Lunar: Dragon Song is a bad game. But don’t worry about me playing it, gentle readers, because I am a cheater!
You know this already. Anyone that has read the Let’s Plays or watched our weekly Even Worse Streams has probably seen me “cheat” in some fashion. Whether it is pumping fighters up to Level 100 or just plain adding invincibility, I have no compunctions about cheating like a louse. Is it allowed by the game? Is it a secret code? Am I firing up a Game Genie? Doesn’t matter. I play how I want to play, dammit.
Why, though? Well, Lunar: Dragon Song’s many issues remind me exactly why I cheat. And some of those issues even appear in good games! So, to explain my cheatin’ ways, we will start by examining…
Atelophobia
I recently played approximately a billion hours of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. This is a game with an easy, normal, and (eventually) hard mode. I did not experiment with these various modes, but it seemed like the basic gist of it was how much you wanted to engage with the battle system. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is an action game with timed hits and perfect blocking, but it is based on a menu driven “press X to proceed” 1997 RPG. It makes perfect sense that the designers provided an “easy mode” where you really do only have to worry about pressing the confirm button to eventually trigger a limit break. There are plenty of other choices you can make in an “easy” playthrough of FF7R that do not rely on reflexes, but careful planning for encounters.
And I realized while playing Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth that I wanted an easy mode for those choices available, not the combat.
Combat is easy! Dodge, block, attack. You see a monster’s tentacle coming at Cloud’s face, you get out of the way, and then reciprocate when the danger is past. Nothing complicated about survival. But you know what is complicated? The faux sphere grid that was provided as a leveling system. You get points through combat and sidequests in Rebirth, and you can spend these points on your folios to earn new skills and abilities. You cannot see the whole grid when you start (as your folios level up as the game progresses), and (obviously) you do not know every opponent you will face when you first play the game. So, naturally, this gives me choice paralysis. Do I spend my points on the MP-less fire ability, or the MP-less ice ability? Do I “double back” on the sphere map to get earlier skills that might be useful, or do I keep pressing forward, assuming it will unlock abilities that are that much stronger now that I am at a higher level. What about those dual techs that are available? A team up attack with Barret and Tifa sounds cool, but are they always going to be in the same party? Cloud is an obvious focal point, but how often can I guarantee I will have the same allies accessible? Should I be carefully managing characters not in my party in anticipation of them eventually getting a focal moment? Or am I going to ditch Aerith wholesale the minute Cait Sith shows up? Is Vincent in this game? I love that guy! Wait… am I going to have to manage his grid when he joins? Is there some way I can prepare for new party members?
And all these questions and choices would mean nothing if I could just toggle on “have 999 points at all times”. This system is neat! In retrospect, it has some cool branches and ways to manage your characters. But in the minute-to-minute of FF7R, I could not care less. I would prefer to focus on the combat, the characters, the overall plot, and whatever chicken-hunting quests that are available. That’s quite the to-do list! In addition to all the things I want to do in the game, the folio is an assignment. It is homework that will earn me a detention if ignored. The dual techs are obvious showstoppers, but there are straight stat upgrades on the folio paths. I do not need to explain why +3 strength might be the difference between life and death. But I have to engage with this damned thing to get that bonus, and… argh… Back to the menu when I could be hunting cactuars.
Oh, and God help me if you make me do that damned Fort Condor nonsense again just because I want to earn the right to see the coolest summon fight in the game. Can I get an easy mode for specifically that?
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has no “instant points” cheats or alike, but I have exploited such in similar situations on other games/systems (and even save-hacked the previous Final Fantasy 7 Remake). I beat Final Fantasy 10 from top to bottom back on the Playstation 2, you better believe I just toggled my way into having infinite spheres when it was time to trounce the dark aeon super bosses on the Playstation 3. I did my time in the grinding mines years ago! I don’t need to worry about Kimahri’s path again!
What’s wrong with Lunar: Dragon Song: Lunar: Dragon Song has an experience system that initially seems like a good idea, but quickly descends into madness. The Lunar franchise has always had a very real Goddess and dominant religion as a central part of its mythology. In L:DS, you can enter “piety mode”, and all monsters slain will be murdered in the name of Goddess Althena, so you will receive “piety points” in place of tangible items. It makes sense from a quasi-religious perspective: you are making the world a safer place through less monsters, and you are forgoing material rewards for God’s favor.
However, the practical way this system works is that you continually must choose between receiving monetary rewards and experience points. And considering the random battles of L:DS can be extremely variable in their danger, knowing which option to choose is the difference between life and death. On my own playthrough, I literally wiped on the first encounter in the game because my opponents came out swinging with some insurmountable poison status effects. Would additional levels have solved this problem? Nope! Playing the game further revealed that was just a combination of terrible luck and the abhorrent way this battle system arbitrarily sticks monsters in an unreachable/invincible “back row”. But I could have spent the next half of the game exclusively grinding up my levels to avoid such a fate again, and then missed obtaining any resources for equipment upgrades. And those are important enough to bring us to our next item…
Microphobia
I love sidequests! They are fun! I have a hard time orgasming unless an elderly villager is in the room telling me how much he appreciates receiving seven miscellaneous seeds. And this is another one where we could fixate on Final Fantasy 7 Remake all day, but let’s move on and use the Xenoblade Chronicles franchise as our target du jour. Xenoblade Chronicles (1) was practically revolutionary in how it granted valuable experience points for not only terminating monsters, but also exploring new areas, and being a good neighbor to a thousand random NPCs. And that’s great! But it also has a sidequest system wherein you might need 70 whatsits to complete a quest, and it gets so bad that your hero uses magical precognition just to clue the player into having to gather up a hundred gear springs. You could be using your mystical, divine power for anything, Shulk! You are blowing it on some dude that has three matchsticks!
So I cannot tell you how many times I have either grinded materials from an easy source (aka a monster that goes down smooth and always drops a specific item), spammed “fast travel” to rejigger relaxed resource spawns, or just plain hacked in 999 of every piece of vendor trash I could get my hands on. I might challenge myself by not hacking in 999 for every stat or useful item, but I sure as hell am not going to let my OCD fixate on how I need to collect a pile of used bandages to synthesize a godly gauze so some anonymous dude in a hospital will survive to see the ending (and I also get 500 g for my troubles). This is doubly accurate for “game long” sidequests, like the infamous bit in Xenosaga Episode 2 where you must raise enough funds to pay off the captain’s debt. I do not need to spend literally the entire game wondering if I am optimizing my gains enough to earn one double tech and a swimsuit.
Oh! And the crafting/merchant/weapon system in Final Fantasy 12? How you need to own and sell incredibly precise amounts of specific items at distinct points in the game? Screw off with that. I am giving myself enough Great Serpent Skins to become king of the snakes, and I am never looking back.
What’s wrong with Lunar: Dragon Song: As previously stated, you can either earn experience from every fight in Lunar: Dragon Song, or items. “Items” in this case is never a cure candy or poison antidote, it is always vendor trash. And vendor trash in this situation does not automatically translate to optimal amounts of cash, you must find the proper sidequest that corresponds to your specific trash. The best way to do this is to slide seven menus deep into your impossible-to-organize inventory, and confirm you already have the required items on hand. Then all you have to do is find that quest-giver that probably does not have a misspelled name or bad location directions (but no guarantees), and fork it all over. But if you decide to pursue a sidequest with trash you do not already have in your bin, you are in for a bad time, as some monsters/rewards only appear in limited quantities, or just plain do not exist after certain game events. But don’t worry! If you take the “wrong” quest, you can always abandon it… after paying a modest cancelation fee. And you will likely cancel at least one quest, as you can only have one active sidequest at a time. But you better do all quests available, as if you don’t upgrade your questing rank, you will plainly never be able to afford late-game equipment.
And this process is the only way to make money at all.
In short, managing your sidequest inventory is a game unto itself, and you damn well better believe that nobody has time for that on top of a battle and leveling system that is murderous from the get-go. Did I mention that every damn random battle contains 5-7 opponents? And you are stuck with a 2-person party for a healthy portion of your quest? You will die to get that giant bee honey…
FoMO
Let’s talk about Final Fantasy 4 (DS).
For anyone that is unfamiliar with Final Fantasy 4 (DS), it was a remake of Final Fantasy 4 released a little over 15 years after the original. Given there had been about sixty different ways to play OG Final Fantasy 4 up to that point, FF4DS made the bold choice of designing the game for people that had already played Final Fantasy 4. You can certainly enjoy Final Fantasy 4 DS without ever having experienced any of its earlier versions, but you will face whole new challenges if you already beat Final Fantasy 4 and were expecting everything to be the same. What worked in 1991 did not universally still work in 2007, and it is great to see a remake that accounted for the times (and that fans might be 16 years wiser).
But Final Fantasy 4 (DS) makes some peculiar choices. It is built to be replayed repeatedly, but not infinitely! FF4DS contains a New Game+ that allows you to bring forward random items and skills through playthroughs. But you can only take it with you for a total of three playthroughs. Once you complete the game a third time, you may not restart with your acquired powers again, and if you want to “start over”, you are truly starting over from zero. And there are skills that can only be acquired through careful playthroughs! Much of the chicanery of the DS version is that you are supposed to give party members that you know are going to leave the party random skills, as you will then receive upgraded skills as a parting gift. And you might notice this on an initial playthrough, but you must notice it by about your second time through, or you are never going to see the coolest stuff before your loops are expended. This whole “limited New Game+” system is ostensibly there to rein in earning infinite skills and simply turning Zeromous to paste with two well-combined, maximum-powered commands, but… Can’t we have a little fun? Are we not entitled to some dragoon-tears-amplified death lasers in a universe where loops are infinite, and we already beat the game 7,000 times? Isn’t this whole exercise based on the idea that we memorized this game once already back in the ‘90s?
And this is a long way of saying that the absolute minute a game introduces a “challenge” in a similar manner, I am going to go full corruption on cheating my ass off. In the specific case of Final Fantasy 4 (DS), the second I recognized what was happening, I fired up a guide. Final Fantasy 4 is not a short game! It is not some Hades situation where I would be cool with half hour loops! Keep your rogue-like elements out of a complete story where you explore two different worlds and a moon! If I am so much as threatened with the concept of spending hours to work my way through blazing dogs I have already defeated just to earn an optimal build, I am done. I will grind slimes in the first few hours of a game if it means I do not have to worry about issues 40 hours down the line. And this is true for games I might quit halfway through! It is the fear of missing out that drives my depravity.
What’s wrong with Lunar: Dragon Song: Whether it be a concession of being on a portable system, or a genuine indulgence from the developers, you can save anytime, anywhere in Lunar: Dragon Song. And if you have any kind of “perfect run”-based obsessive compulsive disorder, this will drive you to an early grave. General mook battles are always a threat to your health and sanity, because not only are enemies numerous and violent, but they can also do permanent damage to your wallet. Thievery is a common ability among many malevolent critters, and when you have an item stolen, you do not get it back at the end of the battle. I guess that angry bird just swallowed the bone sword you were hanging onto? Seems as likely as anything else on this wicked moon. And if you needed that random item for a sidequest, sorry, bucko, but now you are out of luck. Hope that wasn’t one of the arbitrarily limited sidequest items! Now you either have to abandon the quest (which still has an attendant penalty fee!) or reset your way back to before the battle. Always savescum, kids!
And speaking of random monsters randomly ruining your day, equipment is breakable. It takes forever to earn the best armor and weapons (see the previously noted section on how money is exclusively tied to the sidequest system), and once you earn that super-powered armor, some slime could come along and destroy it. And what do you do then? Well, you can either move forward to a boss while knowing you are hobbled (and watch your party fall over dead instantly), or go back to town, complete some more sidequests, and re-purchase that decent equipment. And hope for the best that the same damned thing doesn’t happen again! Or abuse the save system to guarantee your armor persists to see that dragon at the end.
Though it does appear that if an opponent is capable of stealing, inflicting a status effect, or breaking gear, it will be successful approximately 80% of the time. Maybe you are just going to have to miss out on huge chunks of your own time…
Thanatophobia
Shocking news for you Goggle Bob fans: I am mortal. One day, I will die. You will likely realize this has happened when my website stops updating (though, considering I forward date a number of articles, you won’t realize it immediately). In the meanwhile, I am alive, but memento mori plays on my poor skull in more than a few ways. I eat less cheese! I try to avoid wandering into traffic! And when I am playing a videogame, these feelings inevitably transfer to my digital avatar. How does that work out? Well…
I want a samurai with a health bar that cannot be constrained
Screw piety.
I am not a “defensive” player. I often disparage games that rely on “block and reciprocate” gameplay, and if a fighting game gives me a character that is a lumbering hunk of meat with super armor, I am all over that. I tend to take a lot of hits, one way or another. But! I carefully manage my hit points at all times. Or… to be more accurate… I start managing my hit points when I am hovering around 10%. Once that fear of death kicks in, I will do anything to restore health, and that includes…
- Stand around and do nothing
- Methodically break every crate, pot, and barrel in the area to find some sliver of a restorative
- Abuse cure spells/potions at the possible cost of just finishing the battle through using literally any alternative action
And to be clear: this is 100% a fear of death. It does not matter if there is some immediate respawn nonsense going on. It does not matter if it is a Dark Souls/Shovel Knight situation where I can (often) easily make my way back and recover any lost goods. It does not matter if the only penalty for death is a firm statement from a tooltip that I should try harder next time. I don’t want to die. It is how I am wired! I will make my life worse to guarantee I am further from death.
So you want to go ahead and give me some dumbass way to restore health? I am down for that, just so long as it keeps me alive. If there is not an alternative to “just die already”, I can and will cheat myself into infinite HP. Does this rob a game of its challenge? Maybe! But at least I am not spending my whole experience with a controller terror-sweating through my X button.
What’s wrong with Lunar: Dragon Song: Lunar: Dragon Song wants you to die. Battles appear to be optimized to kill you and everyone you care about. You have manual and automatic battle options available, but even “manual” mode does not allow for specific monster targeting. This means you will waste turns as your hero hits the one monster that is guarding, or swings at the boss monster that is obviously not going to go down for another five turns. Take out the stupid little bee next to him, dumbass, then you will stop getting poisoned!
And recovery is damn near impossible. There are some curative items, but your main healer does not have the mana to keep a party alive and happy. For much of the game, you will have two or three charges for your healing spells, and that includes situations where you have to choose between restoring health or status. And on top of that, MP restorative items are few and far between, so staying healthy will either involve a constant flow of (costly) items, or many, many return trips to an invigorating Goddess statue.
Oh, and if you eliminate all the monsters in an area under Piety Mode, you will receive an HP/MP restoration bonus, but the resources you have to sink into slaying those critters will more than offset the “bonus”.
And to drive a stake through the heart of anyone hoping for immortality here: running drains your health. Not running away from a battle, just the simple act of moving faster than slow in any environment. This is true of dungeons where running may help you avoid an on-screen encounter, or while skipping around a completely safe town. If you want to break turtle speed records for any reason, you will lose HP. And this applies to every member of your party. And if anyone is below 1/3 health, they are too injured to run, so you are damned to walking. And you better believe this will be a constant irritant when someone dies in battle, is revived with 1 HP, and you must hoof it back to a safe zone without the ability to engage the slightest haste.
And to add insult to that injury, Piety Mode will grant you special blue treasures (of dramatically variable worth, let me tell you about the armor that is 100% protective only when you are asleep) if you defeat all the enemies on the screen within a specific time limit. The timer only ticks while you are on the overworld, and enemies can be significantly spread out, so you will likely have to literally run from monster to monster to beat the clock. So not only are you losing health while running, but the whole point of that challenge is the combat, so you will be extra depleted by the time you hopefully win your reward. If you didn’t run fast enough? Better luck next time.
So damn near everything will lead to your death in Lunar: Dragon Song.
The Jonah Complex
And sometimes it all comes down to one basic issue: I want to start at the end. In many cases, immediately making your protagonist Level 100 will obliterate any sort of challenge or hardship across the game. But in many other scenarios? It is the only way to play…
Let’s look at a pair of games that were recently(ish) played on Even Worse Streams.
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is a basic beat ‘em up, but it contains a leveling system. All of the interesting moves that are slightly more exciting than “punch punch kick” are locked behind upgrading, so playing from the very start means you spend a solid third of the adventure locked into the most boring play loop available. What’s more, increasing all stats is based on paying out cash, so when you have nothing in your wallet, you are as weak as can be. The opening area enemies are not carefully scaled, though, so that boring loop also takes longer when your strength is zero and your opponents’ HP is at max. If you raise your stats and replay the game from the beginning, it does not suddenly become an instant KO for Scott and friends, it is simply the same game with more options and less time spent on generic mobs. It is more fun to be “Level 100” than not, but you must spend the whole game (and then some) getting to that echelon.
And never mind that this is a game that encourages co-op with new players that… also start at level zero. Boo.
And then there is Justice League Heroes. You’ve got superheroes! They’ve got powers! And you have to fight through a solid chunk of the game just to be able to maybe use those powers. The Marvel multiplayer beat ‘em up games had a similar issue, but they at least had the good sense to let you always use your favorite characters. Justice League Heroes limits your available heroes by stage. The result is that you could finally level up Zatanna to the point that she has the bunny powers you always wanted… but she is not allowed on the next few worlds, so hopefully you will still be excited about your new skills when she comes back from the mall.
It is infuriating! And you can bypass it all if you just start at the highest levels available. Sure, this also makes some of the Justice Leaguers overpowered, but who cares? More options is better than gradually being granted powers over the course of hours.
There can be many different reasons for such, but sometimes you want to skip ahead to the end in some facet of the gameplay.
What’s wrong with Lunar: Dragon Song: Final Fantasy 8 did it better: your levels scale with your monsters in Lunar: Dragon Song, but you have no way to promote better stat gains. You must learn this as you go, but the only real way to make battles easier is through earning better equipment, so the previously mentioned “piety system” for actual leveling is useless in the face of gaming the awful sidequest system for more cash. The only real advantage to leveling is earning new magical skills… which you can barely ever use, thanks to no one having a decent MP pool. You might get to unload in time for a boss or two, but the continual monster mobs are only ever going to fall to buying better combat boots.
Oh, and your mage? She will only ever inflict the absolute least damage no matter what you do. Your designated Beastman girl isn’t much better.
So, basically, Lunar: Dragon Song will never get easier.
So excuse me while I cheat some 999 strength stats into the game…
FGC #663 Lunar: Dragon Song
- System: Nintendo DS. For some mysterious reason, this title was never seen again.
- Number of players: You must be so alone to be playing this.
- You cannot cheat your way out of this: The icons pulsate at all times. It starts on the title screen, and continues straight through to every last menu. And this is a Nintendo DS game, so you have your “regular” menu open at all times on the lower screen. It is always distracting, and occasionally infuriating, like when you have to go seventeen menus deep to explore your vendor trash supplies. The designers clearly wanted you to suffer.
- Favorite Horrible Thing: In order to run from a battle, you have to blow on the Nintendo DS microphone. As sins go, this is one of the lesser issues, but it is still inscrutable.
Story Time: It is normal to say “things just happen” in a story that is harkening back to 16-bit RPGs (Ness became a psychic robot fighting a chthonic god in the past how exactly?), but there is no rhyme or reason to about half the events in Lunar: Dragon Song. As an easy example, on your way to see the king of the world, you get waylaid to a magic school where all the students have been transformed into statues, monsters are stalking the halls, and five big boy creatures are in five separate rooms. This is typical RPG nonsense, but there is absolutely no context for how this is happening, why you would visit this location in the first place, and why you are responsible for fixing it. Just this is bad, you are obviously the hero of this story, so fix it. There is this completely unearned shorthand for so much of L:DS that it is difficult to enjoy the story just like every other cursed thing in the game.- Heavy Morals: There is an early attempt to focus the plot on fantasy racism where Beastmen are the dominant race, and humans are considered weak and useless. This whole thing flies out the window right about when you are reminded the world of Lunar also contains The Vile Tribe, a gang of malevolent people that can only be evil and have been banished to the wastelands. Beastmen and humans should learn to live together in harmony… to kick the asses of those unambiguously horrible people living in poverty.
- Did not understand the assignment: The “Frontier” of Lunar is supposed to be the area of the planetoid not blessed by Althena, so it’s just the moon as we the audience know it. This was established in Lunar: The Silver Star, and was a badass way of showing how desolate this place would be without magic (because, ya know, it’s the moon).
The Frontier in Dragon Song is a depressing island to the south. It doesn’t have quite the same gravitas. Or craters. - An End: The final boss is the main villain’s second-in-command/dragon/Goro, who mutates through three increasingly powerful forms for reasons that are never explained. The main villain of the story never has an explanation for his actions (aside from “racism”), is only fought once at the story midpoint as an invincible scripted boss, and then accidentally falls to his death during an earthquake that ends the game. He also kills the Goddess Althena/Lucia in a dramatic turn right before that… but she is inexplicably fine all of five minutes later during the ending. Sure!
Retroactively Making Everything Worse: Lunar: Silver Star establishes that the Goddess Althena decided to be reborn as a human, lived her life as a human (with a few Magic Emperor-based hiccups), and then died as a normal human. And she never came back! She died! The end! The sequel, Lunar: Eternal Blue, is basically all about how that was a well-meaning action, but left a power vacuum that nearly destroyed the planet a few (thousand) years later. And that’s great! Eternally reborn deities were already played out in the early 90’s, and it is significant that Althena’s choice (that set off a whole world war in the first game) had consequences. And Lunar: Dragon Song shits all over that by having an Althena that either was eventually reborn anyway, or did the whole thing a few years earlier with absolutely no repercussions. And do not even get me started on what this whole stupid adventure does to Lunar dragon lore!- Did you know? Lunar: The Silver Star and Lunar: Eternal Blue are the classics, and this is the bomb that ended the franchise. But there was another Lunar game! Lunar Walking School was a game for the Game Gear that was later remade for the Sega Saturn. And it never left Japan! And it sucks, too! Fan translations are available out there… but don’t bother.
- Would I play again: Absolutely not. Lunar: Dragon Song gets nearly everything wrong. If I couldn’t casually play this with cheats while watching 4-hour YouTube documentaries, this article wouldn’t even exist. Lunar: Dragon Song is a tune I hope to never hear again.
What’s next? Random ROB has chosen… Gargoyles! More 90’s nostalgia! Maybe it won’t be terrible this time! Please look forward to it!
And now I never have to see these dorks again