EmP's Lunar: Dragon Song review

A new EmP review, and for a game worth covering that no one on staff had yet covered with a staff review! I am exceedingly pleased.

In your text, you convincingly retread some valid points against this game here, points that you acknowledge that others have made (complaints I myself voiced at the time of the game's release, in a review for a different publication that I suspect almost no one actually read). You also explain why all of those issues matter, something that newer RPG gamers and sloppy developers should probably pay attention to when considering the value of JRPG staples. Some things are the way they are for a reason, folks!

Your "getting to know the uncompromisingly curmudgeonly EmP" bit at the beginning wasn't as entertaining for me as it might have been in the past because you've used something similar numerous times now, particularly when savaging a string of recent DS titles that you didn't fancy, but that's going to happen with anyone who reviews as often as you do. I find myself fighting to avoid falling into familiar bits, as well.

New readers won't notice the repetition, at least. Besides, it did feel appropriate in this case because of course the first question on my mind (honestly) as I started reading the review was: Why in the world would EmP hate himself enough to spend anything on such a horrible game? Now I know. And hey, you got a good review out of it. Bonus! Now sell the game to some unfortunate sucker who hasn't read your words of wisdom. >8D

What's next in your reviewing plans, anyway? Hopefully something that you'll actually enjoy playing. I know you like to seek out disappointment and such, but even curmudgeonly British men deserve gaming bliss on occasion!

Thanks for the feedback, Jason. This has been a half finished review sitting on my harddrive for a long, long time now (it was initially set to be a TT entry) and I'm currently making an effort to clear these unfinished reviews off my laptop so I can move on to my shiny new PC.

I think I went with the introduction because when I often review retrospectivly, the unanswered question seems to be "Why are you interested in reviewing this?" and expecting a bad game to be bad was the honest answer. I think we're all guilty of it: we hear a game is awful and we want to see for ourselves just how bad it is.

As for what's next, I don't know. There's a few things I want to finish off because having half finished things floating around annoys me, but I've enjoyed not writing anything for a month or so and playing games just because I want to play them. I intend to show for the alphas but past that, I hope taking a bit of time off will help me want to continue reviewing further.

That's kinda where I'm at right now, myself, Emp. I have an assigned game that will be reviewed either Tuesday or Wednesday and my Alpha game, but when it comes to less-crucial reviews, I'm struggling with writer's block. I played through the NES' Wacky Races about two weeks ago. I still haven't finished my review of it and what I have, while good enough to put up, isn't necessarily something that's up to my personal standards. I'm in one of those temporary modes where I'm finding it hard to motivate myself to write about random games I play on a whim. I can see my assigned game's review writing itself in my head....with this one, I can't see anything.