LUNAR Remastered Collection

My first hour with LUNAR Remastered Collection felt like cracking open a time capsule that had been sealed since roughly 1996 and finding the contents in better shape than expected. You get two full JRPGs back to back: Silver Star Story, where young Alex chases his dream of becoming a Dragonmaster while his childhood friend Luna hides a secret that reshapes the entire quest, and Eternal Blue, set a thousand years later, where archaeologist Hiro gets dragged into a world-ending conflict alongside the enigmatic Lucia. Both stories are linear, hopeful, and unashamed of their Saturday-morning-anime energy. If you want branching choices and morally grey companions, look elsewhere. If you want a cast of characters that genuinely grow on you over forty-plus hours, this delivers. On the mechanics side, be honest with yourself: these are turn-based RPGs built for CD-ROM hardware in the early nineties. Combat is physical attacks, elemental magic that each character learns through leveling, items, and a defend option. Silver Star Story layers in a positioning grid where character placement affects movement range and area-of-effect coverage, which adds a thin but real tactical dimension. Eternal Blue introduces Hiro's armlet for absorbing elemental powers, a Crest System that lets you stack stat and magic synergies, and combo attacks that give the sequel a slight mechanical edge. Neither game will stress your brain the way a modern strategy RPG does. What they will do is drain your MP faster than expected on dungeon bosses, and the difficulty spikes are real and old-school. The new adjustable battle speed, togglable between 1x, 2x, and 3x mid-combat, is the single most important quality-of-life addition here. At 1x, the original animations are genuinely painful. At 3x, even repetitive filler encounters become tolerable. The remaster package itself is honest about its limits. Widescreen support, cleaned-up sprite art, remastered animated cutscenes, new English voice acting, a shared party inventory toggle in Silver Star Story, per-character auto-battle configuration, and thirty save slots. Both classic and remastered modes are included, though switching between them requires backing out to the main menu rather than flipping a toggle in-game, which is a small but annoying omission. The new English voice cast drew mixed reactions from reviewers, with performances ranging from charming to flat depending on the scene. Visible on-map enemies mean no random encounters, which was ahead of its time in the nineties and still feels clean today. Party members all appear on screen while exploring rather than collapsing into a single sprite, another detail that holds up. Where the collection falls short is in ambition. Compared to what compilation releases from other publishers have offered recently, there is no art gallery, no developer commentary, no museum mode, nothing to contextualise just how culturally unusual these games were when Lunar 2 shipped with an hour and a half of voice acting at a time when Final Fantasy had none. The PC port runs smoothly and is Steam Deck-compatible, but it is barebones. Anyone hoping for the PSP additions or expanded versions from later ports will not find them here. The writing, credited to novelist Kei Shigema, remains the strongest argument for the collection. It is warmer, wittier, and more consistently characterised than most RPGs of its era, and that quality carries both games even when the encounter design turns into a straightforward XP grind through the same dungeon corridors. For JRPG veterans who missed these the first time, or lapsed fans who lost their PS1 discs, LUNAR Remastered Collection is a clean and functional way to catch up. For players who need build depth, open-world exploration, or the kind of narrative architecture that rewards a second playthrough, the charm will wear thin before the credits roll. The dragons are good, the villains are memorable, and the writing absolutely earns its reputation. The remaster just could have done more to honour it.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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