Lunar: The Silver Star (Sega CD, 1993) - The Impression

 The story is simple: Alex, a boy from a small town, yearning to follow in the footsteps of his idol Dyne, who once ascended to the title of Dragonmaster and saved the planet, goes on a casual adventure with his bud. In the process he stumbles upon his destiny: if he can prove himself worthy of taking up the mantle of manhood, the great dragon Quark will help him become the world’s next Dragonmaster. This triggers an epic quest: evil is unleashed upon the planet that only Alex can stop. Together, with a cast of adventures and his trusty companion Nall, they set off in search of the Dragon items so that they can seal this great evil and preserve peace.

Such is the story that drives Lunar: The Silver Star, a Sega CD JRPG developed by Game Arts and released for the ill-fated add on system to Japanese audiences in 1992. A year later in 1993, a fully localized version of the game would make its way to American shores by way of publisher/localizer Working Designs. This version, which I played to completion in February of 2021 feels like a unique time capsule in many ways: both its localization, its gameplay, and its structure feel as if they were designed in a vacuum free of any grandiose expectations. It might be the ultimate starter JRPG in terms of presentation and accessibility. The game’s structure is simple: wander from town to dungeon and back to town again across a decently sized map while fighting random battles and a series of boss fights to save the world. There are not any complex puzzles to solve, and the game’s difficulty curve is so tame that even my mother could likely reach the credits without too much frustration. Its combat, turn based like the best of them, is functional at best: it is one of the earliest games to implement a form of auto battle in your ability to have the AI make combat decisions for you: I suggest you use this and just cruise from locale to locale.The only real challenge I faced in my playthrough was the repetitive dungeon design in the 2nd half of the game, and the sometimes obnoxious encounter rate. Even that was not enough to get my heart rate up.

To aid in subduing the audience into hangout mode, the game’s score, composed by a team of three individuals to take advantage of the CD add on’s CDDA capabilities, has to be one of the most relaxing JRPG soundtracks I have ever heard. Gone are the harsh tones of the Genesis/Mega Drive’s FM synth capabilities. Instead, you get a series of overworld and dungeon themes that I can, at best, describe as melodic and chilled out. This is not a dig at their work: it takes incredible skill to compose a score that is both relaxed in its approach and also engaging; Lunar’s CD score is both and might be the game’s secret strength. I never tired of its tone over the course of my playthrough - that might be the highest compliment I can pay a JRPG’s score in a game with frequent random battles.

 The game’s most glaring fault, and perhaps its only real one, is that it was localized by a team of writers that I can only describe as, “a group of 20-somethings drinking Mountain Dew, constantly high fiving each other when reading off jokes, and never saying no to any idea, no matter how much it undermined the nature of game.” It felt less like a group of professionals localizing a highly successful Japanese title, and more like the kind of group that produced the J2E re-translation of Final Fantasy IV that I played last summer. At any time, I was waiting for a character to drop a gem of a line like their, “What? Has he been feeling up your butt, Rydia?” My groans were frequently audible.

At the end of the day, Lunar is a competent, accessible, and downright friendly JRPG. It does not push any of the existing boundaries that existed in 1992, and feels designed for a decidedly different audience than your standard early 90s JRPG. The team that made this at Game Arts wasn’t trying to be anything else or surpass anything else, and in doing so created a calm serenity of an experience.

Note: this impression was written in one shot without revision or editing. Deal with it.

Landstalker: The Treasures of King Nole (Sega Genesis, 1993) - The Impression

     It would be unfair to compare Climax Entertainment’s Landstalker: The Treasures of King Nole to other games. Therefore, to set the tone, I will try my best not to. Taken in isolation, Landstalker is an action adventure title for the Sega Genesis that puts you in the shoes of 88 year old treasure hunter Nigel, who after accepting the task of protecting a nymph named Friday from thieves, is whisked away to island where they together undertake the task of uncovering the location of King Nole’s legendary treasure. It's a refreshingly simple premise that allows the gameplay to take center stage as you traverse the landscapes of the island looking for dungeons to clear out in your search of vast riches. Along the way, you’ll butt heads with evil Duke Mercator, who, of course, has only one goal in life: beat you to the treasure. What this ultimately translates to is an excuse to crawl into further dungeons and break the backs of those designers who thought vague, precision heavy puzzles would be a good way to fill your afternoon. Plunder them dungeons, help some townspeople, and get the treasure. Simple, right?

Wrong. Landstalker eskews common sense and adopts an isometric perspective to help it stick out from the rest of the early 90s crowd. This translates to two things: sometimes the movement cannot be described as anything but clunky as you wrestle with three dimensions with a two dimensional controller and that frequently you will think that you are about to make a carefully measured jump from one visual plane to the next and you will almost always be wrong. This is not an issue with the early dungeons and travel through the games world; the early dungeons of Landstalker are, while challenging and highly technical, intuitive in the way it teaches you to read the game’s multi-leveled maps. In my experience however, this does not seem to help with many of the game’s later dungeons, which I can only describe as mean spirited in design.

You see, if it was only the movement that crippled your progress I probably would have been able to deal with it. However, after the first handful of dungeons lured me in with intuitive design choices I just kept getting hit in the face over and over with a general lack of guidance. There were endless moments where I felt I closer resembled a fish flopping on the deck gasping for progress than a seasoned 88 year old treasure hunter. Because I wanted to maximize the limited freetime I have at my disposal I cracked open a guide and followed it closely through the game’s closing credits and let me tell you: I was definitely not smart enough to solve some of these puzzles. And I am okay with admitting that! More people should! 

There is one piece of Landstalker however, that I just felt that bond with immediately: it has really good combat. Though it boils down to moving ever so slightly away from your opponent and slashing viciously, I was immediately down for the count. There was seldom a moment where I hesitated to jump in and have at it due to the game’s lenient respawn mechanic: the game allows you to purchase items which instantly revive you when you are downed. It allows you to unleash the pent up rage that the previous room’s platforming developed all over each of the game’s enemies and boss battles, which are never prohibitively challenging. The only thing regarding combat that boggles my mind is the invisible numbers on the back end: somehow your HP is tied to the number of hits that enemies take in a way that just drives me nuts.

You know what REALLY bothered me about this game though? Duke Mercator, mocking you, offers you 20 gold for finding the treasure, and says you can afford a candy bar with that. You can’t even buy a candy bar in the game.

Note: this impression was written in one shot without revision or editing. Deal with it.

Xenogears - The Next Thirty Hours

 In my first write up on the initial 20 hours of Xenogears I mentioned that I was less interested with what I was actually doing as a party of characters than I was in what I thought was going to happen later on. I can safely say that, after punching out and rolling credits after 48 hours of gameplay that unfortunately this does not change. In many ways, the second 30-ish hours of the game take that feeling I had and magnify it two or three fold. As I look back on the events that occurred in the game, I do not find myself reflecting on the dungeons, quests, and both on foot and mech driven combat because for the most part none of them struck me as particularly interesting. Perhaps I am spoiled by the likes of having played Lufia 2: Rise of the Sinistrals and navigating its wonderful Zelda-like dungeons filled with puzzles recently, but every dungeon felt like it was an exercise in trying to get me lost. Each of the games dungeons in the second 30 hours continued the trend of having bland, identical hallways that will lead you in these maddening circles until you find that one door you missed; it could take hours, or, if you had a map, minutes to navigate such treachery. And when I had to navigate these dungeons in the Gears suits? Good lord those controls brought me to my knees; I am thinking of you, Tower of Babel. 

Fortunately for me, the things happening to my characters continued to ramp up in complexity and intrigue. The story keeps piling meat and cheese on the dense sandwich of gourmet anime nonsense in front of you, and when you finally get to bite into it? Oh baby. The story delivered upon you in Xenogears, especially during the game’s second disc, is complex enough to make Sora and Riku put on a dress shirt and khakis so they can take notes. The twists and turns and mind boggling events just keep on coming through the game’s meaty conclusion, which is, for those who are inquiring, a battle in which you fight god for the fate of the planet. If it seems mundanely similar to many other JRPGs, I will tell you that at least Xenogears is upfront in its intentions from the very beginning. There are no surprises when the stakes reveal themselves: a mysterious figure names you the, “god-killer,” only a few hours into the first disc of the game. Even though some of the events were so extreme that I could not contain my laughter at their execution, there was not a single moment in which I was not interested to see where it was going. If only every JRPG could be this wild in its ambitions.

The last thing I want to touch upon is the hard switch in structure that hits you like a brick when you swap to disc 2: it is honestly the best decision the developers could have made. In some ways, it feels like the only way to execute the insanity of the plot that they wanted to deliver. The switch from a big, open world traditional JRPG to one that tells its story primarily through slides of dialogue and cutscenes feels like the power play of the century, even if it was a result of poor project management and general inexperience, as admitted by the game’s director, Tetsuya Takahashi. The scale and complexity of the events of disc 2 are essential to building into the game’s reasonable conclusion but upon reflection, I do not think any of the events described in the game’s many, many cutscene-ish sequences would have been all that fun to play. Disc 2 is full of events in which the party wanders around looking for various objects, stopping at points to do rather important, yet tedious activities, and various things that probably would have taken several hours of your time in the least interesting way possible. Instead of a cool average completion time of 50 hours or so that ends in a mostly satisfying way, you’d be staring down the barrel of a 100 hour disaster that would send you spiraling out of control into like…..wood working or some other hobby. Just trust me on this: playing the events of disc 2 would have been….rough. Anywho, Xenogears is pretty interesting. That’s about it.

Note: this impression was written in one shot without revision or editing. Deal with it.