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Perhaps it is unnecessary to use Lunar: Dragon Song as my whipping boy once more. Perhaps the game has already suffered enough excoriation by me in both Q&A and the review of it on this site. Perhaps the points I seek to make using it is an obvious one. Perhaps these things are indeed so, but I will not be dissuaded from my task of the day. Lunar: Dragon Song illustrates very vividly how innovation, in and of itself, is not a beneficial aspect to an RPG.
The notion used in Dragon Song of losing HP while running is not entirely incomprehensible. Should a developer wish to introduce a bit of realism to a game, having characters start to lose HP after running for awhile could be a reasonable device. As used in this game, however, where running always costs HP at a steady rate and is in fact impossible if a party member is under 1/3 HP, the mechanic is incredibly repellent.
On its surface having the player be able to access certain chests only after all the enemies in an area are dead is not irredeemable. An occasional example of this in a title with visible enemies could satiate the blood lust of those who like to destroy everything in sight. Lunar: Dragon Song does it badly though: not only is the gambit far too common with the chests frequently being hard to spot (leading to the player killing everything just about all the time to gain whatever might be in the area), but the enemies will also respawn if too much time passes. In many instances the field is too big to navigate comfortably and/or enemies will run someplace inaccessible.
Not too long ago I espoused the notion of having enemies drop items instead of money in another editorial, and I still hold to that. Lunar: Dragon Song illustrates very well how NOT to enact this concept, with enemies needing to be fought twice in order to garner both items and money. There is no reason whatsoever that enemies cannot drop both simultaneously, and the developers force extra combat upon the player by their chosen method of having two modes of combat that award one or the other. Also, making the items enemies drop be nearly worthless is a further annoyance. Completing the fetch quests that deliver useful sums of money to the party is incredibly time-consuming and dependent upon luck, for enemies can drop more than one item and are very loath to cough up exactly what is needed on cue in my experience.
The above excruciating tendencies of Lunar: Dragon Song I will grant the distinction of possibly working in another context, with developers who wanted to make them fun instead of tediously irritating. The game features two other features that I deem indefensible: random targeting in battle and enemies that randomly break weapons. The former is inexcusable for any reason, the latter might be appreciated by the more masochistic players in existence but not by me. Many things may be learned from the mess that Lunar: Dragon Song is, and most of them revolve around how NOT to change RPG conventions.
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