Mega CD: Lunar the Silver Star  .

THE STORY OF A GAME THAT TOUCHED THE WORLD

In the early 1990s, before Final Fantasy III and Chrono Trigger, the Japanese RPG was dead to the West. Square punished us with Mystic Quest and blamed its failure on the genre. The Dragon Warrior series perished with the NES. Sega published a few RPGs here and there, but only the proven Phantasy Star received any significant advertising. People were buying 16-bit systems for platformer action and sports, dammit!

Lunar: The Silver Star’s story begins during this dark era.

By the time Working Designs announced Lunar was coming to the United States, I was already familiar with their work. While the rest of the country ignored Japanese RPGs, Working Designs had published TurboGrafx games like Cosmic Fantasy 2 and Exile for the starved roleplayers of the West, achieving a nearly 90% sell-through ratio. Working Designs was the nation’s RPG king, and Lunar would be their first game on a truly popular system.

My frothing anticipation was rewarded with an engaging fairytale. Lunar is not an epic. There are no warring factions, political agendas, or corrupt religions. The game’s not even long — it can be completed in a day. Lunar is a short story for children and children-at-heart, full of knights, dragons, damsels in distress, and brave damsels in dress. This game speaks to a younger audience than its sequel, as the developers readily admit . . . but it speaks with a rare sincerity that’s likely to bring a smile to child and curmudgeon alike.

“North of the village of Burg lies a memorial to a valiant warrior. He arose during a time of trial and saved the world. That hero, called Dyne, was a dragonmaster. Dragonmaster Dyne was born in this sleepy village of Burg, and it’s here that a young boy named Alex visits the memorial to his fallen hero every day.”

Spurred on by a heroic heart and his fortune-hunting friend Ramus, Alex sets out to find adventure, since it hasn’t been finding him. Along the way, Alex bonds with his childhood sweetheart Luna, explores some weird woods (aptly called “The Weird Woods”), negotiates with stubborn witches, and learns that dragons defecate enormous diamonds.

The cutscenes — often a focal point for these old, CD-based Japanese RPGs — are infrequent and disappointing. When Alex meets the premier guildmage Ghaleon, it’s a simple portrait with large black borders . . . a far cry from Cosmic Fantasy 2′s colorful, animated, full-screen cinematics!

This does not mean Lunar lacks heart. When Ramus finds his fortune, he bids Alex farewell. On his way out, the pudgy sprite silently turns around and pauses; this is his last moment in an adventure that exceeds his abilities, and he wants to remember it well. The in-game visuals show off a keen emotional awareness.

Alex’s adventure is accompanied by upbeat melodies spooled directly from the disc. GameArts used the Sega CD’s redbook capabilities for what was, at the time, higher-quality synth than you’d find on either the Genesis or SNES. This is how most CD-based games were done; full orchestral or symphonic arrangement are rare. Lunar’s music emphasized memorable melodies above rich instrumentation. As a result, the once-rockin’ battle music sounds tinny and false today. Many tracks beg for a modern remake, but a few — such as the piano melody and the echoic dragon chamber ambiance — remain as magical as the day I first heard them.

The best fairytales feature really diabolical villains — the kind of fiends who kick puppies or poison their own children. When Lunar’s big villain introduces himself, he immediately kidnaps innocent women, imprisons revered leaders, murders wizened sages, replaces Alex’s parents with demon imposters, and SMASHES DRAGONMASTER DYNE’S MEMORIAL.

The villain also rides around inside an enormous, seemingly unstoppable steampunk tank and rolls over entire villages. If you want to see The Power Of Evil, then play this version of Lunar; the 32-bit remake puts the heroes on a somewhat level playing field, and actually tries to make the villain sympathetic.

Snow White’s stepmother should not be sympathetic, and neither should Lunar’s archfiend. Thankfully, the Sega CD version dispenses with any notion of redemption; it simply piles one monstrosity atop another, increasing the feeling of hopelessness, laying the groundwork for a classic final confrontation.

The music during that final confrontation is ridiculously good. When the villain reveals himself halfway through the game, Lunar’s soundtrack changes; it shifts from light-hearted to desperately heroic, from unyielding homophony to occasional polyphony. This is the soundtrack that skyrocketed Noriyuki Iwadare’s career, and it’s a shame that every single track was replaced with something completely different in the 32-bit remake.

Lunar was developer GameArts’ first RPG, and it demonstrates ambition in a lot of ways beyond its soundtrack. The characters were designed by Toshiyuki Kubooka, an artist with a distinctive clean style who would go on to design characters for the legendary Giant Robo anime. The combat system expanded the then-traditional “monsters on left, heroes on right” format, augmenting combat with actual battlefield movement. This allowed for rudimentary tactical positioning, but GameArts didn’t let this encumber the swift battles; fights are quick and painless, despite the relatively high random encounter rate.

Then there’s the dialogue.

At one point, a girlish mage named Mia asked me to help her mother. I said no; Mia whimpered and cried. I turned to leave, but my talking pet — the perfect fairytale companion — stopped me. He was mad. He thought my behavior was immoral. I tried to leave anyway. He asked how I could abandon a girl in such a fragile state of mind. I tried to pay him no heed. My pet mockingly imitated me:

“I am Alex, the girly man! No Mia, I cannot help your mother. The monsters in the spire are too dangerous!”

Again, I turned to leave, but my furry friend had more to say. He ran through ten different dialogue snippets before he finally cycled back to the first. Lesson learned: characters in Lunar have a lot to say. In the instruction manual, Working Designs pointed out that they had never before translated a game containing so much text.

Working Designs usually included such “designers’ notes” in their instruction manuals to give customers some insight into the localization process . . . although they occasionally lied. There’s a picture of the black dragon fight in the instruction manual. One of the characters shown in the player’s party isn’t supposed to be there, which led hundreds of gamers to try and discover Lunar‘s secret sequence break, until Working Designs headman Victor Ireland spilled the beans on his message board: it’s a fake picture. They were just screwing around with software editors and left the photo in there.

But that’s okay. The black dragon battle was still pretty damn thrilling.

Lunar: The Silver Star was a labor of love for developer GameArts, and a labor of love for publisher Working Designs. The game even featured an embossed cover . . . for people who waited until after Christmas. The normal-looking first print was quickly replaced by a fancy second edition with silver lettering that gleamed and six alternate sets of disc art.

Lunar certainly shows its age today, but still remains one of my most cherished Christmas gifts. It contains the childish gags you’d expect from a Disney film — in a world of beautiful singers, one lady sings so off-key that my ears bled. It embodies the youthful desire for adventure. And it delivers a villain so diabolical that the hero looks that much stronger for eventually overcoming the odds. Lunar is a classic fairytale adventure, and I pray that GameArts will someday give us something other than another remake.