23rd, 2010 06:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroThis is, amazingly, the worst playable game I've seen in a very long time. Possibly since Secret of the Stars on the SNES. There were so many ideas that could have worked, but just didn't. And there wasn't anything that made me turn it off in disgust, just a lot of things that added up to make me think, "Hunh, that was awful."
It's a game in the Lunar series, which definitely has a following given that they keep remaking it. (I played the PS1 and GBA versions of Silver Star Story, both of which were fun but nothing amazing.) The series started on the Sega CD, and Dragon Song really has the feel of something you'd play on the Genesis. The character art is more realistically proportioned and I think the font is the same as the Phantasy Star series.
- The battle system: You only get three characters at any one time, out of five total. Your main character gets no magic and a three-hit attack. Two characters get a one-hit attack of reasonable power and a single hit-all special attack. Two characters get a selection of healing and buff spells to go with their highly useless attack. You can't target enemies with your attacks, which means that the characters will stupidly waste strong hits on nearly-dead foes, prolonging easy battles. You can use "cards" you win from enemies to inflict debuffs and status ailments, but they're limited-use. Combined with the few spells and inability to target, most battles consist of putting the AI on Auto and holding down the R trigger to make the battle run at 3x speed.
- The XP system: You can fight in two modes. One gives you XP, and if you beat all of the enemies in an area in this mode, you can unlock special chests for better equipment. However, the equipment is only good until you hit the next town and have to pay to upgrade, and enemyt stats scale with your level, so power-levelling accomplishes very little. The other mode gives you vendor trash and cards. You can sell the vendor trash for a little money, but to actually afford things you need to use it for infinitely-respawning fetch-quests, which often require a hike between towns (see below). Oh, and did I mention that enemies regularly break or steal your equipment, including the unique stuff from blue chests?
- Time-filling cheap tricks: You need to walk through the forests and caves between towns every time you pass through them, despite there being a world map. You can hold B to dash, but that slowly uses up your HP (much less of a problem later in the game because the drain-rate doesn't change, but still). Most of the dungeons are just filler that you need to cross to get to the macguffins.
- The graphics: Enemies "waiting in the wings" float on the top screen while your characters and ground-based foes are on the bottom screen. Except that some of the enemy sprites are too tall, and their heads poke onto the top screen in a way that was obviously not intentional. Did they just not playtest, or just not care?
- The dialogue: Apparently, when Working Designs translated the Sega CD and Playstation games, they inserted a lot of irreverent humor. Ubisoft did no such thing for this, so the dialogue is rather stilted and characterization is weak.
- The plot: Your best friend has a secret and now she's been kidnapped. Fight lots of people, get the Macguffins, defeat the evil emperor. That's the plot.
It's not like Unlimited Saga, where one bad mechanic (the reel system) spoils an otherwise really clever game. It's not like Breath of Fire 2, where an excellent game got an awful, awful translation. It's not like The 7th Saga, where executive meddling during localization turned a decent game into a terrible one. It's like they tried a whole bunch of "creative" things that weren't actually good ideas to disguise the fact that they had barely an hour of actual game. (I played 5 hours normally, which got me about a quarter of the way through the game. Then I plugged in an action replay to cut out all of the grinding. Another five hours and I was nearing the end of the game...)
It's a game in the Lunar series, which definitely has a following given that they keep remaking it. (I played the PS1 and GBA versions of Silver Star Story, both of which were fun but nothing amazing.) The series started on the Sega CD, and Dragon Song really has the feel of something you'd play on the Genesis. The character art is more realistically proportioned and I think the font is the same as the Phantasy Star series.
- The battle system: You only get three characters at any one time, out of five total. Your main character gets no magic and a three-hit attack. Two characters get a one-hit attack of reasonable power and a single hit-all special attack. Two characters get a selection of healing and buff spells to go with their highly useless attack. You can't target enemies with your attacks, which means that the characters will stupidly waste strong hits on nearly-dead foes, prolonging easy battles. You can use "cards" you win from enemies to inflict debuffs and status ailments, but they're limited-use. Combined with the few spells and inability to target, most battles consist of putting the AI on Auto and holding down the R trigger to make the battle run at 3x speed.
- The XP system: You can fight in two modes. One gives you XP, and if you beat all of the enemies in an area in this mode, you can unlock special chests for better equipment. However, the equipment is only good until you hit the next town and have to pay to upgrade, and enemyt stats scale with your level, so power-levelling accomplishes very little. The other mode gives you vendor trash and cards. You can sell the vendor trash for a little money, but to actually afford things you need to use it for infinitely-respawning fetch-quests, which often require a hike between towns (see below). Oh, and did I mention that enemies regularly break or steal your equipment, including the unique stuff from blue chests?
- Time-filling cheap tricks: You need to walk through the forests and caves between towns every time you pass through them, despite there being a world map. You can hold B to dash, but that slowly uses up your HP (much less of a problem later in the game because the drain-rate doesn't change, but still). Most of the dungeons are just filler that you need to cross to get to the macguffins.
- The graphics: Enemies "waiting in the wings" float on the top screen while your characters and ground-based foes are on the bottom screen. Except that some of the enemy sprites are too tall, and their heads poke onto the top screen in a way that was obviously not intentional. Did they just not playtest, or just not care?
- The dialogue: Apparently, when Working Designs translated the Sega CD and Playstation games, they inserted a lot of irreverent humor. Ubisoft did no such thing for this, so the dialogue is rather stilted and characterization is weak.
- The plot: Your best friend has a secret and now she's been kidnapped. Fight lots of people, get the Macguffins, defeat the evil emperor. That's the plot.
It's not like Unlimited Saga, where one bad mechanic (the reel system) spoils an otherwise really clever game. It's not like Breath of Fire 2, where an excellent game got an awful, awful translation. It's not like The 7th Saga, where executive meddling during localization turned a decent game into a terrible one. It's like they tried a whole bunch of "creative" things that weren't actually good ideas to disguise the fact that they had barely an hour of actual game. (I played 5 hours normally, which got me about a quarter of the way through the game. Then I plugged in an action replay to cut out all of the grinding. Another five hours and I was nearing the end of the game...)
