I had a look at Lunatic Dawn on the NEC PC-FX, and what an interesting little system that is. The PC-FX was NEC’s successor to the PC Engine, arriving around the same period as the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn. Unfortunately, NEC wasn’t particularly interested in giving the machine a proper polygon graphics processor.

Instead, the PC-FX was rather good at playing back video and pre-rendered graphics. Some of the full-motion video in this game looks lovely, particularly the animated character sequences.

Then I got to the actual game, and things went downhill rather quickly.

I hadn’t the faintest idea what was going on! Everything was in Japanese, which didn’t help matters, and the gameplay felt rather clunky. I managed to find a map with some flags on it and discovered that I could travel between them. That’s something, I suppose!

There were battles too, although I couldn’t say I found them particularly enjoyable. The graphics outside the animated sequences weren’t doing much for me either. The music was reasonably pleasant, but unfortunately that was about the nicest thing I could say about the experience.

It’s a shame because the PC-FX is such an unusual console. I love having a look at these machines and seeing what their developers managed to do with the hardware, even when the results are a little disappointing.

So what did Lunatic Dawn receive on the McRetro scale? A mighty 1.8 units. Ouch!

Perhaps I’d have had considerably more luck if I could understand Japanese, but based on that little experiment, I wasn’t in much of a hurry to have another go.

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