Lunar: Silver Star Harmony

Recently I’ve found myself in the mood to play RPG’s and not much else, but due to responsibilities and the business of “life” my gaming has largely been on a portable level or while sitting on the throne. Based on a need to bolster my portable RPG options and some strong recommendations/reviews from our friends at Interactive Distractions and a few others I picked up Lunar from BestBuy for $19.99 and started my adventure…

I should probably point out a few things about history with RPG’s in general:
Now don’t freak out but…I’ve never actually finished a Final Fantasy game, although I do enjoy them and have played them quite a bit I’ve always had trouble committing the time and dedication needed to get them done. In the past it was because a lot of my time was devoted to heroic amounts of alcohol and misadventures with Metal Slugga and Johnny1051. These days its family life (wife+4kids+puppy) and long hours at work limit my time for gaming and of course I still enjoy a good drink with Johnny and Slugga.

Of all things, portable gaming turned out to be the catalyst for my current shift towards RPG’s. Games like Jeanne D’arc and Lunar are perfect examples of that and more and more of my attention is being focused towards portable RPG’s, that being said i’m still kind of a n00b in comparison with some who might read this so be patient with me and by all means let me know if there are any others I need to be playing.

Lunar is a remake of a Ps2 game, as I understand it they added some polish but basically the story is the same and starts with a prologue that tells of a world that was saved by a Goddess along with the help of a team of Heroes. After this infamous battle (which the world remembers and praises) everyone goes their separate ways…or dies but more on that a bit later.

The meat of the story introduces the main character Alex. Alex dreams of becoming the next Dragon-Master like the Legendary hero and his idol Dyne. He and his friends Luna (his love interest), Ramus (a shady, wimpy kid who means well but just wants to get rich) and Nall (a white “cat” with wings) set off on a silly childish adventure set up by Ramus to find the White dragon and get a dragon diamond to make them all rich. It all feels very familiar as a start to an RPG, this silly joking little adventure soon turns into an epic world changing and character developing story. It may not be the most original story but its serves its purpose well in Lunar.

Lunar is a turn based RPG and the combat plays like you’d expect a turn based RPG would. You basically setup your teams actions during your turn and once your attacks are through the enemies get a go, and so forth. As the game progresses and your strength and magic abilities go up, you do come to some enemies you can defeat in one round without ever giving them a chance to attack. This may sound like its a game-breaker but in addition to upgraded skills you will need to employ some more advanced tactics to get the “ace” attacks done. For instance you would need to use the multi-target attacks properly and deploy them just right (example: when fighting Ice based enemies using a Flame storm spell will wipe them all out in one shot). The combat is in-depth and rewarding, you get points after each combat round which moves your characters up levels and the points seem to be shared evenly amongst all the people in the party as are the items you pick up.

Not wanting to spoil anything I am going to end this right here and advise all Psp owners who enjoy classic RPGs to go pick this one up, it’s a great game with a basic hero plot line that is worth a play-through.