The Japanese sure love their combat systems. It can't be the same thing twice. They have to tweak it, already perfect or not. Lunar: Dragon Song didn't escape the tweaking. Gone is the strategic element to the battles. You don't get to select which monster to attack. You only select attack and it's up to the CPU to decide which creatures to attack. I'm clearly going to miss that, as it would prevent having the wrong characters attacking the wrong creatures. Being able to select the creatures minimizes the risk of death, and speeds the battles themselves along. We all know the standard Japanese RPG drill. Go out into the world, find creatures to fight, collect your items, experience, and silver. Build up, buy better weapons and armor and stock up on healing items and the like. Advance the story. Kill the badguy, and watch the credits. Hopefully enjoying the story and characters along the way. As far as the experience, items, and money work in L: DS, they tweaked all of it. In L: DS you fight creatures in one of two modes. In Combat Mode, you'll enter a dungeon and see the creatures walking around. You'll run into them to start a fight. Within the actual fight the combat plays out the same for either mode. You have your options for manual or automatic battle. Manual allows you to select attack, items, or magic. Automatic has the CPU allowing your characters and the creatures to just slug it out uninterrupted. You can regain manual control at any time with the push of a button. So after the fight in Combat Mode, you'll be rewarded with the spoils of battle. The spoils are in the form of items. Creature parts, food, natural items like spores, metals like lead, and a ton of other various items. That's it. You don't get any experience points, and you don't get any money. Just the items. The items go into your satchel, where you can hold up to 99 of each kind of item. You'll be needing them. If you want experience, you need to be fighting in Virtue Mode. You can shift between the two modes at anytime while walking around the dungeons and locations of the game with the R button. Switching to Virtue Mode and fighting a battle will reward your victory with experience points and nothing else. No items, no money. It's the only way you can level. There are other effects the two modes have on the game. In Combat Mode, your killing the creature removes it from your screen in the dungeon, and spawns it elsewhere in the dungeon. Allowing you to kill them again and get more items. Fighting battles in Virtue Mode removes the creature from the dungeon and doesn't respawn them elsewhere in the dungeon. Instead, you'll start a timer on the menu screen. The game takes place on the upper screen, and the menu screen stays in place while wandering around towns and dungeons. The battles use both screens. Also in the menu screen while wandering around the dungeon are a given number of boxes. One box per creature in that section of the dungeon. When you kill the creature sprite that represents the actual numerous creatures you fight in combat, you'll put a check in one of the boxes. You have roughly about a minute as the timer is now ticking away to find the next creature in that section of the dungeon. If you find the next one in time, you'll enter battle. Winning the battle earns you more experience, checks off that creature's box, and earns you another minute to find the next creature. Finding all the creatures in time will reward you with a free healing of thirty percent of your hit and magic points. It also opens the blue chests in that section of the dungeon. In the Lunar games there have always been colored chests you can't open without a trick. Usually it's a single key that allows you to go back through every dungeon in the entire game to open the locked chests you've been finding all along. L: DS sort of turns them into a combat minigame and allows for you to get their contents as you find them. If you aren't able to find the creature within the minute or so allowed, a box is unchecked and a creature is respawned back into the dungeon. That covers experience and items. That leaves money. Selling the items you get from the creatures isn't going to make you wealthy anytime soon. You need to work as a courier in the game to earn money. You'll go into a Gad's Express office in the game. There is one in every town. It will have a list of jobs delivering packages to people throughout the land. You can only accept one job at a time. This is where the items you're collecting off creatures come in handy. The jobs will have requests like bring me the items needed to make such and such a thing. The job will list off the items and how many you need to make whatever it is the person needs or wants. It will also list who you're supposed to deliver it to, and what town they're in. Every last NPC in the game is named for this purpose. You can look at your current job information at any time outside battle via the menus. You'll accept jobs based on already having the items needed or being sure you can go hunt them down. You'll take them to whoever it may be, and they'll give you a receipt which you'll take back to any Gad's Express office to claim your fee. If you accept a job and find yourself unable to complete it you'll be able to cancel the job for a cancellation fee. It's not small either. It's based on how much the reward offered is, so be sure you can complete it before accepting any jobs. The jobs are rated from one to five stars in difficulty. Some jobs only require from one to three of a single type of item. Others require dozens each of numerous different types of items. The rewards reflect the difficulty accordingly. That's how you'll make money to be able to upgrade your weapons and armor and afford those healing items, which coupled with time spent in Virtue mode gaining experience, will allow you to advance the story and see the game through. Seven and a half hours in, I'm pleasantly surprised to find myself liking this system. Hearing about it beforehand, I had my doubts. The question becomes will it last. Will I still be enjoying this system by the time the credits are rolling? There's only one way to find out...
Next time should cover a shrunken world for a handheld device.
No comments:
Post a Comment