Lunar: The Silver Star

1992 · RPG · Sega CD

About Lunar: The Silver Star

Lunar: The Silver Star (1992) is Game Arts' Mega-CD role-playing game, a "different kind of RPG" told with CD audio, animated scenes and voice acting, and the best-selling Mega-CD game in Japan.

Lunar: The Silver Star in Depth

In top-down 2D the player crosses towns, fields and harsh landscapes, completing story objectives and talking to people, with short animated interludes, full or quarter-screen, and CD-quality music carrying the story. Random encounters lead to turn-based battles in which characters act in order of speed. Characters must move close enough to strike unless they have a ranged attack, and they can also retreat into a corner, stand their ground or flee. The flying cat-like Nall, who does not fight, sizes up enemies before each battle. Progress is saved to the Sega CD's internal memory or a RAM cartridge.

Lunar is a small world orbiting the barren Blue Star, where humanity lived until war made it uninhabitable and the goddess Althena moved people to the Silver Star, setting four dragons to guard it. Fifteen-year-old Alex, from the mountain town of Burg, idolises the late Dragonmaster Dyne. An outing to a dragon's cave for a diamond leads the old white dragon Quark to urge him to pass the dragons' trials and become the next Dragonmaster. With his childhood friend Luna and companions such as Nash and Mia of the floating city of Vane, the bandit Kyle and the priestess-in-training Jessica, he confronts the sorcerer Ghaleon, who has become the Magic Emperor and kidnapped Luna. Locations were given a cool, "northern" feel, partly so that the characters could wear more clothes.

Making Lunar: The Silver Star

Game Arts, known mostly for side-scrollers and shooters, wanted an RPG centred on animation and storytelling. Novelist Kei Shigema wrote a story meant to break from "hum-drum 'model'" games that "had stories, but had no story-telling", and Toshiyuki Kubooka designed the characters and planned the animated scenes. Noriyuki Iwadare, Hiroshi Fujioka, Isao Mizoguchi and Yoshiaki Kubodera composed the music. Working Designs, a small California publisher, made it its biggest project, working closely with the Japanese team, adding jokes and pop culture references and producing embossed manuals and seven different disc designs; its English cast included a young Ashley Parker Angel as Alex.

It sold out its Japanese production run in its first year, an estimated 100,000 copies, and Sega credited it with pushing Mega-CD sales; worldwide only Sonic CD sold more on the system. GameFan named it the best RPG of 1993 and GamePro called it "one of the best on any Sega system", though some found its battles dull. Lunar: Eternal Blue followed in 1994, and remakes began with Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete in 1996.

Lunar: The Silver Star Trivia

Game Arts founded Studio Alex, named after the hero, to oversee most of the game's development.
Nearly a third of the planned project was cut for time.
Working Designs translated the nearly four-megabyte English script in eight weeks.
The scene where Alex plays his harp to awaken Luna was added at Working Designs head Victor Ireland's request.
Mel's epithet "Hell" Mel became "Deadly" Mel in English for censorship reasons.