Guess what Lunar role-playing-game fans, Lunar is on the Nintendo DS with Lunar: Dragon Song and it plays with the touch screen! Know what else? It is just not that much fun. Lunar: Dragon Song touts the fact that it is from the creators of Lunar: Silver Star. Silver Star was the first Lunar game that appeared on the Sega CD way back in 1993. Perhaps this return to the original series creators is why the title has a dated feel to it. And what little new has been added fails to measure up in the implementation department. Flawed gameplay and the "been there, seen that – actually seen better" feel of the game makes it a prime candidate for leaving on the shelf, even if it is the first RPG to see release on the Nintendo DS.

In the world of Lunar two races live in relative harmony: the stronger beast-men and the more tool-using but weaker humans. The main character of the story is Jian, a delivery courier that finds himself in the middle of events that threaten to upset the peace that has long existed between humans and beast-men. He decides the only way to set things right is to become a dragonmaster, and thus begins his quest. The sad thing is that this Lunar game has none of the wit, spoken dialogue or nice anime-styled cinematics that originally made the series such a delight. The storytelling comes off bland and uninteresting.

Navigating the world of Lunar becomes the player’s first challenge. Meandering about a locale at a walk is an almost painfully slow experience. There is an option to run, but inexplicably the player takes a heavy hit in health points when he decides to sprint. I suppose this was done to make avoiding combat with the visible monsters cost something, but the logic of continuing to have this "feature" when the player is in a non-threatening environment with no monsters and every reason to get about their business quickly and efficiently completely escapes me. Otherwise the mechanics for getting around the world and town maps are adequate and fairly intuitive to use.

Combat is a little different than the average role-playing game. In most RPGs successfully completing a fight with an enemy can potentially reward the player with both items/money and experience points. In Dragon Song the player must choose what his fight will yield. Choosing to fight in "virtue" mode will have the defeated enemy offered up to the Goddess Althena and converted to experience points to level up your characters. Fighting in "combat" mode will not earn the player any experience, but will result in items being dropped by the fallen foe for the player to use.

Once a mode of combat is chosen, the game shows another serious flaw. The turn-based combat allows the player a selection of actions per turn: attack, use an item, or employ a special skill. The problem is the game will not allow the player to choose which enemy to attack first. Two monsters can be facing your intrepid little band and one is obviously more of a threat to your continued survival than the other. Can you therefore logically choose to attack the big bad first? No. The game makes the choice of enemy to attack and has about as much chance of choosing the logical one as a drunken wombat does. (In case you were wondering, drunken wombats make such choices by passing out and gently falling over in the general direction of one enemy or another.)

Controls for the game are adequate. The whole game can be played just with the touch screen or it can be played with the directional pad and buttons. This is totally a matter of preference, but since you paid all that money to get a DS with a touch screen shouldn’t you really use it? After all, if you wanted to play it like some half-wit GBA title you would have bought one of the superior GBA RPG titles, right?

This kind of brings up the quality of the graphical presentation of the game. It is not so good. The character design is attractive enough on the static story screens, but the in-game graphics are bordering on the downright ugly … and often they cross the border. There are also no cinematics or voice in the game. Now I realize the card format of the DS is a trifle limited, but let’s get real. There should be a little room for some better set dressing in this game. It reminds me a bit of a GBA game. Come to think of it, I believe I’ve seen better looking GBA games.

Okay, so Lunar: Dragon Song is not a great game. But you may ask, "It is the only Nintendo DS role-playing game currently on the market, and I really want an RPG to play now, shouldn’t I go ahead and buy it to play until something better comes along?" The answer is an emphatic, "Probably not." There are enough serious problems with this game to make a firm case for not buying it. Wait a little while. There will be better RPG games than this D+ effort along soon for the DS. Patience is a virtue … and it saves your wallet a hit you’ll regret later.

Questions? Comments? Contact the author at willhill2600@charter.net .