So I recently reactivated my Gamefly account since I finished school (got more free time to play games and other stuff). The first game I decided to check out was Lunar on the PSP, and the reason why I decided to check it out was because it got positive responses from both critics and gamers. I never played a Lunar game before, so I didn't know what to expect. Well, I completed it yesterday (which was pretty short btw), so I want to share my experience with this game.
Good:
You can save anywhere: Pretty self-explanatory. You can save anywhere in the dungeons, meaning that you can tackle this game bits by bits.
Interesting range battle concept: Basically, range matters in battles. For example, if the enemy is far away from you but you select that enemy to attack, you won't be able to damage him since he's far away. However, you'll get close to him, so in your next turn, you might be able to attack that enemy. The same applies for the enemies. If the enemy is far away from you, he won't be able to attack you, but he will close in on you. It's an interesting concept, but sadly, you'' rarely pay attention to this because the battles are incredibly easy (and boring). It's a missed opportunity since this could have added a lot of strategy and depth to battles, thus making them more interesting than they are.
Neutral:
Story: Basically, Lunar is about a boy who wants to be like his idol, so he sets our for adventures and searches for the four dragons. The story did have its fair share of moments and a few nice twists. The first few hours, however, are horrible, and the story is predictable for the most part. The story is not bad by any means, but it's nothing worth talking about. Sometimes a story can be driven by its characters, but the characters didn't do it for me (which I'll talk about in the bad pile).
Bad:
Plot set-up: Like I previously said, the first few hours of the game is horrible - story-wise. Alex, the main protagonist, wants to be a dragonmaster like his idol, so he ventures off to look for adventures and the dragons; he travels all over the place for adventures, which is boring. It takes about 8 hours until the story evolves into something else. Alex still continues his search for the dragons, but he now has a good reason to look for those dragons. It's no longer about a kid wanting to be like his idol.
Soundtrack: I didn't enjoy the music in this game including the opening and title theme. In fact, I found the soundtrack annoying for the most part; it's all 'cheery' and whatnot. There was one piece of music that I completely hated; the singers at the bars mostly sang this dreadful song ("la la la la"), which lasts for a whole minute. I couldn't find it on youtube, so praise the heavens that I couldn't link it for you. Speaking of la la la, Luna's small singing, or battle voice if you like, also annoyed me. I used items instead of casting healing spells, so that I could avoid her singing.
I also want to add that the music didn't fit the mood/tone of the scene at times. For example, someone's dad is turned to stone. You would expect some sappy music to play in the background while the child cries and vows for revenge. But, uplifiting music plays during this stone scene, so what the hell? Am I suppose to feel sad or happy?
Characters: Let's get this out of the way: Rasmus and Nash's (oh God!) character designs are horrible, imo. Nomura's character designs are like a Godsend compared to these two. It's not game-breaking by any means, but yuck. With that out of the way, I didn't enjoy the characters; Some characters were just one-dimensional, uninteresting or just plain annoying. Luna, Ghadeleon (sp?) and Jessica, to a lesser extent, were the only characters I found interesting.
Voice acting: Bad, especially Mel's voice acting; the voice actor has some weird accent, like Irish or something. Fortunately, voice acting is kept at a minimum.
Anime cutscenes are not in full screen: The game has some anime cutscenes, with the majority lasting less than a minute each. My problem with the cutscenes is that they're not in full screen. It's in box form, with two black bars at the sides. It's like they were directly ported from the previous version. This screams lazy remake to me.
Easy difficulty & boring battles: Like I said before, the battles are pretty easy. You rarely have to pay attention to the range concept, since this game rarely poses a challenge. You can get through the battles by simply selecting the attack command. Another thing is that battles are incredibly slow, mostly caused by the animations. The spells/skills animations are a little lengthy, which ruins the pace of the battles. Enemies like to attack with spells, so be prepared to stay in that one battle for a while. So combining easy difficulty and slow combat nets you tedious battles. I found myself using 'attack all enemies' spells to quickly dish out all the enemies and just move on from these horrific, monotonous battles. I found myself wanting to avoid these tedious battles, but.....
Unavoidable battles: Enemies appear on the field like in Chrono Trigger or Persona, and once you come into contact into the enemy, you get sunk into a battle. This is a good concept since you can avoid battles when you want to. However, in Lunar, you can't avoid the battles since the corridors are freaking narrow. The enemies basically cover your path, so you have no choice but to (sigh) battle.
Another bad thing about this is that enemies respawn when you come back. Dungeons are connected with small parts, so once you get into the next part and come back to the previous part, the enemy you previously defeated is waiting for you again. If you thought fighting him once was bad before, be prepared to fight him again!! Whopee!! So with these tedious battles being unavoidable, I came to the conclusiong that my only solution was to just flee from the battles, but....
Fleeing from battles is a huge cluster****: Mostly everytime I tried to flee from the shitty battles, the party members would jump around. What the hell? All they did was just jump around; they didn't get near the corners to escape; they just jumped around, mostly to the center. Jesus christ, can this game piss me off even more?
Backtracking to the dungeon's entrance: Once you complete the dungeon, you have to make your way back to the entrance. Yep, you have to encounter those unavoidable battles again. There is an item that immediately takes you to the entrance, but I couldn't find them in stores.
Chests casting confuse on you: You know the old chest tricks; some chests damages your party when you open them, and some cast some ailment. In Lunar, a few chests cast confuse on your party, and you get immediately sunk into a battle, meaning that you can't control your party. You would expect that your party members would be cured from confusion once they get hit, but nope, they remain confuse regardless if they get hit. The only cure to this ailment is death. If one of your party member dies and gets revived, you can finally control that member, but the bad part is that he has like 1HP, so he will most likely die soon. To sum it up, when you open one of these chests, you'll mostly likely die, get a game over and lose your progress.
Talking to NPCs to advance: At times, you have to talk to NPCs to find out where you need to go next, and the majority of the NPCs aren't helpful. Sometimes, you're running around in circles, trying to find out where exactly you need to go to advance, and Lunar takes this annoying process to the next step. Sometimes, you have to talk to a certain NPC two or three times in a row for him to tell you useful information on your next objective or what exactly you need to do.
Also, some of these NPC talk are a waste of time. They basically have you running around town, only to be told that you can advance without someone's permission. For example, you have to cross this pass (for adventure!!), but the gatekeeper won't let you pass until you get the boss' permission. You talk to to various NPCs to find out his location: one tells you he's eating, then the people eating lunch tells you he's asleep, then the person at his bedroom tells you he's somewhere else. Once you find the boss passed out drunk in a prison cell, the guy guarding the cell tells you to go ahead and pass. So I ran around in circles for nothing!!
Poor value: There's nothing to do outside of the story; there's no mini-games (from what I recall) or any interesting side-quests. Lunar took me about 20 hours to complete, which is poor length. You know what, maybe that's a good thing. The less time I have to spend with this boring game, the better.
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Maybe Lunar was great back in the day, but as of today, it just couldn't pass the test of time, imo. Battles are easy, slow and tedious, there's little diversions from the main story, battles are unavoidable and causes frustration w/ backtracking & fast respawn, and story & characters are so-so (the latter tilting towards bad). In short: boring & poorly designed RPG is boring & poorly designed.
Score: 4.5/10 (poor)
but i'm not really in the mood for it, so i'll just leave it be, in the end its all opinions.
