Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete Review

There are some games that never lose that certain something which makes people want to play them, and get remade in one form or another several times. Presumably they are remade because there are people who want to play them. This is one of my major pieces of evidence for why RPGs don’t need excellent graphics, since people have as much fun playing the game now as when it was first released, despite obviously dated graphics. So, let’s take a look at a game so classic, it’s been re-made thrice (at least), and has one of the most endearing songs on the internet. I refer, of course, to Lunar: Silver Star Complete.

The story of Lunar should be immediately familiar. A boy sets out to defeat an insane villain, bent on ruling the world, aided by his many quirky companions. Well, no, it’s not original, but believe me, there are a few twists that you may not see coming. The characters, on the other hand, are really great. Each and every significant character has their very own anime intro when you first meet them, and whenever the group does something interesting, a cutscene is not far behind. Kyle, the bandit womanizer, comes out in drag, and ambushes some baddies. Going to the hot springs actually gets you an amusing still of the guys. And going through the hard as nails optional dungeon gets you to the girls’ spring… Even when a cutscene ends, you’ve still got reasonably complex character stereotypes. Yeah, they’re still pretty conventional, but they’re anything but generic. Nash, your whiny little show-off mage, actually pulls some pretty big shots. Plus, there’s a strong undercurrent of humor throughout the game, which means that your party members will frequently crack jokes, especially when you talk to npcs. It’s certainly more interesting to talk to the npcs than in many games, where you ignore everyone in town except shopkeepers and plot points.

As far as the battle system goes, it’s pretty basic. You give out commands, and party members act them out in order of their speed. However, Lunar mixes things up a little by making it necessary to move up to your enemy before launching a melee attack. At the beginning, this requires you to seriously consider your characters’ movement ranges. Probably the best part of the battle system is that power leveling will only get you so far. Minor enemies, which can occasionally be avoided on the dungeon map, don’t scale to your level, but bosses do. Power level too far, and the boss’ll cream you, since your gear won’t be up to snuff. The only reason to level up at all is that each character gains spells/abilities depending on their preset “class” at certain levels. Good for those of you who just want to play the story, but if you want character customization and grinding, you might want to look elsewhere else.

All your characters have a set of abilities, which overlap a little if not consistently. At some points in the game, you’ll have two healers, and for most of the game you’ll have two main fighters and two attack mages. This frequently happens because temporary characters join your team. In fact, it happens so much that you begin to wonder who is going to be in the final party. Some characters are pretty obviously only temporary (Lvl 99’s anyone?) but there’s a few you’ll be a bit surprised to see go. Just remember to take all their stuff!

Which brings me around to the next bit. Stuff. In Lunar, your inventory is limited. You can’t just keep lugging around your old gear, and sooner or later you’re going to have to drop things to make room for better. It’s kinda too bad, because some of the gear is mildly amusing. The Magic Robes, for example, are described as “Magically Delicious.” This ain’t no Disgaea, but it’s the thought that counts. Still, the limited inventory adds challenge, especially since characters can only use the items that they themselves are carrying. Plus, you’ll want to save room for the bromides, which are little bits of fan service for all of the female characters. Sexist? All I have to say to that is “men’s hot springs.”

Graphics? Excuse me, but I refuse. This game came out for the Sega CD, and got ported to the Playstation. Yeah, there was a Nintendo DS remake recently, but the game I’m reviewing is Silver Star Story: Complete, for the Playstation. That’s the one I own, and it’s the one I played. The other versions are supposed to be fun, but I’ve never played them and may never get the chance to do so. Whatever. In any case, graphics are about as relevant to rpgs as hypotension is to literary theory. Yeah, occasionally you get exceptions, but I’ll let you know when those games rear their ugly, or in some case gorgeous, heads.

Replay value? Well, hmm. This guy just ranks in at “once is enough, plus or minus nostalgia value.” There’s not a whole lot you can do on a second run. I did two runs because I messed up getting an optional item or two the first time, but really, there’s not a lot that you can do differently, so it would get old. You might replay it for the story or for nostalgia though.

Down to the overall rating. This game gets about 8.5 out of 10. Remember, I run most rpgs at 5, no matter how bad, so it might be something like 3.5 out of 5. Still good, but not fantastic. There’s definitely some great nostalgia surrounding this game though, so I’d definitely give it a go. Just remember to save often. When a party member leaves, they take all their stuff. You think you lost party members permanently in Final Fantasy VII?

Quick Tip: When you become dragonmaster, head back to Lann for Ghaleon’s Tear, a really good accessory. You just need to have a little chat with the elder to get it.

How I Broke Game: Ghaleon’s Tear? It makes it so you do one physical attack to all enemies instead of your normal attack options. I gave it to Nash, who has weapons that inflict status effects. Sometimes even death…

If you liked this game, you might look into these games. Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete is very similar to the first game, and has a lot of little references in it to characters and events from LSSSC. Breath of Fire III and Breath of Fire IV have similar battle systems, and somewhat of a similar attitude toward characters, making complicated stereotypes of the playable characters. Grandia has a nice, light-hearted story to match Lunar, though the battle system is pretty different.

Breath of Fire III

I want to start off this review by imagining if RPG series/companies were sodas. Yes, there’s a reason, so bear with me. Suqare-Enix, with Final Fantasy, probably represents the name brand stuff. Atlus, and its series, the Shin Megami Tensei (with spin-offs) might represent a competing main name brand, though one that’s a little less popular. There’s also Namco Bandai, with their Tales series, which might be considered like gourmet sodas by some, or recently Nippon Ichi, with their Disgaea and whatnot, might be an indie soda company. Or something like that. Whether or not you agree with those allocations, I think it’s pretty fair to say that the Breath of Fire series, by Capcom, represents the generic brand. The store brand. That’s not to say it’s bad, but it is pretty generic. Since I’m currently looking at Playstation games, I’m going to start with Breath of Fire III. I mean, that one even calls itself, on the cover “The Classic Role Playing Game.”

Breath of Fire III begins with a couple of miners facing down a dragon whelp that is not as extinct as the rest of the dragons. You take control of the dragon, and burninate your way through the mine; you get captured, and carted out into the world. From there, you assemble a motley crew of unique individuals, who help you discover the truth behind the eradication of the dragons that occurred hundreds of years ago. Ultimately, you have to save the world from a goddess bent on ruling the world with an iron fist. Yeah, that sounds like a generic story to me. There’s some pretty good moments along the way, and actually, the game does a really good job of making a sympathetic villain, but there’s not really any major twists, and there’s only a few minor twists at the end of the game.

As far as the characters go, they’re okay. Nina, the princess of Wyndia, has issues of having to be the perfect princess at the expense of being allowed to be herself. Rei, lovable rogue that he is, is fully aware that he’s an irresponsible individual, and worries about whether he can do the right thing. Garr, the holy warrior, begins to doubt whether the services he performed for his god where justified. Most of the characters are fleshed out pretty well, except possibly for Peco, who only gets a little development late in the game. The biggest problem I can see with the characters is that they’re played completely straight. There’s occasional minor humor involving Garr’s great size and strength, or Peco’s … weirdness, but the personalities of the characters aren’t really humorized.

Game play is possibly where things get the most generic. Battles play out where you enter commands for all your characters, and they and the enemies act in order of agility. Characters have a balance between fixed character classes and customizability. While each character gains certain spells at certain levels, and emphasizes certain abilities in their levels, you can apprentice them to a master, who will teach them skills and adjust what stats they gain as they level up. It’s the best of both worlds, right? Well, it doesn’t always work out that you can change a character to whatever you want, because the basic stats of the character rule out certain options. So, the masters only serve to possibly cripple a character with stats that make them balanced, but not useful. You know how in some games, “Everyone’s a Red Mage,” or can learn and cast all types of magic? The most interesting thing about this game is that instead, “Everyone’s a Blue Mage,” and can learn enemy skills that have been used against them. It’s subverted, since you can switch which skills each character has, but the concept is one of the more original ones. Ryu, the main character, can turn into dragons by accessing various genes, and one fun thing is that, depending upon what genes are selected, the dragon will have different abilities, including some unique dragons that are greater than the sum of their parts.

This game is surprisingly long for a one-disc Playstation affair. It could last you a good 60 hours or more if you’re methodical in hunting out every side quest and minigame. Plus, when you use different character classes for your characters, it changes how you can use those characters. But, on the other hand, unless you’re a contrarian and enjoy doing things you’re not supposed to do in a game, you won’t want to make your characters inefficient in their party roles. So, this game’s replay value is something like “Despite some good replay elements, it’s still only a game you’ll want to play once.” It’s kinda a shame, because it’s not a bad game, but there’s not much to be gained from a second playthrough.

The numerical rating is a good place to come back to my original analogy. Just because Breath of Fire III is the RPG equivalent of the store brand of soda, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad game. In this case, it’s actually quite a good game. The flow of the narrative is a little slow, but a lot of the more or less unrelated quests still have some important character or world development that occurs during them. All in all, this game gets a solid 8 out of 10. It’s hardly original, but it’s a good iteration of those things that have been good in lots of other games. That’s why you’ll frequently see this game on the list of games that you might want to try for my other reviews. It’s generic enough that it’s got some elements of most other games in the genre, and these elements are mostly handled well enough.

Quick Tip: When you’re walking in the desert, late in the game, DON’T READ THE DIRECTIONS IN YOUR TENT. They are wrong. Remember what the guy told you, and do that instead.

Fun Fact: That mural you see in the opening of the game? That’s depicting the characters from the first Breath of Fire. But there’s some characters missing…

If you liked this game, you should try one of these games. Breath of Fire IV has mostly the same systems, and a few cameos from III. Chrono Trigger is an excellent game, and though you don’t have much customizability for your characters, the characters themselves are great. Dragon Warrior VII does a lot of the things that Breath of Fire III does, like classes, and a pleasantly meandering plot.

Paper Mario

Some of you may be wondering by this point “Well, yeah, the Playstation and Playstation 2 had some great RPGs, but what about other systems?” Weeeell, okay. I don’t have a SNES, so I won’t go into those, but there’s always the Nintendo 64 right? Ha. Ha. Hah. But the good old N64 had two or three good RPGs, and today’s review is paying homage to one of those. Paper Mario.

Paper Mario starts off with a traditional Mario premise. “Dear Mario. Please come to the castle. Bowser’s about to kidnap me, and I need you there so that you’ll know about it and start rescuing me. Princess Peach.” So you show up, watch Bowser, yada yada, get sent flying to a corner of Mushroom Kingdom, blah blah blah. It’s not the best story out there, but it holds. The characters you meet on the way are… mostly okay. Each of the characters in your party has a special ability, and you’ll need to use them to get through the dungeons of the game. There’s some pretty decent puzzles involving the use of different character abilities. There’s one really great character (you can boo me any day Lady Bow) and the rest are good enough. Lady Bow is a boo with bows on her head, hence her name. Clever. Her special ability is to turn Mario invisible, but he can’t move while this is active. She’s also sneaky in that she’s captured the star spirit you need to rescue, but forces you to help her with her own problems before she’ll give him to you. She’s just a little sneaky, with a cultured attitude that occasionally slips. No, we don’t have amazingly deep, soul searching characters in this game. I’m not sure that’s strictly necessary for a JRPG. In any case, Lady Bow is the best of the bunch in context, which is kind of unfortunate. Kooper’s an all-Mushroom-Kingdom guy, and doesn’t really get any more development than that. You can jump on him, making him go into his shell and hit switches (and enemies) or grab items. Bombette’s a pink bombshell, but beyond the fact that she’s a girl bob-omb, she doesn’t have any interesting personality traits. She can blow up cracked walls. Lackilester is one bad Lakitu, with mildly interesting speech mannerisms, but that’s about it, since he’s your last party member, and doesn’t have much time to be developed. He can glide over spikes indefinitely. So, really, the characters are functional for the game, and their special abilities add just a little bit of variety to the otherwise pretty standard gameplay.

The gameplay is a cool combination of classic Mario, RPG, and the quirky “paper” conceit. You can get a literal jump on enemies ala Mario, but the battles play out like a standard RPG, complete with timing based attacks. You’ll find that your papery nature helps you get into some areas, but mostly it serves as a background detail that is irrelevant to the gameplay. As for your vital statistics, you have a very simple system. You have hit points, which act just like they do in every RPG. Flower points are this game’s magic points, which means you can use them for special attacks. You also get star power, which can be used for a different set of special attacks. This charges a little every turn, but there are no items that restore star power. Finally, you get a certain number of badge points. Badges help you customize your Mario. Some badges do things like give you special attacks, like the Power Bounce Badge, which lets you perform a power bounce. This attack allows you to continue hitting an enemy until you mess up the timing. There’s also badges that affect your attack power or defense power, like the Mega Rush Badge, which increases your attack by 4 when Mario has 1 hit point left. There’s even a number of general capability badges, which do various things. The Zap Tap Badge, for example, makes it so enemies that touch Mario take one damage. With each level up you get increase only one of your HP, your FP, or your B[adge]P gauges though, so you’ll have to strategize how you build up Mario. Some people enjoy having enough FP to constantly perform specials, other prefer BP for lots of customization. Finally, at the end of every chapter there’s a bit of tactical stealth espionage featuring Princess Peach.

Well, now we come to replay value. Fortunately, this is an aspect of Paper Mario that is handled quite well. Depending on the choices you make when leveling up, the game presents different challenges. Furthermore, your selection of badges can make all the difference. Prioritize defense, so you take less damage, work on your hammer skills, or even trust to luck based skills, there’s a lot of ways to set things up. Thus, this game gets “good for a couple of afternoons every once in a while.” It’s not a super long game, but sidequests extend gameplay a little, and it’s a game that will take a few sittings for most people to finish.

Overall, this is a pretty good game, especially for a console that has very few RPGs at all. There’s nothing really wrong with it, as far a games go, so I’m going to have to give it a 9 out of 10. No, it doesn’t stand out anywhere, and it’s a bit short, but for a quick romp, there are few games that are better. The gameplay’s addictive, and it never really gets old. That counts for something.

Quick Tip: In the Dry Dry Ruins, there’s a room where you’ll have to switch the orientation of red and green staircases to get over a wall to the Super Hammer. But if you walk along the ledge above the Super Hammer chest, against the far wall you’ll find a hidden room, with the completely useless Slow Go badge. LOL.

If you liked this game, I’d recommend you look at these games. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, is pretty much better in almost every way, which is saying something. Grandia and Grandia III are pretty fun, and incorporate some pre-emptive striking into their encounters.

Persona 3 Review

Some games have it easy. They come out, and everyone will buy them immediately based solely on the name. Final Fantasy comes to mind, but there are other offenders in the RPG market. The Legend of Zelda is perhaps even more widespread, Dragon Quest (known until recently as Dragon Warrior in the States) has had a big following, and of course the Pokémon series. What’s really exciting is when games come out to immensely greater acclaim than previous titles in the series. I’m going to be reviewing one such game today. Persona 3 came out, and took critics by storm. Persona 2, on the Playstation, had garnered some praise, building on the slightly creepy, stylish world of the original Persona, also one the Playstation. However, Persona 3 brought the series to a whole new level of popularity. No longer was it just cult series, it now stood out as one of the best RPGs for the PS2. It’s also one of my favorite games. Now let’s go on to the review. I’ve been waiting for this.

Well, Persona 3 starts out with the protagonist walking around town. Then you see a girl with a gun, which she eventually aims at her own head. !! However, when the protagonist get off the train, it starts getting weird, as all the electronics stop working, everything turns green, and where all the people were, there’s just a bunch of coffins. !?! So, yeah, you find out that, at midnight, there’s an extra hour in the day that only some people can experience, and that there’s these creepy things called “Shadows” that attack people who aren’t inside a coffin. Your new school turns into a freaky tower, and you don’t know why. The main drive of the plot is figuring out what’s going on with the dark hour, and how to put a stop to it, with a backdrop of people becoming living zombies as a result of shadow attacks. Naturally, you eventually find yourself on a quest to save the world, but it’s not quite so simple. Saying anything more would be spoiling this game’s really quite adequate plot.

The characters in this game are great. The main character is basically a self-insert avatar for the player, so he’s pretty bland. Emo, but bland. Headphones, one lock of hair covering an eye, skinny like a stick, yep, he’s emo. But Junpei, in addition to being a loud obnoxious guy, also has his own major issues that he tries to deal with, like his own mediocrity. Mitsuru’s not just a hot, mature ojousama, she’s also got a major chip on her shoulder. And so on. There’s some really traumatic events that happen during the course of the game, e.g., a couple people die. These events really bring out some realistic and sympathetic reactions from the main characters, which just serves to increase the realism of the game. Even a lot of the NPC’s are pretty cool, due in no small part to the Social Links system. I’ll get to that in a minute, but the dating sim aspect this adds to the game seriously benefits the quality of the NPCs as far as personality and interest go. Since there’s conversations with each of the Social Link NPCs at each of the ten levels of the relationship, they all develop in one way or another as you interact with them. Plus, you can go on outings with the guys or dates with the girls. Yes, of course you can date the girls. Unfortunately, you can’t date the guys, unless you’re playing the Playstation Portable version, but even then, only if you play a female protagonist.

Personas are this game’s classes, basically. Each one has a certain set of ability scores, elemental weaknesses/resistances, and certain spells or special attacks or abilities. The main character’s protagonist power is that he can decide what abilities to keep on his Personas, create new Personas, and switch Personas mid-battle. Each Persona can only have 8 abilities, including spells, special attacks, and special abilities. When you have too many abilities, you can choose which ones to forget, either old ones to make room for new ones, or the new ones if you like the skills you have already. You create Personas by fusing two (or more) Personas together, making a new Persona based on the ones you used. That Persona will inherit some of the skills, spells, or special attacks of the “parent.” Finally, once per turn in battles, you can switch your Persona to any one you have in your possession at that time. This means you can get out a Persona that is strong against enemy attacks, or has an attack that is super-effective versus those enemies.

Wow, your main character is awesome! Too bad you can’t directly control you party members. Wait what? Yep, that’s right. Despite being a fully turn based battle system, you can’t input commands for your party members. You can set AI tasks, like heal/support or full offensive, but you can’t make them use a certain spell at a certain time. This is usually alright, but during some of the boss fights, it can be a problem. Apart from storyline bosses, there are “minibosses” located at specific floors of the main dungeon. Many of these minibosses are actually much more difficult to defeat than the bosses in the story. This is in no small part because the A.I. of your teammates is frequently incredibly stupid. Faced with the main character at low health, and another teammate poisoned, a character with healing spells will frequently cure the poison. Did I mention that if your main character dies, it’s game over? Yeah. There’s also instant death spells that are commonly possessed by enemies. Yay.

Now that I’ve covered the battle system, it sees like a good time to examine the Social Link system. So, what is a Social Link? Basically, you can form social relationships with specific individuals. Each of these social links is represented by one of the major arcana of tarot. For example, Fushimi Chihiro, the student council treasurer, is Justice, whereas Hiragi Keisuke is [The Wheel of] Fortune. The higher the level of your social link, the more bonus experience it gains when you make it via the persona creation system. It really does matter who you hang out with, and how much. Also, with the girls you can date (Yuko, Chihiro, Mitsuru, Yukari, Fuuka, and Aigis) there’s a certain point where your relationship becomes intimate, meaning they’ll get mad at you if you are intimate with another girl, or ignore them too long. Just like in real life! Whenever you hang out with any character, they get closer to you. If they’ve reached a certain level of intimacy, you have a conversation with them where you can choose one of three dialogue options at various points in the conversation. Some answers increase the number of brownie points with a character, some do nothing, and some will make the character really mad at you. It’s handled pretty well, so that it’s fairly difficult in most cases to get someone to hate you without trying to do so. The only issue with the social link system is if you want to be a completion whore about it. It requires a meticulous schedule to get all of the social links maxed out in one playthrough, which gives you less time to enjoy the other aspects of the game.

Fortunately, news is good on the replay end of things. There is a new game+ feature, which has your stats, items, and Persona library (but not Persona inventory) carried over into a new game. This is especially important for your social stats, academics, courage, and charm. The necessity to increase these stats through various time consuming activities is the main reason why it is hard to get all of the social links in one playthrough, because some social links require you to have a certain level of each one. Unfortunately for replay value, with all of your old gear, and the ability to get back some of your old powerhouse Personas, the game’s not terribly hard. I’d give this one “play twice; once for the story, and the second time to take your time and get everything you missed out on.”

Well, I have to say, this is one of the best RPGs for the Playstation 2. It’s got great characterization, is moderately challenging, has decent replay value, and has a somewhat unusual setting. Not many RPGs are ostensibly set in the real world. Plus, it’s got some elements reminiscent of Dating Sims and Monster Catching games, so it’s not entirely standard RPG fare. So the rating? 9.5. It’s really good, but it’s easy to see how things could be improved. Especially, the dungeon crawling can get tedious, going through hundreds of floors of randomly generated hallways.

Quick Tips: You can leave the dorm in the evening to go to the mall. You should do this at every opportunity, even if you’re sick, but not if you need to go to Tartarus. Also, go to the bathroom. Seriously.

How I Broke Game: Well, there is how I got Junpei (weak to wind) an accessory that makes him immune to wind. However, I made Laevateinn about halfway through the game, which allowed me to beat Chidori in two turns when I fought her.

If you liked this game, you should look at playing one of these games. Persona 4 is everything you loved about Persona 3, except better. The social links are better, they have voice acting, they don’t play by the same rules, your party members can be turned to manual controls, the list goes on and on. Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love is a Dating Sim S[trategy]RPG, in that order, where Persona 3 could be considered an RPG Dating Sim in that order. However, Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love is another great game to play with an audience, because much of the Dating Sim is hilarious, and the whole game is totally over the top. Thousand Arms is another of the elusive Date Sim/RPG genre, and one that is an affectionate parody of both of its parent genres.