FITHOS LUSEC WECOS VINOSEC: Succession of Witches, and...

So.

In 1997, we had Final Fantasy VII which, despite being technically uneven, was an unprecedented success.  Its sales figures were amazing for its time, and are still respectable today (more than a decade and a half later, mind you).  It’s a sort of lightning Square has been trying to make strike twice to this day.  As a popular and critical darling, warts and all, it’s a rare creature, and it was the spark that set off the explosion of Japanese RPGs that would become staple genre of console gaming for the remainder of that console generation and virtually all of the next.

In 2000, we had Final Fantasy IX, a massive nostalgia bomb, a love letter to the medieval-ish high-fantasy days of the series before the Playstation.  Hearkening back to its 8-bit and 16-bit history, it referenced and name-checked all sorts of characters, places, plot elements, weapons, and other thematic elements from the days of yore, which really weren’t all that far back in retrospect, but were worlds removed from the modern, urban fantasies that Final Fantasy VII had ushered in.

In between, in 1999, we had Final Fantasy VIII. 

Final Fantasy VIII, the awkward, gangly, but well-meaning middle child of its generation.  In retrospect, it could never have been anything else.

The success of Final Fantasy VII was practically an accident, as most such runaway successes tend to be.  It was a massive technological leap forward for the series, horrifically inconsistent visual style aside.  While its enduring success is due to its rock-solid gameplay, interesting story, memorable characters, and status as a game of historic significance in both its specific genre and the medium in general, its immediate success owes much more to savvy marketing.  Not one commercial for the game showed any of the actual playable parts, but instead focused exclusively on the cutscenes, which were state of the art for their time.  If you didn’t know that Final Fantasy VII was a role-playing game, and you didn’t know what a role-playing game was, you had no idea what to actually expect of the game.  Which was a perfectly understand course of action to take for the advertising, really.  Menu battles don’t exactly make for thrilling commercials.  As far as Squaresoft (now Square Enix) was concerned, so long as you wanted it nonetheless (as many people certainly did), then that was fine.

I say this mainly to point out that Final Fantasy VIII’s own considerable sales figures, despite its status as the black sheep of the Final Fantasy family for several years (and now merely as one of the black sheep), are no great surprise.  It traded on a massive amount of goodwill built up by Final Fantasy VII.  The plain truth of it is that Final Fantasy VIII could have been shit—Square could have packaged actual human feces in every jewel case—and still it would have sold millions, based solely on the strength of reputation.

But let’s step back a bit.

*             *             *

It’s pretty uncommon now, but it used to be, way, way back in the day, that sequels could be radically different from each other.  The Legend of Zelda went from being an overhead-view action-adventure game with non-linear exploration and some light puzzle-solving to a sort of vaguely RPG-ish game where most of the actual playing, outside of navigating from one location of interest to another, took the form of a side-scrolling platform game.  Super Mario Bros. 2 was so different, mechanically, from its predecessor that it might as well not have been a Mario game at all (I know, I know; what we got in the U.S. as Super Mario Bros. 2 technically wasn’t a Mario game originally, but bear with me; I’m going somewhere with this).  Where Castlevania was a linear, side-scrolling platform game, Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest offered a wide-open sandbox with no real boss encounters until the very end of the game.

And so on, and so on.

Final Fantasy, as a series, has always done this.  What makes Final Fantasy as a series unique is that it has kept doing this, while other series are now content for sequels to simply iterate upon the basic formula outlined in the first game.  Iron out the kinks from the previous game, introduce a few new quirks to the system, make the game bigger and better-looking.  That’s essentially the way sequels are done today.  Occasionally, you reboot the franchise if things have gotten stale or you want to go in a new direction.

Meanwhile, the only thing truly the same between all Final Fantasy titles is the goddamned title font.  And even that wasn’t set until Final Fantasy IV.

Actually, that’s a little bit untrue.  In recent years, Square has taken to creating compilations of games set in the same world, featuring the same characters.  It started with Final Fantasy X-2, and there have been other sequels and related games made for Final Fantasy VII, XII, and XIII.  But even before this, there were certain things all entries in the series had in common.  Some of it was in the names of certain places, characters, and items, which carried over from one game to the next.  Some of it is in the mechanical elements of the games (the ATB System, the Job System, etc.).  A lot of it was in certain ideologies and philosophies; certain repeated narrative themes, elements, and motifs; and a certain “feeling” (for lack of a more exact description) present in the various games.

Final Fantasy is one of the only series around still doing this, still reinventing the wheel with every new installment.  Which is one reason why I like Final Fantasy VIII, perhaps in spite of itself.  Because even in the face of the overwhelming success of its immediate predecessor, Square decided not to do the obvious thing, which would have been to make another game exactly like Final Fantasy VII, only prettier and bigger.  Instead, they chose to do what they’d always done, which was to do something completely different.

*             *             *

Inevitably, Final Fantasy VIII was going to be seen as somewhat of a disappointment to a lot of people.  It was really never possible for it to be anything else.  The truth is simply that its predecessor left some impossibly big shoes to fill by virtue of its reputation, and no game on planet Earth was going to be able to fill them.  Much like Destiny today, the product being sold by advertisements and interviews and previews and ad space in magazines, and on the strength of the reputation of its predecessor, and the product that eventually arrived in stores, that real human beings in our sadly limited physical universe could own, were too far dissimilar.

Which is not, of course, to say that Final Fantasy VIII is perfect, or even great.  It isn’t, and there are reasons why it’s one of the black sheep of the series.  But it isn’t a bad game, either.  It’s merely a good game, coming after a series of consistently excellent ones, and foreshadowing some of the troubles its developer would come to face in a console generation or two.  But then, experimenting with the formula is bound to result in more than a few failures.  It’s in the nature of experimentation to fail, occasionally.

But probably even saying that is putting it too harshly.  A game that has moved as many millions of units as Final Fantasy VIII has over the years can hardly be considered a failure by any reasonable metric.  And as time has marched on, and we’ve gotten away from the immediate aftermath of its predecessor and can more clearly judge it on its own merits, without bias, it turns out that Final Fantasy VIII is pretty all right, in the end.

So what does Final Fantasy VIII do right, and where and how does it go wrong?  What’s it like to play today?  That’s what I’m hoping to answer.

One of the first things Final Fantasy VIII got right was its English localization.  This was a relatively new practice at the time; in point of fact, Final Fantasy VIII may have been the game that pioneered it.  Before this, games were usually translated into English at some point after the game was finished and released in Japan.  Because getting the game into English was a generally secondary process, it usually had a brutally short timeframe.  Most of the quirks and errors in the translation of earlier games tended to be due to this.  Rather than laziness on the part of the translators, it was simply a matter of not having enough time to get it fine-tuned.  The international success of Final Fantasy VII helped to convince Squaresoft that the market beyond Japan was important enough that good localizations mattered.  And so the English script was written in tandem with the game’s development.

This was also the first game to finally standardize the spell name structure of the Final Fantasy Series.  The whole “-a”, “-aga”, “-aja” suffix thing got its start here.

As an insufferable English pedant myself, this pleases me to no end.  Granted, some of the slang and other colloquialisms of the game stand out sharply today, and date it, but on the whole, the attempt (largely successful, by the way) to give the game’s dialogue some texture and flavor was and remains greatly appreciated.

There are other developmental points we could make about the game—its use of realistically proportioned character models, the minimalist combat menus, and so on, but technical details are so dry and boring, and don’t make for a good retrospective.

So let’s talk about gameplay.

There’s a lot to talk about, and I’m probably only going to scratch the surface because of it (this is a retrospective, not a manual or a guide), but even just skimming the surface reveals how different this game is.

As I mentioned, pretty much every Final Fantasy game reinvents the wheel to some extent.  Final Fantasy VIII does it more so than most. 

Where its predecessor was already comparatively minimalist about weapons, armor, accessories and whatnot, VIII does away with these things altogether.  You don’t even buy new weapons.  You can upgrade your weapons, assuming you find the right parts (these are items, dropped like everything else after combat, depending entirely on the will and the whims of the fickle and almighty Random Number God).  Aside from the usual combat items – potions, antidotes, echo screens, eye drops, softs, etc. – there’s not much to buy with your money.

And then money is yet another thing VIII handles differently.  Rather than earning money from fighting monsters, you are paid at regular intervals.  Your characters belong to a mercenary group (more on this later), and are paid a regular stipend corresponding to their rank.  Said rank can be raised and lowered depending on how skillfully (or not) you play.  You can also take quizzes to raise your rank, and increase your pay thereby.

And then there is the Junction System…

This is the thing that frustrates newcomers and people who prefer more straightforward character building in games.  A cursory look at how the system works makes it look like the most insufferable thing imaginable in a game. 

So:  You have Guardian Forces (GFs from here on out), which are powerful spirits like Ifrit, Shiva, Quezacotl, Siren, and a score of others (basically the summon spirits from previous Final Fantasy games).  You Junction these GFs to a character, which initially enables various battle commands (magic, items, etc.).  The GFs can be summoned at will, without draining any kind of magic point pool—because there isn’t one.  They also each offer a slew of passive bonuses and abilities, and are capable of learning more as they level up along with the characters.  One of the fundamental  benefits of GFs, however, is that they let you junction magic to your stats.

This takes some explaining.

So, in Final Fantasy VIII, you don’t have magic points, or even spell charges like the very first entries (at least, not in quite the same way).  Instead, if you have a GF junctioned, you have access to a “Draw” command.  You can use this to draw magic spells out of the enemies you fight (each enemy has a set selection of spells you can draw from it, though not a set amount of said spells), as well as certain “Draw Points” in the world at large.  Drawing from an enemy or draw point will give you between one and nine charges of a particular spell.  Characters can carry up to 100 charges of a particular spell.  When you junction a spell to one of your stats, the more charges of that spell you have, the greater the effect.  So if you junction 100 Cures to your hit points, you can expect your HP total to jump by about a hundred or more.  Some GFs let you junction elemental spells to your attack stats, meaning your default attack will carry an elemental modifier, which makes those attacks more effective on enemies weak against that element.  You can also junction status effects to your attacks as well, with the right GF.

This is the sort of complexity that makes some players tear their hair out.  It’s also exactly the thing that lets you open the game up wide, break it over your knee, make it your bitch, etc. , etc., in so many clever and creative ways. 

You know those status spells that always sound really cool?  Blind, Sleep?  Death?  You know how they never, ever work when you need them to or want them to in other Final Fantasies?  Well, they still don’t work terribly often in Final Fantasy VIII, either, not when cast regularly.  But only a chump does that.  Slap 100 Sleep spells on your attack stat, and you’ll be putting enemies to sleep about 80 percent of the time with just your standard attack.  Or maybe you’re just tired of getting hit with Death spells yourself, since your enemies never seem to suffer from the sort of questionable effectiveness of these spells.  Junction 100 Death spells to the right stat, and you’re pretty much immune to the instant-death status.

And it gets better!

There is a card game you can play with many other people in the game’s world, with cards based on various characters and enemies found throughout the game.  One of the GF abilities you can learn early on lets you turn enemies into cards.  Now, winning the card game is great and all, but there are other GF abilities which let you refine cards into items, sometimes rare and powerful items, which you can then junction to your stats, which then allow you to run roughshod over the world at large, like gods.

I could go on and on forever, probably.  There’s the fact that enemy monsters’ power scales with your own experience level, so that they always present a consistent challenge, but if you keep your levels low and junction smart, you can make yourself inordinately more powerful than the monsters, and stomp all over them from hell to breakfast, if you like.

I think I need to stop, though, or else I’ll never shut up.

*             *             *

So what’s Final Fantasy VIII about, anyway?  We’ve come this far; maybe we should, you know, talk about the story.  There are four discs of it, for God’s sake; it must be worth mentioning at some point.

So we start off playing as Squall Leonhart.  Squall is a young man enrolled at the Balamb Garden, a sort of military academy which trains and deploys elite mercenaries, known as SeeDs (yes, with ridiculous capitalization), all over the world.  Squall has a rival or adversary of sorts named Seifer Almasy.  While their relationship is mutually antagonistic, they also seem to be the only people who really understand each other, and they both mirror each other in odd ways throughout the game.

To say that Squall is a loner is to put it mildly.  An orphan (as are so many main characters in this game), suffering from severe abandonment issues, he believes that a person should rely only on themselves, and should never have to rely upon others to get by, either physically, emotionally, or otherwise. 

Upon becoming a SeeD (which happens fairly early on), he and two companions are sent to aid a resistance group in a place called Timber.  Timber is occupied by an imperialistic nation-state (there do not seem to be well-delineated countries) called Galbadia.  While in Timber, Squall and Co. discover that Galbadia has a new ambassador, the Sorceress Edea.

Sorceresses in this world, we learn, are Bad News..  There was a massive war fought to subdue one (probably the equivalent of a World War) 17 years prior, and Galbadia’s thinly veiled bid for world domination looks likely to trigger another such conflict.  And of course, the Sorceress here is far more than she appears to be. 

Not long after this, Squall’s orders change.  Instead of supporting the Timber resistance, he is to eliminate the Sorceress Edea at all costs. 

With him and his SeeD compatriots in this endeavor is Rinoa Heartilly, the young, impulsive leader of the resistance that he was previously (and grudgingly) aiding.  While she is quite serious about the resistance movement she leads, she is immature in ways; she lacks the understanding of just how grim an undertaking it is that she leads.  Squall finds himself irritated by and with her, and at the same time, can’t seem to part himself from her.  As much as she frustrates him, she also helps to ground him and humanize him. 

If it wasn’t apparent before, even just from looking at the game’s logo, Final Fantasy VIII is, as much as it is a fantasy adventure, a romance.  This is both good and bad.

The characters themselves are actually fairly well done and developed, and interesting once you get to spend time with them.  But it’s the time required for this to become apparent that is the fatal stumbling block of Final Fantasy VIII.

A large part of the problem is the pacing.  To an extent, this is true of most PS1-era RPGs.  The vast amount of storage space for raw content offered by the then-new widespread adoption of CD-ROM as a standard format was far too tempting for many developers of long-form games, and very, very few of them were able to resist that temptation.  “Bloat” is one of the hallmarks of the era, honestly.  But Final Fantasy VIII feels especially bad about this.  There are a number of segments that feel, if not necessarily gratuitous on their own, then excessive and unnecessary taken altogether.  It feels as if, enamored with the thought of all they could do, they never stopped to think about whether they should do it.

And this makes the characters suffer.

In previous Final Fantasies, as with most games, the characters are instruments of the plot.  Their strengths and weaknesses, their troubles, their failures and their triumphs, all occur by order of dramatic necessity. 

Final Fantasy VIII tries to turn this around.  The characters, their relationships, and the development of both, are ends in themselves.  The characters don’t develop on the way to other things; their development is a large part – probably the main part – of the whole.

But this process is slow.  Clear and momentous transitions are vanishingly few, perhaps nonexistent.  Our hero Squall is one person at the game’s start, another, different person at its end, and there is not a single point where all of it changes.  It’s a gradual process, not set up in discrete stages or movements.  I like this, actually, because in this much it is honest.  Life is like that.  But the drawback to this slow development is that first impressions, or any other brief surveying of the game, will not reveal any of its greater depths.  It will, in fact, only reinforce the stereotype of Squall as an emo loner jackass.  And while this much is true as far as it goes…

1.        He has reasons for being the way he is, and

2.       He gets better, which of course is part of the whole point of the story in the first place.

But it is such a slow burn.  You have to stick with it.  And this is a large part of the problem. 

I like character stories.  Really, I do.  I have always been of the belief that good, strong characters are the life’s blood of any story.  If you can’t get invested in the characters—whether you love them or hate them—you can’t get invested in the story.  But this kind of story is perhaps not the best fit for an RPG.  The countless hours of random battles and grinding and drawing spells and fiddling with your junctions and hitting enemies with wildly improbable weapons until all the numbers come out can get in the way of the character development, and vice versa.

None of this is to say that Final Fantasy VIII is bad—far from it!—but it does require a certain amount of patience.  An amount of patience I didn’t have back in 1999, when I was 18.

*             *             *

So, how has Final Fantasy VIII aged?  Is it worth it?

Graphically, it’s a bit rough.  In September of 1999, of course, it was phenomenal.  But fifteen years of technology marching on have not been kind to it.  I’ve been playing most of my PS1 games on my PS Vita, where the screen is small enough that this issue isn’t very noticeable, but on a nice, big, HDTV…

The polygons are sharp-edged and jagged like sawteeth, and the pixels in the texture maps are big enough to pick out and count.  Some of the animations look pretty twitchy and jittery as well, par for the course in this particular timeframe.  And of course, because of the PS1’s shortsighted lack of perspective correction, the textures warp and bend at odd angles from time to time.  But in a weird way, I’m nostalgic for that.

I’ve taken to playing the game on my PS2 on a standard definition TV.  I find that it softens the blow.

The music is definitely a step up from its predecessor.  Final Fantasy VII was well-composed, but the execution was frankly embarrassing in comparison to Final Fantasy VIII, which maybe doesn’t have as many memorable songs, but certainly has an overall better sound quality.

In all, the gameplay conventions that Final Fantasy VIII was founded on have gotten pretty long in the tooth.  Random battles are becoming increasingly passé, and the game probably serves as one of the most egregious examples of the aforementioned PS1-era bloat.  I’m not sure who the audience for this game is going to be.  Kids who grew up on HD systems are probably going to find it visually glaring, mechanically obtuse, and torturously slow.  But for those of us who are older and more patient, those are the very things that make it more rewarding (well, not the visually glaring part), and I’m finding that I enjoy the game much more today than I did fifteen years ago when it came out.

So that’s my verdict, I suppose.  If you tried it and couldn’t hack it then, give it another shot now.  You may find that it’s changed, or that you have. 

Get Born Again

So last night, for the first time in my life, I got to see Alice in Chains play live.  They’d never come to Peoria before, and their touring days were basically done for the then-foreseeable future by the time I got really interested in them.  They’ve remained a favorite band of mine ever since I was sixteen, when I got my first CD player and my first CD. 

I asked for an Alice in Chains CD on… not really a whim, necessarily, but not with any particular motive, either.  I’d heard a number of their songs (“Man in the Box”, “Rooster”, “Over Now,” and “Heaven Beside Me” come immediately to mind) on the radio, and I liked what I’d heard.  And their name stuck with me.

Prior to this, I’d listened pretty exclusively either to my parents’ music, or whatever I could manage to record (on tape – how quaint!) from the radio.  But it was getting harder and harder to find most new artists on cassette, CDs offered less hassle and greater portability, not to mention better sound.

This first CD was the band’s latest at the time, and would turn out to be their last for several years, as they went on hiatus.  I worked my way through their discography basically in reverse, literally.  I bought their CDs as I could, from latest to earliest.  This wasn’t something I planned, or did for any reason other than that it was just how I found them.

I could never put my finger on why I liked their music so much.  But that’s me, in a nutshell, when it comes to things I like.  I can never explain why things have an impact on me, at least not without a lot of thought and the benefit of hindsight.  I just hear a song, and it sinks into my head, pushes all my buttons; this is how I know I like it.

Their music was darker than I had expected, based on what I’d heard on the radio.  That this didn’t scare me off surprised even me, really.  Their sound was so far off-base compared to what I’d grown up on (Phil Collins, Bruce Hornsby, Fleetwood Mac, James Taylor, and Elton John are the names that come immediately to mind) that I’ve spent a good chunk of the interval wondering just how in God’s name I acquired a taste for this sort of thing.  Alice in Chains gets lumped in with the grunge movement, because they’re from the Seattle area, but they aren’t really a grunge band in the strictest sense (compare them to Pearl Jam or Nirvana or Soundgarden, and you’ll see what I mean).  They’ve been called metal, and there are elements of that in their music, but they weren’t really like much of what metal sounded like at the time, either.  They’ve been called alternative, but that term, helpful as it sometimes is, is pretty much also a cop-out.  “Alternative”, especially in the 90s, applied to everything from Incubus to Creed to R.E.M. to Natalie Imbruglia to the Dave Matthews Band to Live to No Doubt to Primus to… well, you get the picture.  Basically, if it wasn’t heavy metal, or pop, or R&B, and was in any way even vaguely rock-ish, it was bound to get the Alternative label slapped on it.

I think, looking back, that a large part of what I liked about their music was that it felt in a weird way relatable.  Now, this takes some explaining, since I was in high school at the time, and the struggles of the average suburban white kid in high school tend to be pretty minor in the grand scheme of things, to the point that “struggles” should probably be written in scare quotes, in all instances.

Hang on, let me go update my AP Style Guide…

Part of what was interesting in their music was the weird dichotomy of it.  On the one hand, you have songs begging forgiveness for past mistakes and crying out to be understood, or at least not to be misunderstood, and lamenting this feeling of isolation and alienation.  On the other, there are all the songs furiously condemning a society that rejects people for their problems, for failing to slot easily into ready-made roles, for failing to properly align with some nebulous idea of normalcy, and punishes them for having the audacity to be dissatisfied with this state of affairs.   

There were also the songs about the sheer soul-devouring hell of heroin addiction, but I never did relate to these, nor do I expect to, for reasons that I hope should be obvious.

Obviously, being in high school was nothing like the grim and soul-wearying struggle Alice in Chains was singing about, but I sense an inkling of that sentiment in my own life.  Their lyrics felt true, or at any rate felt that, for me personally, they soon would be.

There wasn’t a lot of solace to be found in the music, but sometimes, you don’t need solace, and you don’t need answers, because the solace feels false (and the world only feels that much worse when you eventually have to go wading back into it), and the answers never feel adequate.  It’s not that help is unappreciated, but more like it can never be enough.  Sometimes, the only thing that seems to make the world make sense is the knowledge that someone, somewhere, shares your frustration, your anger, your desperation…   Someone shares it, and even if they can’t answer you, can’t help you, or don’t even know that you exist, you know that you are not alone in feeling the way that you do, and just knowing that, all by itself, can make a difference.  And someone, somewhere, is taking that pain and making amazing music out of it.

I’ve heard the theory before that all art comes from pain.  I don’t want to believe that, sometimes.  It seems unbearable, monstrous almost, to think that all the amazing, beautiful works I’ve enjoyed in my life – every movie that I’ve loved, every song that spoke to me, every lined in every book that ever sent shivers down my spine – were created from the suffering of another person.

At the same time, it makes perfect sense.  Happy people, content people, practically by definition, don’t have that gaping void in their lives to fill that inspires – that demands – that one make art, capital-A Art, in whatever capacity possible.

And the thing is, the more I think about it, the more the idea that art comes from a person’s pain and struggles isn’t necessarily such a bleak and hopeless idea after all.  What could be more comforting than knowing that pain and struggle can be turned into something of real beauty, meaning, and worth?

*             *             *

In April of 2002, the long downward arc of Layne Staley’s personal struggle with heroin addiction came to the bad end everyone suspected and no one could really stop.

I was in the Army at the time, stationed at Fort Lewis, in Washington.  This was about an hour or so from Seattle.  I was a journalist, working on the Northwest Guardian, which was the post paper.  My friend Joe was a photographer, and when it came to the work of taking photos, his bad days were better than my best days were ever going to be.  I say this without jealousy or envy, but to state a simple fact.  I cared much more about writing stories, and I didn’t really “get” photography beyond the absolute basics.  The basics, in this case, being “make sure the picture is in focus and for God’s sake try not to let your hands jitter too badly”.  He was one of the civilians on staff at the paper, and he’d lived in the area for most (if not all) of his life.

I call him my friend in the hope that the feeling was mutual.  It was a strange and awkward time of my life (the obvious joke here being “when has that ever not been true”), and in hindsight, I have to admit that I could be kind of an insufferable shit at times.  I don’t know why.  Sometimes, everything just felt wrong, and I felt wrong right along with it.  I told you Alice in Chains struck a chord with me.

So I was on my way past Joe’s desk for something or other, and he pulled me aside.  This is the conversation as best I can remember it”

“Hey, you listen to Alice in Chains, right?” he asked me.  I told him I did, and wondered where this was going.  “Well, you’re not going to want to hear this, but you should probably know that they found Layne Staley’s body in his apartment yesterday.”

“Oh…  Shit.”  I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“You know who he is, right?” Joe asked.  He looked a little concerned.  “He was the lead singer of—”

“Alice in Chains, yeah.  Um…”

“Are you going to be okay?”

“Yeah, I’m just going to go… sit down, I think.”

Which I then did.  It was a strange feeling for me.  I couldn’t claim that I was personally moved by the death.  I had never known the man as anything other than assorted photos in the liner notes of CD inserts, and a tremendously talented voice from the stereo.  But that voice…

In many ways, he is one of the most talented singers I’ve ever heard.  He could go from a grainy, anguished belting-out, to a scream of fury and pain, to a sonorous drone all within the space of one song.  He shared songwriting duties with Jerry Cantrell, the lead guitarist of Alice in Chains and one of the better guitarists currently active, period.  With a few notable exceptions, he wrote most of the lyrics for the band’s last album.  It might help to explain most of that album’s dark, introspective tone.  You can tell from the lyrics that this is the work of a person who has problems with the world.

I couldn’t mourn the man personally, because it didn’t hit me the way deaths in my family have done, striking in the place below and before thinking and understanding, the place where there is only feeling and reaction.  But at the same time, I did feel upset.  Someone who had been important to me had been taken out of the world.

By all accounts, or at least, judging from his interviews, Staley was not a man who enjoyed his addiction.  Maybe he had, once, at the distant beginning.  But he had reached a point where he did heroin for the same reason most people breathe: because some part of his brain told him it was necessary.  He admitted on at least one occasion that he was fairly sure it was going to kill him, and he felt like there was nothing he could do about it.

Like I said: the bad end everybody knew was coming and nobody knew how to stop.

It was hard to listen to Alice in Chains for a while.  Suddenly, the band’s whole body of work sounded to me like one long, pre-emptive obituary for Layne Staley.

I didn’t listen to them for a long while after that.  It just felt strange and uncomfortable, knowing that the owner of the voice coming through the speakers was no longer alive.

*             *             *

Some years and a few jobs after I came home from the Army, one of my supervisors asked me if I’d heard the latest Alice in Chains album.  This was in 2008, and Black Gives Way to Blue had just come out.  I hadn’t been paying attention.  Alice in Chains had gone on hiatus in 1996, when Staley’s heroin problem had become enough of an obstacle that he could no longer perform live or even really record in the studio.  While there had been a couple of new songs released in this interval for a “Best Of” album (itself culled from a boxed collection), titled “Get Born Again” and “Died”, even this had been a struggle to arrange and execute.  The group had disbanded following Staley’s death, and I figured, well, that was it.

“I didn’t realize they had a new album out,” I said to my supervisor, whose name was Brandon.

“Yeah, it just came out like a few weeks ago.  There are a couple songs on the radio.  I think you’d like it.”

I was oddly offended.  “How can they even have an album without Layne Staley?” I asked.  “I mean, he wasn’t just some singer.  He wrote a lot of the lyrics.  He wasn’t exactly the whole band by himself, but still…”

“I know, man, but the new guy they got sounds pretty good.  A lot like Staley, actually.  Just...  Look, just give it a listen.”

For a while, I couldn’t shake the weird feeling of betrayal.  It felt like moving on with the same name was in some way trampling on everything the band had been.  Layne Staley had been an integral part of it.  I mean, if he’d been fired, that would have been one thing.  But this was completely different.  

Eventually, though, I broke down.  I bought Black Gives Way to Blue.  And if I didn’t love it the way I’d loved the self-titled final album before Staley’s death, or Jar of Flies or Dirt before it, it was still good.  The new singer, William DuVall, does sound a bit like Layne Staley, and a little different at the same time.  What’s more important, though, is that Alice in Chains still sounds like Alice in Chains.

That’s the thing I kept thinking as I was at the concert, with the music roaring and my skull shaking, singing along with the lyrics of pretty every song (save for the ones on The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here, which I need to go out and buy soon) and knowing my voice was lost in the crowd, completely inaudible even to my own battered ears, and caring not even one single bit.  The important thing, the best thing, was that Alice in Chains still sounds like Alice in Chains.

And they sounded incredible.

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.

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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.