Lunar 2: Hope Springs

If Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete was in some way partly about becoming an adult and living a dream, then Lunar II: Eternal Blue Complete is much more about being an adult, dreams or no.  It is about making and living with the decisions of a harsher world that allows for fewer mistakes, and forgives them less often, less easily and less completely.  There is a running thread throughout Eternal Blue—I wouldn’t call it a theme, necessarily, but it feels broadly present— that what is best for everyone might not always be what makes them happiest.  Certainly the game is shot through with melancholy meetings and bittersweet partings.  From Nall’s quiet sorrow over long-absent friends, to the party’s final tearful farewells, the message is clear.  No one can escape the bitter choices, the compromises and the sacrifices that are imposed by reality.

I started playing Eternal Blue Complete in the Christmas season of 2000.  I was home from the middle of basic training during Christmas Exodus, and it was on the short list of games I felt I absolutely needed to play.  It was supposed to have come out before I shipped out the previous Halloween, but this was Working Designs we were dealing with, and I discovered that their trouble with delays wasn’t something isolated to Silver Star Story Complete, but was instead more like an unintentional company policy where RPGs were concerned.  I played it a bit at that time, but only a bit, because there were lots of other games to play (also purchased during this brief window: Final Fantasy IX, Breath of Fire IV, Mega Man Legends 2, RayCrisis: Series Termination, Mega Man X5, and, lamentably, Vampire Hunter D), and because there were friends and family to visit and spend time with who of course took priority, and holidays to celebrate.

I picked away at it in fits and starts, here and there, throughout my time in the Army and afterward, but could never seem to find the will to power through it.  It wasn’t as if the game was bad.  I suppose the mechanics had progressed, in this interval, from being quaint and charmingly retro to positively archaic, but I’ve played tons of equally antiquated games, so I’m sure that’s not all it was.  But that was a strange and uncomfortable period in my life, for the most part, and it was difficult to enjoy a lot of things.  I didn’t properly finish Eternal Blue Complete until the early winter of 2008, when I had been laid off from my job and the utter collapse and ruin of my life seemed nearly inevitable.  I was looking for work, but looking for work isn’t nearly as time-intensive as actually working.  I had a lot of free time to kill, and a lot of mental and emotional anguish about my situation that I didn’t know how to handle; I just wanted to be gone.  If I could have stepped out of my life and all its attendant miseries and problems and just become somebody else, I think I might have done it.  As Tolkien tells us, there are two kinds of escape: that of the deserter, and that of the prisoner.  And I think that the very best kinds of escape are those that take us, for a time, out of our own lives and teach us something, so that we come back better armed to handle our troubles.

Looking back, I could not have chosen a better time to play Eternal Blue.  I had never, and have never since, been more in need of hearing the things it had to say.

Eternal Blue is a darker game than Silver Star Story.  It’s not dark, per se.  Indeed, silliness still abounds.  But the circumstances are much more dire, the stakes higher, than the previous game.  The characters are a bit older, many of them a bit more worldly and world-weary.  These aren’t all a bunch of kids (and a couple of newly minted adults) trying to rise to a dream of heroism.  These are, for the most part, people who have gone out into the world and done some living.  Some of them have blood on their hands, some of them have made mistakes and fallen from grace, some have lost faith in themselves. 

But far from being a lament for the imperfection of the world and the people in it, the message of Eternal Blue is ultimately positive.  Hope, even amid the gathering dark, still thrives, and through Hope lies the victory of the Good and the Right.

The story starts us off with the protagonist, Hiro.  He’s been raised by his uncle, Gwyn, who is an archaeologist, and who has set up his household near a couple of ancient ruins sites to better study them.  Hiro himself has an interest in archaeology, but where Gwyn’s approach is thoughtful and scholarly, Hiro is more an archaeologist of the Indiana Jones persuasion.

But Hiro’s life takes an unexpected turn (as these things often happen in fantasy stories) when a bright light descends from the sky to the top of a nearby tower, called the Blue Spire, one of the aforementioned ruins near Hiro and Gwyn’s home.  It’s a mystery worth investigating, but Hiro isn’t the only one interested in it.

A thousand years have passed since Silver Star Story Complete, when Alex became the Dragonmaster and cast down the Magic Emperor, and the world seems to have grown more grim and solemn in the millennium interval.  It’s more than the knowledge that friends from the previous adventure are all long in their graves.  In the era of Eternal Blue Complete, the goddess is once more physically incarnate.  She dwells in the holy city of Pentagulia, surrounded by her worshippers.  But where the Goddess of ages past wished simply for people to be kind and good to one another, and employed force only to defend her people against the forces of evil, the Goddess of this more modern era has an army at her disposal to enforce her will.

It is one of her soldiers, the beastman Leo, who Hiro encounters on his way home early in the game.  The strange light that has touched down on the Blue Spire was predicted, it seems, and is identified as the Destroyer, sent from the Blue Star to bring doom to the world of Lunar.  Leo has been sent to find this Destroyer, and destroy it first, before it can begin its apocalyptic work.  Yet beneath all of this, there is a deeper mystery at work.

One of the things that draws me to Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete is the way that it examines the mystery behind the very existence of the world of Lunar and the purpose and origin of the Blue Star.  It isn’t as if these things weren’t touched upon in Silver Star Story Complete, exactly.  They were, in a minor way.  And it isn’t too hard to guess even from those few, vague clues what is going on—why the world is called Lunar in the first place; why the Frontier is a grey, crater-marked wasteland; and why the massive Blue Star dominates the skyline the way that it does.  But these things were hardly significant to the story of the first Lunar game, and were tangents to the main thrust of the story. 

Most of that story, we know from legend.  Humankind dwelt on the Blue Star once, eons ago, but some disaster struck, and that world became corrupt and impossible to live upon, and humankind stood at the brink of extinction.  It was then that the Goddess Althena took the remnant of her people and fled to the world of Lunar.  Once an inhospitable waste, through her powers she turned it into a lush, green world, save for a small portion of it which maintained much of its wasteland nature.  But the blight of the Blue Star was no accident.  It was set in motion by a being or a power of uncertain origin but clearly malign nature.  Though that power has lain dormant for a long age, as the events of Eternal Blue Complete unfold, it begins to stir, and it turn its attention to the world of Lunar, and the descendants of those who escaped its wrath an age ago.  But the Destroyer is not what we would expect, or who, and the evil that threatens Lunar is more insidious and more subtle than it seems.

This is one of the storytelling tropes that I love the most, the one I think of as the Mystery of the World.  So when it comes to evaluating Eternal Blue Complete, it’s perhaps unfair that it begins with an advantage regarding my own personal tastes.  Part of this sense of mystery requires unveiling  a little of the lore of the series.  We know the broad strokes, but Eternal Blue Complete gives us a hint at something greater, more horrifying, hidden and forgotten in the mists of time.  It seems to emphasize the ancient past of Lunar more than the first game did.  In terms of playing the game, this results in you visiting all kinds of ancient, tumble-down ruins which were nowhere to be found in the original game, although there are even more which you cannot access during the main quest—foreshadowing for the epilogue.

It’s interesting that Silver Star Story Complete and Eternal Blue Complete are such different games.  While they share certain themes and a roughly similar outlook, in tone they feel very different.  Silver Star Story Complete is very upbeat and positive.  The circumstances are occasionally dire, but they’re more Hollywood Dire than anything.  You know the heroes will prevail, because this is the sort of story where the heroes always must.  It’s kind of the whole point.  Eternal Blue Complete is never so certain in its victories.  On the one hand, you’re certain that the heroes must win.  It’s That Kind of Story.  On the other hand, some of your bitterest foes are fundamentally good people whose desires to do good are twisted by shadowy, insidious forces to the ultimate ends of evil.

Insidious.  I like that word.  Just the sound of it seems to hint at its meaning, and when it comes to Lunar 2, its especially apt, since that’s the way much of the evil you confront is presented.  There is a clear and obvious enemy who makes himself known (though he doesn’t exactly appear) near the beginning of the story, but the full nature of his intent, and the complexity of his schemes, are not apparent until much later, when the trap is sprung and nearly closed.

But that’s another difference between Silver Star Story Complete and Eternal Blue Complete: scale.  Silver Star Story had as its villain the Magic Emperor: a man whose evil lay mainly in his hideously, horrifically misguided attempt to correct what he believed to be flaws in the very nature and structure of the world.  He believed, as most evil people in the world today believe, that what he did was perhaps brutal and unfortunate, but ultimately necessary as the only certain means to achieving what he believed to be right.  But that’s just it: he was an evil person.  Bad as he is, there is at least a little essential humanity that makes him work.

The antagonist of Eternal Blue Complete has no such limitations on its nature.  It is not a man at all.  It has no desire to control the world, to correct its flaws; it has no delusions of making life better for others by providing them with what it sees as a necessary structure or authority.  It does not concern itself with these things.  It is a cosmic engine of fear, malice, corruption, and hate.  It isn’t quite a Lovecraftian monstrosity, but it’s in the ballpark.

And it inspires the tiniest thread of doubt in the story—doubt not about whether these particular heroes will win, but doubt about whether any sort of victory at all is possible.  After all, this is the power that laid waste to the Blue Star, rendering it a withered husk of its former grandeur and might.  This is the power which forced the Goddess Althena to flee.  When even the Goddess must abandon resistance in favor of mere escape, what hope has humankind for victory?

So there’s the narrative for us.  Considerably more grim and solemn than the previous game, as any tale of impending apocalypse should be.

I could talk about game mechanics, but why bother?  I did that for Silver Star Story Complete, and Eternal Blue Complete changes nothing.  Characters progress in exactly the same fashion as the previous game, learn new spells and techniques in the same way—there’s really no need to even acknowledge the manual, though you may want to for the artwork, if nothing else.  It was upgraded from the Sega CD original to match the look, style and mechanics of Silver Star Story Complete, and in that respect it is absolutely successful.

There is at least one continuity error in Eternal Blue Complete that I know of, though.  In the Sega CD original Lunar: the Silver Star, the Grindery (the Magic Emperor’s mobile fortress) makes its final assault on the city of Meribia.  There it is brought to a standstill by the efforts of the player’s party of heroes.  A millennium later, it is inhabited by a pseudo-bandit named Nall, who uses it as his headquarters, but his main activity is not so much real banditry as it is watching over a small host of orphans who have happened into his care.  In the PSX remake Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, however, The Grindery doesn’t attack Meribia, but instead is directed toward the floating city and headquarters of the magicians’ guild, Vane.  To me, this makes more strategic sense.  Vane seems like it would be able to mobilize the greatest opposition to the Magic Emperor, and its destruction would be the first order of business in any sensible plan of conquest.  So in Silver Star Story Complete, the Grindery comes to its final rest outside of Vane.

This becomes a problem in Eternal Blue Complete.  The party’s meeting with Nall has some significance for the storyline at the particular time it happens.  The party travels to Meribia fairly early in Eternal Blue Complete, and so the Grindery is right there.  To place it where it last stood in Silver Star Story Complete would put it much later in the game, requiring a rewrite of much of the story which occurs between those two locations.  I don’t know how that amount of reworking would have been handled, and the problem (if you can call it a problem) is that such a rewrite really feels unnecessary.  Because the fact of the matter is that Lunar 2, both the original Sega CD Eternal Blue and the PlayStation remake Eternal Blue Complete was a much better-made and better-executed game than its predecessor. 

Silver Star Story Complete was meant to improve on the execution of its first iteration, and that execution was flawed due to some combination of a compromise of vision or lesser capability of its makers at the time.  A fair number of the changes Silver Star Story Complete made seem to have been qualitative in nature.  But GameArts seem to have really found themselves with Eternal Blue, and so considerably fewer of the changes made between Eternal Blue and Eternal Blue Complete were qualitative.  Most of them were quantitative—updating the graphics, making the cut scenes full anime like Silver Star Story Complete, that sort of thing.  It was less necessary for them to remake Eternal Blue, because the limits of its execution laid less with the creators and more with the technology, where the same is less true for The Silver Star.  Eternal Blue’s remake seems to have been predicated less on the logic of making necessary improvements to tell the story correctly, and more on the logic of “well, we remade the first one, so we should probably update the second one to match”.

And I’m all for that, really, because any way you look at it, Eternal Blue Complete is still a fundamentally better experience than Eternal Blue on the Sega CD.  It’s just that Eternal Blue being a better-made game overall meant that the creators were less willing to rewrite major sections of the story for Eternal Blue Complete, probably out of a fear that, once you start changing one major thing, you have to change others, and pretty soon the thing bears no resemblance to the much-loved original.  And why should you do that when the story’s solid on its own, and all to avoid a single continuity flaw?  So I can see why GameArts did what they did, even though it will always bother that weird part of me that requires everything to fit just so.

So, is Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete worth playing today?  Well, the graphics and sound can be a little underwhelming by today’s standards.  Even when I was finishing it in 2008, it was beginning to look long in the tooth even by the standards of retro-style games.  The five-year interval has probably not changed that at all—not for the better at any rate.  Not to say that the game looks bad, just… dated.  But the fact stands that I still recommended Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete more or less without reservations, and God knows it has all the same technological shortcomings.  So why would the sequel be any different?  It’s a bit darker, but for me, that’s practically a selling point.

I like dark and grim stories because they make us confront the true perilous nature of reality.  I like to escape as much as the next person (possibly more so, it’s true), but I usually prefer not to lie to myself while I do it.  And the true heroes seem to be the ones who prevail over true darkness.  So I prefer Hiro’s story in Eternal Blue Complete somewhat more than Alex’s story in Silver Star Story Complete.  It’s not that I don’t think Alex is necessarily a lesser hero.  As a character, he had no certain knowledge of his victory, but the same was not true of me.  I knew he would win, not because I am so very wise, but simply because that’s how these kinds of stories go.  I couldn’t say the same for Hiro, not completely.  He, of course, was uncertain of victory, because remotely intelligent heroes always are.  But I was uncertain as well.  There was that thin thread of doubt.  Would he lose?  Would he win, but at terrible cost?  And that doubt was what made the difference.  Because there is no hope without its attendant fear; the former cannot pretend to reality without the latter.

When the characters feel hope and fear, that’s one thing.  When the player feels that hope, and that fear, that is something much, much greater.  More profound.  More real.

And it was that sense of hope that helped me through a dark time in my own life.  Maybe that sounds cliché, or trite.  Certainly there are other stories, similarly themed and equally well told, that might have taught me the same.  But they weren’t there at the time.  Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete was.  I’m not going to sit here and tell you that playing this game turned my life around, because that would be cliché, and untrue besides.  The situation was much more complicated than that.  But it helped me to see past the mire of the present into the possibility of the future, to strive for something better in that future, and to handle the present with grace meanwhile.

And that has made a difference.

Lunar: With Uncertain Steps

When the first bright, warm days of May come around, I always get nostalgic for the spring of 1999.  This was when I graduated high school, and when I was confronting the impending dilemma of full adulthood, and a life with no certain structure, meaning or purpose.  School and home had provided all of those things, but I was approaching the point in my life where school was going to be something I tackled purely on my own terms, in my own way (if at all), and home was becoming less of a sanctuary and more a place I wanted to escape if I could.  Still, there are a lot of things to look back and remember fondly.  Since I’ve been playing video games since about the age of four, games are one of them.  Most of the major moments of my life, I can associate with music I was particularly into, movies that especially interested me, books that I was getting absorbed in, and games I was playing.  In this case, the game in question is Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete.

It was long in the coming.

I had pre-ordered it on the recommendation of a friend, who said he’d heard our local game store might not have enough copies to go around when the game came out.  This was instantly compelling.  So I went to the store (it was a Babbage’s then, and it’s a GameStop now), put down the money for the pre-order, marked my calendar for the anticipated late February or early March release date, and waited.   And waited.  And waited.  And waited, and waited, and waited, and waited, and waited, as the release date got pushed back a week here, two weeks there, a month on one occasion.  It began to feel as if Working Designs (the company responsible for localizing the game and releasing it in the U.S.) didn’t actually have any projected release date, and were popping dates out at random because they knew they were expected to have one.

Finally, in May (possibly the tail-end of April, but I keep thinking of May), the demo arrived.  This was about a month or two after the full game was supposed to be in our hands.

Demos were different back then.  In this case, it was a disc made available exclusively to pre-order customers, and contained the first few hours of the actual game.  This was pretty generous, even by the standards of the day.  On top of that, you could save your progress in the demo, and load it up once you had the full version of the game.  So that was how I spent the last couple of weeks of high school, in between actual classes, extracurricular activities and work: glued to the TV, slowly working my way through the demo of this game that I had worked myself up over.

It was June or July by the time the game actually came out, and I was there the very first day to pick it up, of course, but some of the fire had died down a little.  The main question—“What kind of role-playing game is this, anyway?”—had been answered.  Most of the fundamental sense of mystery was taken care of at that.

My first actual RPG, of the random-encounter-having, turn-based variety, had been Final Fantasy VII.  I had technically played a couple of RPGs before, but Crystalis eschewed much of the traditional RPG framework, and Swords and Serpents  was, put bluntly, godawful, and I didn’t really play it at all once I determined that.  And I missed the 16-bit generation petty much entirely. 

So Lunar was in some ways a step backward, into the aesthetics and the mechanical framework of games of the previous generation.  Which I suppose is an especially apt way of putting it, considering that’s more or less exactly where Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete belongs.

The game began life as Lunar: The Silver Star, made by GameArts for the ill-fated Sega CD Genesis add-on, and made its way to the U.S. courtesy of Working Designs in 1993.  It was a fairly impressive use of the technology, but GameArts blew it out of the water about a year or so later with the sequel, Lunar: Eternal Blue.  It was apparently enough to make them wish they could have done a better job with the first Lunar, because they remade it and released it as Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete on the Sega Saturn in Japan in 1997, then ported it to the PlayStation, and it’s that version of this remake with which we’re largely concerned. 

The story of Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete concerns itself mainly with a young man named Alex.  He stands on the borders of youth, staring across the wide and perilous gulf of adulthood, and in his heart is a single hope, a dream, and he has no idea how to turn it into a reality.  He wants to be a hero, but not just any sort of hero.  He wants with all his heart to be the Dragonmaster.  This is a title, a station, granted to one who is chosen after completing the trials of the four dragons who serve the Goddess Althena.  He is uniquely empowered to act as a champion for the Goddess herself, and fight against all threats to humankind.  This is rather a difficult path to follow, and not less so for there being no directions, no roadmap, no indication of where he should go and what he should do.  And even when he gets the chance to speak to the wise in his world, they mainly shrug and shake their heads.  Go and seek the dragons, they all tell him.  They will determine whether you have what it takes to be a Dragonmaster.

In Alex’s case, destiny turns out not to be so much a thing to be sought as an inevitability bearing down upon him.  But at any rate, his search to fulfill his dream, his ambition, resonated with the feelings I had myself, around that time.  A feeling that there were no paved roads into the future, no clear and certain paths forward into life.  I simply had to go and do whatever it was I had it in my head to do.  The rest would happen, or not, as it would.  In the meantime, stop worrying about how.  Just… do.

There are times when we read something, or see something, or hear something, and it speaks to us in ways that we do not expect.  They tell us what we need to hear, even if we do not realize we need to hear it, even if we do not understand it until many years later. 

What’s interesting about Lunar is its deceptive depth.  On the surface, it looks very rote, very done.  You have the hero, a very earnest young everyman who is mostly defined by his ambitions.  His personality is much more nebulous; we don’t know what he likes, what he dislikes, what makes him angry or sad or happy.  Well, we know one other thing that his life seems to revolve around: the girl Luna.

A young lady of uncertain parentage and unquestionable singing talent, the infant Luna was taken in by Alex’s parents not long after he himself was born.  Somehow, she and Alex managed to overcome the Westermarck Effect in order to have the sort of will-they-won’t-they romantic relationship that drives so many romantic comedy anime.  Except here, it’s actually fairly subdued.  It’s clear that they care about each other romantically, but the fact of this care and attraction runs through the story without ever being brought to the forefront, save once, powerfully.

What really sells it, though, is the earnestness.  There is a certain way of thinking which views anything simple as unworthy.  We tend to revere complexity, mistaking it for sophistication, because simplicity has so little readily apparent value in the eyes of many.  But simplicity does not mean unimaginative, or dull, or stupid, or trite, or at any rate it doesn’t have to.   And the people at GameArts who made Lunar didn’t tell a simple story because they’re just all thumbs in the ideas department; they told a simple story because that was the story that they had in them to tell at that time.  They told it with as much skill and polish as they could manage, and they made it work.  They were serious about it, and they were earnest, and that shows in their characters.  Alex and Luna are strong enough to carry the story, and if you’re looking for more colorful people, well, the game has that, too.  Your regular party includes four other main characters.  You have Kyle, possibly the oldest member of the group (at least he’s of legal drinking age), a lecherous barbarian type who takes very little seriously.  Then you have his girlfriend, Jessica, a priestess in training who much prefers punishing the wicked over quiet contemplation and prayer, and who is both a ferocious melee fighter as well as a healer.  Then there’s the brash, stuck-up, frankly irritating mage apprentice Nash, who displays a bit more depth than he might initially seem capable of, and his object of affection, Mia, who is the quiet and unsure daughter of the headmistress of Lunar’s magic guild.

Interesting how all the main party members break down into romantic pairs.

The game itself is linear almost to a fault.  There are no items of consequence tucked away in out-of-the-way corners of the world, no caches of treasure and rare items or equipment to give you the edge over some looming boss encounter.  The few optional elements are there basically for fun, or for bragging rights.  They alter the game’s difficulty and mechanics not one iota.  Character development happens purely as a matter of course.  There is no choice about which spells or techniques a character will learn.  All of them are either bequeathed by the plot, or else become available once the character reaches a certain experience level.  There’s nothing really to discuss about character builds in that regard.  And in some ways that does hurt the game.  “Replay value” is a term that gets tossed around a lot; having it is a good thing, while lacking it is a bad thing, and tends to hurt review scores.  But RPGs like this are long-form entertainment anyway, like reading a book.  They aren’t something to be played over and over again, to achieve all the multiple means of mastery.  You play it, you move on to something else, and then in time possibly years later, you come back to it fresh.  You remember very little specifically, except that you enjoyed it the first time around.  The vague memory of that enjoyment makes revisiting that world and those characters all the better; it's all suffused with a warm glow of certain affection.

Part of what makes Lunar so refreshing to play today is that despite the simplicity of its characters, they actually seem to be basically real people.  You really can’t make a game like Lunar today.  If you tried it, brand-new, all the characters would be moe, Luna and Jessica would be some kind of horrible tsundere or yandere, and Mia would be every creepy otaku’s favorite due to crippling shyness and submissive tendencies (she also might be twelve).  But Lunar strikes me as the sort of game where none of the characters were created specifically to adhere to a particular “type”, or designed to garner appeal from any specific demographic.  They were created the way they were because that was what the creators had in mind, and that was what the story needed.

The original version of the game, Lunar: The Silver Star for the Sega CD, appears to have been a bit of a diamond in the rough.  Various employees of GameArts have said as much in interviews, and this was one of the reasons for the remake.  They felt they could do better than they had, that perhaps the story deserved a better treatment than they were capable of giving it the first time around.

Much like the Sega CD version, the in-game graphics in Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete weren’t setting anybody’s world on fire.  And the music was actually something of a step down in quality.  The Silver Star had employed Redbook audio—basically CD-quality audio—whereas Silver Star Story Complete relied on the game console’s sound chip.  Still, the soundtrack is nice enough, though much of it stays squarely in the background.  In technical terms, though, Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete really shines in its cut scenes.

While the Sega CD original featured anime-style artwork in its cut scenes, it was on a very limited basis.  There was very little real animation, as such.  By and large, it seems to have been mostly what I think of as “dynamic stills”, where there is only slight animation (eyes blinking, mouths moving, and the occasional more involved animation), but done with greater detail than was usual.  It still looked nice, is what I’m saying.  Silver Star Story Complete, however, had actual anime cut scenes.  This allowed for much greater dramatic impact and much more theatrical presentation.  It wasn’t uncommon for games to have an animated introductory sequence to get your attention and to serve as a sort of trailer, but it seems (to my memory, at least) to have been fairly common in those days for those intro sequences to be the only such instances of such animation.  Lunar inserted them at various points of the story so as to fully “sell” the important moments.  The in-game graphics were relatively pedestrian and old-school in their design—back when “old-school” barely applied to anything—so the anime cinematics were more than just showing off.  They were integral to the storytelling process, helping the story achieve a greater sense of urgency than a bunch of cutesy, squashed super-deformed sprites could depict convincingly on their own.  And this was at the very beginning of the anime boom in America, which certainly couldn't have hurt sales at all.

*             *             *

For a long time, Lunar was the province of Redmond, California-based localization company Working Designs.  They got their start localizing Japanese games for the TurboGrafx-16, and later became convinced that CD-ROM games were the future.  They went to the Turbo Duo (a CD-ROM add-on for the TurboGrafx-16), and after that went south, they began bringing out games for the Sega CD.  They later went on to localize games for the Sega Saturn, but their relationship with Sega soured, and they cut their ties there.  In retrospect, this was a wise business move for any reason, since the Saturn became one of the worst-performing consoles ever to be released by a serious contender in the console wars.  They then went on to enjoy a period of (for them) unprecedented (and, sadly, unequaled) success and productivity for the Sony PlayStation. 

There were two things that set Working Designs apart from most other companies, discounting their status (fairly rare for the time) as a company who did not make games at all, but localized existing games from Japan.

The first was that they believed that literal translations were inferior to localizations.  They would take the basics of the dialogue and rework it into something that more closely resembled the speech of a native English-speaker.  On many occasions, they threw out the original dialogue entirely, and wrote in its place something that conveyed the same meaning, but made use of American slang and colloquialisms, as opposed to Japanese.  While I am in favor of this practice (or some variety of it), there are those who did (and still do; some grudges die hard) harbor a fiery hatred of Working Designs because of it.  And, in fairness, Working Designs were capable of taking it too far.

The second thing about Working Designs was that they also had some kind of fetish for releasing their games as deluxe packages.  Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete shipped in a box that included a full-color, hardcover manual; a soundtrack sampler CD; a Making-Of CD; and a cloth map—with an oddly pungent odor—not to mention the two discs of game content, for something like seventy or eighty dollars.  This was in an era when PlayStation games came in standard CD jewel cases, with slender black-and-white manuals the size of CD jewel case inserts, which doubled as the cover artwork.  And while this sort of thing is usually offered as some kind of limited edition package these days, Working Designs would hear of no such thing as a division between standard or deluxe editions.  Oh, no.  It was deluxe or nothing.

But back to point number one above, there are things about the Working Designs treatment that I really could have done without. 

There’s a town in the latter half of the game, the gimmick of which is that all of the people in it are all, shall we say, uncomfortably inter-related, and talk like the worst Deliverance-style caricatures of backward Southerners.  I’m comfortably certain this was absent in the Japanese version.  Likewise the sage and inventor Myght, who dislikes people in general and lives by himself in a tower.  In the hands of more reasonable translators and localizers, his dislike of people and his cranky personality would be enough to justify his living apart from his fellow creatures.  But no, for Working Designs, this is not enough.  He must be a horrifically odoriferous old man, and also afflicted with chronic flatulence.  Elsewhere in the game (this may be either shortly before or after we meet Myght; I no longer recall), there is a scene where the characters are required to sculpt something out of clay that has personal meaning for them—I could explain why, but it’s one of those things that only really makes sense at all when you play, so let’s just go with it for now.  Jessica sculpts a copy of a pendant that is important to her.  Kyle says that it looks like an IUD.

I understand that Working Designs was trying to inject humor into the game, and I appreciate the effort.  But so many of the “jokes” fail to be humorous, and come off cringe-worthy instead.  The IUD joke struck me as particularly bad, as out-of-context as it was.  How in God’s name does a barbarian on a medieval-ish fantasy world know what an IUD even is?  Breaking the fourth wall to make unfunny jokes strikes me as a bad idea, but maybe I’m just weird.

Working Designs imploded in 2005.  Possibly one of the earliest signs of this was UbiSoft picking up the rights to an edition of Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete for the Gameboy Advance.  Maybe Working Designs just didn’t deign to work on handhelds.  Certainly the reviews of this particular version of Lunar have been generally unkind, and as compromised as that version must have been compared to the PlayStation version, I wasn't too enthusiastic to find out anyway.  But even diehard fans were seeing the writing on the wall at this point.  I should know.  I was one of them, kind of.

Happily, for those tired of Working Designs-style nonsense, there is another, newer edition of the game available for the PSP, titled Lunar: Silver Star Harmony.  There appears to have been some drama surrounding its release, courtesy of former Working Designs CEO and current CEO of GaijinWorks Victor Ireland trying to inspire a boycott of the game since his company wasn’t handling it.  He made much of all but one or two of the original voice actors not working on the game, castigating the one or two who "broke ranks" and lent their voices to it.  Considering that most of Ireland's voice cast seemed to consist of friends and neighbors (and some guy who made it onto O-Town), any sense of victory to be gleaned from this is questionable at best.  Thankfully, the lady who lent her singing voice to Luna, Jennifer Stigile, returned for the PSP version. 

And, it must be said, Silver Star Harmony stacks up favorably to previous releases.  It features the same anime cut scenes from Silver Star Story Complete, along with in-game graphics which look shockingly modern (by handheld standards, anyway).  The story has been added to a bit here and there as well, lending some unnecessary but still appreciated background.

*             *             *

Ultimately, it can be difficult to assess the overall quality of a game so mired in my own nostalgia.  That’s the problem with nostalgia generally speaking.  You never know when you’re objectively evaluating something (so far as objectivity is even possible with a work of art or entertainment), or when you’re artificially inflating its value due to positive associations with your own past.  And you're always consumed (at least, if you're me) by the fear that you're actually doing the latter no matter how much you feel like you're doing the former, no matter what anyone tells you.  In the end, I’d like to recommend it to just about anybody.  It’s a good, simple, fun RPG with a lot of charm and heart.

But more than that, it’s the game I remember from when I stood at a strange, uncertain point in my life.  I’d say “at a crossroads,” but that would be inaccurate.  There weren’t even roads, crossed, straight or otherwise, that I could see.  Popular thinking and fiction likes to paint any major juncture in life as a clear-cut, often binary choice: you can do one thing or the other, be one thing or the other.  But that's not always been right.  For me, that's never been right.  There are just myriad choices, and possibilities, all heading off in some vague and often worryingly tangled future-ward direction.  And whenever those choices lie before me, when there’s no clear way forward, no certain path, it’s Lunar that I think of.  And then I remember that there is no certain road ahead, and that doesn’t matter.  It’s often only when we are looking back that we can see whether our way was correct or not, and why.  Sometimes, in the moment of choice, there is no one who can tell you which way is right or wrong.  And in the end what you have to do is just go.  Do. 

Make your own way, however you may.