Lunar Silver Star Harmony

Graphics

It may not have the best graphics in PSP but considering this is a remake of PS1 (Lunar Silver Star Story Complete) and GBA (Lunar Legends), I consider this fantastic. Unlike Square Enix games whose improvement over the previous games are not that obvious, this game feels like a brand new game, rather than a remake. The graphics for the whole game is completely overhauled, except for the event scenes which retain their "old-school" anime style. The reasons why I call this a complete overhaul is that not only the graphics is upgraded, the towns and dungeons are also remade. It feels like visiting different towns and dungeons. While the in-game graphics is 2.5D, they keep the character icons etc as 2D :) And with the nice bright colours used, it is just nice to see and play.

 Burg in Silver Star Harmony.

 

Burg Spring (top) and Alex's House (bottom) in Lunar Silver Star Story Complete (left) and Lunar Silver Star Harmony (right). Doesn't it feel like a completely different game?

Gameplay

It retains the same gameplay as the older games. Click any of the desired actions, choose the enemy, and depending on the distance, you may or may not reach the enemy. There is another feature which allow players to "save" certain configurations. So rather than selecting attack 5x for 5 different characters, we can preset the characters to all "attack" mode and just select auto for that round.  This can be costumised to any particular magic or any particular skill and not only limited to "attack", "defend", "magic". Unfortunately, if this feature is used, players have to rely on the AI to select the enemies and sometimes the AI is just not as smart as human. So expect that 1 round is wasted because the AI selects the unreachable enemies at the back or selects the wrong enemy in a way that an AOE (area of effect) attacks only hit 1 enemy. And nope this is not the same as selecting "AI". In AI mode, players have no control in what action the characters perform.. They can use physical attack, magic attack, skills, or defend up to the AI decision.

Battle scene from Lunar Silver Star Story Complete (left) and Lunar Silver Star Harmony (right).

Lunar Silver Star Harmony offers additional yellow bar a.k.a special attack gauge bar.

The special attack from Lunar Legends is retained here. As we attack the enemies, the special attack gauge will slowly fill. And upon completion, special attacks can be performed once. After that the gauge is empty and needs to be filled again. It is not particularly useful but it helps to a certain extent.

There is no longer inventory limit and this makes the game much easier. Previously, each character can only carry 7 items so managing inventory can be quite a headache, especially with regards to HP and MP filling items. Now, there is a common/party inventory so each item can be kept up to 99 :) Not that this is very important because somehow the difficulty level is much easier in this PSP version. I hardly need to use or shop for the items.. Simply collecting them from enemy drops and they just continue to pile up. 

Nall is extremely predictable here. He will definitely clear every status ailments and revive KO-ed characters at the end of every battle. That will save lots of items as well. However, in the middle of battle, he does not actually do anything. If I don't remember wrongly, in PS1 version, Nall may revive someone randomly in the middle of ongoing battle. And it is not a guarantee that he will revive and clear bad status from every characters. Again, if I don't remember wrongly LOL.

There is a big issue with the loading time.. It is way too laggy.. Any change of locations (like entering a room), the screen will black out and the music stops for a few second.. This will get very frustrating. Similarly with the load times to initiate a battle. To make things worse, the enemies here are more aggresive and more difficult to avoid. Perhaps it is also because the dungeon are simplified that players have less area to manouver. And to top it up, the battle is frustrating because of the load time everytime characters or enemies perform their special skills or magic. Blah!

Another thing that I despise is the inability to walk on the world map. Instead, players only choose the location and the characters "run" to that place. Although there is no random battle in the world map, I find walking around in world map is an integral part of an RPG so it kinda feels weird with being unable to walk around.

Features/Replayability

As an old J-RPG, the game focuses mainly on the story. There is no filler plots, useless subquests, or hunting certain items. There is no need to grind for level as well. To me, this is the strength of J-RPG. The story! There are bromides (images) to collect and they are missable! Yes.. but there is no special difficulty to get them but they can only be acquired within short period of time. For example before travelling from town B to town C, there may be a need to go to town A first to get the bromide. If you realise it once reaching town C, then can say bye bye to the bromide and move on hahaha... When playing in PS1 for the first time, this is the reason why I need to replay the game. But based on that experience, now I make sure that I follow the guide and there is no need to replay.

There will be an item called "Rememberiser" which allow us to watch every single anime cutscenes in the game. So again, there is no need to replay to watch these scenes anymore.

One interesting feature is about the conversations with NPCs. Unlike typical RPGs, the conversations with NPCs constantly change according to the storyline. After you proceed to the next town and clear the events there, when you go back to the previous town, the NPCs sort of know what happen in the other town and their conversations change. That makes talking to NPCs interesting.. something which I usually skip in other RPGs lol. Unfortunately, the bad translation makes me cringe sometimes o_0

Storyline

Nothing much changes in the main plot. Perhaps there are a few differences regarding how players meet Nash etc. Other than that, more or less everything remains intact. There is a bonus storyline about the Four Heroes at the start of the game. I have a rather mixed feelings about this. On one side, it is a good addition to let me know about Dragonmaster Dyne whom Alex admires. And it is nice that this plot (about 15minutes) is presented as bedtime story for Alex. It also serves as tutorial for the battle system.

On the other side, the additional plot feels incomplete. There is no further mention of Eiphel and the 5 princes of Black Star. And the personality of young Lemia Ausa is waaay to different from the one we meet in the game. Well, at least there is something different from the previous ones eh.

Scenes from the additional story of the Four Heroes

Music/Audio

This is the area in which Lunar games are legendary. The audio tracks are completely remade :) It is still the same music but with the remake, it complements the feeling of the graphics. The magic is still there!

However, the voice acting is terribly horribly sucky! Grr.. They should just keep everything from Lunar Silver Star Story complete. They even change the lyrics of the opening song and Luna's boat song. Jeez.. not to mention that everyone is speaking like bullet trains here.. A big big disappointment. It is so weird to see a guy voicing Nall (supposedly a prepubescent dragon boy) and Luna sounds a bit masculine here (yucks!). Thanks to Luna's voice actress, she no longer has the image of innocent nice girl here. She sounds so bossy, irritating, and aunty-like. Ew..

Overall

As a Lunar fan, this is a nostalgia. It is not perfect, but I still love it. Thanks to newer games which usually only have few hours of storyline and many more hours for nonsense, when I play this, I feel like the game is very looong.. Haha.. I feel tired as if Alex's journey is really never ending. It spans more than 20 hours of solid gameplay (no filler, no subquests, a bit of grinding). But perhaps my frustration is also stemmed from the lag times which can completely destroy the whole gaming experience. The voice acting is butchered but thank goodness the awesome music remains.

And as much as I would like to complain, I have to applaud this remake. When I play other remake games, I feel that they are just re-port. I am basically playing the same game just in different console. This is especially typical for square enix games which retain the old graphics and just add few FMVs and label them remakes. For Lunar Silver Star Harmony, I feel that I am playing a completely new game! It is not graphic improvement but it is graphic makeover. Totally fresh. With lower difficulties, I can completely focus on the story.. Add the bonus plot in the opening and that makes me feel that this is a perfect RPG which focuses mainly in the story :D

The new (shitty) opening song

The original (and the best) version