though i have just now played the game in its entirety for myself, i have some history with it going back into the mid '90s. see, i actually owned a copy of it and had played just a bit of it before a friend of mine offered to buy it from me. he had a new sega cd, and i was far more stoked on squaresoft games; i wanted to buy a copy of chrono trigger (which was retailing for EIGHTY BUCKS!) and, well, lunar got me there. that's pretty much the long and short of it.
still, though the game was no longer mine i did see bits of it over at my friend's house. its music felt familiar and nostalgic even as i began to play it last month. now, in 2020, this version of the game carries with it the charming mystique of those early '90s cd-rom games from japan which largely eluded me as a teenager (i mean, until the ps1 and saturn... but i'm talking about the sega cd and the turbo cd, among others). in short, my enjoyment of this game leans heavily on this vibe.
it's just not a particularly great jrpg. it's not bad! it's good enough that i still look forward to seeing what improvements are made in eternal blue and the psx/saturn remakes. and frankly, the working designs localization does it no favors. i did not need to read dialogue about using barney video tapes as target practice in a fantasy rpg. also, there's a serious imbalance in the obnoxious encounter rate when i can't walk two steps without getting into a fight half the time, but every single boss fight is over in 3 or 4 turns. this is absolutely one of those jrpgs where the endless battling becomes tedious, especially since you're just attacking (or choosing 'ai', which is... also just attacking) most of the time.
aside from wanting certain quality of life improvements to menus and understanding what spells do, i hope the future games are much more colorful. this one made overwhelming use of brown and often felt very drab—not the best use of the system's color palette, at least outside of the really nice anime-style pixel art cinematics.
one last note: the music is great! i just love this style of early disc-based, prog rock inspired jrpg music. from what i've heard, it's actually much more pleasing to my tastes than the music in the remakes. we'll see, though.
still, though the game was no longer mine i did see bits of it over at my friend's house. its music felt familiar and nostalgic even as i began to play it last month. now, in 2020, this version of the game carries with it the charming mystique of those early '90s cd-rom games from japan which largely eluded me as a teenager (i mean, until the ps1 and saturn... but i'm talking about the sega cd and the turbo cd, among others). in short, my enjoyment of this game leans heavily on this vibe.
it's just not a particularly great jrpg. it's not bad! it's good enough that i still look forward to seeing what improvements are made in eternal blue and the psx/saturn remakes. and frankly, the working designs localization does it no favors. i did not need to read dialogue about using barney video tapes as target practice in a fantasy rpg. also, there's a serious imbalance in the obnoxious encounter rate when i can't walk two steps without getting into a fight half the time, but every single boss fight is over in 3 or 4 turns. this is absolutely one of those jrpgs where the endless battling becomes tedious, especially since you're just attacking (or choosing 'ai', which is... also just attacking) most of the time.
aside from wanting certain quality of life improvements to menus and understanding what spells do, i hope the future games are much more colorful. this one made overwhelming use of brown and often felt very drab—not the best use of the system's color palette, at least outside of the really nice anime-style pixel art cinematics.
one last note: the music is great! i just love this style of early disc-based, prog rock inspired jrpg music. from what i've heard, it's actually much more pleasing to my tastes than the music in the remakes. we'll see, though.