Night or day, it doesn't matter anymore: Lunar Knights is a great game.
Controls 10/10
Lunar Knights is a beautifully controlled game, period. Once you play the game once, you instantly know the controls. Attacking, charging your energy, looking around, and blocking are all mapped to the face buttons, while weapon changing, and the lock on function are mapped to L or R respectively. It is never hard to perform all these different actions in the fast-paced action of the battles. There is nothing else I can say about the controls, other than the controls set the standard for handheld games.
Graphics 8/10
This is one of the many DS games that use sprites, but 3d models are also used in the many space battles that occur. Not surprisingly, the animation is fluid, there is some nice anime cutscenes that look absolutely beautiful and break up the action, and some nice special effects are present. This game does a nice job at keeping the environments pretty without making it overly so if that makes any sense to any of you.
Gameplay 9/10
Here it is. The meat of the review as it were. As said at the start of this review, Lunar Knights is an action-RPG. Lunar Knights does a good job at having a nice balance between fighting, exploring, and some puzzles. First, lets talk about the combat. Combat is done on the plain that you run around on, with no random battles. You have an attack button that launches a different kind of attack depending on what weapon you're using, a block button that has the character using 1 of 4 shields each with a different ability to block attacks, but you can have your guard broken to keep you from blocking everything constantly. You can dash, but that will drain your energy, which is what you use to infuse your weapons with different elemental abilities, allow the guns to fire, and a couple of other things.
Unlike Boktai, Lunar Knights has a simulated weather system, instead of a solar sensor on the cart. This is a good thing for a lot of people, but some people wish the game used the solar sensor. To those solar sensor fans(like myself) you can slot in a Boktai,Boktai 2 or Boktai 3 game into the GBA slot and use that as a solar sensor in addition to the simulated system. Unlike Boktai, the stealth aspects of the game is all but missing. The closest to getting a stealth segment in this game is the second level, in which you have to blow into the microphone to make the character whistle, which in turn will cause the monsters to be distracted, so you can sneak behind them because you dont have a weapon at the moment.
There is also a multiplayer mode with support for download play and multi-card play. The general game is a deathmatch, with the differences between the two being that you are stuck to using the first melee weapon "Vanargand" with one of the main characters Lucian, and one of the guns "Knight" with the other character, Aaron.
Overall 9/10
Lunar Knights is a fantastic action-RPG with some good puzzle, and exploration pieces. The sound could be a bit better, but Lunar Knights is a game I could easily recommend to any DS owner. Well, I’m done, so I hope you find this review helpful, Ja ne!(it means see ya)