By now, most people think that side scrolling beat em ups are dead. Lunia: Record of Lunia War attempts to prove this wrong by combining elements of a side scrolling beat em up and MMO together. It does a fairly good job of it. After Phantasy Star Online: Blue Burst went down in the US version, players had 3 choices. They either played Phantasy Star Universe, went to SCHTHACK's server, or quit the game. Then came Lunia which became the alternative to those choices. Lunia is good at doing what it does. If Lunia had to be classified, I would consider it an Action RPG.

Story:

The story of Lunia Gold is the best that I have seen in any MMO. The game itself is broken into Episodes which are divided further into Stages. Each Episode contains 10 stages and at the end of most Stages is a boss. Between Stages are cutscenes that tell the events of the game. The only problem being that it is automated and you can't advance it at your own speed. There are a few dialogues during the stage itself as well. All of it is put together for a coherent story. The only problem is that depending on which English version you played, the translation is different. There have been 3 versions so far handled by GamenGame, 12FootTall, and ijji. Right now the game is handled by ijji and the only complaint I have is that Sieg uses words like LOLWUT in his dialogue because he is suppose to be an idiot that only uses brute force.

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The story of the game is broken into 2 parts. Episode 1 to 3 and Episode 4 to 6. The following is a brief overview of the story because I want to avoid the spoilers.

Episode 1 to 3:

The crew (Sieg, Eir, and Dainn) find out that orcs have stolen a magic book and has plans to use it. The crew pursues it only to have things go wrong here and there. It leads to the final showdown against Daru imbued with the power of the magic book.

Episode 4 to 6:

After the events of Episode 3, the crew is stranded in a forest and are trying to get back to the kingdom. Upon their return, the knights begin to attack them and they find trolls wandering the streets of the city. It is up to them to find out what is going on.

 Graphics:

The graphics uses some cell shading to give it the look it has. There are nice spell effects and the characters are pretty good as well. The enemies start repeating themselves after a while which can get annoying, but some of the bosses have nice effects to go with their abilities. The spell effects are probably the best part of the game having the most variety I have seen in a long time. Characters look similar at first, but change as you get to higher levels and eventually it will be difficult to find a doppelganger of yourself because of the possibilities in equipment combinations.