I beated it.

Our dedicated fanbase may have discerned that tho' Reviewiera undertakes many a videogaming projekt, most of these campaigns flame out, tire out, are eclipsed by the new kid on the block, get boring, cease to be rewarding¹, get frustrating, require too much MU, seem awesome at 1st but then end up sucking. And so forth.

Personally, my ratio of games completed-to-not-completed isn't too bad due to a sterling PlayStation service record². Since those halycon days of leveling, alcoholism, & leveling, things are less productive. I've beated Advance Wars II & Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation.

And that's it.

Pokemon:FireRed? Got bored, got interested again, got bored again at Pokemon Mansion, or whatever. Still pissed I can't catch a Scyther.

Drilldozer? Love the way it looks, love the way it plays. Somehow always end up buying something else...

Much beloved Astroboy? Got really really far, like to the brink of victory, & got burned out on the 3rd or 4th consecutive sub-final-boss fight in a row.

And it was after this burnout I decided I dearly wanted to sink my GBA SP teeth into a JRPG level-fest. For sentimental reasons related to the never-finished-on-the-PlayStation Lunar 2: Eternal Blue, I was gravitated towards Lunar Legend, a GBA port-thing of the original Lunar: Silver Star, originally for the Sega CD.

Lunar's got the combat system, sorta, that I remember from Lunar 2. The hallmarks of the Lunar series (in my mind) are strong & frequent voice acting, & well-drawn & frequent anime-style cut-scenes. The anime scenes make for nice stillscreen asides in the game, tho' sometimes these seem a bit a silly. The voice acting, of course, is gone, &, sadly, the script has not picked up the slack. There's 7 playable characters but they're pretty predictable. I mean, christ, Taisen has like 3 times that many playable characters but at least they make me chuckle.³

Aside from these, admittedly, matters of taste, there are some major gameplay faults.⁴

1. You cannot "free-roam" the world map. You can only take "roads" from set point to set point. In other words, outside of dungeons, there are no random encounters. I believe that a prime tenet of JRPGs & rpgs in general is the ability to leave of the confines of city & town & wander hither & thither.

2. This may be more of glitch than a flaw. If you port something to a portable system like the GBA, you have to add an on-the-fly save option so that when you have to get off the bus or your boss is going to be coming by or whatever you can just save, shut down, & go back to the boring world for a bit, until later. Lunar has this, but when you do so & then turn it back on, you continue where you left off w/ all yr HP & MP recharged. I'll admit, its kinda sweet to do every dungeon in ONE FUCKING TRY but it kinda takes the challenge out of it.

So yeah, I beated it. The reward was I could put the game away knowing I NEVER HAVE TO TURN IT ON AGAIN, not that it was that bad, just nice to not have it nagging me like those other games.⁵

That, & that now I get to play Taisen2.⁶



-d.d.

¹ Stimulation of the brain's reward center being, in my interpretation of ludology, the primary appeal of video games. 'Course, different games reward you in different ways.
² Fat suggested a theme months ago where one lists every game, going back to the dawn of time, one has beaten DEFEATED. Hence I end up the CGA-graphics Afrika Korps strategy game or maybe Duck Tales on a rented NES. Not including that kind of stuff, the graves of defeated PS games read as follows: Final Fantasy 7-9. Legend of the Dragoon. Siphon Filter 1-3. SuikodenII. Thousand Arms. Xenogears. Front Mission 3. Legend of Mana. Parasite Eve 1-2. Dino Crisis 2. And whatever the last edition of NBALive on the PlayStation was. Games never finished (not including stuff I never liked so never really tried): the 1st DinoCrisis. Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV: Wall of Fire (which is FUCKING AWESOME!!! The only reason I can't beat it is my generals die of OLD AGE!!). Bushido Blade II. Lunar Legend II: Eternal Blue (lot of regret, there).
³ Excellen, you fucking tease...
⁴ In Phantasy Star II, for example, you barely see the playable characters' faces, much less get to know what they're talking about, what their hopes & dreams are, etc. But I LOVE that game b/c the RPG play element is strong.
⁵ Looking at you Shenmue, Space Channel 5, Jet Grind Radio ( I swear, I'm really close to the end in this one!! SWEAR!!!), Phantasy Star II (cart battery probs), Astroboy, Drilldozer, Pokemon, uh, probably others.
⁶ That Atlus logo came up the 1st time in Taisen2, a solitary tear marched down my chiseled cheek...