Seriously?

Lunar Dragon song, or Genesis as known here in the UK was the first title of this series released in the EU. I was excited, as the older games looked brilliant and was met with nothing but a wall of bad gameplay decisions that simply baffle the mind. I don't say this lightly when I say that Lunar Dragon Song has to be among the top 10 worst games I have ever played.

Now I will say that Lunar is not 100% without good qualities. The character artwork is nice and I quite liked the story at first with your characters being part of a courier service though it soon fell apart as past an initial delivery it loses all direction.

Everything else seemed like it was designed intentionally to be awful. Let me start by saying that in no RPG is it a good idea to make your characters lose their hp as they run. That's right, either walk everywhere or steadily lose your hp. Other then to infuriate and purposefully be different like a modern art gallery there is no point to it at all. This is just the start of the frustrating features this title has. I don't joke when I say this game is about as player friendly as an exploding oven.

The second most annoying feature, at least for me, was the experience / item issue. Lunar is a standard turn based RPG where each character and enemy takes it in turn to perform an action such as "item" or "attack" based on their speed. While basic the combat system is relatively fun but not fun enough to have to battle everything so much. There are two modes selected before combat, one that gets characters experience to level up at the end of combat, and one that allows them to get items at the end of combat, you can not do both. Bare in mind the only ways to get money are to either do deliveries between towns (which takes ages) or combat for items to sell as enemies don't drop money and you get nothing but a system that is totally pointless and involves extra grinding for no reason at all. Who, and I mean who, play tested this game?

Thirdly, throughout the dungeons there are multiple treasure chests that can't be opened normally, oh no, you have to run through the whole dungeon in a timed mode called "virtue" killing every monster, if you do it in the time allocated the treasure chests open. It's annoying. Just another "there to be different" features that adds nothing fun to the experience of dungeon traveling.

And last, why have only one character that does half decent damage, then take away all his skill to make him useless? Why? It didn't even make much sense plot wise, never mind gameplay wise.

Graphically the game is passable though will never impress. The characters and areas are colourful and fairly well designed. However, everything is a bit pixelated and really doesn't take advantage of the DS. The audio is of a similar fair getting by with some fairly generic RPG background tunes that neither offend or offer a reason to be remembered.

I have no idea how long the game lasts because this is one of the few RPG's I have played that I simply couldn't stomach to finish. Considering the item / experience issue though I can imagine it would take a while, but the question is, would you really want to? I gave up at about 12 hours in and honestly thought I did well.

Simply put, if you like RPGs or even if you don't, avoid Lunar: Dragon Song. The game is plagued with issues that simply take away all fun that the game potentially had leaving nothing but a game full of different gameplay mechanics that other developers never implemented for a reason. They just aren't fun.

+ Anime character designs look nice.

- Game breaking item/experience issue.
- Losing HP when running is an awful idea in every way.
- Graphics are pretty sub par.
- Everything else.