Lunar Quest is a short dungeon-crawling RPG created in a week by Crescent in RPG Maker VX Ace. It features retro pixel art and can be completed in less than two hours.

The plot is that a moon spirit was sent to earth to find heroes to banish the monsters that have invaded her Moon Temple. Unfortunately she got stuck with last pick for squad of heroes; the sword-wielding spitfire Ashtia and her posse, the insane sorceress Erana, and...wait a minute...



So if you're not in on the joke yet, you might check out my previous review of Star's Favour as this game copies liberally from it. Not just in terms of having the same art style; dozens of RPG Maker games looks alike. I mean down to plot and setting details and the fact that the heroine's younger brother is a party member and you fight enemies in slime-shaped containers.

While Crescent, the creator of Lunar Quest has acknowledged Indrah and Star's Favour as an influence, I feel like this game probably went a little too far. But while Star's Favour was a short but polished game, Lunar Quest feels more like a beginner effort.

After arriving at the Moon Temple to save a trio of ethereal lunar sisters from a fierce dragon, you'll find there's not much plot to be had. The four characters in your party have no real personality at all aside from possibly being slightly insane. The game is unfortunately written in poor English, but as the developer appears to be a non-native English speaker I won't hold that against the game.

The dungeon does make an attempt to incorporate some obstacles such as spikes and locked doors, although the way to proceed is still inevitably to fight something. the game has a limited supply of healing items and no opportunities to full heal without them so the game does require some resource management if you're going to survive, and if you slip up you could screw yourself out of being able to complete the game. Combat is extremely easy as once your characters hit level 3 or so they'll all learn party-wide attack skills which do very high damage and you can pretty much just spam them to cut down all but a handful of the game's tougher foes. The final boss is very powerful but you can nullify his attacks entirely with the right skills, leaving you to chip away at his absurdly large health bar while he waits for death.



The game is very short, maybe an hour if you fight absolutely everything, but while the game tries to do a few things it doesn't do any of them particularly well. I can totally understand the idea behind looking at a game you liked and trying to figure out what you think the creator did to make their game fun, but Lunar Quest as it stands doesn't have much to offer over similar games.