37: Lunar: The Silver Star Story
Game Arts, 1992: Sega CD Points: 379 Votes: 9 Previous Rank: 28
It’s hard to imagine, but there was a time not too long ago when anime hadn’t slipped into every corner and crevasse of popular culture. Where it was a rare and alluring thing, wild in style and promise. Lunar, in both its western releases, represents a big push to sell the aesthetic. Or rather, to garner sales via aesthetic appeal. Lunar isn’t just another JRPG that happens to have an anime art style. It is anime, through and through, relishing in every hallmark, cliche, touchstone, and peculiarity. Even by 1999, though Japanese animation had made significant inroads into western pop culture, this approach was still fresh, especially when leaned into as thoroughly as Game Arts and Working Designs took it.
Lunar, on the Sega CD, represented something of a manifesto for the power of multimedia roleplaying. Designed with the intention of making a "different kind of RPG,” the game put the audiovisual experience forefront, with voice acting, Redbook audio, and lavish, fully animated, video cutscenes. Remember, this was 1993, when in the US the closest analogs for a robust JRPG story experience were Secret of Mana and Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. Lunar was on a whole other level. Not just with its fancy animations and talking characters, but with the fact that it put narrative first and focused on strongly defined, dynamic characters. As a response to Final Fantasy IV, it’s a doozy: if RPGs can be centered around story, then why not make one in the style of a whole dang OAV?
Now, being a CD game in the early days of the format meant that there wasn’t a huge audience for Lunar in the west, but also being a CD game in the early days of the format meant that Lunar anticipated many of the experiences and maneuvers console roleplaying would move into a few years later as the technology and genre entered the Playstation era. Lunar very much feels like a forerunner to the fifth generation rather than a true member of its contemporaries’ fraternity. It makes sense then, that Game Arts would see so much success by adding a bit of spit and polish and remaking it just a generation later; to bring the game home, as it were.
The Silver Star Story Complete is already a robust experience—with a longer story, more dialogue, more animated cutscenes, and even a whole dang boat song included—before having to contend with Working Designs’ excesses on top of it. But in the west Ol Mad Victor was at the height of his powers and the excessive production Working Designs lavished on Lunar’s US release is as much of the game’s identity as any of its contents. From a Making Of CD to a freewheeling translation to a self-satisfied self-reverence, Working Design’s publication of the game has all the flavor and tone of Newtype and Web 1.0 fansites: a frothy obsession tinged with a counterculture swag that often relished in the mildly transgressive. And so Lunar: The Silver Star Story is doubly potent: both excessively anime in content and in a sort of fanish regard for itself. It embodies two sides of the coin that was anime’s emergence in the west: both the medium itself, and the culture that formed around it.
Thus in turn, Lunar makes for a significant game in this era of JRPG history. As the genre grew more popular, and more games with more of a foreign quality were released in the west, a certain adoption of anime’s particular styles and modes of expression came hand-in-hand with the adoption of JRPGs’ particular styles and modes. Lunar, with all its excessive anime-ness, made for a showy, appealing, and, most of all, enthusiastic flagbearer. In a sense, a more pure and representational JRPG would be difficult to find. For a huge slice of what the JRPG pie would become, Luna is there, leading the way, belting out her love for a boat.
