Genre: RPG
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Game Arts
Release Date: September 27, 2005

In retrospect, the DS was completely the wrong system for the release of a new Lunar game.

The Sega CD's Lunar titles established the franchise as the evolutionary "missing link" between the 16-bit RPG classics (Final Fantasy VI, Lufia, Breath of Fire, etc.) and the generation of RPGs that would be rising in the PlayStation generation (Final Fantasy VII, Star Ocean, Suikoden). No one played Lunar because it was innovative or even deep; its appeal was in blending classic RPG gameplay with a hint of the multimedia spectacle and more involved characters and stories that would soon become a defining trait of the genre. The music, the beautiful art, the characters, the voices, all with familiar gameplay behind it... that's what people loved about Lunar.

Multimedia spectacle, however, isn't going to be easy to create on the Nintendo DS. The hardware is essentially two GBAs stuck together with some N64 parts added to assist with 3D acceleration. You can create some beautiful 2D animations with it (Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow and slick if simple 3D (Mario 64 DS), but your storage media is basically a flash cart and you've got relatively low-resolution screens to display your graphics on. You're not going to be wowing people with CD sound and vibrant cel animation here. On top of that, the DS demands a game figure out how to make decent use of the two-screen display format and the touch screen interface potential. Making a good game on the DS hardware frankly demands huge innovation and a willingness to think in terms of the unusual. If anything, the new Lunar probably should've headed over to the more traditional and spectacle-friendly PSP hardware.

However, the Lunar game we got was not only for the DS, it was the first attempt at doing any sort of traditional Japanese RPG on the DS at all. To say that the game fails at capturing the spirit of the old Lunar titles is a bit of an understatement; if anything, Lunar fans are going to be most bitterly disappointed with this game. As the DS' first RPG, it still doesn't work, but at least fails in interesting ways. Dragon Song is not unplayable so much as it's a dull game, full of ill-conceived play mechanics, bad interface ideas, and void of all the story and character dressing that RPG fans love. It's somewhat excusable since some of its experiments almost work, and simply because it was the first game to try and make the genre work on the DS' hardware. Game Arts fell short but Dragon Song, much like Beyond the Beyond for the PSX, also points the way to what good DS RPGs might be like in the future.

Lunar: Dragon Song opens with a text crawl that talks about how Althena supervised the creation of the world with her four dragons and loyal Dragonmaster. Two races came to live in this world: humans, who were clever and industrious, and beastmen, who possessed enormous physical prowess. Ultimately the beastmen built giant cities and rich palaces, while humans clustered in small villages and port towns. The two races lived a largely separate but mostly equal existence in Althena's world. Now, reading this might fool you into thinking that Dragon Song is going to be about something big and epic, but such is not the case. For the most part, the game is actually about fetch quests.

You begin the game with an introduction to the protagonists, Jian Campbell and Lucia Collins. They work for a package delivery service called Gad's Express. Lucia is pretty much a White Mage, and Jian is a skilled martial artist with preternatural agility (he stands on his head a lot, just as a hobby). They get sent out to deliver a package, but something goes wrong. A series of fetch quests are required to complete this fetch quest. Then Jian gets it in his head to go to the beastman city nearby and enter their big fighting tournament, to show them that humans can be just as good as they are. This draws the ire of their King, who rewards Jian's victory in the tournament with the Curse of Lost Equilibrium, which makes it impossible for him to stand on his head. From here on our, Jian and Lucia hook up with a rogue beastwoman named Gabryel and set off to try and find the King to force him to lift Jian's oddly specific Curse. Doing this involves completing many fetch quests, and occasionally some completely random and unmotivated actions on the part of your characters.

The infatuation with fetch quests comes through in the gameplay, too. When in battle, you have to choose to fight in Virtue Mode or Combat Mode. In Virtue Mode, your character amasses "Althena Conduct," a fancy way of saying "Experience Points," by "purifying" monsters. Purifying monsters looks remarkably like kicking the crap out of them. In Combat Mode, where you actually are kicking the crap out of them, you earn no experience points and no money, but do get a random selection of Sundries. Then, to earn money for buying weapons and armor upgrades, you'll take delivery jobs for Gad's Express. These jobs involve amassing certain amounts of giving sundries, like Chocolate or Hugging Pillows, then taking them to a certain person in a certain town. That person hands you a receipt after you made the delivery, which you can then cash in for your pay.

Doing this over and over again to amass cash is exactly as much fun as it sounds like. While the idea of having to work for money instead of beating monsters for it is interesting, the way the Gad's Express system is implemented basically boils down to beating monsters up to get money with lots of annoying backtracking thrown in before you actually have access to the money you earned. The fact that you don't even get to gain experience points when you're grinding through monsters for seventeen Mushroom Spores or what have you is just insult to injury.

On top of this, Dragon Song's basic combat system is rather bland, which makes all the random encounters you have to grind through excruciatingly dull. In combat, your character can opt to spend each turn using Items, Attacking, or using a Special Ability like Lucia's magic. In 99% of all battles, you will Attack constantly. You don't get to pick which of the enemies you attack in combat. Most battles you resolve simply by putting combat on Automatic, which makes your characters attack each turn until the battle is over. The combat animations are slow and boring, so you'll almost always be holding down the R button to speed through them. Even doing so, most battles feel like they take forever to resolve. Boss fights are a bit more interesting since they require you to actually bust out powerful Items, like the Cards you sometimes get for winning fights in Combat Mode, as well as your Special Abilities. Sadly, boss fights are few and far between.

Every aspect of the game's interface is cluttered with random, arbitrary "innovations" in the vein of the irritating Virtue Mode/Combat Mode split. To attempt to retreat from a battle, you have to blow into the microphone. Accessing the menu requires tapping a "menu" icon on the touch screen, but then certain parts of the menu can only be accessed by tapping the face buttons. Your characters walk very slowly, and can get stuck if they bump into rocks or other uneven surfaces in the map. You can run by pressing down the B button, but doing so actually burns away your characters' HP. Trying to move around a town map calls for moving an icon of Jian around toward glowing squares, and checking the menu at the bottom part of the screen to see if that's the location you actually want to visit. Doing pretty much anything in the game is slow and awkward as a result. Even if Dragon Song had compelling characters or an interesting plotline, you'd probably get too upset with the insane interface to really start caring.

Rounding out the game's problems is a lackluster localization courtesy Ubisoft. It's hard to think that a Lunar game could receive a poorer treatment than the Sega CD ones did at the hands of Working Designs, but when you play Dragon Song you realize you're dealing with sloppiness the likes of which has rarely been seen since the 8-bit era of gaming drew to a close. The script uses a translation so literal it's almost nonsense, and one riddled with typos and inconsistently spelled names besides. At point it becomes an active detriment to gameplay, since some character names are spelled one way in the Gad's Express job information, and then another way when you talk to the characters as NPCs. These aren't minor discrepancies, either - when the data screen tells me to go give a package to Laban, it's not going to occur to me to give it to Raiban instead.

Graphics and sound for the game are merely competent; not too bad, not too great. The combat sequences have an extremely blurry, pixilated look to them, owing to the pseudo-3D used to move the camera around. The overworld sprites aren't very expressive or interesting, while the map environments feel sterile and bland. The isometric perspective also causes some navigation problems, but nothing quite so bad as, say, Atelier Iris. Music seems to be trying to go for the fantasy-Celtic vibe that Atelier Iris captured so well, but largely comes off as unnecessarily bleepy and repetitive. A lot of elements of Dragon Song actually seem to be trying hard to create a game in the Atelier Iris vein, and missing the mark because of the DS' hardware limitations. All told, this is not really a game worth purchasing unless you're desperate to have a Japanese RPG to add to your DS library. If you're simply nostalgic forLunar, Atelier Iris will probably hit the spot a lot better.

Score: 6.0/10