WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL - Lunar: The Silver Star

Lunar: The Silver Star Publisher: Game Arts Developer: Team Alex Release: 1993

Ask anyone to name a Sega CD game and you'll most likely hear three titles in particular over and over again – Night Trap, Sonic CD, and Lunar: The Silver Star. Night Trap because it was infamous thanks to the congressional hearing on video game violence; Sonic CD because, hey, it's Sonic; and Lunar because it's easily the best RPG on the system. In fact, it's possible that it was one of the best RPGs of all time when it was released in 1992/1993.

The Genesis had a bit of an unfair reputation that its library lacked RPGs. A more fair statement would be that it just didn't have the volume of RPGs found on the SNES. And maybe the average quality wasn't as high, which was to be expected when you consider Square and Enix were pumping out SNES games in those days. In particular the Genesis didn't seem to have anything that successfully competed directly with the swords and sorcery stylings of the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series (not that any of the latter's 16-bit sequels came to North America).

That all changed when Lunar came around. Game Arts, a company better-known for making shooters and action games like Thexder, Silpheed and Alisia Dragoon, decided that it wanted to create an RPG that would focus on storytelling and animation. Because the studio had very little experience with the genre, it formed a subsidiary, Studio Alex, to co-develop and consult on the project. Studio Alex was founded by Nihon Falcom alumnus Kazunari Tomi.

Where a lot of RPG stories at the time tended to start the player in the role of an established warrior in a world on the brink of – or in the midst of – war, Lunar was something different. The story here centers on Alex, a young boy who idolizes the long-dead Dragonmaster Dyne. Dyne was one of the four heroes, the other three of whom are still alive. The four heroes were responsible for putting down a demigod years earlier and saving Lunar.

Alex's quest starts simply when he and his friends, Ramus and Luna, go to explore a nearby cave in search of a legendary Dragon Diamond. Things just sort of snowball from there, culminating in Alex meeting a cast of very colorful characters and getting caught up in a new plot to control the goddess and take over Lunar.

But despite all this – and one of the things I love about Lunar in general – Alex's story tends to remain small and personal. At the end of the day, he's simply following his dream and trying to save his friend from a terrible fate. Sure, the fate of the world hangs in the balance, but that really feels secondary most of the time.

Another thing that Lunar did wonderfully was create a cast of characters that were filled with personality and, for the most part, extremely likeable. Alex's party in particular is fun to interact with and observe – the womanizing Kyle, the tomboyish Jessica, the quiet but strong Mia and the egotistical Nash all go through trials and tribulations of their own along the way, and become all the more endearing for it.

Even the main villain (who I won't name for spoiler-y reasons) isn't simply evil. Like every other character he's got more depth than we were used to in an RPGs from the early 90s. He's actually a tragic figure.

Lunar is gorgeous. It uses the super-deformed characters that were common in 16-bit RPGs for the most part, but it also comes complete with about 15 minutes of beautiful animation, most of which is voiced as well. It was one of the elements that made the game stand out against competitors like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.

Another major focus of the game was music. In fact, music is more or less magical in the world of Lunar. And when you give music that much power in the fiction, you'd better be sure the actual game music is something special. For the most part, Lunar delivered on that as well. The tunes during game play are very memorable and well written. The sole down note being the opening title sequence, which is almost painfully campy.

I'm not done with the praise! While a lot of care and effort obviously went into Lunar's presentation, the game play's no slouch, either. The star of the show here is the battle system, which at first seems like your standard, Final Fantasy-style turn-based fare. And while that's true to a point, the difference is that Lunar actually takes into account character movement and range. So when you tell Alex to attack that monster on the other end of the screen, you'd better hope it's in range. Otherwise Alex will use up all of his turn just getting to his target, leaving him a sitting duck for any other nearby enemies.

The battles are beautiful in their simplicity. Having to pay attention to movement opens up new strategies, especially when it comes to running interference for your weaker/range weapon characters.

Lunar came to the US courtesy of Working Designs, which up until that point had concentrated almost entirely on localizing games for the TurboGrafx CD console. And while history hasn't necessarily been kind to Working Designs or its tendency to throw in a lot of anachronistic pop culture references, you have to understand that their localization work was generally miles better than almost anything we had in the early 90s. This was well before Atlus was doing the same thing, and well before Nintendo's localizations became spectacular.

Lunar: The Silver Star is the best-selling Sega CD game in Japan, and the second-best seller in the world behind Sonic CD. It's also seen a bunch of remakes across systems like the PlayStation, Saturn, Game Boy Advance, and PSP. All of those are varying levels of great, but if you've never played this game before I highly suggest checking out either the PlayStation or original Sega CD versions. Heck, play both. They're different enough from one another that it's well worth it.