Despite owning Boktai for well over a year, I’ve never actually played it. I could chalk that up to backlogs, but the main problem was that damn sun-sensor. It’s daunting. Now, I could go on as to why I never gave Boktai a chance, but that’s not really the point.
Lunar Knights, which I keep mistakenly calling Solar Knights, is an action RPG with heavy emphasis on resource management. Not only is your inventory limited, but many items ‘rot’ over time, making them useless or less effective. Once in a while it seems my chocolate bars will turn into Wonderballsâ„¢ and I’ll get a cool item from within. But usually, rotten food sucks. Besides your items, you’ll have to manage both characters’ Life and Energy gauges. Life is simple enough. Use potions and food to recover. Energy, though, is a tad more complicated. The gunman, Django, cannot attack without expending energy. Sabata, the swordsman, can but his damage increases much by aligning his attacks with an element. This alignment makes each attack cost energy. When Django is under the sun, and Sabata the moon, they will slowly regain energy. Holding down A will let you suck in energy faster.
The problem, besides the fact that the moon and sun slowly change phases and you’ll need to swap between the two frequently, is that being indoors or under a cloudy sky will interfere with your energy sucking needs. Thankfully there are items to do the job, and enemies are fairly good about dropping them. But the resource management I spoke of still applies, and a lot of the dropped items will rot. I’ve had plenty of milk go sour in my inventory.
The game lets me control the weather to some degree, and this is even important for some optional puzzle solving. Unfortunately, to do this is such a pain in the ass to do that I never bother. To do it you have to go to a specific point on the world map and ask the climate to be changed. When you’re in the middle of a dungeon you can’t do jack all but leave the dungeon, go change it and come back. And sometimes there are more than one puzzle per dungeon. The one time I did do it, all I got was a generic healing item. Not worth the effort.
I’m fourteen hours in right now and the difficultly has been steadily increasing. The only part that has remained fairly easy is the shooting stages. Yeah, shooting stages. In the world of Lunar Knights, in order to purify the souls of vampires and get them to stay the fuck dead, you need to take them to outer space and have their asses annihilated. Via your stylus controlled spaceship you take out enemy ships by poking them and dodge by dragging the ship around. Fairly fun stuff but mostly hectic so far and not really challenging. The same place that lets you change the weather allows you to retry the stages for higher scores. I haven’t bothered yet, but I will say that these stages are more fun than the Gummi Ship catastrophe Kingdom Hearts housed.
There are a few things I didn’t talk about, such as upgrading weapons and buying accessories, but there’s nothing really special about doing that in Lunar Knights. The meat of the game is in its action RPG stages and resource management. And it’s damn fine.
