This might be the most disappointed I've ever been in a game. I've been looking forward to this for literally 30 years. Back in my youth, I would lust over ads and features for Lunar, its fantasy RPG world, the anime aesthetic, swords, magic, dragons, dudes in big capes!!! I bought a dang Sega CD for this game!
Oh, sweet summer child.
So fast forward, I never did find a Sega CD copy, I got SSS complete as a birthday gift in highschool, never played it, until now many years later. And holy shit this was not enjoyable.
Graphics are okay for a redesign of an older game. I think more effort could have been put into sprite, battle, spell animations, that kind of stuff. And oh my goodness, why do characters in these games need to be constantly walking in place? Is it a limitation of the hardware? Coding? Laziness? Does this really bother anyone else??
Music is utterly forgettable, not even one tune stands out to me, and the sound design is just lackluster and dated.
Battles, despite enemies being visible on the map, are mostly unavoidable and way too frequent. Forgiveable if fighting was interesting in the least, but from battle one to the last boss, fights are boring, tedious, repetitive, and just plain not fun. There were only a couple difficulty spikes that grinding a couple levels would fix, but it was all over the place. Many monsters could one shot my weaker team members. In the same dungeon, I could just auto battle melee my way through it with no thought. Heal up and worry about MP conservation after every fight because no matter how strong you think you are, you're taking a lot of damage in every single fight.
Gameplay is reduced to the most formulaic quest possible. Town, dungeon, fight and heal 800 times, boss, next might-as-well-be-identical town, same feeling dungeon, same 800 fights and navigating the annoying as hell menu 800 times. No side quests, no mini games, no puzzles, no secrets (more on this in a bit), no hidden characters or locations, nothing much special at all to see or do, just go through a dozen boring towns and a dozen boring dungeons, kill a hundred interchangable enemies, and that's it. Not even the last boss is cool.
I think that's it for the technical stuff, so let's move on to the plot and storytelling. The plot is flimsy and threadbare. The protagonist, Alex, wants to become a Dragonmaster. He idolizes the previous one, Dyne, from his village, who died fifteen years ago. We never do quite learn what a Dragonmaster does, except serve the Goddess in... some way. Everyone on earth (well, Lunar, so, the moon) worships (and well, not really worships, more like talks about and perhaps respects) a goddess, who, for some reason you never learn, genocided an entire race several hundred years prior, for something they did. We're never told what they did but it was bad enough that they deserve a slow, hundreds of years long extinction because of it. Oh, in the moon part of the moon. There are cloudy details about an extinction event on earth, so Althena, said goddess, brought humanity to the moon, used her magic to make some of it inhabitable, but not all of it, because apparently she's not a very talented Goddess. So for some reason, beastmen (wherever they came from) and humans get to live in the earth part of the moon, and the "Vile Tribe," who are really just humans with pointy ears, live in the Frontier, the moon part of the moon which is not super habitable. Things are real shitty in the Frontier, so not unexpectedly, the Vile Tribe decides to get a piece of the good land. That's basically the plot. Everyone does stuff around that with little to no reasoning, because I guess just no one thinks about it.
The characters have some cutscenes and out of battle dialogue that's voiced. It's not great. And oh man, in battles when you cast a spell, they say a little phrase. So you hear the same five sentences thousands of times and they are so poorly acted, like all of them were bored and couldn't be bothered. Except, here's one compliment I'll give, the villain's maniacal laugh is one of the best VA maniacal laughs I've heard.
The cast in Lunar is awful. Every person is terrible for some reason or another. Here's a rundown of our playable team.
- Alex - he wants to be a Dragonmaster for some reason. His personality is he likes Luna.
- Nall - a flying cat thing. We don't know why he exists, what he is, where he came from, or why he hangs out with Alex, but he's around to carry items and make comments.
- Luna - she's a girl. Her personality is liking Alex even though he's basically her brother.
- Ramus - he's fat and greedy. The game reminds you of this constantly.
- Jessica - she's a loud, bossy girl. The game reminds you of this constantly.
- Kyle - he's a lecherous, alcoholic dickhead, who somehow is Jessica's boyfriend. He would be the worst video game character ever, if not for...
- Nash - the worst video game character ever. He is a huge asshole. His personality is being a whiny, snobby, condescending, traitorous little shit and saying awful things.
- Mia - she's a quiet, demure girl. The game reminds you of this constantly. For some reason, she returns Nash's affection for her, which is really only expressed by him owning a naughty picture of her.
Everyone else in the game falls into one of three categories: mysoginistic men; quiet, demure women; and loud, bossy women.
This is the impetus of Working Designs' localization philosophy with this game. They don't allow for anything else. There's very little grey area. In the world of Lunar, if a woman doesn't submit to her husband, she's a loud, bossy bitch. There are very few, if any, men in the game who don't talk about women as sex objects. The quiet, demure girls should constantly doubt their ability, and need a man to be worth anything. Men are rude, lecherous, drunks. There are, of course, some outliers, but they're the exception.
The translation is riddled with errors, typos, and mistranslated things (good old "antorion" instead of "antlion"), and a couple instances like I noted in an earlier status update, bits where they forgot what has or hasn't happened yet in the plot, and give spoilers away.
On top of this, the localization is truly awful. I get it, companies need to make things understandable and accessible for American audiences. But this game constantly, incessantly, unrelentingly goes overboard in every facet. There are so many product, commercial, and pop culture references, that the game bloats itself with outdatedness. We've got 90s Milk ads, M&Ms, Wheaties, Mountain Dew, Star Wars, James Bond, Tootsie Roll Pops, ABBA, and it just goes on and on.
For some reason, WD decided to give country accents or affectations to a few towns' citizens, even when absent in the original. And it's never done for clarity, to show some regionalism, or any valid reason, it's just always done for laughs, in the form of the team treating everyone like idiots and making incest jokes. Also, there are like five characters in the game who speak with super awkward speech patterns, totally unlike everyone around them. Their grammar almost seems machine translated. I wonder if this handful of characters had some delay or something and someone with a poor grasp of English translated their dialogue.
There are non stop jokes almost every character makes insulting others around them. We've got some degree of everything - fat shaming, misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, and a general, negative otherring of everyone that's not that person. You can call me an SJW and that's probably true, but I really do value free speech, and I enjoy my fair share of edgy, immature, maybe even questionable comedy, as long as it's done with wit and knowledge. There's no such thing in Lunar. Pretty much none of it is funny, it's all punching down, or the most basic, vulgar, crass insult comedy you can think of. Who doesn't love a good fart joke? This game can't even get that right.
And it's constant. Kyle never stops objectifying women. Nash is never kind to anyone unless he wants something from them. Every dude oggles every woman he sees. A woman thinks her son is a crybaby idiot. Some guy's defining trait is he's a jerk who smells bad. Random dude hits on a party member and, being rejected, talks about putting the moves on his cousin. It just NEVER. STOPS. Even saving the world, WD makes sure there's always time for a put down or quick masturbation joke.
Did I mention that Lunar: SSSC makes no attempt to hide that women are objects intended for the male gaze and that sissy gay dudes are jokes? Oh okay, well here's another example. The only secret/side quest in the game is accumulating naughty images of female characters. Most of them come in the form of bromides found around the world, that shows your girl teammates or villains in various stages of undress when used as an item. In addition, there are two hot springs areas where, if you have a bar of soap in your inventory, you're treated to watching your team bathe in the springs. But there's a catch - without telling you, the first hot spring turns out to be males only. "Haha, surprise gaywad! Dude, you're so gay!" is what I imagine Working Designs' staff saying to me in this moment. So you're treated to two scenes of cartoon dude butt. Eventually, you find the spring for women, and get to see underage anime boobs if you have soap still. Oh, but you have to work your way through one of the hardest dungeons in the game to get there. Lest you think I'm a hypocrite, I skipped over these... adventures.
That's not all folks, WD puts its charming humor all over their support materials as well. Here's a few doozies from the guide:
Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete is awful. It's mediocre in every way, and in case the gameplay wasn't bad enough, Working Designs has covered it in a thick layer of pure, juvenile shit and outdated references for you to really get a laugh. L:SSSC'S worst sin of all, though: it's just not fun, AT ALL, to play.
