It has been almost 12 years since an original release of a Lunar game hit American shores. While I would like to say that Lunar: Dragon Song is as charming and beautiful as its predecessors, I cannot. Dragon Song continues the Lunar tradition of great storytelling at the expense of fairly mundane gameplay. Except this time, the storytelling isn’t quite so great and the gameplay isn’t merely mundane, it is often downright infuriating.

From its Sega CD birth to its amazing PlayStation remakes, the Lunar series has always excelled at absolutely beautiful visuals (in the cutscenes at least) and downright classic soundtracks and voice acting. Unfortunately, neither of these things translates well to a portable system and despite its impressive potential for a portable, the lack of animated cutscenes and voice acting mutes much of the storytelling magic. That aside, Dragon Song is no slouch either. Its graphics are fairly attractive and while its soundtrack isn’t quite as impressive as previous titles, it still retains a distinct Lunar flair and should please fans.

Like Silver Star Story and Eternal Blue before it, Lunar: Dragon Song is a straightforward console RPG reminiscent of the old 16-bit classics. While the previous offered very simple gameplay (often to a fault), Dragon Song attempts to spice things up with a few changes. Unfortunately, these changes are utterly ruinous and offer little but anxiety and frustration.

The most prominent change is that characters no longer obtain silver (the monetary unit of Lunar). Instead you must complete jobs from the various Gad’s Express outlets scattered throughout the world. These jobs consist of bringing a laundry list of items to a specific NPC. Items for these lists are obtained from killing enemies.

Unfortunately, you cannot obtain both items and experience from enemies. You engage enemies in either combat or virtue mode. Victories in combat mode will net you items, while characters will earn experience points for defeating enemies in virtue mode.

The system sounds ok in theory, but the execution leaves much to be desired. All too often, the only jobs you can get involve items you have never seen before or items that are downright impossible to get at your current location in the game, leaving you with very limited options. The game also decides to remove your access to any Gad outlets at very bad moments. There is one segment of the game where you have four dungeon areas in a row lying ahead of you and a shop full of expensive equipment you really need. I hope you have been saving up though, because you have no way of getting any jobs during this particular portion of the game.

To illustrate the type of “cheap” difficulty the game often employs, I will give you another example from this same spot of the game. Like in all Lunar games, you restore your hitpoints and magic power at Althena statues. At this particular segment, the only statue is found deep within the only town you have access to. So that’s four dungeons, plus a few boss encounters, and they decide to give you no statues along the way (at least that I found, and I was damn thorough). Fine, I can deal with that.

But that’s not enough. They also decide to strip you of your only healing character along the way. So unless you knew ahead of time to bring a lot of extra healing items, you’ll have to end up walking all the way back to the town to restock. You’ll probably have to end up walking back to get to the Althena statue at some point anyway.

Is that really so bad, having to walk all the way back? Well, yes. See, you walk pretty slow in Dragon Song and running actually takes away from your hitpoints. When one of your characters gets down to 1/3 of their hitpoints, you can’t run anymore so you’re obliged to suffer through a long, boring walk unless you use some of your healing items (keep in mind, healing items cost money and you can’t take jobs right now). To add insult to injury, one of these areas is a desert with sand that you move extra slow through. Sound engaging yet?

To be fair, I’ll mention that clearing all of the enemies on a screen in virtue mode (they reappear in combat mode) restores your health and magic by 30%. This might be enough to get you through if you had a healer, but not with the characters you have. They simply take too much damage.

Combat also seems to have devolved. While combat in Lunar games was never really cutting edge stuff, at least the spells were pretty and multiple attacks and location added a sense of strategy to the fights. None of this exists in Dragon Song. The game is, in fact, about one step away from a game that just auto-resolves your battles. Movement is gone and there are very limited spells. You can attack, but you can’t even choose which enemy you will target and the AI is absolutely horrible. You can collect cards from enemies to use in battle, but it’s not really enough to overcome the lack of special skills and the fact that you can’t target your enemies.

I won’t even get into the completely arbitrary ability that enemies have to break your equipment which is just downright ridiculous. The game also features a fairly throwaway multiplayer card battle mini-game that’s silly because it uses up the cards, so you can’t use them in the single player.

Lunar: Dragon Song has one redeeming factor and that’s its story. Apparently set sometime long before the events of Silver Star Story, Dragon Song tells the story of Jian and his female companion Lucia (longtime fans should already have their ears perked up). While it’s not nearly as good as the previous games, the story does some fan service and tells the story of a time when there was heated racism between the humans and the beastmen and open conflict with the vile tribe was commonplace. While the story covers very little new ground, it does come close to answering some very interesting questions previous fans may have had.

Lunar: Dragon Song is not a very good RPG. However, if you are a huge Lunar fan, the pretty graphics, good music, and mediocre (but Lunar based) story might be enough for you to give this one a try.