Lunar Retrospective: Dragon Song

 

For years after the release of Eternal Blue, rumours circulated about a third Lunar game. What was strange about the rumours were that they were mostly fueled and circulated by Victor Ireland, the Lunar series’ lead translator and the head of Working Designs. He would’ve had next to no actual input in the direction of the game but judging from how he acted in interviews, he seemed to think he was a big shot developer instead of just the guy who ran a localization company. As far as I can find, the three men who Ireland always called the “holy trinity” of Lunar (character designer and animation director Toshiyuki Kubooka, music composer Noriyuki Iwadare and scenario writer Kei Shigema) never divulged any information themselves about any potential Lunar 3 games that may or may not have been in development. Like most creatives, they naturally would’ve wanted the series they liked worked on to continue, but they never actually said that they were working on anything, not with the same frequency that Ireland insisted in interviews that something was in development and that it had a firm release date already, while at the same time always acting like he was breaking a non-disclosure agreement just by suggesting it.

I know I gave Ireland a lot of grief already for what he did to the first two games, but since he was not involved in Dragon Song at all, I think I can leave him alone, just this once.

I don’t think I need to overstate how excited fans were when Dragon Song was finally announced. In fact, it wasn’t even called Dragon Song yet. The genius of the marketing for the game was that they got the fans involved in unique ways. A vote was held to determine the game’s English name and I was one of the ones who voted for the name Dragon Song. Originally, the game was called Lunar: Genesis in Japan, but I guess they felt that they needed a different English name and came up with the vote to get the fans involved.

Maybe they didn’t think that English fans would be on board with the game if they weren’t already involved prior to its release, and they were right. It built excitement for the game and may have sold copies that would otherwise have not been sold if fans had been a bit more cautious in their optimism.

If you are already familiar with this game, then you may note that this is what is called foreshadowing.

Having already covered The Silver Star and Eternal Blue for this blog, it’s time to cover the third and final game in the Lunar series (not counting the side games that never officially made it out of Japan). Did the series go out with a mighty bang or a pitiful whimper? Will Lunar be long remembered as one of the greatest series of RPGs of all time, or has its legacy been tainted?

This is actually the easiest game to cover in the series, since there’s only one version of it rather than the two different versions of Eternal Blue and the four different versions of The Silver Star that I was willing to cover (and as I already mentioned in my articles for those games, the true number of different versions of each game is much higher, due to how Victor Ireland just couldn’t leave the games’ balance alone when translating the text).

The game opens approximately a thousand years prior to The Silver Star. I want to say approximately because so many games take place exactly one thousand years after some significant event. Final Fantasy VI takes place a thousand years after the War of the Magi, when in reality, it probably would’ve happened something like eight hundred thirty seven years after the War of the Magi, or one thousand and fifteen years after, or something just as uneven.

It’s probably unfair to criticize this game based on the year it takes place relative to other games in the series, especially since there are actual things worth criticizing, but this is unfortunately the mindset one starts with when one has already played this game once before.

A brief text crawl explains the lore of the world. A goddess by the name of Althena, whom players familiar with the franchise will be well aware of by now, arrived at the world and transformed it from a dead planet to a lush paradise under the protection of four mighty dragons and their human Dragonmaster. Two sentient races rose up on this planet: Beastmen, who are physically strong but not as smart, and Humans, intelligent but not as strong as Beastmen. In the time of Dragon Song, the Beastmen are considered the privileged class, owing to their physical prowess, but the two races apparently mostly stay out of each other’s business, willingly segregating themselves for the sake of keeping the peace.

The two races mingle a lot more than the opening suggests, and this is one of many ways in which the translation and/or writing are not up to par.

We are introduced to a pair of human characters living in the settlement of Port Searis, Jian Campbell and his friend Lucia Collins. The Lunar series has always had American-sounding character names, and this game is no exception. It should also be noted that, even though Lucia shares her English name with one of the characters from Eternal Blue, they are different characters entirely; their names are very similar to each other but slightly different in Japanese. The English translation chose to give her the exact same name as the character from Eternal Blue, which is unfortunate in a franchise where names significant to the history of the world show up in multiple games.

Jian Campbell is introduced as a courier who likes acrobatics, and this is going to play a big part in how he fights, but more on that later. The first thing players are expected to do is seek out Lucia, and this feels reminiscent of the beginning of The Silver Star, when the first thing Alex was supposed to do in the game was seek out his friend Luna.

The first thing players will likely notice about the game is that it sounds enough like a Lunar game to be familiar, but more like this is how an AI might think a Lunar soundtrack should sound like. The music was composed by actual people, but it sounds utterly unremarkable. They were trying to ape Noriyuki Iwadare, but unfortunately they succeeded at their task so much that they failed to provide a good product. It’s ironic that, in a game called Dragon Song, there are very few original ideas in the soundtrack.

At this point, one might expect that they can just hit the run button and charge through the game in order to finish quicker, but the game is designed to prevent this strategy and punish players for employing it. The moment Jian starts to run, he (and anyone else in the party) starts to lose HP. He won’t actually die, but when anyone in the party falls to about a third of their maximum HP, the run button is disabled for everyone and they’re all forced to walk. The game is basically holding players hostage and forcing them to engage with the game slo-o-o-o-o-o-o-owly. We will play the game at their pace or not at all, apparently.

This means that if players do decide to eat the run penalty, they’re basically held back by the party member with the lowest HP, since everyone loses HP at the same flat rate of 1 every couple seconds or so.

In a departure from the other two games in the series, the developers decided that, instead of crafting towns that players can run around in and explore, they would hop on the trend of making even navigating a city a function of the menu. Players are instead expected to select from a list of businesses and homes rather than checking every nook and cranny of Port Searis themselves. On the one hand, it feels like a lazy way to build a city but on the other hand, selecting from a menu ensures that you probably won’t miss one or two buildings that you’re allowed to enter, but which you accidentally run past as you search for secrets.

In many RPGs, there are always buildings that are closed off to the player, mainly because the developers couldn’t think of a purpose for the building other than as background scenery. Not every building needed to have a clear purpose, but sometimes finding out that a door was locked didn’t necessarily communicate that players would never be allowed inside. There’s always the notion that the building was placed there for a reason, so it must factor into some aspect of the game in the future, right? Dragon Song at least lets players know that they’re allowed inside the restaurant, they’re allowed to go to the pier, and so on. If it’s in the menu, it’s available to the player.

One such building available right from the start is the Weapon Shop, where Jian starts the game with enough money to purchase Sneakers, to increase his attack from 15 to a whopping 40. He could also go to the Armor Shop and purchase the Flashy Bandana to increase his defense a little, but he can’t afford both upgrades yet, he has to choose one.

Jian finally runs into Lucia at Fountain Square, where she reminds him that they have a package they’re obligated to deliver to Perit Village. Leaving town, players will find that even the overworld has been turned into a menu. To be fair, the original game had a seemingly vast overworld which didn’t indicate clearly enough where players needed to go, and was also wide open and bereft of actual things to do. This is in some ways an improvement, but it still loses that sense of exploration and discovery. Now, all players need to do is select Thieves’ Woods, which is the only place available to them outside of Port Searis at this early stage in the game.

One of the first things the player might find is a blue treasure chest but try as they might, it doesn’t open. It only opens if every enemy in the area is defeated first, but only in Virtue Mode. Strap in, this is where things start to get needlessly complicated.

There are two combat modes in the game, Virtue Mode and, well, Combat Mode. When Combat Mode is active, enemies drop items and not experience, and when Virtue Mode is active, enemies drop experience and not items. Experience points, in this game, are called Althena Conduct even though every other game in the series just calls them what they are, experience points.

It’s not stated in the manual, but enemies seem to scale up with the player. I never get the sense that I’m getting powerful enough from leveling up that common enemies stop being a threat like in the first two games. In fact, whenever a new party member joins and I spend the time to level them up a bit, it also ends up giving the rest of the party experience as well, and as a result, I’ve noticed the new party member takes more damage from the same enemies even though they’re gaining levels and have higher stats, therefore they should be taking less damage. It’s pretty much the opposite of what typically happens in an RPG.

If there is enemy scaling, then this means that it’s probably possible to get through the game at as low a level as possible and accumulate items that can be sold for money to buy better gear. However, the blue treasure chests in each area can only be opened if all of the enemies are gone, and enemies only die off for real if players are in Virtue Mode. In Combat Mode, enemies respawn right away. Enemies respawn in Virtue Mode as well, but only if players don’t defeat more enemies within a certain amount of time. This is what the stopwatch on the bottom screen is for, to let players know that an enemy is going to respawn soon. The timer can be reset if Jian enters battle in Virtue Mode and defeats the enemies found within. If all of the enemies in an area are defeated within the time indicated on the watch, the party regains 30% of their HP and MP and there will be no more encounters in the area until the party leaves and re-enters the dungeon.

There’s no worse feeling in the world than having defeated all but one of the enemy groups in an area, then searching all over for the last one and not finding it and watching helplessly as enemy groups slowly respawn, further keeping you away from the blue treasure chest you’re trying to unlock. Meanwhile, you’re not allowed to sprint because the game will penalize you for doing so, so you’re stuck slowly wandering around the dungeon, looking for that last enemy you can’t find. Due to the enemy respawn rate and the fact that they can respawn anywhere in the dungeon, you’re usually better off just resetting all of the enemies and systematically working your way through the dungeon a second time if you want a shot at that blue chest.

This isn’t as much of a problem outside of forests, where trees can completely block the player’s view of enemies, and later on, players gain tools that allow them to change the behaviour of enemies entirely, so at least this one little annoyance in particular eventually becomes less of a problem.

On the way across a bridge in Thieves’ Woods, bandits rush the party from behind and steal the package. You’d think someone would do something about a forest known as Thieves’ Woods, but I guess no one thinks it’s that big of a problem for travelers to be mugged as they go between Port Searis and Perit Village.

Jian and Lucia decide to press on and ask around in Perit Village, but before they can, they have to fight their way through the woods, which means it’s time to describe combat. If you’re familiar with the first two Lunar games or you read the other two Lunar retrospective articles, you’ll know exactly how combat is supposed to work in the Lunar series. Here’s how combat works in Dragon Song.

Positioning on the battlefield is no longer important, as players and enemies line up just like in every other RPG. However, unlike every other RPG, players don’t have as much input as they’re used to. All they can do is tell the characters to attack, they have absolutely no control over who they attack. Characters will attack randomly based on their weapon type. Jian uses his shoes to attack enemies, delivering boots to the head like he knows Jeet Kune Do, and Lucia smacks enemies with her umbrella. Neither of them are able to attack airborne enemies until the ground enemies beneath them have been killed; whenever a ground enemy dies, the airborne enemy above it obediently flies down so that Jian and Lucia can kill it.

I say “randomly”, but players will quickly identify typical patterns of behaviour in Jian and Lucia regarding which enemies they prioritize. It doesn’t make the killing of them go any faster, it just means there’s a discernible pattern.

At this point in the game, Lucia’s main function in battle is supposed to be a healer, but most enemies deal so little damage that she won’t have anything to heal. Her umbrella does exactly one point of damage when she’s at level one, though, and that’s not going to do anything against the enemies. She very slowly gets stronger with each level she gains, but not enough to make any kind of difference.

Meanwhile, her spells are pretty expensive. She can cast her basic healing spell twice before she needs to regain MP, which makes her healing feel about as useless as her physical attacks, but those two healing spells are pretty much all she needs to cast here before the enemies have been cleared out. Still, it’s a harrowing feeling, knowing you only have two healing spells and might need to rely on your items as well.

Jian’s starting equipment includes an accessory that allows him to occasionally dodge an enemy attack and perform a counterattack. When Jian does it at this early stage of the game, it essentially reduces the number of turns needed to defeat enemies in battle, since he’s the only one actually capable of killing anything in one turn.

Given that Jian only requires six experience points, er, Althena Conduct, to reach level 2, he’ll likely gain that level in just one battle. It’s also possible to get to level 3 in the very next battle, since starting enemies are much more generous compared to previous games in the series.

If the party manages to clear out all the enemy groups in this area, they can loot a set of Clogs from the blue chest, but players who already purchased the Sneakers will find the Clogs worthless except to sell at the next town. It’s a bit disappointing as loot goes. There are also brown treasure chests in the area, but they can be looted any time and in the Thieves’ Woods, they contain consumable items.

If the sheer amount of hassle required to get a blue chest open isn’t enough of a slap to the face, certain enemies can steal items from the party. Unlike in other games, if an enemy steals something in Dragon Song, that item is gone forever and there’s nothing you can do about it. Certain enemies can also randomly destroy an equipped piece of armour, and as this can often happen deep in a dungeon, the only practical way to get it back would be to quit and reload the most recent save file. No other game in existence says “Fuck you!” and breaks your armour without warning. Games with gear fragility systems at least show you how damaged your equipment is if you check it, so you have a general idea of when it’ll break. There is no gear fragility in Dragon Song. Your equipment is either at 100% strength or at 0% strength, there is no in between.

I was once told, although I don’t know if they were being serious or not, that the game was made with the Japanese audience in mind, and this argument is very reminiscent of the kind of argument used to defend some of the random elements of the Dragon Quest series. The trouble with this defense is that at least in the Dragon Quest series, it’s possible to quickly recover from bad luck. In Lunar: Dragon Song, you’re almost always worse off due to a piece of strong gear being destroyed, both due to the huge financial investment it requires to replace, and the huge time investment to earn the required money. I’m sorry, but if Dragon Song is meant to be a challenge, it’s not a fair one. It’s not like the challenge of, say, Dark Souls, which will kill you over and over until you get better. This game? This game punches you in the face whenever it thinks it can get away with it and then attempts to walk away consequence free with a smug look on its face. This is basically the Donald Trump of video games.

There is one thing that can prevent items from being stolen and gear from being destroyed, and that is the use of cards. Cards drop from enemies in Combat Mode, but players can only carry one of each kind at once. Cards offer a variety of effects in battle, from the Yeti card preventing items from being stolen to the Shreeker card poisoning enemies and deducting a flat 5% of their maximum HP per turn. This can be very useful in boss battles to determine how much HP they have and to allow players to figure out when they should be more defensive and when they can go all out to finish one off.

Admittedly, bosses are actually rather easy to defeat due to the use of cards, especially later in the game when players have access to a lot more of them.

Cards aren’t a one use only resource, but they also don’t last forever. There’s a set amount of P Points on each card, and this determines how many times it can be used in battle. Each use costs 100 P Points and cards might start with as low as 800 and as high as 2000 points, depending on what type they are.

At this early stage in the game, not a lot of cards are available and most enemies die pretty quickly anyway. That said, if the blue chest has been looted in an area, there’s no real reason to set the game to Virtue Mode when re-entering the dungeon. Players might as well farm for items as much as they can as they make repeated trips through such areas.

After clearing out the first area in the Thieves’ Woods, if the party goes west, they’ll find their way blocked by rocks. There’s an Althena statue here, and just like the rest of the series, the party can heal up by touching it. The proper route to Perit Village is down the east path, which places players in the second half of the Thieves’ Woods where more enemies and another blue chest awaits. Players who are able to open this one get the Wonder Umbrella, which actually is an upgrade for Lucia.

Perit Village is located west from here, and it’s there that Jian and Lucia find out that there’s nefarious things going on in the Thieves’ Woods. It should be noted that in towns like this, there’s usually an Althena Statue, so players can run as much as they want, since they can just heal up for free whenever they run low.

Jian and Lucia find out from Perit Village that there’s a Sasquatch terrorizing the Thieves’ Woods, stealing whatever he wants, and when he’s not stealing things, he’s occupying Delrich Temple. The temple is located on the other side of the rock blockade that Jian and Lucia encountered earlier, but this means they need to fight their way through the Thieves’ Woods once more before they can make their way to the temple, possibly picking up another blue chest along the way, this time with a better bandana for Jian.

The first thing anyone will notice about Delrich Temple is that it has a lot of stairs leading up to its entrance. And I mean a lot of stairs. It’s like the developers knew that players would be forced to walk up them rather than run, so they put in as many stairs as they felt they could get away with.

The temple itself is actually an exercise in decent dungeon design, despite the egregious number of stairs required to enter it. It may lack blue chests in every room, but killing everything will allow players to solve a puzzle to progress without needing to constantly interrupt solving it to fight enemies. The temple also contains four mini-bosses fought one at a time. The Sasquatch mentioned by the people of Perit Village is actually four Sasquatches, specifically the four bandits that stole the package from Jian and Lucia in the Thieves’ Woods. The Althena Statue in the dungeon allows for healing in between the mini-bosses and reminds me of some of the little mercies other games offer players to ease them into the game and get them past the first couple hours relatively painlessly.

Perhaps due to the rewards system, bosses automatically put the party in Combat Mode so that they can drop items. It’s shown in game that praying to Althena is unsuccessful in these fights, but that begs the question: why would Althena forsake the party during boss fights? Wouldn’t this be when they need her the most?

Even with Combat Mode active, the package doesn’t drop from any of these Sasquatches, so Jian and Lucia are stuck searching the tower for it. Somehow, the package spawns in the only room in the entire tower that was empty during exploration, and it’s relatively unmolested as well, so Jian and Lucia are happy that they won’t get fired.

Part of playing this game is knowing when it’s safe to thumb your nose at the developers and hold the run button down, and this is one of those times. With no enemies left in the tower, players can just rush through and heal at the Althena Statue at the base of the stairs if they wanted to. It only costs 14HP to run from where the package spawned to the statue, so the healing might not even be necessary.

On the way back through the Thieves’ Woods to Perit Village, I can’t help but wonder if the woods might need a name change now that the thieves are dead. Maybe more will move in to fill the void. Maybe there’s going to be a job opening. “Thieves wanted, be prepared for Perit Village to hate you and want you dead, but they won’t actually do anything to prevent you from plying your trade. If you see someone named Jian Campbell, run.”

Once the package is delivered, general deliveries are unlocked. This is the biggest source of grindable cash for the player, since enemies don’t drop money in this game. Unfortunately, the majority of the deliveries require the player to hunt down the items themselves. Gad’s Express is introduced as a courier service, but in actual gameplay, it acts more like a service where people order items and couriers go and harvest these items from enemies in the various dungeons of the game. The downside is, since there isn’t any in game encyclopedia like in more modern games, if you accept a quest to hunt down and deliver, say, Rusty Kettles, you need to either know which enemies drop them, or have had them drop already and can automatically deliver them.

Once the player has enough items to fulfill the delivery, they must then seek out the person who put in the request and deliver the items to them in order to receive a Receipt, whereupon they can return to Gad’s Express for the reward. Players are only told in which city the person is and must check each and every location in town, even the places of business. If they’re lucky, the recipient is someone like Eva, whose home is listed in the menu. If they’re not lucky, the recipient is hidden away at the inn or something. Players can also only have one delivery active at a time, so between this and the extra steps required to turn in a request, it makes Gad’s Express feel like a chore instead of a fun activity that encourages players to earn money.

To make things worse, package recipients’ names occasionally include typos in the Gad’s Express menu that makes it harder to find them. One such typo is the result of the same person’s name being translated two slightly different ways.

Now that Jian and Lucia have returned to Perit, they hear that the bridge south has been repaired, meaning Healriz is now available to them. The game’s dialogue strongly suggests that players must head to Healriz now, despite that it’s a Beastman settlement and they likely won’t get a warm welcome, and if the player uses party chat, Jian himself will declare that he absolutely has to go there. For reasons. That’s literally what it is. For reasons.

Healriz is a large city, so much so that takes up two menus worth of options. There’s a Western and Eastern portion of the city, where the Western portion contains all the businesses and recreation, and the Eastern portion contains all of the residential neighbourhoods.

One of the things I like about looking at how RPGs are put together is to see how the developers balance their games. Do they expect players to grind for money, or will there be enough random encounters between one city and the next to give players enough money for everything they require? Healriz contains huge upgrades for Jian and Lucia, but whether players will be able to afford those upgrades or not is a direct result of how many Gad’s Express deliveries they’re able to fulfill. Unfortunately, this means there may be a lot of grinding required just to get the items needed for a delivery.

The one mercy about Gad’s Express is that players can reload the delivery list and they’ll get a random four deliveries that are available at that point in the game. This will help players to find deliveries that they can either make right now or that they might not need to keep running back and forth through the Thieves’ Woods to accomplish.

The big event going on in Healriz is a tournament, and of course since he’s a main character in an RPG, Jian means to participate. It’s not as straightforward as entering, though. It turns out that Jian has to bribe a man named Leoncavallo, as it turns out that he’s basically in charge of the city, despite a man named Othello being mayor. Othello seems to be mayor in name only, though. I’m sure a lot of people have known mayors who aren’t really in charge.

To use as a bribe, Jian and Lucia get a tip that Leoncavallo likes Honey, so they venture into the nearby Roland Forest to get some. This must be done, of course, in Combat Mode, for Honey is a random drop. Enemies in the Roland Forest hit harder and inflict many status effects that can debilitate the party, so hopefully the Honey drops rather quickly or else players might need to grind out materials to use in deliveries in order to afford the gear available in Healriz if they haven’t bought them already.

Back in town, Jian tries to use Honey to bribe Leoncavallo but ends up in, as the common folk call it, a dick measuring contest. Jian claims that humans are as tough as Beastmen, so Leancavallo tells him to go defeat an Armored Boar.

This time, players might want to make sure they’re well geared up, or else this is going to be extra tough. In fact, now might be a good time to actually look at the cards available to players at this point in the game. Namia drops a card that give players a 10% HP regeneration per turn, which can help with the healing if players are a bit undergeared for an area. If Lucia is flat out of MP, the Hellbird card can replenish her MP back to full (well, it replenishes the party, but she’s the only one yet who actually uses MP for anything, so it might as well be a single target MP replenishment at this point). Shreeker drops a card that can poison an enemy, but that’s usually better off being used against bosses.

The point is, there are some pretty useful cards at this early stage in the game, and the developers likely intended for players to make full use of them.

The Armored Boar is actually not that difficult for Jian and Lucia if they’re level 14 and at the very least, have some good weapons and the regeneration card for free healing over time.

Upon returning to Healriz, Jian explains to Leoncavallo that he actually has nothing but positive race relations in mind for why he wants to enter the tournament. If a human can do well in the tournament, then hopefully the two races will one day be seen as equals. He wins Leoncavallo over with his speech and gains a tournament pass.

The first two battles in the tournament drop two Healing Drops each, which is good because the game expects them to be used in subsequent battles. The third offers two Mental Drops, but Jian’s been fighting these battles solo and still doesn’t possess any skills that require MP despite possessing MP. It’s pretty much a staple of the series to star a character who will eventually have magic but gains MP ahead of time in preparation.

Jian is teleported away suddenly after the third battle and a friendly beast girl comes to take Lucia to safety. Her name is Gabryel and she seems to also believe in Jian’s philosophy about the two races. Speaking of Jian, they find him paralyzed in the nearby Sun Square, and it’s revealed he’s a victim of the Curse of Lost Equilibrium. The Beast King Zethos, after having witnessed him fight, placed the curse on him for some reason. Gabryel has an in with the king, though, and can grant Jian and Lucia an audience, but Zethos isn’t in Healriz anymore. In the short period of time it took Gabryel to lead Lucia to Sun Square, Zethos has made his way to a city called Leephon. I guess he teleported.

Sometimes it can be interesting to see what level a new character joins at because it shows me what level the game intends for the main characters to be, but Gabryel joins at level 1. The upside is that she can gain levels quickly. The downside is that getting her to a level where she doesn’t die quickly can be a bit painful unless you’re incredibly lucky. That, and the Curse of Lost Equilibrium cuts Jian’s damage down to about a third of what it was. In other words, his three hit combo in battle has been turned into a one hit combo. Before now, fighting groups of enemies wasn’t that bad, but now, fighting has been turned into a slog since Jian can’t even kill an enemy in one turn any more. Gabryel won’t gain any levels unless somehow exactly none of the enemies target her at all.

Gabryel comes with Gale Cut, and while it does hit all enemies on screen, it also does single digit damage when she’s at level 1, and she only has enough MP to cast it once, rendering it almost useless to use.

The best way to level her up is to just let her die and then spend almost all of Lucia’s MP to bring her back near the end of the fight. At level 14, Lucia has just enough to cast a single Miracle Tears spell, which brings a character back to life with minimal HP. Then the player needs to pray as hard as they can than the RNG gods don’t see fit to kill Gabryel off again before the last enemy dies. If she manages to survive, she’ll typically gain four to five levels in that first battle and have a bit of a cushion to fall back on due to having higher stats and at least twice as much HP as she had before. She can then also cast Gale Cut twice, although its helpfulness is debatable until she hits level 7 or so. Players who might decide to level her up even more will find that Gale Cut gets a lot more effective by the time she has enough MP to cast it three times, which occurs around level 11 or so.

Level 7 is unfortunately the point where Gabryel requires a lot more experience to gain even a single level. On the one hand, getting her some more HP and a little bit more physical attack power will help end battles slightly quicker, but the time investment might not make it worthwhile in the long run until players can afford to upgrade her gear.

After analyzing several Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games, it’s strange to look at a game like this. It begs the question, was it actually play tested and if so, how did they ever decide this was a good enough game to release?

Speaking of small annoyances, the poison status also remains active outside of battle in this game. Worse, Althena statues don’t clear poison when replenishing everyone’s HP and MP, meaning that the party has to talk to the statue twice. First, to give Lucia enough MP to clear the poison status, then again to give her back the MP she spent. There is absolutely no reason to force players to have to do this. They could just as easily have allowed the Althena statue to clear poison as well.

Getting back to the story and acting on instructions from Gabryel, Jian and Lucia make their way back to Port Searis to take the ferry to Port Olbeage. Sadly, the Cathedral of Althena has been attacked by the Vile Tribe and Gad’s Express in Port Olbeage isn’t giving out any jobs right now, so if players want to be able to buy the new gear available in Port Olbeage, they’ll need to solve the new crisis.

One good thing about Port Olbeage is that there are a couple vendors there that sell materials that drop from enemies, so if players are having trouble farming them, they can just drop some cash and then turn around and deliver those items for a relatively hefty profit.

When the party finds out about the trouble in the Cathedral of Althena, Gabryel runs off to deal with the guards at Port Olbeage’s Checkpoint. All it takes is for her to show off the royal emblem and the guards back down. Thus, she’s able to secure the party’s passage through the Checkpoint.

At this point, the Cathedral is the only place the party can go to, so even if they wanted to continue onward to Leephon, they must defeat the Vile Tribe first. Perhaps due to this game being what it is, this absolutely standard RPG plot point that would be acceptable in any other game somehow feels like railroading. Dragon Song does not deserve to be judged negatively for this plot point, but forcing Jian to do this while being cursed does not feel great.

Arriving at the Cathedral, they find everyone inside have been transformed into stone statues, but the game shows a bit of mercy by placing an Althena statue among the statues of people. This would therefore be a great time to farm for materials if the player can stand taking a break to farm.

The statue also helps players heal up between boss battles, since there are four Deuces that each hold an orb which belongs in a grander-looking Althena statue deeper inside the Cathedral, and it’s entirely possible for Lucia to be killed in one hit, from full health, by an unlucky critical hit delivered to her by one of the Deuces unless the party grinded for money before arriving in Port Olbeage so that they could afford the new armour.

Upon retrieving the four orbs from the four Deuces (and the colours correspond to the colours of the four dragons, of course), a locked door unlocks and makes the Gronk boss fight available. Gronk is somehow both more difficult and less difficult than the Deuces. Whereas Deuce will inflict status effects like sleep and confusion with each hit, and will sometimes hit twice in one turn, Gronk will waste turns casting a petrification spell on an ally or healing himself. Unlike what seems to have happened to the people of the temple, petrification in battle is only temporary. Petrification prevents the party member in question from having a turn.

I will have to assume that after everyone was petrified in the Cathedral, the Vile Tribe have been delaying taking any more turns, thus making the transformation of the Cathedral’s people effectively as permanent as they want it to be.

In fact, now is a good time to talk about the status effects in the game. Some games are good about coming up with different status effects that do different things, but there are several present in Lunar: Dragon Song which have the exact same effect and are cured in exactly the same way. Petrify is basically immobilization and can be cured with Cure Squall or simply waiting for it to wear off. Sleep is basically immobilization and can be cured with Cure Squall or simply waiting for it to wear off. Paralysis is basically immobilization and can be cured with Cure Squall or simply waiting for it to wear off. Confusion is almost the same as Petrify, Sleep and Paralysis, as it’s basically a chance at immobilization and can be cured with Cure Squall or simply waiting for it to wear off. In other words, there are four status effects which can be described as methods of temporary immobilization with only a visual difference between them, and there’s no reason why there are so many of them. The only real difference between any of them is that Sleep disappears if the affected player gets attacked.

The only status effects that do different things are Poison, which deals damage equal to 5% of the character’s maximum HP each turn and it never wears off, it must be cured by Cure Squall. Blindness makes it harder for the character to hit an enemy, which sucks because there’s already a problem with accuracy in the game not being 100%, this just makes it worse. Silence prevents a character from casting spells and can be cured with Cure Squall or waiting for it to disappear, and it’s not as crippling as it should be due to how limited magic is in the game. Characters in the first two games would’ve been debilitated much more than characters in this game are, and silencing Jian is a wasted turn until he finally earns one of his spells much later in the game.

With Gronk defeated, the party tries to go back to heal but the door is locked. They try to move forward and the way forward is locked as well! A man named Rufus has blocked them in and forcibly escorts Lucia and Jian away. Their supposed crime? Being heroes while human. The Beastmen apparently can’t let word get out that humans are capable of such feats of strength.

And yet the rumour gets out anyway, so this is utterly pointless.

Lucia and Jian are brought before Beast King Zethos, which is who they were trying to meet anyway. Lucia challenges Zethos to a fight, but Jian tells her to stand back, he’ll beat the king solo. Jian, Lucia’s the only one in the group with healing spells! Do you really want to waste healing items and 100 points from your Namia card just because of your pride?

I guess he does.

Zethos lifts the curse during battle, allowing Jian to perform his three hit combo again. After defeating Zethos, Jian realizes the Beast King didn’t fight at his full strength and finds out that Gabryel also had ulterior motives for becoming their friend. Lucia acts like this is the ultimate betrayal and Gabryel runs off, upset at her role in the events that played out. It turns out that Gabryel is Zethos’s daughter and has been traveling the world, looking for strong fighters to fight the Vile Tribe, but the way Gabryel acts in this scene, you’d think she was plotting to lure Jian and Lucia into a trap or kill them or something.

According to Zethos, the Goddess Althena has been taken prisoner by the Vile Tribe and as a result, the world is going to turn into the barren wasteland of the Frontier due to the weakened state of magic in the world. They’ve been sending strong fighters into the Frontier to try to fight the Vile Tribe, but not a single one has returned thus far.

One of the things Final Fantasy started to do in the fourth game in the series is to feature scenes during battle where characters talk. In Final Fantasy IV, it was famously utilized in the “you spoony bard” scene. Final Fantasy VI played out several scenes during specific battles. Final Fantasy VII had Barret tell Cloud to attack the Guard Scorpion while its tail is up, waited for Cloud to queue up his attack, then Barret told him that it’ll powerfully retaliate. And so on through the series. Final Fantasy XIV in particular makes significant use out of adding dialogue to dungeons and raid bosses.

I bring this up because when the party talks to Zethos again, Jian and Lucia inform the player that Gabryel is very vocal in battle, but this is an informed ability. We never see any dialogue in battle, and we never see any scenes play out after battle where Gabryel offers any advice. When comparing this to a Final Fantasy game, it’s easy to see that it should’ve been more than possible. When comparing this to previous games in the Lunar series, it should’ve been an easy decision to include dialogue in battle, but not even spell names are vocalized this time around. Instead, we’re just told that Gabryel would always be quick to offer advice and tried to take command of the party’s fights. We never see this, ever, we’re just being informed of it after the fact. It honestly would’ve been nice to have been able to witness it prior to now, even if just in text form.

Jian finally gets an explanation for why the Curse was placed on him. Both Zethos and Gabryel had noticed how strong he was, but Zethos wasn’t keen to have a human join the fight in the Frontier, so the Beast King placed the curse on Jian so that Gabryel might give up on the human, but Gabryel traveled with him anyway, witnessed how Jian overcame the burden of his curse, and decided that he was truly the kind of warrior that they needed.

Jian is also convinced that he’s got what it takes to take on the Vile Tribe, and so Zethos challenges him to try to cross the Sungrid Bridge that leads into the Frontier.

On their way out of town, Jian and Lucia patch things up with Gabryel and accept her back into the party, and so the three of them venture across the Sungrid Bridge.

Before they set out across the bridge, it’s time to raid the equipment shop, but the gear options for Lucia are a lot more expensive than what Jian and Gabryel can buy. However, the developers were a bit cheeky and put the gear in treasure chests and then stuck the chests in the bridge, in a room that’s a bit out of the way to find, so savvy players can equip Jian and Gabryel only. They aren’t even blue treasure chests, they’re chests that can be opened at any time. I can’t imagine how frustrating it’d be to grind out the item drops necessary to raise the funds to buy absolutely everything, only to find out that a lot of time could’ve been saved if Lucia’s equipment needs were neglected for a short while.

It gets worse for players who might’ve spent money on Lucia’s gear. Across the bridge, the party finds an injured Rufus, but Lucia’s healing suddenly stops working. The party has stumbled into a trap, and Lucia is captured. This is around when veterans of the series will start rolling their eyes, especially if they’ve played multiple versions of The Silver Star already and know this particular story beat by heart. You’d think hiding equipment upgrades for her in chests the player finds literally right before she’s removed from the party means that she’s not gone for good, but this is a development team that has shown on several occasions already in this game that they’re hostile towards the game’s players. Plus, this plot point is pretty much recycled anyway, so it also shows a lack of creativity.

The game doesn’t even try to hide it, because in the very next scene, the Vile Tribe discuss the fact that Lucia is Althena’s chosen disguise. It turns out that Althena’s capture up until this point in the game was nothing more than false rumours purposely being spread by the tribe and now that they actually do have Lucia, they want to reawaken Althena within her and use her power to defeat the Beast King Zethos. For that, they require the Chamber of Rebirth, and thus need to somehow get past the Four Dragons.

Jian awakens underground, having been knocked out when Lucia was captured. It is in this secret underground cave where we meet Flora, the fourth party member in the game. Her and Rufus basically round out the playable cast and now that Lucia has been captured, there’s some space free in the party. Rufus is there as well and volunteers to lead the party, which is a nice change from when he arrested Jian, but Jian refuses his help and chooses Flora instead. I get it, I really do. Rufus left a sour first impression, so of course Jian might not be ready to accept his help.

Plus, you and I both know Jian just wants to be surrounded by pretty women. Sure, he doesn’t act the part, but he’s been the only male party member so far in this game. He’s either very feminist or he just wants to have women around him at all times. Rufus is going to join later on, but for now, the game might as well be called Jian’s Harem.

Jian receives an Ignatic Stone from Flora, who explains that it allows them to basically make their way through Vile Tribe territory without being attacked, and thus she joins the party. Just like with Gabryel, Flora joins at level one and is incredibly weak. Enemies, of course, are tuned with Jian in mind, and it’s very likely he’s at least level 18 by now if players went out of their way to collect all of the blue chests so far.

After leaving the underground, Jian finds himself in Lind Village, but this is where the game’s lack of options for money really hold it back. Given that Lind is a village in the Frontier, it does not have a Gad’s Express. The only way to accumulate money now is to sell items, and random items dropped by enemies typically don’t fetch a high price.

At this point, Jian has no real options other than to go to Guystole Mine. He can go back to Sungrid Bridge, but the bridge is out and so he’s trapped in the Frontier for now. Flora’s main role is as a replacement healer, and players should probably pray to Althena that enemies don’t target her in her first battle so that she can receive some experience points and gain a bunch of levels at once.

In the pursuit of blue chests, Flora should comfortably reach level 15 before the party exits the mine and enters the Sandra Desert. She’ll also receive some much needed equipment upgrades. In fact, most equipment from here on will eventually be found in chests, sometimes before it’s even available in shops, so it makes you wonder what the point of Gad’s Express even is, other than to trick the player into spending more time in the game than is absolutely necessary.

Enemies in the Sandra Desert are definitely a lot tougher than the ones in the Guystole Mine, but Flora has enough MP by now to cast a few healing spells when needed. There’s also an enemy that likes to break equipment in the Sandra Desert, which is a pretty unfair thing to do in a region of the world where money is hard to come by, and where players would have to trudge back through the entire Guystole Mine in order to replace whatever gets broken. There are other enemies in other places all over the world who like to destroy gear, but this is an especially egregious example of the kind of hostile design that went into the game.

Upon making it through the Sandra Desert (and yes, I see what they did there with the word Sand in the name of the desert), Jian attempts to pull a Cecil and tries to have Gabryel escort Flora back to Lind. Jian, you know Flora’s the only healer you currently have, right? I know healing in this game is expensive relative to how much MP a healer typically has, but some healing is better than no healing. But Jian’s stubborn and he goes off on his own into Elda Canyon.

Surprisingly, the game doesn’t punish the player too much in the canyon. It’s like the developers actually understood that its difficulty should be balanced for the single character making his way through rather than the party of three that they had before.

That said, there are enemies that can poison Jian here, and without anyone to clear the status until the group joins back up, there’s literally no way to deal with poison other than with items, so if you didn’t buy any, you’re pretty much screwed. There’s also no reason for the player to expect that their friends are coming back yet, so any broken gear, any poison attack landing, anything like that probably warrants a reset.

If you recall the issue that Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest had, it’s that there were status effects like petrification or confusion that would cause absolute misery for players during sequences where Benjamin was alone and wouldn’t be that much better when he had a partner. The Elda Canyon sequence is like that, in a way. The enemies are balanced for Jian’s power, but not for the fact that he’s got no healer to help him and is far enough away from a vendor that he can’t replace broken gear.

When Rufus and Gabryel show up again to help fight a trio of minibosses, he still doesn’t have access to any healing, but at least he has help. Rufus also joins at level 15, which feels like a small miracle, considering literally every other character started at level one. Maybe Rufus actually did start at level one and making his way through the desert and the canyon to meet up with Jian gave him enough experience that he was able to join the party at a much higher level than Gabryel and Flora did.

But for everything the game gives to the player, it exacts a terrible price. These minibosses can also break gear. When I played the game to get screen shots for this retrospective article, Gabryel’s gauntlet got destroyed during this boss fight, decreasing her defense at this critical junction. It’s like the developers wanted to build a roguelike game and included many ways in which random chance can screw over the player, then remembered that the game is supposed to be a regular turn-based RPG but didn’t remove the negative random elements.

In fact, in the next zone, after reloading and doing the boss fight without losing any gear, an enemy broke Gabryel’s gauntlet again, then broke Rufus’s weapon, then broke Gabryel’s armour. The game really wanted me to lose my equipment and took it so personally whenever I reloaded in order to avoid the consequences. I felt like the game was maliciously acting against me throughout the entire experience, even during the parts where the developers showed a bit of mercy.

Just like Gabryel, Rufus comes with exactly one magical attack, and just like Gabryel, it hits every enemy on the screen and costs 10 MP. Jian still hasn’t learned any magic at this point and experiences glacially slow MP growth, even worse than the slow MP growth that Gabryel and Rufus experience. At least Jian has the excuse that he’s being prepared for when he gains his abilities later in the game, but Rufus and Gabryel have their abilities now, so they have no excuse for why it takes several levels for them to be able to gain even a single extra cast of their skill.

When the party finally makes it to Vile Castle, it turns out it’s yet another lengthy dungeon full of enemies that can and will destroy gear, and they do it often. There gets to be a point where the only way to make it through the dungeon with all of the party’s gear intact is to save after literally every battle.

Eventually, the party finds themselves confronted by a demonic member of the Vile Tribe known as Gideon. He’s the one who took Lucia, so Jian has reason to fight and defeat him. Rufus, however, sends Jian and Gabryel ahead and then stays behind to fight.

Jian and Gabryel meet Ignatius, who looks like a dollar store Ghaleon. Gideon follows them in, having killed Rufus off screen, and an angry Jian can only speak like an NPC who has just one line, “Give back Lucia!” Honestly, Ignatius’s speech is pretty much wasted here and even Ignatius agrees. So he attacks the remaining duo of Jian and Gabryel and his fireballs do nearly a thousand points of damage to each of them. To put that in perspective, Jian likely has less than 300 HP at this point in the game, depending on how many battles he’s fought in Virtue Mode.

Speaking of Althena, she suddenly arrives and pleads with Ignatius to not kill Jian and Gabryel. It’s here where she drops a bombshell. This isn’t just Ignatius, leader of the Vile Tribe.

This is Dragonmaster Ignatius. If you’re a veteran of the Lunar series, I don’t think I need to explain what it means to have a Dragonmaster as your enemy.

As Althena teleports Jian and Gabryel to the Cathedral of Althena, the scene confirms that Lucia was Althena in disguise. With Lucia gone from the party and Rufus dead, there’s only three playable characters left. Naturally, like with previous games in the series, both Lucia and Rufus left the party with the gear they had on.

Gabryel leaves Jian in the care of the Cathedral and discusses with her father what they should do. The death of Rufus is hardly touched upon and the characters don’t take time to mourn at all. Rufus himself is basically seen as a plot event and nothing more.

Instead, Gabryel takes on a job from Gad’s Express and practically browbeats Jian into accompanying her. He appears to be suffering from depression, but agrees to come with her anyway. The scene adheres to the popular notion that telling a depressed person to not be depressed anymore should cure depression, which it absolutely can’t. If that sort of thing worked, there would be no mental health crisis in the world today.

Instead of taking the work, though, the talk with Gad inspires Jian to go seek out the Beast King Zethos to come up with a plan of action to defeat Ignatius. Gad also delivers a gift to Jian, a pair of shoes which have a bonus to Dexterity and Luck, but aren’t as powerful as the shoes he got from a blue treasure chest earlier in the game.

During Jian’s talk with Zethos, the Beast King apologizes for the way his people have treated humans. Throughout the game thus far, if Jian were to talk to random members of the Beastmen, some of them would look upon Jian as a curiosity and some of them would react with disdain, but it never really felt to me like they were oppressing the humans due to racism. It’s strange to say, but to me, it felt more like prejudice based on economic class than on race, if that makes sense. Granted, in the real world, the oppressed are usually also poor anyway and the richest city in the world of Lunar is a Beastman city, but Jian is shown as being the only human to even try to make waves in the world. Everyone else is happy to go about their lives and humans in the game show no resentment towards the Beastmen. One even purposely moves to a Beastman city because the Beastmen don’t go out of their way to oppress humans, they just don’t want anything to do with them.  Thus, the human can live in peace without anyone bothering him.

Zethos gives Gabryel his blessing to go travel the world with Jian and advises them to look for a man named Titus Lauren in Healriz. Titus turns out to be a priest who determined that a new threat was going to emerge in the world and so he made his home in Healriz.

It all began when Athena started to wonder if the future should be entrusted to all of the people of the world and not to a single person. That’s what the game says and the way it’s worded is a bit strange. I don’t know if this is supposed to mean that she thought everyone should be a Dragonmaster or if she thought the Dragonmaster was too powerful a position, but whatever she was thinking, Dragonmaster Ignatius clearly took it personally. He used his power to take those undesirables that had been confined to the Frontier and turned them into the Vile Tribe.

Her thoughts proved to be so unpopular with people that she transformed herself into a human and sealed her powers and memories away so that no one could use her for evil.

Ignatius, however, had decided that a single powerful being needs to lead the world, needs to watch over and direct it in order to lead it to paradise, and this is why he needs the Goddess Althena. Her power will help him achieve his goals. This very much goes against what the Dragonmaster represents in the rest of the series. It always seemed like Dragonmasters were adventurers, roughly the Lunar equivalent to the Warrior of Light from Final Fantasy or the Legendary Hero from Dragon Quest. Here, though, Ignatius treats the position like he’s a powerful ruler or a god.

It should be noted that Studio Alex, who handled the writing of both The Silver Star and Eternal Blue, went bankrupt long before Dragon Song was made, so the original writers had nothing to do with this game. The DS package claims that Dragon Song is “from the original creators of Lunar: Silver Star” but clearly it’s not the case.

Jian finds out that he must pass the Trials of the Four Dragons in order to become a Dragonmaster, for the only one who can oppose such a person is another Dragonmaster. While playing The Silver Star, I’d gotten the impression that having more than one Dragonmaster in the world was something that was typically not done, since Dyne gave up his power long before Alex started earning his, but there’s at least one instance in supplementary material where a pair of sisters became Dragonmasters together. This is, of course, never discussed in the games, so its status in canon is unclear. What is clear is that this game features two Dragonmasters at the same time, and one of them is apparently evil.

Flora returns to the group here, giving Jian back a healer, and just in time because it’s time for the Trial of the Red Dragon. Or it will be, once they cross over the Barrel Desert on the other side of the Roland Forest, then make it through the Red Dragon Cave. The Cave, owing to the lava within, deals damage over time to anyone who tries to make their way through it. It’s a trial just to get to the Trial!

This, by the way, is the only time in the series where characters take damage by being in the Red Dragon Cave.

When Jian makes it through the cave and talks with the Red Dragon, she reveals that she thought the same as me, that there can be only one Dragonmaster at a time. You see, the dragons are supposed to serve the Dragonmaster and can’t give aid to those who might threaten the current Dragonmaster. Even though they know Ignatius is corrupt, they’re not allowed to do anything to unseat him. Therefore, Jian cannot be allowed to take the Trial.

Rather than take the Trial, he begins a boss fight against the Red Dragon, and when he wins, it turns out that was the Trial. It’s not even that much of a boss fight. It’s entirely possible that she does damage in turn one and then gets defensive for the rest of the fight. Either that or her AI broke when I fought her due to how much damage I was doing. I’m told this fight is particularly lethal towards Flora, since the party doesn’t find anything that Flora can equip that protects her from fire, but Gabryel and Jian both receive at least one piece each before facing the Red Dragon.

Given that the Red Dragon was bested in combat, she fades from the world, which doesn’t seem to bode well for anyone else wanting to take her Trial in the future.

After the Red Dragon comes the White Dragon, and the key to getting into the White Dragon Cave is apparently hidden in an old legend where humans were assholes to a giant. The giant had built Delrich Temple and had crafted 100 stone steps for it. If you recall, there were a lot of steps for no real gameplay reason. You can write lore for the steps as much as you want, but it doesn’t change the fact that they go on for far longer than they should. Anyway, humans didn’t want the giant to gain favour in Althena’s eyes, so before the Goddess could see his work, they stole one of the steps. Since there were only 99 steps now, Althena banished the giant to the Frontier as punishment, even though he did nothing wrong. Jian assumes that the way into the White Dragon Cave is to give Delrich Temple its 100th step back, just because he finds something outside the White Dragon Cave which vaguely looks like it could possibly be a step if you look at it in a certain way.

I find the legend of the giant to be pretty mean spirited. Literally any other species would see a skilled architect that could build a temple in half a day and think, “This would be a valuable ally to have. Maybe he could even teach us a thing or two about the trades.” Humans? Nah, fuck this guy, we can’t stand that anyone might be better than us at something. And apparently the Goddess Althena fell for it and banished the giant?! I would probably need to hear from the Goddess herself to confirm this but it doesn’t seem like something she would do.

It makes even less sense when Jian arrives at Delrich Temple and it turns out it’s only part of the step! The 100th step was still mostly there! Surely it would be obvious that the step had been there and got stolen, right? Althena wouldn’t have overreacted at something like this… right?

When the step is put in place, nothing happens. For some reason, they were expecting things with the White Dragon to happen at Delrich Temple and not, you know, at the White Dragon Cave. So the party decides to go back to the White Dragon Cave to see if anything changed over there.

By the way, if you’re curious, there really is exactly 100 steps leading up to Delrich Temple. I counted. The biggest reason why it feels like it takes forever to climb is because the party’s walking speed decreases when climbing or descending stairs, even when the run button is being pressed.

The White Dragon Cave is located near Jian’s hometown, just like its proximity to Alex’s hometown of Burg in The Silver Star, so it’s strange that Jian didn’t go visit the White Dragon first, before the Red Dragon.

If there’s one thing all this back and forth is good for, it’s item farming. Why grind for items when you can just gain them from being forced to replay the same forest dungeon over and over again? Of course, players could also opt to gain experience points here, and that’s a valid option as well. Enemies will still scale up, of course, but giving the characters more levels means they have more MP and can cast their abilities more often. It’s probably the only real reason to level up.

It’s a small miracle the developers didn’t decide to make MP cost also scale up with each level, meaning the characters would only be able to cast their abilities a set number of times no matter how powerful they get. Final Fantasy XIV used to do that until they just gave everyone 10000 MP no matter what their level is, and it was a bit disappointing at first to see my MP increase but to not be able to shoot more fireballs with it.

Speaking of abilities, Jian finally has access to magic, but not only does it cost the same for him as it does for Gabryel and did for Rufus (10 MP, and he only has a little over 40 at level 30), he has to equip a specific ring in order to cast even one of his spells. This is so very different from prior games that it just adds to my theory that the developers were acting with hostility towards players. I wonder if this is somehow revenge for years of fans asking if there was ever going to be a third Lunar game.

Fortunately, the spell he gains is a fire spell that hits all enemies and the next dungeon is the White Dragon Cave, which leans heavily into the ice element in this game, to the point where stalactites fall from the ceiling and nearly everything dies from one blast of fire magic. (I want to say they’re just icicles, but they’re pretty thick and the proper term is actually stalactite when you’re in a cave.) Still, he can only cast his fire spell four times before he’s tapped out and has to recharge. Yes, he regenerates HP and MP when the enemies are all cleared out of a room while in Virtue Mode, but as has been covered before, he doesn’t gain it all back, so in the next room, he’ll only have one charge of fire magic, two if he’s lucky. He can’t even regenerate MP during battle, that requires him to wear a ring and he’ll already be wearing the one that enables fire magic.

Given how fast battles are over when he casts his magic spell, though, it’s very much worth it to use some Mental Gum and Mental Drops and just plow through the cave. The run button costs exactly the same amount of HP now as it does at the start of the game and the party has a lot more now than they did at the start of the game. Most of it will replenish after everything’s defeated anyway, so by now it feels rather pointless to hurt the player when they try to run.

The White Dragon, of course, is discovered within the White Dragon Cave, and Jian pleads with him to offer a way to become Dragonmaster without having to defeat the dragons. Jian is just like Captain America here, he doesn’t want to kill the dragons. Or better yet, he’s like Captain Picard in Star Trek: Nemesis when he tries to get Shinzon to stop his attack and Picard points out he’s not pleading for his own life, he’s pleading for Shinzon’s. Here, Jian is pleading for the lives of the dragons, but this seems to be the only way. The dragons know that Ignatius will be angry if he can determine that they deliberately conspired against him to replace him with a new Dragonmaster, so they need to act like their hands were forced. Talons were forced? Paws were forced?

English sure is a very human-centric language.

The White Dragon assures Jian that the dragons won’t actually be ending their lives when they’re defeated, this is just how they’re giving their magic to him. They won’t actually disappear from the world.

One thing players will likely notice by now, the version of the dragons in Lunar: Dragon Song are different than the version of the dragons as they appear in the previous two games. None of them have names, but the Red Dragon looked a bit like a phoenix. The White Dragon takes the form of a white tiger with wings. These two dragons represent two of the Four Auspicious Beasts in Chinese mythology. The Red Dragon’s Beast is known as Suzaku in Japanese and is a popular figure in many video games, including some that I will be covering in future Final Fantasy Retrospective articles. The White Dragon’s Beast is known as Byakko in Japanese and often appears alongside Suzaku and the other Auspices.

After defeating the White Dragon in battle, Jian gains the White Dragon’s power and finds out the Trial was a bit of a mind game. The White Dragon lied to him and said that the Trial was merely to take the Sacred Stone to Delrich Temple, but left one very important clue in his words: he doesn’t know that he trusts Jian to not become like Ignatius. This led Jian to want to prove to the dragon that he’ll be a better Dragonmaster than Ignatius by showing that he’s willing to defeat the dragon in battle, because he has someone he loves and he wants to become a Dragonmaster in order to save and protect her.

Yes, I did say a moment ago that he didn’t want to fight the White Dragon, but as soon as the White Dragon told Jian that he wasn’t actually in mortal danger, I guess that went out the window.

Just like with the Red Dragon, the White Dragon rolls over and takes it from Jian in battle – at least, he did for me – and thus two of the four Trials are complete. The White Dragon also saw Jian’s pure heart in battle, meaning he now trusts Jian completely and offers his power. Hopefully he wasn’t lying about not truly disappearing.

Despite the White Dragon Cave having an ice motif, the dragon himself is a lightning elemental, according to his card, and the spell he gives Jian is Wind Cutter.

Thanks to the game’s party chat feature, Jian reveals that their next destination is the Meryod Cave that leads to the continent of Ghulian, where the next two dragons live.

At first, it seems like the idea to plow through the rest of the game with Jian’s magic might seem sound, but unfortunately, the player’s supply of Mental Gum and Mental Drops is limited, since these can’t be purchased in shops. It’s just another way in which the developers decided to make things more difficult for the player for absolutely no reason.

There is only one renewable way to replenish MP, and that is to use specific cards. The Gloomwing card replenishes MP for a brief period, and there’s usually enough time to accumulate MP and still prevent enemies from respawning. Hellbirds drop a card that fully restores the party’s MP, but can only be used ten times before the card is used up and must be replaced with another one.

The Meryod Cave is divided into two destinations on the world map, with an Althena statue in between, a small mercy for a party with limited MP regeneration available to them. Jian can go back to the statue every time he’s out of Inferno charges without resetting the second half of the cave. Players who level up a bit will earn a fifth charge of Inferno around level 37 or so.

On the other side of the Meryod Cave, Jian and his friends find themselves in the city of Noapeace, finally giving the party a chance to upgrade gear. Flora will especially benefit, as she’s been getting left behind by the game’s blue chests, and also because the weapon shop contains massive upgrades for her, whereas the best weapons available at the shop for Jian and Gabryel in Noapeace have already been dropped by chests found along the way.

Now that the party has made it to Noapeace, they find out that they can go back to their home continent by ferry, since it’s only just now been added to the list of ferry destinations by Beast King Zethos. Great, all Jian had to do was wait a day or two and he would’ve been able to sail to Noapeace instead of travel through a pair of dungeons.

Noapeace is just a stopping point as Jian gradually works his way towards the next Trial. Next on the list of destinations is the Valley of Neza, where the very first blue chest contains a bow upgrade for Flora that’s even better than the bows available at the shop in Noapeace. There’s also a blue chest that contains a Clear Ring and this illustrates an issue I have with how Jian is expected to use his magic. The Clear Ring prevents silence and confusion, but if he’s supposed to equip a ring to use any of his spells, he can’t equip the Clear Ring to keep from being prevented from casting his magic. There’s no point for him to equip the Clear Ring because then he can’t cast his spells anyway.

The Clear Ring is probably meant for Flora, since she’s the only character who has a wide variety of spells at this point in the game and who can use those spells without needing to equip anything extra. It’s less useful for Gabryel since enemies in the Valley of Neza require at least two blasts of Gale Cut to die, occasionally more, and she needs to reach around level 38 or so to have enough MP to cast it seven times.

The Black Dragon Cave is open when the party approaches. Thankfully they don’t need to solve any puzzles. Inside, though, the cave is dark and players can only see a limited radius around the characters. Not only that, but it’s a dungeon with multiple floors and multiple ways to transition between floors. Players can fall down holes and utilize ladders, and yet the Black Dragon is hiding at the far side of the main floor. Players don’t really need to explore the lower floors, since there’s only one blue chest in the entire dungeon.

The Black Dragon claims to be the embodiment of all Jian sees as evil, but is in the form of the tortoise Genbu who often appears alongside Byakko and Suzaku in video games. The fight itself is a two stage battle, with the first stage being against the Black Dragon and the second stage against a dark version of Jian. Buffs reset between phases, so players would need to reapply card buffs first. Unlike prior Trials, the Black Dragon and especially Dark Jian both put up quite a fight. Dark Jian possesses Jian’s three hit combo and speed, which can be rather dangerous to a party member if he focuses one down. Flora won’t know to heal until the next round, and by the time she’s allowed to, she or her unfortunate ally might already be dead.

The lesson the Black Dragon is trying to teach is that everyone has evil inside of themselves and must fight it and keep it at bay in order to make the world a better place. Ignatius clearly did not take that lesson to heart. Either that, or Ignatius’s Trial was different and Jian’s was developed in response to the life choices Ignatius made.

One of the best things about the holes and the multi-floor dungeon the Black Dragon lives in is that it’s actually pretty easy for Jian to make his way back to the entrance by falling down a couple holes and climbing back up, because the ladders take him directly to the entrance. It might be intended to feel like a punishment for players trying to find the right holes to fall down in order to find the cave’s hidden treasures, but it really helps players to exit the dungeon quickly.

Beating the Black Dragon earns the Lunar Quake, which despite its name, is actually an earth magic attack that also hits airborne enemies. The game is sadistic but thankfully not quite that sadistic.

On the way to visiting the Blue Dragon Cave, the party has to travel through the Moto Rainforest, but can return to Noapeace first to replenish their HP and MP. In Moto Rainforest, many enemies can require at least three blasts of Gale Cut to defeat them, so Gabryel taps out fairly quickly here. Fortunately, Jian’s power is still enough to take out most enemies in one hit with one of his magic attacks.

There’s a weapon for Gabryel in a blue chest that offers the chance to double her damage, and this pertains to Gale Cut, too. Some enemies will take double damage from it, putting it almost on par with one of Jian’s spells and making battle significantly less tedious, but the extra damage does’t always happen.

Rebric Village breaks up the Moto Rainforest and offers a place to regain MP, but there are no more Althena statues through the rest of the Moto Rainforest and the Blue Dragon Cave. The good news for the party is that a Magic Booster can be found. It’s bad news for Jian, of course, he’ll never be able to use it, but Gabryel can equip it to reduce the cost of Gale Cut down to 3MP. Suddenly, she can go from almost 8 casts of the spell to over 25. Despite her lower damage compared to Jian, she can now cast it so many more times on large packs of enemies. It’s at this point that players will feel like they no longer have to manage her MP.

The Blue Dragon Cave requires players to find three “treasures” which seem to be nothing more than rocks in three different chambers, but once all three are collected, the way forward opens. Jian talks to the Blue Dragon (who actually takes the form of a dragon because there’s a dragon named Seiryu among the four Auspices), and now I’m reminded that I need to play the Blue Dragon games. The Blue Dragon has noted that the magic in the world is fading and he wants to pass along his power to someone worthy of the title of Dragonmaster. He wishes for Jian to take his Trial alone, and Jian will be granted wisdom. However, the battle is too much for Jian alone, and the Blue Dragon allows his friends to join in.

I wish I could say that the fight remained challenging, but the Blue Dragon rolled over and took it just like two of the other Dragons did. There are definitely mechanics to this fight but increasing damage output with cards seems to put the dragon into a defensive stance, like the other dragons.

After winning against the Blue Dragon, Gabryel points out that that in order to become the next true Dragonmaster, Jian must defeat the current one. This wasn’t how it worked in The Silver Star, but to be fair, most of the time, Dragonmasters rise up to fill a void and defend the world. Jian is arguably doing the same because Ignatius is not fulfilling his duty, but Ignatius is still the current Dragonmaster and now he’s going to have to be expected to defend his right to be one.

The Blue Dragon fades away and thus the barrier keeping Ignatius out of the Cathedral of Athena also fades. Ignatius can now reawaken the goddess so that he can take her power for himself, like he stated many, many hours prior.

It should be pointed out that at least half of the game’s run time up to now involves Jian taking the Trials. There have been literally no other plot points during this, no world building, nothing. Jian has arrived in a few different brand new cities between his first confrontation with Ignatius and the last of the four Trials and none of them have problems of their own to solve. There are grave issues with the game’s pacing. Everything from the start of the game to the first confrontation with Ignatius moves rather quickly, but then the same amount of time is given to Jian taking the four Trials. Instead of giving the player several things to do and maybe offering them some additional plot points to experience, maybe some people to rescue, the player is instead given a number of dungeons equal to the number of dungeons that covered literally the entire rest of the plot, and no context for them is offered other than to give the player lots of enemies to defeat.

In fact, you could argue that the game stopped being competently written after the tournament Jian took part in, when the game turned into nothing more than a delivery system for several dungeons in a row between actual plot points rather than opening up a dungeon whenever Jian needed to do something to drive the plot forward. Even Lufia & the Fortress of Doom paced itself much better than this game does and is a joy to play. Dragon Song is chores.

It seems to be a design philosophy games in the RPG genre have been adopting in recent years, especially ones developed in Japan, but longer experiences aren’t necessarily better unless there’s substance to the length. If there’s nothing to do except have your time wasted, it doesn’t help the game to be longer than necessary.

Now that the Trials have been completed, Jian knows it’s only a matter of time before Ignatius succeeds in his plan to rule the world and resolves to rush back to Vile Castle to stop him before it’s too late.

For some reason, enemies have respawned in the main cave but not in the side caves, but that’s okay. Jian can switch to earning item drops here if he wants, and it’s probably time to address them a bit more. It’s often unintuitive which enemies drop which items, and there’s no way to look that information up in the game itself. This is a bit of a weakness, as even Dragon Quest was starting to offer this information by the eighth game. To be fair, Dragon Quest VIII tried to make item drops make sense, and there have been games that have had item drops that were just as nuts as what’s found in Lunar: Dragon Song. Final Fantasy VIII had enemies that could drop entire jet engines, for example.

In fact, I often think about this game as the Final Fantasy VIII of the Lunar series, in that it sort of feels like Dragon Song is what an eighth Lunar game might look like if they had bothered to develop games three through seven. And yet if they had, they would’ve probably done a better job pacing this game and making its systems make more sense overall, as they would’ve already known what works and what doesn’t, and they wouldn’t have put systems in place that actively punish the player and draw the game out longer than necessary. There’s so little substance to the second half of the game that at least ten hours could’ve easily been trimmed out of it and nothing of value would’ve been lost.

Getting back to this game’s loot, some of it makes sense. Snail’s Shell will drop from snail-like enemies, and that makes sense. Amazing Frying Pans can also drop in the same battle, which makes less sense. Mermaid’s Scales make sense in the Blue Dragon Cave, for it’s a water-based dungeon. Engines can also drop there (among other places) and make less sense because you’d think they wouldn’t do well in an environment that’s far too moist and might make them rust.

If you want to check on what you have, the list of loot dropped from enemies is actually divided into six categories, which makes it a bit of a chore to look up what you have. Metal, Life, Natural (which is somehow different from Life), Ornament, Daily and Food. The distinctions between categories can be vague at first glance, so if you want to check and see how your Beast’s Horn supply is coming along, you might look in Natural and not see them there because you actually have to look in Life. Life, it turns out, pertains not to life in general but to sentient life. Natural pertains to items found in nature but which aren’t sentient as Earth classifies them, so your Wood, Dried Grass, Acorn, Morning Dew and so on. Life, meanwhile, is where various bones, horns, tails cruelly cut off from animals, and so on, can be found. Note that the world of Lunar would stick Wood and probably Acorns in Life due to the presence of sentient trees that attack the party in several of the dungeons. Sun Rays don’t count as Life (the sun isn’t sentient, of course), but also doesn’t fall under Natural either. The sun itself isn’t trying to kill Jian, as this isn’t a Super Mario game. It turns out that they count as Metal, along with items like Clay, Crystal and Ether. Actual metals such as Steel, Copper and Iron exist in this category to round things out, but good luck trying to figure out that Sun Rays, Crystals and Clay are found here, too.

Ornaments, as close as I can describe them, are various items that can be displayed by collectors, whether they have value or not. Items like Wooden Dolls, Expensive Plates (random enemies carry dinnerware around, for some strange reason), Bottle Ships (random enemies carry ships in bottles around, for some strange reason), and Rusty Kettles (not kettles owned by squirrels named Rusty, kettles that are pretty much ruined by rust and yet they’re apparently still desirable) count as Ornaments. Daily pertains to items that seem to have a daily use for anyone who owns them. These are your Magnets, your Amazing Frying Pans and Engines, your Hand Mirrors, Magic Hats, Hugging Pillows (basically just a body pillow), Magic Hats, and so on. This category also includes Caltrops, because I guess people need to blow out tires on a daily basis in the world of Lunar even though I don’t think cars exist there, and in comparison to our own world, where I think many people can go their entire lives without thinking, “I wish I had tiny metal spikes in my pocket so that I could shred some tires right about now, that would solve most of my immediate problems.” The category also includes Light Feathers, which you’d think would’ve belonged in the Life category with the Bird Feathers, but I guess I don’t know anything about plumage at all. This actually suggests to me that the item was likely not translated properly, which would be par for the course in the Lunar series, honestly. Just because Working Designs doesn’t translate these any more, it doesn’t mean that errors don’t creep in.

You would think that bottles of Perfume count as Daily items, but they actually count as Ornaments. Why smell pretty when you can show off to your guy friends that you could smell pretty if you wanted to but instead you smell like utter shit on purpose, just like the rest of them?

By the way, speaking of strange translation choices, the icon for Rusty Kettles in the game’s menu looks less like a kettle and more like the scythe that a Grim Reaper would use.

The last category is Food, which includes stuff like Honey, Wine and Chocolate. Like, literally an entire processed chocolate bar drops from enemies in this game. Granted, this isn’t the only game I’ve ever played which featured enemies dropping chocolate bars once defeated, but at least it was a healing item there. Many games will drop healing items from weak enemies to offer players a bit of an easier time grinding for experience within the first few hours of hitting Start. Here, the chocolate is just random loot that needs to be collected in order to make deliveries. The least they could’ve done is find a way to make the chocolate make sense. Honey can drop from bees, yes, but why does a chocolate bar drop?

For a lot of these items, players will have to look up on-line in order to find out where they can be found because otherwise it’s not obvious, especially when the item in question is a rare drop and the random number generator just refuses to generate the number that tells the game that it’s time to let another Beast’s Horn drop into the player’s inventory. Players might think that they don’t drop from where they’re farming and move on to look elsewhere. What’s worse is that, when the random number generator tells the game that it’s time for an enemy to steal an item, it’s almost always one of the rare items that the player is trying to grind for in order to make a delivery. Many deliveries require rare drops before they can be completed, so it can feel like yet another slap in the face and waste of your time when you need just one more Cow Bone and then an enemy steals one from your inventory and leaves the 99 Whiskers you have alone.

Sometimes an item only drops from one enemy in one dungeon in the entire game, so it’s probably better to just ignore any delivery that calls for the item if you don’t have enough of them. Half of the time spent in any Gad’s Express consists of talking to the clerk over and over to try to reset the deliveries and find one that won’t require a lot of grinding to finish filling out the list.

Nearly every village in the game has a Gad’s Express, including Rebric Village, where Jian returns in order to ask around and see if he can find out how to get to Vile Castle as quickly as possible. The game, which has drawn out everything as long as it possibly could, is now pretending that there’s any kind of urgency to Jian’s mission and attempting to gaslight the player into forgetting about all of the various ways in which it has wasted time.

Back in Rebric, Jian finds out from talking to everyone again, that an inventor named Kirlis is building a flying machine. You’d think that airships wouldn’t have much use in a world where there isn’t any overworld travel, but Final Fantasy X and its sequel let players select every destination in the game from a menu while on the airship, so there is a precedent already set.

This is where players might feel completely lost, not knowing where to go and what to do, but when they first arrive at Rebric, they will have encountered a fork in the path in the Moto Rainforest. If they go down the other path, they find themselves at the Tower of Kirlis. They might even have found themselves there prior to arriving at Rebric, and it’s entirely possible the developers took it for granted that players would venture down both paths, fully exploring this part of the Moto Rainforest, before going through Rebric and towards the Blue Dragon Cave.

The Tower of Kirlis is a maze that attempts to be confusing, full of stairs and elevators that love to double back on one another, but there aren’t enough of them to truly make the tower a chore to navigate, and eventually the party finds Kirlis in his lab. He’s surprised to see visitors, which is probably due in part to his tower being built the way it was. However, he refuses to talk to the party because they didn’t bring him a present first.

It turns out that there is another piece of information that can be harder to find in Rebric, and it requires the player to tell someone who asks him if he knows about the Blue Dragon Cave to say no, despite having already fully explored it. The man then tells the player about a special stone flower and suggests that Kirlis wants it. This is annoying because players may have already noticed the flower prior to leaving the Blue Dragon Cave but they weren’t allowed to take it then. They are allowed to grab the stone flower after talking to the man and before going to the Tower of Kirlis, but apparently players are only allowed to break some of the sequence, they’re still required to repeat the dungeon.

This is exactly what I was talking about earlier, the game tries to gaslight the player into not looking at all of the ways in which it pads its time while inventing more ways to do so.

It’s therefore a small mercy afforded the player that the Tower of Kirlis is built so that there’s a shortcut up from the bottom floor to Kirlis’s lab. Kirlis accepts the stone flower and then brags about his brand new airship. However, he also confesses it won’t be able to fly right away because he requires a Levitation Stone.

Well, that’s not fully accurate to say. He has a Levitation Stone already. He requires a second Levitation Stone because they work in pairs, but are ineffective otherwise. At first glance, this sounds like the game attempting to waste the player’s time some more, but this is actually exactly what the last fifteen or so hours of the game needed! It’s okay to give the players side goals to accomplish in order to further the main goal! Don’t just make the main goal require ten dungeons to accomplish four things! Make the dungeons make sense!

The other Levitation Stone can be found in a place called the Negri Ocean Lab, and so despite the urgency of their mission, Jian heads to the lab to see what he can find.

Or tries to, anyway. At first glance, there’s no indication in the game of where it is, party chat is not helpful at all, no one in Rebric offers any information and Kirlis doesn’t state where to find it either. Noapeace is similarly bereft of information.

I know that many players criticize both early Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy games for their lack of information, but even then, there’s almost always hints the player can find that tell them where to go, there’s usually also physical restrictions from straying too far away from where the player is expected to be early on, and there’s some sort of fast travel option available later in the game to make scouring the world for clues much easier.

Dragon Song is not built like this, though. With mandatory dungeons that block the way making backtracking to some of the towns and villages take longer than it should, it makes searching for clues much more tedious than it has any right to be.

What turns out to be the case is that the Negri Ocean Lab quietly unlocks near Port Olbeage and players are just expected to search around until they find it in one of the menus.

The main thing that sticks out about the Negri Ocean Lab is that there are plenty of small rooms, some of which spawn about one or two enemies at a time and some of which spawn them all. They all require defeating anywhere between five to seven enemies to clear each of them in Virtue Mode. There’s no real benefit to this since there’s only one blue chest in the entire Lab. The rooms are also small enough that players can see they don’t need to kill everything.

The way forward requires a lot of backtracking to find all of the levers Jian needs to pull, but eventually the Levitation Stone is found. With the second Levitation Stone, Jian can return to Kirlis and he is given free and unlimited use of the airship now that it’s finished. Kirlis has heard that Jian is trying to save the world, so the inventor wishes to be of help.

Jian once again tries to leave Gabryel and Flora behind, for he’s worried about their safety, but they’ve been more than capable of keeping up with him all this time. There’s no reason not to take them to the Frontier to defeat Ignatius once and for all. Besides, Cecil wasn’t alone at the end, and there’s no reason for Jian to be.

Sure enough, just like in Final Fantasy X, the airship allows Jian to go to any town in the game as well as Vile Castle. Since there aren’t any side quests other than deliveries, and the only reason to do deliveries is to afford equipment, players don’t really have anything to do but head to Vile Castle and run full speed ahead towards the end of the game.

If players wish, they can hold back and attempt to level up some more, but there’s not a lot of reason to, other than to try to get as much maximum MP as possible. By the time Jian’s in his mid 60s, level-wise, he’ll finally be able to cast a spell eight times before he needs to replenish his MP. Gabryel, of course, no longer has to think about her MP, thanks to the accessory she found earlier.

In Ignatius’s grand hall, Jian meets up with Rufus’s murderer, Gideon, and decides that his quest to rescue Lucia can be placed on hold for just a moment, because it’s time for some revenge.

Gideon does hit hard and actually puts up a fight, but players likely saved up their cards, which makes him a bit of a pushover. As I suggested before, the card system basically makes boss fights trivial.

The rest of Vile Castle consists of four towers that take the form of dungeons Jian’s been to before, and he must kill everything in Virtue Mode in order to progress. Saving is disabled while inside each illusory dungeon, and there are enemies that can break gear, so it can be a bit annoying to fight in here, especially if one’s Termite card is running low on points.

Requiring these illusory dungeons to be cleared out illustrates another aspect of the game quite well. Since the party will never progress to the point where they’re reasonably stronger than the enemies they face except by wearing stronger equipment, there’s little incentive to level up other than to gain extra casts of their spells, but Jian and Gabryel’s spells are so expensive and their MP growth so slow, it takes nine levels or so to accumulate enough MP to cast their spells one more time. There’s very little actual sense of progression in this game, and making these dungeons require Virtue Mode to clear forces the characters to level up and gives the illusion of progress.

It’s rather fitting for dungeons which are also illusions.

This is also what unlocking blue chests does. It forces players to gain levels that they might not otherwise try to gain, so the grinding necessary for Jian to be able to cast Inferno more than two or three times doesn’t feel like grinding at all.

The way to the Chamber of Rebirth has been unlocked and, wait a minute. Wasn’t the Chamber of Rebirth supposed to be in the Cathedral of Althena? What’s it doing in Vile Castle? What was the purpose of the dragons protecting the Cathedral of Althena, then?

It also turns out that Gideon isn’t dead, and he attacks the party again. Just like before, thanks to the use of cards, he’s basically a punching bag that fights back a little bit.

Inside the Chamber of Rebirth, there’s an Althena statue, so the party can restore their health. Jian confronts Ignatius and-

Oh, sorry, one moment, Gideon’s back for a third attempt to defeat the party. He just doesn’t know when to give up. This final battle with Ignatius’s strongest ally is presumably the toughest, but after a few party buffs, and after debuffing Gideon a bit, you could say winning just isn’t in the cards for him.

“Now, hold on,” you may be thinking. “Why is Gideon the multi-phase boss fight? Shouldn’t that honour belong to Ignatius, the final boss of the game, whom Jian needs to defeat in combat in order to become the world’s true Dragonmaster?” I’m glad you pointed that out! When Ignatius reveals himself to the party, he brings with him a reawakened Goddess Althena, and she does not remember her friends at all. Well, she wouldn’t remember Flora, of course, but she takes a stern tone with Jian and Gabryel, threatening them with harm if they don’t leave her sanctuary.

During the confrontation, Ignatius attempts to convince Jian that the love he has for Lucia is selfish and in response, Jian does the only logical thing.

…he attempts to give up the rings he got from the dragons. Ignatius points out, though, that nothing Jian does will change the fact that he’s a Dragonmaster. Jian passed the Trials and earned the dragons’ favour. So when giving up the rings doesn’t work, Jian attempts to get Ignatius to kill him, declaring that it actually doesn’t matter if one of them defeats the other, it just perpetuates hatred.

Yeah, this conversation goes places. I’m trying to summarize it as best I can, but honestly, it’s nuts. Jian then confronts Ignatius with the notion that Ignatius is afraid of himself. Ignatius grows tired of dialogue and tries to finish the hero off, but Althena suddenly shields him with her body. The mind control Ignatius had put Althena under has been defeated by the conviction of Jian’s spirit.

Interestingly, even though she’s freed from his control, this time Althena begs Jian to spare Ignatius’s life. It’s a reversal of the scene from about halfway through the game, when Althena begs Ignatius to spare Jian’s life, and it would’ve been nice if this was her way of indicating that Jian is now the more powerful of the two Dragonmasters, but this is an unfortunately lost opportunity. She also reaffirms that the world doesn’t need her any more, that the world should be ruled by its people. Except she’s about a thousand years too early for this, since she still exists in the time of The Silver Star.

Althena fades away and Ignatius attacks the party once more, restraining Flora, but the building just randomly starts to crumble due to the release of Althena’s power and Ignatius loses his magical hold on her. Despite both wanting Ignatius to kill him and wanting to defeat Ignatius at different points in the same conversation, Jian desperately grabs Ignatius before he can fall, but Ignatius slaps Jian’s hands away and falls to his death. With Althena gone, the Cathedral of Althena is starting to crumble around them.

In other words, the reason the Chamber of Rebirth is accessible in Vile Castle is because there seems to exist a teleport between Vile Castle and the Cathedral of Althena, and this entire scene actually plays out in the Cathedral. This explains why it was so easy for Ignatius to attack the Cathedral but begs the question: why wasn’t the teleport destroyed long ago? Didn’t anyone foresee its use by the Vile Tribe as a possibility? Or was this the way in which heretics and other undesirables were banished to the Frontier, so many years ago?

The party flees the Cathedral to avoid sharing Ignatius’s fate.

Suddenly, the scene shifts to a couple of NPCs in the world of Lunar who briefly discuss the ending and reveal that Althena has been reborn as Lucia once more, that she didn’t actually fade away when she released her power. And the credits roll.

I’m serious. This is where the credits roll, the game is now over. Ignatius was never the final boss. Thanks to a bit of a bait and switch, that honour actually belongs to Gideon. Instead, Ignatius dies a very Gaston death after the game builds him up to be the ultimate bad guy that Jian needs to vanquish. Althena declares that the world doesn’t need her but then returns anyway and is still around by the time Alex starts his journey to be a Dragonmaster. All the people of the world, including the Vile Tribe, are encouraged to co-exist, although by the time of The Silver Star, the Vile Tribe are still ostracized. It’s like the writers had an ending in mind but were struggling against the canon of the series and had to compromise a little.

Not only that, but many of the major story beats that are there are similar enough to The Silver Star that it makes you wonder what the point of making this game even was, other than money. Between a bare bones story that’s still derivative of what came before in the series and the numerous dungeons designed to use up as much of the players’ time as possible, this is basically the The After Years of the Lunar series.

And yet, with how closely they tried to ape The Silver Star in the structure of its story, they clearly didn’t understand the game. While it’s true that the canon events of The Silver Star differ between versions, there are still clear ways in which Dragon Song contradicts or causes problems with the overall canon of the series. For example, The Silver Star leads players to assume the Vile Tribe began about five hundred years prior to the game, but does that mean there’s a different Vile Tribe in Dragon Song that still somehow exists in the Frontier, full of undesirables who can’t co-exist with society? Or did they get reintegrated into society, only to be banished again at the point in time when The Silver Star said they were, and they existed all along?

Another example can be found in Vane, explores its status as a floating island, and the events which it reveals to the player seem to have happened at roughly the same time as Dragon Song. The thing is, Vane doesn’t exist in Dragon Song, but even if you consider that Vane could be the Cathedral of Althena with a name change, the Cathedral seems to have been destroyed at the end of the game, and the great flood that necessitated Vane’s levitation would’ve required Althena to be Althena and not Lucia.

I don’t know if this matters in the long run, because the different versions of The Silver Star are deliberately told differently to suggest that no one tells the same story in the same way, so since the series canon already has a rather fluid reputation, it’s possible that Dragon Song doesn’t necessarily contradict the rest of the series on purpose. The story is disappointing enough as it is, it’d just get worse if compared to the other two Lunar games.

Dragon Song may have intended for the Gideon fight to feel personal to the player, but Rufus hadn’t been in the party for very long before getting murdered, and he both joined and left not long after Lucia was taken. Players would be too focused on Lucia to care about Rufus. Then, after the game went to great lengths to draw things out and use up as much of the player’s time as possible, it’s hilarious that the ending is rushed. Ignatius dying in a cutscene right after fighting Gideon three times, then the game pushing the end credits out mere moments later very much feels like the game trying to keep its players from thinking about this too much.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a video game story that carries more personal stakes for a player. I’ve played games where the world doesn’t need saving, the only goal is for the main character to get better at alchemy. I’ve played games where the player is only expected to deliver one single continent in the world from evil. There are also entire genres of games where the sole purpose of them is to get the main character a girlfriend (or boyfriend… or several).

Dragon Song carries no real stakes for the world. Dragonmaster Ignatius wants to rule it with Althena’s magic, but while this is clearly an abuse of power and of the position of Dragonmaster, I don’t think we ever get the sense that he’s actually evil. The Vile Tribe attacks the Cathedral of Althena, but we don’t see them attack anywhere else even though the game claims that they frequently do so. He staged the kidnapping of Althena and put her under mind control in order to take her power, but he never actually succeeds in doing anything with the power. He even dies an embarrassing and ignoble death! He’s probably even less proactive and effective a villain than the least proactive villains in the Dragon Quest series. He claims that he wants to lead the world to paradise, but we never get a sense for why this is a bad thing for the world.

Instead, it would probably have been better if the stakes had remained low, if the main reason for Jian’s adventure ended up being to rescue Lucia. Jian starts out with no goal other than adventure, and that’s perfectly fine. Even The Silver Star had the characters’ motivations be entirely self serving until circumstances demanded they save the world. Here, the Vile Tribe are talked up as this huge threat to the world, but not much is actually done with them.

And then the rug pull at the end, where we’re made to believe there’s still one more boss fight to go, only for it to be taken away from us in a cutscene? It makes the ending feel disappointing and yet also a bit of a relief, since the game’s over sooner. It’s funny how most of the game feels like a waste of time, but when the game cuts and runs without delivering a proper ending, it still feels like we got cheated somehow.

Now that I’ve experienced the game again, I feel the need to address a complaint I had when I first played this game more than a decade ago. In my original review, I claimed that the game’s text was not properly formatted to the screen, but replaying it for this retrospective article, I only found one instance of that in the entire game. I don’t know if it’s due to the emulator that I used in order to take screen shots somehow making the game’s text work properly or if my memory was wrong, but I don’t feel like playing the game again on the original hardware, because I’d rather not torture myself all over again, so soon after writing this. The opening few minutes contained properly formatted text when I did dig out my physical copy of the game to check, so that’ll have to be good enough for me. This is a complaint that I’ll have to retract.

I will say that, despite Victor Ireland not being let anywhere near this game, the translation is far from perfect. At least there aren’t any out-of-place pop culture references, but in their place, the text can often sound strange and disjointed. I mentioned frequent typos in my original review and I took screen shots of some while writing this article, but there weren’t as many as I’d thought there were. It’s probably on par with the number of typos you typically get in a mass market paperback novel. Most of the typos pass a spell check, they’re just not the correct words for the situation.

I want to say that this game could’ve been great, but it would require an overhaul in a number of areas. Its writing, its pacing, its world design, its music, its battle system… this game is just not good. The only reason Lunar isn’t a completely tragic tale of a series murdered by the company that owns it is because they keep going back and remaking The Silver Star rather than trying something new again. And by remake, I mostly mean they take everything and put it on a newer system, thankfully without removing any of the gameplay mechanics that made the game great in the first place. After they modified The Silver Star heavily from its original Sega CD version, the modified version has been the one they’ve based every other version off of. They did not at any point try to change the game to be more like Dragon Song, and that in itself is a small miracle.

In the end, Dragon Song should be left forgotten in a bin somewhere, a game that might at one point have been a good idea, but which was stuffed full of so many bad ideas that it’s impossible to recommend anyone play it. Stick with the first two games and pretend the series ended there.

 

Screen shots generated by the author; the crosshairs in each shot were added by the emulator and are not present in the original game