YMMV / Lunar: Dragon Song

• Anti-Climax Boss: For all buildup for Ignatius (having a Hopeless Boss Fight at one point), the final boss is actually not him, but one of his minions. Ignatius is instead shafted as a Cutscene Boss, and said cutscene involves him falling to death because the floor underneath him fell apart. The heroes didn't truly earn their victory against him, they just won with a stroke of luck. Pretty anti-climatic.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Lunar fans refuse to acknowledge this game as official part of the series. It's not particularly hard to do so, since this game has few continuity links to the other games and even what's present in the game is marred by Series Continuity Error. (Where is Althena's Sword? What happened to all the other Dragonmaster armors? Who knows, and who cares.) Compare this to Lunar: Walking School, another prequel that is also often considered an underwhelming installment but gets a pass for having the same spirit of and a fun Call-Forward to the previous Lunar games.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Running drains health. Combine this with a painfully slow walking speed, and players are torn between getting bored moving slowly from point A to point B, or going there quickly but having lower HP.
  • Some enemies can break your equipment. Not fun.
  • You can't choose which enemy you attack. The game has each character's AI choose their target instead, taking much of the strategy out of the player's hands. Word of God's excuse for this mechanic was that it would speed up combat- which is undermined by the game's battle animations being agonizingly slow.
  • Combat and Virtue modes, which boils down to having to choose between getting XP from a fight or items, doubling the amount of grinding required.
  • Jian eventually gets Dragon Magic, but all of the spells are tied to him wearing specific accessories, meaning you can only ever use one at a time and using one requires giving up any other accessory effects.
• Sequelitis: Most fans are in agreement that the game is an extremely poor follow-up to the games that preceded it, and just a badly designed, underwhelming game in general.
• Spoiled by the Format: Some optional Cards are based on post-transformation major characters and you can get them before you get a better look of them. This spoils Althena in her Goddess form and the last form of the final boss.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Unlike all the other games in the series, the Dragon Song soundtrack has no input from composer Noriyuki Iwadare. However, many of the songs are basically well-executed variations on songs Iwadare wrote for prior Lunar games.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: One major complaint with Dragon Song is that its story is a recycled version of Lunar: The Silver Star, but not as good. The childhood relationship between Jian and Lucia resembles that of Alex and Luna in some details (right down to Captain Obvious Reveal that the girl is a reincarnation of the Goddess Althena), and later plotline of Jian going through Dragon Trials by four dragons to become the Dragonmaster is nearly identical to Alex's trials. The Silver Star is accused of Cliché Storm but had strong writing, rich characterization, and decent voice acting and FMV cutscenes to overcome it. In contrast, Dragon Song has none of those and is further hurt by substandard English translation.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: One story element standing out from the previous games is a Fantastic Racism between humans and beastmen. In a better Lunar game, this could make an interesting (if Anvilicious) story. Unfortunately, it's as poorly written as the rest of Dragon Song, with most of the drama being minor NPC beastmen trash-talking on Jian, and nothing of interest comes out as the story moves on from it (the game's "Blind Idiot" Translation doesn't help). The only relevant outcome from it is that it adds depth to Gabryel, a beastwoman party member who rejects the idea of race superiority, but that's also quickly forgotten.

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