Happy New Year. Sorry to start on a 3/10 note but, well, this game… I’ve tried to have some fun with this review, at least, as playing the darn thing certainly didn’t yield any pleasure. I did toy with just doing a straight review but then I figured the text had better do something different otherwise when people scroll to the score after reading the first couple of lines of text then they’d probably not look back. Luckily I was playing the DS’s Phoenix Wright over the Christmas holidays and it’s unabashed, sparkling brilliance more than made up for the time lost to this game.

Lunar DS is a disastrous, ruinous game. It devolves every RPG convention to its lowest common denominator until all that is left is a primeval abortion of a videogame. It’s an embarrassment to its Lunar parents; its MUD ancestors are probably blushing zeros and ones that their DNA is scratching around anywhere near this touch-screen. Set 1,000 years before its predecessor, it feels like it was designed then too.

Its errors extend even to the choice of platform: The dual screen set-up exacerbates and highlights the game’s ill-conceived form, ill-presented format, witless dialogue and a litany of design choices made by a developer seemingly with eyes clenched shut, fingers entombed in mittens, hammering random, ugly, soulless code into a prehistoric keyboard.

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