Lunar: DS was a disappointing mess, but still had a little bit of charm towards the end.
----------Battle System----------
Lunar: Dragon Song is a turn-based RPG that uses a round system. You can only use 3 characters per-battle and have you set their moves the round is over and you then watch it unfold. You can choose between Fight or Auto. Auto will pick all your moves, which is ideal for quick random battles. In Fight you get to use Attack, Items, Cards and Special. Your main character can't use special attacks, but he can attack multipal times making him the only useful character in the game with any physical strength. The biggest problem with the battle system in this game is the fact that you can't pick or choose which enemy you want to attack. The computer takes over from there removing that small element of tactical battling, but giving you another burden also. It's mostly annoying because you want the person with the bow to attack the flying mosts and you want Jian to attack the big monsters, or you just want to eliminate the small monsters first and leave the big ones for last. Either way, it makes it a little bit more challenging but also annoying.
The monsters in the game are always visible before you fight them, but they usually generic representations of what you may fight when you run into them, similar to a Grandia II. Once you get into a field or dungeon you can choose between Virtue mode or Combat mode. If you fight a monster in Virtue mode, you then gain experience after the battle, and if you fight a monster in Combat mode you then gain items after battle which are required to do jobs, and to gain any money. So gaining experience and items is boring. I have no idea what they're thinking when they decided to separate the items from the experience after defeating a monster. It just doesn't make sense.
One of the better things about the game is the Battle Cards. You gain cards by defeating enemies in Combat mode, you can use these within battle similar to Items or Magic. These cards summon monsters that you defeated into battle (although not sure on screen) and either attack or heal your party. Each card has a point system though, and each time you use them points will be subtracted. ----------Characters / Story----------
You basically play as Jian, a delivery boy, that takes a delivery job to another town and gets sucked into a quest to save the world. The story isn't terrible but I don't remember a significant bad guy in the game until towards the end and that's about the only time the story got interesting. As I mentioned in the graphics part, the dialog box is terrible and ruins a bit of the game.
----------Graphics----------
The battle system is slightly better looking than the Golden Sun games. The bosses and character models usually look great, but the random enemies don't but everything can get pretty pixelated. The dungeons and fields look pretty good though. I like the anime drawings of the characters, but HATE the dialog box, it looks like a chat room and ruins most of the stories experience just reading each line after line without seeing the characters show any emotion or thought. ----------Sound----------
I don't remember anything bad about the music or sound effects, but there's nothing about the music that I remember. So take that for what you will. ----------World Map----------
The map is a standard dot-to-dot map that I hate, but for a dot-to-dot map they still make it interesting and still give you a sense of "adventure" out of the game. You can't just warp to any dot on the map, you can only go to the nearest dot that's connected to your line, and once you picked which location you want to go to, you then have to walk through a field to that town or dungeon you picked. Each town and dungeon is separated by some sort of field you have to walk through, so I'm not even sure why they needed the dots in the first place. Oh wait, now I remember. You can't walk into the towns like a normal RPG, the town maps are another dot-to-dot map where you use the stylus to pick which house in the town you want to go in. Once you're in a house you can walk freely, but inside a town you're trapped inside a map which sucks!
----------Time to Complete Game----------
37:33
This was a pretty long RPG for the DS, but most of that time was wasting by traveling back and forth and trying to get money and experience. Anyways, after you beat it nothing really unlocks or anything and you are warped back to your last save spot.