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| CORBIE'S BLOG <- REVIEWS <- CONTACT |
| Lunar: The Silver Star Publisher: Working Designs Release Date: December 1993 Genre: Turn-Based RPG     |
 Because the story in Lunar is so outstanding, I won't spoil any of it with a lot of plot details. Suffice it to say, the game follows the adventures of a young adventurer and his friends as they set out to save their land from the advances of the Magic Emperor. I'll let you experience the rest of the story for yourself. This is the one area of the game that's feeling the most dated to me. The combat system in Lunar Silver Star is a very standard turn-based system, but unlike many of the rpgs of this time period, the game uses the distance in between your party and the enemies as a factor in the battle. Your characters can only move a set distance, and if they're not close enough to attack, they merely move into a better position automatically and then have to wait until their next turn in order to actually strike the enemy. If you had the ability to move them yourself, this little extra feature might actually be more fun, but as it is, it's mainly more of an annoyance than anything. The game also features an "AI" function that will allow the computer to take over and carry out a character's battle selections for you. I don't care for this feature personally as it takes what little control you have in the battle away from you. Over the past decade, we've seen turn-based combat systems improve a lot, so this is possibly a reason why Lunar Silver Star feels a little outdated so many years later. That's not to say that it's still not a solid battle system, it just doesn't have that zing it had years ago. Graphically, Lunar Silver Star still looks pretty good. It still has that slightly tinted look to it that seems to dull the colors a little too much, but it's still one of the better looking 16-bit era rpgs. The anime sequences are still a nice diversion from the game, and show just how capable a system the Sega CD truly was. It probably doesn't help that the second Lunar game looked quite a bit better than this one either, but this is an rpg, after all, so visuals don't have as much emphasis here as they might in another genre and let's face it, the Lunar series has never been about flashy graphics anyway. At the end of the day, the visuals in Lunar Silver Star might not impress those who have grown up on the more recent game systems, but for those of us who remember how blown away we were when we first played this game back in 1993, it's a nice trip down memory lane. Now here's where the game still shines as brightly as it did 13 years ago. There are few video game soundtracks that I love as much as the one in Lunar Silver Star. Absolutely beautiful and melodic musical tracks abound through every inch of this game. Everything from very soft and gentle tunes to the more uptempo battle music, you won't find a bad track in the entire bunch here. The voice work is also a strong point of the game. Not only is there an enormous amount of voiced dialogue, it's also very well done. Once again, not as mind-blowing as it was back when spoken dialogue wasn't terribly common, it's still a big reason the story comes across so vividly in the game. I know I've expressed some gripes about Lunar in this review, but I don't want people to come away from this review thinking that Lunar Silver Star isn't a terrific game or that I don't like it. Lunar Silver Star is still one of the rpg greats out there and a game that any fan of the genre owes it to themsleves to play through. I think it's just that I was so blown away by this game years ago and now with some of the rpgs on the current systems, I think it's just lost some of that "wow" factor for me. That being said, it's still better than most rpgs of its time period and for those who owned it years ago, a nice peice of rpg nostalgia as well. |
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