Lunar Silver Star Story Playthrough
Playtime: 00:00-02:51
That's right kids, mixing it up a bit. This is a game that I've genuinely never played before, other than the first hour or so once. My initial thoughts about Lunar are, first of all, that it's a lot of fun, and secondly that it moves quickly. It's like a JRPG in the hurry-up offense. It has all the traditional elements of a JRPG, including a story, albeit a pretty simplistic one to this point, but doesn't really spend a lot of time dallying at all. A little under, I've been through the first three areas, and just felled the first boss: the weird gelatinous creature on the pirate ship. The game doesn't have any huge blocks of dialogue, the load times are minimal (given that it's a top down 2D game, this would seem to go without saying, but the load times on the PS1 Final Fantasy ports are putrid), and battles usually last less than a minute. When an RPG presents an interesting world to explore, it's fun to slow down and let yourself be immersed in it, but I'm finding this a nice change of pace after having played two FF games. Recall that in FF IX it took a good hour to really get into the game proper after a menagerie of cutscenes and battles of no real consequence.
Like pretty much every JRPG, Lunar is a coming of age story. Our protagonist is Alex, a teenager growing up in a quaint little town who, much like Link or Zidane or a thousand other RPG characters, is actually more than meets the eye. He has the same green eyes as Dyne: the legendary dragonmaster, Alex's hero. And so, after passing the trial of the legendary white dragon, awakened from his slumber, Alex sets off to find his destiny, accompanied with his loyal flying cat Nall, his friend of the fairer sex, Luna, with a renowned singing voice, and his loud, obnoxious, tubby friend, Ramus. Later you meet Nash, the requisite arrogant bastard character. Each character gets a little CGI cutscene to introduce them with some kind of dated looking, but still decent animation. The voice acting is hardly great, but given that this was made at around the same time as Symphony of the Night ("What is a man... a miserable little pile of secrets!!!") and Mega Man 8 ("But it cannot fall into Dr. Wah-wee's hands!"), it's hard to complain about. At times, there's actually voice acting over the regular top down pixelated graphics, which is just kind of bizarre more than anything and doesn't really add much. The game has a pretty good sense of humor, and some very Americanized humor. I'm not sure how much of that is the result of localization or if it was in the original Japanese. Talking to random people in towns will produce some pretty amusing little asides.
The battle system has some elements of Chrono Trigger (undoubtedly other games also, I just associate it with Chrono Trigger) in that enemies will move around during the battle and there are certain area-of-effect spells that will hit more enemies the more they're grouped. In Lunar, your characters also have to physically move to melee attack enemies, and can't fully traverse the screen in a single turn. This is a little bit frustrating, as it doesn't specifically define exactly how far you can move, and on a couple of occasions a character has basically burned a turn just moving toward an enemy that I thought he could get to. Additionally, if you tell a character to attack a nearby enemy that then dies at the hands of the character who went immediately before him, that character may select a much farther away enemy leading to the same result. Not really that big of a deal though. At the time, I don't have a lot of variety in abilities but that's slowly improving, especially now with the addition of Nash as a caster. In general, battle is usually fun and fast moving. It does seem a bit odd to me that it took this long to get to a genuine boss battle. Hoping the rate of those will pick up a bit.
Overall thus far, Lunar is a fun game that you can pick up and get into the meat of quickly, without a lot of stops and starts along the way. I don't know if it's really high art as much as some of the better Final Fantasys are. The story is very simplistic and there's a lot of just getting you from point A to point B without a lot of flavor added in. The humor is genuinely amusing though, and it holds your interest. More to come.
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