iPhone App Reviews

Luna Story

Jacob Jones | Apr 16, 2010 Games

User rating: (8 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)

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I’ve been enamored by the concept of gaming since before I could read; Zelda on the NES being the first game I ever played. Back in the day, a half-way decent story and a sword was all that was needed to make a good RPG but the genre has come a long way since the early days of Zelda and even earlier days of ROGUE. Today’s standards have forced developers to push the limits of their thinking to create a living and breathing world. As a result, a lot of mediocre RPGs flood the market with only a select few shoving their way to gaming greatness. Njoy’s Luna Story doesn’t quite make the cut for gaming greatness… but don’t let that fool you. Luna Story is pretty solid RPG.

In Luna Story, you play as Ray, a village kid that’s been saddled with the intense responsibility of saving his fellow Bohemians from a tyrannical ruler Pecsa. The only way for Ray to restore his people to their former glory is to gather the 5 elixirs scattered through out time. Admittedly, the story isn’t much to begin with; the game was poorly translated from Korean to English, resulting in a lot of hilariously bad dialog. It takes a lot of getting used to if you’re the type that takes their gaming seriously. So if you can read Korean, I’d recommend getting this game in it’s original Korean format. If not, you’ll probably be WTFing every time Ray or anyone else talks.

Unlike most of the RPGs on the iPhone platform, Luna Story uses the portrait setting instead of the landscape setting for it’s controls and HUD. The obvious disadvantage to the portrait setting are that the all the controls are squeezed together at the bottom of the screen.  Anyone with large fingers would have a very difficult time playing this game while trying to keep a grip on their iPhone. I heard from the rumor mill that they are working on a fix for this design problem as we speak. Hopefully they follow through because I’m tired of playing a decent game like this in portrait mode.

A control update would more than likely solve this game’s HUD problem too. For some strange reason, Njoy decided to place all the HUD stuff right under the controls and right beneath your thumbs. Whenever I got caught up in a big fight, I would have to move my thumbs away from the screen to get a good look at my health. This was a pain in the ass because on several occasions I was too busy fighting off a whole horde of enemies to even have the time to move my thumbs to see my health.

Some areas had so many enemies crowded in one spot that as soon as I started swinging my sword around half the map started to attack me. This wouldn’t have been such a big deal if they all didn’t respawn three seconds after I had killed them. This is good for grinding but when I actually want to get on with the story, it’s a pain to have to kill thirty or so monsters to move and advance to the next screen.

With all the glaring issues out of the way, I can finally say some good things about Luna Story. The main chunk of the game is played through quest. While a decent amount of them are fetch quests, the story related quests can be really impressive and satisfying to complete. It’s a ton of fun to try and finish all the quests in one area but most of the time I found myself completing quests just for the funny dialog between Ray and the other characters.

All in all, Luna Story is a pretty solid game with only a few technical shortcomings. The graphics are a lot better than most and the dialog is pretty freaking hilarious. If it weren’t for the control problem, I would consider this game to be an instabuy but unfortunately, I found it a bit hard to enjoy myself when I had to concentrate on keeping a grip on my iPhone.

iTunes Link – Luna Story

Version 1.2

Reviewed on iPhone 3G 3.1.3

Tags: $2.99, Jacob Jones, rpg