It’s funny how things we now see as cliche, generic, or overdone were once novel and completely new. Such was the case for a little game called Lunar: Silver Star Story. Previously released on the Sega CD as Lunar: The Silver Star, the game was famous for its litany of 2D anime cutscenes, amazingly adapted songs, generally bright and colorful anime artstyle, which back then was unheard of for games that came out in America at that time, and for its script having a lot of 90s pop cultural references and slang thrown in. It got a Playstation 1 remake a few years later, which is the version many fans grew up on. I’ve mentioned before that I never grew up with home consoles such as the Playstation or Nintendo 64, so I never even heard of Lunar back then. I did dabble in it a bit via watching some videos of HCBailly’s Let’s Play of it and playing a bit of the PSP remake, Lunar: Silver Star Harmony, but I didn’t get very far with either. I should really get back to playing Harmony on my PS Vita. But in September of 2024, GungHo Online Entertainment announced that a remaster of both this game and its sequel were due to come out in April 2025 on modern consoles. I managed to snatch the Switch version as soon as it was available. As someone who didn’t grow up with Lunar but did grow up on a lot of anime during the 2000s, I certainly do enjoy it, even if nowadays it’s nothing really special. I can definitely see its charms and why people like it so much.
The story centers on a teenage boy named Alex Noah, who dreams of going on adventures and becoming a great hero just like his idol, the Dragonmaster Dyne. But that’s not quite possible in a small, humble town. At the behest of his friends—aspiring merchant Ramus, snarky dragon companion Nall, and childhood sweetheart Luna, Alex decides to travel the world alongside his friends to become a Dragonmaster. But in the process, he and his friends get roped into a conflict caused by the evil Magic Emperor, who plans to ascend to Godhood and kidnaps Luna for that purpose. It’s up to Alex and his friends to save Luna, defeat the Magic Emperor, and bring peace back to the world before it’s too late. Yeah, there’s no beating around the bush here, if you’re even remotely familiar with the classic hero’s journey and all the tropes and story beats that are associated with it, you can pretty much predict how the entire game goes from a mile away. It’s a wholesome, unambiguous tale of good versus evil lacking much in the way of narrative twists (Albeit, a certain character being a villain was considered one at the time of the game’s creation), so it can come off as derivative to people who are more familiar with stories and games that did things differently later on. But in my opinion, for the most part, Lunar’s story is still pretty good for what it is, and these days, it’s kind of refreshing to just have a breezy, feel-good adventure story.
It helps that the cast of characters are pretty fun and likeable, predictable archetypes notwithstanding. Yeah, don’t expect this cast of characters to be particularly deep and layered, especially since nowadays video game characters are allowed to have much more depth and nuance to them. But again, in this case, that’s okay, and the characters themselves are still fairly memorable and interesting. Most of them, anyway. The eventual villain is pretty much a stock standard villain who wants to take over the world or become a God, I might as well call him prototype Sephiroth, and Alex is so vanilla and goody two shoes that he comes off as rather bland in the personality department. The rest of the cast fares better, though Luna gets completely benched in the second half and reduced to little more than a damsel in distress. The game does do some interesting things with having characters have personalities that differ from their expected job classes, such as Jessica, a healer, being a foul-mouthed, rough and tumble tomboy, whereas Mia, a mage, is a sweet, humble girl, whose personality would be considered more fitting for a healer. Sometimes playing around with job class archetypes can be fun, and Lunar seemed to have fun with it.
Which leads me into the gameplay. You can only control a total of five characters at a time, and the game isn’t afraid to put handicaps or limitations on your party setup when it feels like it. There will be dungeons where you won’t have a mage handy, or one where you have no access to your healers, or one where you can’t use anything but magic, so on and so forth. With every enemy having their own strengths and weaknesses, knowing those and making do with your party setup is key. There’s also an element of resource management as early on, defeating enemies don’t give you a whole lot of money, and certain items such as Star Lights (Which restore MP) are hard to come by, not to mention the rather…annoying inventory system that not only limited how much items you could keep, but there wasn’t a designated space for extra items, as you were limited to how much each character could hold. I know the original English PS1 release not only ramped up the game’s difficulty by making enemies stronger and having some spells cost more MP, but deliberately changed the locations of items. Luckily, the remaster gives you the option to have an easier, more streamlined inventory system, which remedies this quite a bit, along with undoing Working Designs’ changes to the PS1 version. Battles are also interesting in that your characters can move around the battlefield, and their positioning, along with paying attention to enemy animations to decide when best to reposition, attack, or defend, keeps things engaging. The remaster also has the option to fast forward the battle speed.
Man, all this time and I haven’t even talked about the 2D animated cutscenes yet. Lunar became famous for having a lot of 2D animated scenes, usually used for either character introductions, new locations, or important story events. Most games that come from Japan have them, yes, but Lunar has about over an hour’s worth of them, some of which you have to go out of your way to find, and are fully voiced as well. Not to mention they’re all fluidly animated, the occasional rough early CGI for certain locations notwithstanding. I miss hand-painted cel animation. The graphics and in-game sprites by themselves are charming, cute, and full of personality on their own, and the dungeons have great designs and layouts. Some of the dungeons even have interesting gimmicks where, in order to progress to certain locations, you have to goad the monsters into attacking you, dodging, and having it so that they break the obstacles. Lunar is a game that rewards you for figuring things out and using your brain. The soundtrack is also very nice, both the background music and the dubbed theme song. The PS1 and PSP versions had their theme songs dubbed by a lady named Jennifer Stigile, a singer who worked with Working Designs back in the day, though the PS1 translation of the song, while famous and beloved, isn’t an accurate one. The WD lyrics were used for the Remaster, though here it’s sung by Luna’s new English voice actress, Jackie Lastra, to mimic the Japanese version doing the same thing for Luna’s seiyuu. I like the dubbed theme song okay, but I admit, I laugh every time I hear the verse “magical thoughts” because that’s just such a clunky, stupid sounding line that it breaks the immersion for me. I prefer the 2009 version with its more accurate lyrics.
Speaking of voice acting, let’s talk about that! Lunar: Silver Star Story has had three English dubs ever since its first release in the US, with the PS1 English dub by Working Designs being the first and most well-known. However, because the head of Working Designs at the time, Victor Ireland, owns the licensing rights to the original voice prints and requesting exorbitant royalties for them, any remakes and remasters of the game have opted to make their own English dubs, the other two being the 2009 PSP remake, Lunar: Silver Star Harmony, and the recent 2025 remasters. This also applies to the game’s sequel Lunar 2: Eternal Blue. I played a bit of the PSP remake, but having watched some clips from HCBailly’s Let’s Play of the PS1 game…I’m gonna be honest here, I’m not a fan of most of the PS1 voices. I know, saying this is sacrilege to diehard Lunar fans who grew up with said dub, and if you like it, more power to you. But in my opinion, many of the performances for the PS1 dub are extremely uneven, running the gamut between too stiff and rigid or too hammy. It says a lot that all of them haven’t pursued more voice acting work since Lunar. I especially couldn’t stand Nall’s voice, which is ear-splittingly high pitched and very clearly digitized. I honestly prefer both the 2009 and 2025 re-dubs, even if the 2009 dub made the mistake of casting Spike Spencer as Nall and making him sound too old and nasally. You’ll have to forgive me for preferring Erica Mendez’s interpretation of Nall, if only because it has neither of the problems I mentioned above and the voice she uses is closer to his seiyuu. As much as I like the 2025 dub for sounding more professional, I do have one quibble with it: There is soooo much double/triple/quadruple casting in GungHo’s dub, it’s not even funny. I’m not exaggerating, Alejandro Saab plays a total of FIVE characters in this! Five! Granted, two of them wind up being the same person, but that’s a spoiler. For as little as I’ve played the PSP remake, I know for a fact that dub didn’t have that much double casting.
Actually, this does bring up a good question: What was stopping GungHo from putting the Silver Star Harmony voices on this remaster? The PS1 voices not being available is understandable because Victor Ireland is being stingy and wanting way too much money from licensors, but the PSP voices don’t seem to have this issue. The mobile game version, Lunar: Silver Star Story Touch, was able to use the PSP voices and theme songs for their adaptation and spliced them into the PS1 graphics just fine. Did GungHo think just making a new dub straight up would be cheaper? This is just weird. I mean, it’s not like the PSP version is inaccessible, as it’s still available on the PS Vita store, though you can’t use bank cards to buy games off there anymore. Plus, XSEED is normally pretty good about letting other companies use their stuff for the most part. Eh, I’m probably thinking too hard about this. Though fair warning: The 2025 remaster DOES…for some reason bring back Working Designs’ heavily embellished and localized script, complete with all the old 90s jokes and dated references that made the developer both famous and notorious back in the day. Not sure why they felt the need to re-use their script since while it may have been cute and funny back when it was first released, many of the jokes and references come off as really out of date now. The only really noteworthy changes GungHo made to the script is that they removed usages of slurs and some more problematic aspects that wouldn’t fly today, though this is more obvious in Eternal Blue’s script. There is one thing I really wish the revised script had changed, and that’s the name of one particular monster. For some reason, WD thought it a wise idea to name a monster…Nipple Yanker. The hell? Unfortunately, this is the only English script the game has, as while the game lets you play with Japanese audio, people who have an ear for translation will notice the discrepancies between both audio and adaptation right away. Kinda wish they gave us the option of toggling between the WD translation and a more faithful one, like what WayForward did with River City Girls: Zero.
But you know what? Lunar: Silver Star Story as a game is still a fun time, flaws and all. Sure, it’s not going to bring the house down nowadays, and many aspects it revolutionized were improved and expanded upon by later games, but there are reasons why the game still has fans even now. The remastered collection is selling like hotcakes, and in an era where games are now expected to be massive, sprawling, 100-hour epics full of twists and narrative turns, Lunar: Silver Star Story offers a comforting, compact, mostly wholesome heroic adventure akin to a Saturday morning cartoon, reminding you that journeying across the land with your friends can still inspire wonder and joy. I wouldn’t call Lunar: Silver Star Story the best JRPG ever, or even one of my favorite games ever, as there are other games I enjoy far more, but I did enjoy my time with it regardless, and with it and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue‘s re-release on modern consoles, more people can play it now than ever. Whether you’re a diehard Lunar fan who’s been there since the Sega CD days, or a new fan wondering what all the fuss is about or someone just wanting a break from all the massive epics, give Lunar: Silver Star Story a shot.
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