Lunar Knights
Template:Wikify-date Template:Future game
| Lunar Knights (Working Title) | |
|---|---|
| Lunar Knights, promotional logo. | |
| Developer(s) | Kojima Productions |
| Platform(s) | Nintendo DS |
| Release | Q4 2006 |
| Genre(s) | Adventure |
| Mode(s) | Single player |
Lunar Knights (Working Title) is the first title in a brand new series of games developed by Kojima Productions, announced at E3 2006. Though it bears many similarities, this title is not a part of the Boktai franchise.
Gameplay
The game revolves around two vampire hunters, Aaron and Lucien, who show a striking reselmblence to Django and Sabata. Lucien a swordsman but can earn maces, staves, and other melee weapons as you go along. He's also imbued with the power of vampirism, and can change into a vampire after he builds up what's called a TRC meter, which allows him to suck life out of his foes. Aaron is an apprentice sharpshooter, and uses a variety of ranged weapons to deal hot death to his undead foes. Unlike Lucien, Aaron has light powers, and can temporarily become an avatar of life when needed.
The TRC meter is a fairly familiar gameplay mechanic: It's built up as you land blows on your enemies,like the Overdrive in the Final Fantasy series, or the fury meter in the Sword of Mana series. When it's full, you'll be able to use the powers of one of your pets to launch into an extra powerful attack that affects multiple enemies. The transformations mentioned above are two of these attacks, but some are more magical in orientation, and often revolve around interaction with the touch screen. The fire-oriented attack has you drawing circles around your foes on the touch screen, which can send meteors down to hit them, while the wind-oriented attack is done by creating a huge tornado by rapidly swirling the stylus around on the pad. Other powers would involve other kinds of interactions, including blowing into the DS mic to create a blizzard.
The pets that you have available to you are elementally-oriented, with fire, ice, wind, and other elements represented, in addition to the good and evil pets that are only available to one of your characters. When these pets are following you around the screen, you can use your TRC powers if you desire, but they'll also add their elemental attacks to your weapon strikes, at the cost of called energy. If you strike an ice monster while your fire pet is following you around, you'll obviously deal extra damage, but if you hit him while your ice pet is following, you'll barely dent him.
Your ultimate goal in Lunar Knights is to destroy a number of boss vampire enemies. The boss on display at E3 was a fire-oriented vampiric unicorn, that dashed around the arena in which we fought him, leaving fire in his wake. with a bit of hammering and one big tornado, he can be defeated. After the boss enemies are defeated, you'll get into a Casket Rocket and attempt to purify them with with the intense solar radiation in the stratosphere. The ship is controlled from a third person persective with a stylus.
Hideo Kojima has announced that the player will be able to use the Game Boy Advance Boktai games' sun sensor to play Lunar Knights like the original Boktai games.