If you count yourself a retro RPG fan, well, you are among the overstuffed. Lately, we’ve been getting so many re-releases, remasters, and first-ever-outside-of-Japan titles that it’s frankly hard to find the time to play all of them. The latest is a compilation of the first two Lunar games developed by famed Japanese development house Game Arts – also responsible for the Grandia series – which by all accounts should be considered the only Lunar games, really, Lunar: Silver Star Story and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue.
Widely considered classics that already saw numerous re-releases over the years since they’ve been out are now available for all current consoles and the PC in remastered form, complete with re-digitized cutscenes, widescreen support, and the bells and whistles of higher fidelity graphics. Most especially, they feature the same gameplay as their Japanese originals, making Lunar Remastered Collection the optimal way to play these games.
Why is that, you ask? Because when both were new back in the Sega CD days, the add-on to the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive that bolted onto the poor thing in order to play CD-based games, the publisher, infamous Working Designs, messed with them in order to make them more “fun” to the Western audience, flipping the difficulty switch to 11 and mucking up the overall experience.
Otherwise, they did a decent job at translating these games and mostly everything else, but once people found out about their fiddling with core gameplay, those looking to play the first Lunar games had to go through the hoops of emulation and fan patches in order to see that through. Luckily, what we have here is a solution to the 20+ year problem, keeping what was best about these games intact, and there’s a lot of that to go around.
The Lunar games are very traditional RPGs in terms of gameplay, so there’s not much to go on about that: they play using turn-based battles, and you go through towns and maps in an isometric viewpoint, colorful as they are, with great looking sprites and some of the most impressive animated cutscenes from that time. What sets them apart from the rest, though, are their scripts. They are funny as all hell, full of quips and charming jabs at characters and the situations they find themselves in.
None of the humor is forced and that makes these two lovable RPGs very memorable. Last time I played the first was on PSP, and I can count the times I laughed out loud while revisiting it now, 15-ish years later. The same can be said about the second, which has been even longer since I’ve touched it. The story about goddess Althena, her creation of the world and its denizens is as entertaining now as it was then, for as anime as it can get at times, it’s easy to forgive it.
In terms of offering options akin to other similar retro compilations, Lunar Remastered Collection is at the skinnier side. Outside of configuring the color or the dialog boxes and the speed of text, there’s not much else to configure in them. Still, you can play both the remastered and original versions of the two, so if you really want to play in 4:3 and in low resolution like the olden days, you are welcome to do it.
Publisher GungHo have done a decent job reviving dormant Japanese RPG franchises over the years like Grandia, and later in 2015 they plan to release a full remake of the first entry in my beloved The Legend of Heroes series with Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter which, fingers crossed, will be great. If you’ve never experienced the series, this is the best way to do so when it comes to Lunar, bar none. That’s even more so on the Switch, where it looks very sharp.
