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.
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