Thursday 4 October 2007

Lunar Knights (DS)

Lunar Knights, an RPG from Kojima Productions (!), is apparently the spiritual successor to a game called "Boktai". I'm not ashamed to say that I'd never heard of Boktai before, I didn't have an advance back then and I hear it wasn't that popular, so when I bought Lunar Knights, as far as I knew it was a one off.
Lunar Knights is set in a realm where vampires, assisted by aliens, have taken over the world. Humans are either killed on sight, or taken to the capital city to be treated like cattle. You play the part of Lucian and Aaron, a somewhat reluctantly drawn together team of vampire hunters. Aaron has a gun which doesn't work at night, and Lucian has a sword that runs on demon cat (He's called Nero). Anyway, I'm not making this game sound very good, so let's skip to the first impressions.

My first impressions of the game were quite good. Plenty of anime-style video clips thrown in, well drawn sprites, I liked the characters, I even put the tiny free poster i got with the game up on my wall. It was genuienly enjoyable. Was.

The game is basically a series of dungeons crawls, often ending with a boss fight and seperated by a map screen. You get to switch between Lucian and Aaron, each one has his own fight style, strengths and weakneses, but they share experience points and an inventory, and since you can only play as one of them at a time (switch with the select button), they can both have the same equipment equiped. The dungeons can get a bit boring at times, but they are usually quite different from eachother, and the bosses are very different (ususally requiring you to switch characters at the right moments). After each boss fight is a stylus-controlled space battle, which are quite fast paced and fun.
You can unlock new weapons from doing certain missions, and after each boss battle you unlock a new 'Terrenial', which is basically an avatar that gives your attacks an elemental type. The weather can be changed at a lab that you can travel to between levels, and the levels, and the power of some armour and weapons, change depending on things like wind speed, temerature, rain, etc.
Some of the levels even have "Stealth Missions", where you have to run around withotu being seen to achieve some objective (you can blow into the mic. to make your character whistle. I'm looking at you, Hideo), and there are similar "Trap Missions", where you're locked in until you defeat everyone.

I think all this sounds quite good. Involving weather systems, different fight styles, magic, space fights, level variation (there's even a train level!)... But I don't like Lunar Knights. Last time I played it, I wanted to throw my DS at the wall and flush the game cartridge down the toilet. I didn't do those things, but I did rip the shitty little freebie poster off the wall.

The game starts off so easy, you think you've wasted your money on a children's game. This fear is increased when you realise your only friend is a talking, floating cat, and everyone's voice is so cheesy and innocent that it makes you want to cry. When you unlock Aaron, his floating friend is a sunflower, which was also pretty bad. The big nasty vampire bosses in their casket armour don't look tough at all -one even has a bowler hat and a beer belly, and rides around on a robot crab- and there are talking humanoid dogs and foxes rather frequently considering.
It's really hard to take the game seriously, and thus 'get into it', when everyone acts like they're from Wonker's chocolate factory. I mean, it is good that there are frequent video clips and are voices. It is. but they could have chosen some better voice actors, really. This is Kojima; they did Metal Gear. Surely they could get someone who doesn't talk like a moron or a child to work for them.

The two characters that you can eventually pick from are also a bit... undesirable. Lucian starts off pretty cool with his eyepatch and sword, but his "I'm only in this for myself even though I've clearly gained allies and friends" ideal starts to get a bit lame quite quickly once he meets Aaron. Aaron, on the other hand, is basically a red scarf brandishing child (with a slection of firearms). Unlike Lucian, who is actually very good at fighting, Aaron is almost impossible to play effectively as unless you use his Witch gun. From a choice of about 6 weapons, only having 1 that's actually any good is a bit of a let down.
Lucian uses a sword, but he does actually have 2 other weapons that can be obtained through side quests, qhich brings me onto my next point rather well: side quests. Lack of them.
Apparently there are 2 additional missions in each level for you to find and complete, but I got all the way to the end without seeing a single one. Hiding things like that too well means that most players are never going to experience how much the game has to offer. A rather poor oversight by Hideo there.

Okay, so once you get to the part of the game where you have both of your playable characters, then the game really kicks off. Actually, it doesn't, until the last level. The game is rather flat all the way through, with only very slighty increasing difficult levels.; it's not until the last level of the game where it suddenly becomes a challenge, and then it's almost impossible.
It seems like Hideo and his mates suddenly realised they'd made their 6 hour game too easy, because every enemy in the last level, unless you kite it, is either a far higher level than you, or else there's loads of them. you can't actually kite properly though, because enemies can only go a certain distance until they despawn and reappear where you encountered them. You are also suddenly expected to know how to 'counter' enemies, something you're not told about before, and there are pits everywhere (falling down a pit is game over; reset your DS time, even if your other character hasn't been "KO'd").

Final opinion: I don't have anything else to say about Lunar Knights. It's too easy and then it's too hard, it's embarrassing to play around other people because of the voices, Aaron sucks, and it's childish. Lucian's eyepatch jumps from between his eyes if you run left and then right. If you are able to go all the way through a level without having to bottle it and go back to the shop for more health packs, you are rewarded by getting to the boss fight only to find that you've been in the dungeon for 3 game days, and all your health fruit has gone wrotten and will poison you if you try and eat it. N1.
I don't recommend this game, unless you are 8 years old, and have enough time on your hands to level up your characters before the last area and find all the side-quests/ armour and weapons etc.

Cheapest I've found it: http://www.game.co.uk/ £15. Free delivery and you can use your £2.50 vouchers with your game card, if you have enough points.

http://www.konami.jp/gs/game/lunar_knights/america/index.html

Live-D

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