LogFAQs > #951546482

#5. Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete (PS1, 1999)





Lunar: SSSC is a game that came along at the right place and right time in my life, and everything about seemed perfect. There is definitely a certain set of memories and emotions attached to the game, along with a legacy of influence it left on me. I'm not saying it wouldn't hold up today or anything, but at the time I played the game, everything worked out in way that I absolutely loved the entire experience.

I touched on this a little in my Lunar: Eternal Blue writeup, but I remember seeing ads in game magazines for Lunar: The Silver Star for Sega CD. I thought it incredibly cool. I had no clue what anime was, but the style of characters and the detail to them just grabbed my attention. I also was not very familiar with RPGs, but I had to play this game. I didn't own a Sega CD though, or really even know anyone who did. Lunar was just that cool game I would play one day, I guess, but I didn't know how.

Fast forward to the Playstation days. I'm still not very experienced with RPGs (I've played Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy Legend 2/3, and Super Mario RPG by this point in time). I'm also minimally more familiar with anime, as Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon were playing on Cartoon Network's Toonami everyday. I saw an ad or a preview or something in a game magazine for Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, and that desire to play this game kicked right back in. I still wasn't certain I would even like this game, but I knew I had to give it a try.



The story in Lunar seems pretty standard from the start. The main character, Alex, wants to set out on an adventure to meet the dragons of the world and become the next Dragonmaster. Alex idolizes the previous Dragonmaster, Dyne, who grew up in the same small town and brought peace to the world as part of the Four Heroes. I don't want to get into any spoilers but there are some big twists as you advance through the game, and the story definitely ramps up as Alex seeks the dragons, meets new companions, encounters the Four Heroes, and learns about their past. But the story is really secondary to the characters. Lunar is really a tale about friendship, about love, about helping each other achieve goals, and working towards goals. The main cast is interesting and is given a lot of time to interact among each other and really work into their relationships. Where other RPGs might have tried to create a grandiose, over-arching story across all the universe, Lunar kept things more focused on the character level and full of more personal levels of charm.

One of the characters in the game is Ghaleon. If you were to ask me my favorite video game character, Mega Man might seem a good choice, since I do use a Mega Man-based name online these days, and there's a chance I could answer with that. But most days, I'd still probably say Ghaleon is my favorite character. That's right, I was the guy trying to get him into the Gamefaqs contests back in the day. Ghaleon can be intriguing and enigmatic, but also very real in his motivations. And given the themes in the story and characters and Alex's journey, he fits in great to really enhance all of it.

Because the game is a remade Sega CD game, it looks very much like a 16-bit era 2D RPG. Battles kind of play out like Grandia's, where characters can move around the battlefield, and there are attacks over certain areas or with certain reach. It's not like a full strategy RPG though, it's still a classic turn-based system, and just has some light elements of movement/positioning/strategy to keep them fresh, but also keep them moving along quick. All the 2D sprites are nice visuals, being on the Playstation. Noriyuki Iwadare made the music (another similarity to Grandia), which works great to convey feelings of adventure, with just the smallest bit of cheesiness to also make the songs fun. There's also a good selection of music that works with the emotions of the story. And you can't forget that there are a couple vocal tracks, which was a big deal at the time!

And going from the vocal tracks, there were the anime cutscenes, another big deal at the time. They seemed crazy detailed for the time. I think, as much as or even more than anything on Toonami, Lunar was what really made me aware of what anime was and gave my desire to seek out any anime I could find in the early 2000's. Working Designs also did a very good job with the dubbing on these, as they typically put a lot of emphasis their presentation of things. That reminds me, do you remember the band O-Town? No? I didn't think so, but they were the boy band created from the TV show Making the Band back in the day. One of the guys that made the band was Ashley Angel. Ashley Angel was a local kid to Working Designs offices, and they opted to cast him in the lead role of Alex for Lunar. It was his first role in anything showbiz, and he went from there to be in a major band, and then have a Broadway career after. This doesn't relate to my enjoyment of the game at all, but I find it interesting that a voice acting role in this game set him down the path to much greater successes in life.





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