"A classic"? "Immersive"? "Deep"? Someone needs to distribute dictionaries, quickly.
User Rating: 2.4 | Lunar Legend GBA
Sometimes, mass opinion mystifies me. One example, if I may be somewhat controversial for a moment and not without good reason, would be Final Fantasy. Yes, it just about defined the genre pre-32-bit and yes, Squaresoft pretty much brought the RPG into common knowledge and the massmarket conscience with FF7, but in my opinion the flagship Final Fantasy series which should be the one thing that Square work hardest on adding to and changing, really doesn’t cut it with me. I find the random battles, which as far as I can tell were something implemented to get around hardware sprite limitations, completely tiresome. Why do we have to put up with invisible enemies in the day and age of multi-million polygon console systems? Why is it that the SNES could show us all the enemies we were going to bump into in Chrono Trigger and Earthbound, yet RPG developers the world over still insist on using the random encounter as a staple of the genre? Anyway, this isn’t about Square or Final Fantasy or the lack of imagination applied to the greater part of the genre in general (well, perhaps just a little), this is about the opinion of the masses. More specifically, this is about the Lunar series and Lunar Legend in particular. Many moons ago, I read of Lunar Eternal Blue and really, really, REALLY wanted to buy it for my Mega-CD but couldn’t justify the then-price of £60 to import, considering that I was still in high school and not exactly raking it in from my paper round. The more I read about the Lunar series, the better it sounded. Epic story this, amazing character development that, pinnacle of RPGs the other. I wanted it so much, yet never quite got around to buying it and moved on and the Lunar series was forgotten to me until two years ago when a little blue box with “Lunar Legend” on caught my eye in my local importer. I’d heard good things about it so had to have it and walked away happy in the knowledge that I’d have a decent portable RPG to play on the bus to work or the best place to play portables, on the toilet. How utterly, tragically and completely wrong I was. At the time of writing this, there are four community reviews here on Gamespot, rating the game between 8.2 and 9.2 with Gamespot itself rating Lunar Legend at 7.8, which is more sensible but still doesn’t go far enough. While I’m not one to discard the opinions of others, I wonder why I feel so at odds with these five other opinions. Have I been playing a completely different game? I need to redress the balance. Visually, admittedly, Lunar Legend does some things right. There are some nice-looking full-screen images and the cut-away story sections are quite well-drawn, sprites are for the most part large and clear both in-battle and during exploration and, on the surface, everything looks hunky-dory. It’s when you take a closer, more studied look that things fall apart a tiny bit. Often in dialogue the sentiment of the text (and I’ll be getting to that in a short while) doesn’t match the facial expression of the character displayed alongside. During battles, the half-arsed attempt at fight animations and magic wears thin very quickly, there’s none of Golden Sun’s sparkly particles and transparency effects here, no feeling that that fire spell is actually hot or that your characters are exerting any sort of effort during a critical hit combo. Worst of all is that, when attacking, the characters don’t just approach the enemies and have a go at them, they do this awful shimmery wibble across the screen. Who knows why this was done? Surely it’s harder to code this in than to just make the sprite walk or run toward the chosen enemy? Outside environments are about average, the villages don’t quite bustle as much as they should, I know the GBA can push more sprites than this, but the worst part of Lunar Legend’s visuals are the dungeons. Could they win an award for most boring, samey RPG dungeons post-NES? It’s pretty close. As appears traditional, after graphics, I’ll talk about sound. Let’s not talk about the sound. A fuss has been made in various reviews that the game contains digitised speech when Luna sings. Big wow. Really. So Game Arts have worked out how to make the GBA play a low-quality sound sample, what do they want, a hero biscuit? A paper hat? Or perhaps the most coveted prize of all, a chocolate watch? While the sound effect select would have you believe differently, as far as I can remember there are about 6 sound effects that you hear over and over and over and over and you get the idea. There’s nothing special in the effects department. But what of the music? Yes, what of the music indeed. If you’ve ever had cable television or watched TV very late at night, you’ll have no doubt seen an advert for “Sound of the Panpipes”, consisting of panpipe covers of well-known entries in the hit parade. Lunar Legend’s attempt at music makes SotP sound like the London Philharmonic. Exploration themes are often downbeat and relaxed in the RPG genre, the guitary, whistley traveling theme from Illusion of Time being one lovely example of non-battle music done right, the overworld theme from Final Fantasy 6 (particularly the snowbound version heard in the introduction) being another. Lunar Legend pushes all previous examples of good chip music to one side, picks up the instruments rejected from aforementioned bad cover tunes album series and proceeds to subject my ears to a wishy-washy mangle of halfheartedness. Even the themes that should instill the heat and urgency of battle and inspire the player, the battle and boss themes, fail completely. During the last few hours of Lunar Legend, I played with the sound turned off. The music is only ever memorable for being bad, these are the kind of tunes that go around in your head when you’re trying to sleep and only make you very angry that they won’t go away. So what of that good old unquantifiable thing that everyone seems to talk about but no one can quite define; gameplay. I fell asleep four times during the course of my ‘adventure’. The story is your usual hackneyed, unimaginative, overused tripe about some pathetic kid who wants to become a Dragonmaster so he sets off with a few mates to see a dragon and pass the tests, instead being entrusted with saving the world from a good guy turned bad, avenging his father’s death, coming of age, having awkward moments during the parts of the decidedly wonky plot where he’s supposed to fall in love with one, some or all of the female characters but can’t get over his own ambivalence to everything far enough to actually make a choice and do something constructive. So instead he wanders around the countryside saving the world, generally becoming a hero, trouncing the evil empire and all that good stuff. There’s nothing to like about Lunar’s characters, no feeling that you’d like to get to know them better, hang out with them if they were real or even care about what happens to then during the course of the game. So what’s your motivation, really? Quite frankly, there is none. Does anyone really care about playing a game multiple times in order to unlock stupid little collectable cards that hold no value whatsoever and have no effect on the main game? It’s quite possible to get all the cards in one sitting but, quite frankly, why would anyone in their right mind bother? RPGs usually spur the player through those reams upon reams of random encounters with invisible enemies by providing some meaty dialogue. Lunar Legend doesn’t bother. Instead, the text is littered with awful Americanisms and spelling mistakes. I certainly don’t insist that games of this setting and subject matter should be all “thee” and “thou”, but when I was a minute into the introduction and a character told me I was going to “get chewed out”, I should have realised I was onto a bad thing. The plot and dialogue has all the depth and maturity of a primary school English essay so don’t buy this game expecting something epic and deep because it simply isn’t going to happen. Also, “a lot” is two words. Finally, there’s no challenge here. Lunar Legend is probably the easiest RPG I’ve ever played for two reasons. One, when any of your characters dies in battle, the annoying flying cat thing Nall (who serves no other purpose than to hover around at the top of the screen during battles and chime in with some inane nonsense during dialogue) revives them at the soonest available opportunity at no cost to your party. Two, outside of battle you can save your game then reload and your entire party’s health and magic are refilled. Apart from one or two early boss battles and unless you’re completely inept, your party will never come under pressure of failure. Halfway through the game, your party will be levelled up significantly enough that you can set the fighting sequences to Auto and save wear on your right thumb and the GBA's A button. If you manage to get defeated playing Lunar Legend, I suggest you find a different hobby. I wouldn’t even recommend this game to small children or anyone looking to break into RPGs, it’s no fun and is likely to turn them away forever. In summary, Lunar Legend doesn’t even come near achieving the heady heights of the stagnant, average, by-the-numbers quality of many a Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest wannabe. Don’t waste your money buying it, don’t even waste your time reading the back of the box. It's an atrocious example of the genre.
