I finally got my save cart for my Saturn in the mail, so my urge to play more Saturn RPGs was revived~. Lunar was a game I played like a decade ago on PS1 and had a not terribly amazing time with. It was brutally hard in a way I really disliked. I liked the game alright, but just got soft-locked in a too hard area I could never get out of. The localization was handled by Working Designs, and as such it was made far far harder than the Japanese original simply because they could. I was really excited to play the Japanese original since it would mean I'd finally get the originally intended difficulty balancing, and I was not disappointed~ (at least for the most part x3). It took me around 39 hours to beat the game on real hardware.

Lunar is the story of a quiet young man named Aresu (Alex, in English) who dreams of going off on an adventure someday and becoming a great hero and dragon master just like his hero, Dragon Master Dain. One day, a great earthquake opens up the nearby cave where the great white dragon is said to sleep, and his best friend Ramus encourages him to set off there to find a dragon diamond for them to sell. Alex's adoptive sister Luna insists on coming along too, and once there they not only meet the dragon but also begin a quest for Alex to pass the tests of the other three dragons and become the next dragon master. Of course, this quest itself turns into something much grander, but the start is of humble beginnings befitting many RPGs of this era.

Something I'd never realized is that the 1996 Lunar: Silver Star Story is actually a very extensive remake of a Mega CD game from 1992. The overall premise and overall ending of the story are more or less the same (so far as I'm aware), but a TON has been changed in between. Dungeons were added and removed, important characters were given more involved roles in the story and for longer, and new animated cutscenes were added as well. Along your journey you'll meet several more party members each with their own well fleshed out personalities, but most characters you meet and places you go aren't the most dynamic bits of writing in the world. The dialogue is charming and entertaining and the plot and the mystery are engaging, but the biggest narrative problem that Lunar has (other than unfortunately falling into some homophobic and racist stereotypes, granted that's hardly unique for a video game from the 90's, or even now) is that it just can't escape being a remake of a much more simple game from 1992.

While one or two main party members have something of a character arc, most characters simply have a goal and work towards it, and for most of the story that goal is just "save the world". Where a game like FF6 (from 1994) has many characters and the trials and arcs each of those characters go through all support a general theme, Lunar: Silver Star Story more so has characters who all sort of exist and take actions in support of a larger theme. There isn't nearly as much introspection into the flaws of characters and/or why they might do the things they do, they more often just do them. The overall theme of the game (at least how I read it) is using the different characters (both goodies and baddies) to compare the different things people will do to protect the people and things they care most about, and I think despite the relatively flat writing that it manages to do that quite well.

A prime example is Alex, the main character. In the original Mega CD game, he's completely silent and never talks. His little flying cat-dragon companion Naru does basically all the talking for him, very much like Link's fairies do in the N64 Zelda games. In Silver Star Story, the quite clever way they get around this is by just making Alex a canonically quite demure character who only says things when he absolutely must, and generally just keeps quiet. It works pretty well, and as someone with non-verbal tendencies myself, I always love to see a well done character who canonically just doesn't talk much, but it really doesn't get around the fact that Alex is a very flat character whose only real character trait (if you can call it that) is that he always cares about his friends and saving the world (and the person most special to him). The way the story and characters are written aren't so much bad in a vacuum, so much as they are a clear indication that the writing team is capable of doing more, and they were doing just about as much as they could with the tools at hand to expand a much more simple narrative into something more meaningful and engaging without doing a FF7 Remake and making something entirely new.

The mechanics of the game use positional combat on a more traditional JRPG turn-based battle formula. Each character has items, spells, and normal attacks they can do, but they also have a movement allowance to get close enough to an enemy to strike them (something basically only important for booping with physical attacks or happening to stand out of the way of an enemy's AOE attack). It works well in practice, but it does mean that battles can drag on for quite a while because it makes the already slightly gratuitous animations take even longer. Thankfully this has Earthbound-style enemies that you bump into in dungeons, and no random encounters (and no encounters of any kind on the world map, oddly enough).

The AI of the movement isn't the best though. In this version at least (I'm not sure if it's true for the PS1 version), there's no way to manually move, so AI movement takes care of it all, and sometimes allies and enemies will totally waste a turn if they're boxed in and can't get to the target they want to punch in the face. This isn't a huge problem beyond it being annoying that, in a game where enemy and especially boss AOE attacks can be so devastating, you have no way to manually split up the party to avoid location-based (rather than target-based) attacks. Thankfully, the boss and dungeon design of this version of the game are balanced really well even though the bosses of the game do have some stats (most often HP) that scale to the level of the main character. Every boss I fought but one (the 3rd to last boss is SO mean, omg) was something challenging and satisfying to beat but still one I could beat in just one try.

The presentation of the game is really nice. Now this version of the game isn't the 1997 version (which the PS1 port is based on) that uses the Saturn's RAM expansion to give the ability for better cutscenes, so all of the cutscenes appear in a size that's half the screen and still often VERY blocky-looking (they look like Sega CD cutscenes, and I thought they must've been ripped right from that version for quite some time). Still, they're well animated and voice acted. The character portraits are well drawn and expressive, in-game sprites look very nice, and the music is also very good. They sexualize the female characters (especially the 15 year olds ^^;) in a way that made me pretty uncomfortable at times, but it never went far enough that it was something I'd call a reason to stay away from the game completely. It's something to be aware of, but this isn't nearly as exploitation-heavy as something like Corpse Party.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. Working Designs really went out of their way to make the PS1 localization of this game far more grindy in its gameplay and sophomoric in its writing, but the original Saturn version gets two thumbs up from me. It's a really sweet story that, while imperfect and not terribly impressive for the time, is still a delight to go through and satisfying in its own right. It's a well made RPG that shows just how dedicated Game Arts were to their craft, and it's a damn shame a version this fun to play never officially made it to English-speaking audiences.

I feel bad for anyone who had this game as their first JRPG, it's fuckin' awful. Did a 10 year old write the dialogue? It shifts from innuendo and american food jokes to melodrama in an instant. The combat sucks because half the characters are worthless and the bosses are poorly designed, the difficulty of them is often either 0 or 100 depending on if you place your party members in a specific spot, a binary choice isn't strategy. The voice acting is horrible and whoever had the great idea of having characters repeat a voice line EVERY time you cast a spell in a JRPG needs to be shot.

Hübsche Cutscenes (sogar mit Synchro!) netter Soundtrack, coole Optik, anfangs gut geschriebene Dialoge, die nach 2 Stunden SO schlecht werden.
Der Protagonist ist ganz plötzlich offenbar nicht mehr in der Lage an Unterhaltungen teilzunehmen. Ich muss im Youtube Longplay den Anfang durchskippen um festzustellen, dass er in der Tat ganz normal gesprochen hat.
Ab Stunde 2 hat Alex einen von 100 Sätzen.. wird aber ständig angesprochen.
Ständig antwortet Nall für ihn und das ohne driftigen Grund.
Vielleicht ist man seit Final Fantasy 8 verwöhnt was gut geschriebene Dialoge angeht.. aber das raubt mir echt den Spaß am Spiel. Der Plot selbst ist auch so gut.. was bleibt ist das Kämpfen und das ist wie in beinahe jedem JRPG zweckmäßig.
Sehr schade, da das Spiel so viel Potenzial hat. Die Charaktere sind so gut gezeichnet und der Soundtrack ist wirklich nicht schlecht, gerade für die Zeit.
Aber alles andere kann man heute keinem mehr antun.

One of the most "alright" rpgs I've played. The visuals and music were just ok, nothing really stuck out to me. The combat was also incredibly basic while taking way too long. They also flood the dungeons with the exact same fights so a lot of them get really repetitive. I was mostly looking forward to the story and characters since that's what others have praised most about Lunar, but they were also just ok. There's a lot of dialouge, but their personalities were pretty basic and in the case of the main character, nonexistent. There also isn't much interesting development for these characters over the story, as it's pretty formulaic in what they do and where they go. There's a scene near the end where the characters reveal their inner weaknesses and insecurities, and that one scene was more interesting than the rest of the game, yet it happens right before the final boss. This is all backed by a very mixed localization, as the banter can be a bit nice at times, but the forced jokes can get pretty grating. The voice acting is also perfectly split between being charming and a big yikes. I see the foundation of a good game, but it doesn't really go far enough in any area for me to call it one. Outtakes were great though and honestly the highlight of the experience.