Gretchen Leigh

Previous installments

• Gretchen Leigh plays Lunar: The Silver Star | Evil forces take heed!
• Gretchen Leigh plays Lunar: The Silver Star | Stop trying to make "fetch quest" happen
• Gretchen Leigh plays Lunar: The Silver Star | Big Meribia, 3AM

With your new party configuration of Alex, Nash, and Nall, you head off to Vane, the magic city that floats in the sky. Nash lets you know that you'll need to get there via the Fountain of Transfer, which is just a bit south of Meribia. But first, you'll likely want to grind a little bit more to buy magic restoratives, because the next dungeon will once again force you to rely on magic.

Once you get back out on the overworld, it becomes clear that Alex and Nash are a formidable team. Alex packs more physical power, while Nash is the stronger magic user. But both are well-rounded characters, with Alex's healing spells and Nash's skill with ranged weapons giving each a unique advantage. Nash is much more useful than Ramus; you'll be steamrolling the overworld foes. As you head further south towards the Fountain of Transfer, you'll see Vane floating overhead, a nice touch.

When you get to the Fountain of Transfer, Nash once again leaves the party. Before Alex can enter Vane, he needs to pass the Trial Cave, which will test his magic skills to make sure they're good enough to continue his magic studies. Naturally, Nash can't help Alex with that, so he simply heads directly to Vane.

The Trial Cave is the biggest dungeon since the White Dragon Cave. It has numerous winding passages and dead ends, although in most cases you'll at least be rewarded with a treasure chest for going off the beaten path. If you've prepared decently, it shouldn't be too much of a problem. There isn't much in terms of strategy; just spam Alex's fire magic and make sure to heal and restore his MP regularly. There are two bosses: a pack of four giant dogs and a mushroom tentacle thing. These don't offer much in the way of surprises and can be easily taken down with the same fire magic as the regular enemies.

Once you reach Vane, you'll catch up with Nash, who mentions that he wants to find Alex a magic tutor before scurrying off to meet with his master, Ghaleon, who also happens to be one of the Four Heroes who fought alongside Dyne. You'll want to meet Ghaleon soon, but first you have a new city to explore.

Vane is one of the most memorable and beloved locations in the Lunar series. Not only is it important in The Silver Star, it also plays a crucial role in Eternal Blue. You'll learn more about the history of Vane and the world of Lunar at a library and hear some rumblings about the Vile Tribe, an evil group that lives on the forsaken Frontier. You'll also learn a bit about two more important characters: Lemia, another one of the Four Heroes who is the head of the Magic Guild, and her daughter Mia, who Nash apparently has a crush on.

You can briefly meet Mia if you head to the Silver Spire, a tower in the northwest corner of Vane. While Alex's Dragon Ring reacts upon entering the Silver Spire, neither he nor Mia is able to break a magic curse that prevents them from proceeding past the ground floor. Alex can also go around to some of the classes being held on the Magic Guild campus to attempt to gain admittance, but he's unable to join without a letter of introduction. Guess it's time to find Nash and Ghaleon.

You know right away that Ghaleon is an important character, because not only is he introduced with a full screen portrait, his introduction is voiced. While Ghaleon is ostensibly one of the Good Guys at this point, he has an ominous air about him. Nonetheless, there's no reason to question his motives... yet. Ghaleon decides that he will help Alex get into the Magic Guild in exchange for completing a task: There's a man claiming to be the next Dragonmaster on an island off the shore of the fishing village of Lann. Since this imposter is nothing but a nuisance to the Guild and the people of Lann, Alex can prove his worth by taking care of him. Easy peasy, right?

At this point, you can optionally take Nash along or go it alone, but there's no reason to not take Nash. So with your reformed party of Alex, Nash, and Nall, you head off to your next quest.

This is another stretch of the game that's focused primarily on worldbuilding and exposition. We get a glimpse at the bigger picture of Lunar, a world that's deeply steeped in magic, and start to piece together more about how Vane, the Dragons, the Four Heroes, and the Goddess Althena all fit together. We've met, or at least heard about, all of the major characters now, and we'll soon be meeting the last two major party members, Jessica and Kyle. Things are starting to heat up!

Previous installments

• Gretchen Leigh plays Lunar: The Silver Star | Evil forces take heed!
• Gretchen Leigh plays Lunar: The Silver Star | Stop trying to make "fetch quest" happen

Upon your arrival in Meribia, Nash leaves the party, telling you that if you need him, he'll be hanging out around Black Rose Street. With your party reduced to Alex, Ramus, and Nall, you continue on with your quest to sell the Dragon Diamond for big bucks to a Meribian jewelr. Seems simple enough, right?

My overwhelming impression of Meribia when I played Lunar as a child was that it was gigantic. I had only played a handful of RPGs before Lunar, and its closest analogue, Final Fantasy II, had relatively compact towns that were largely utilitarian in design. Meribia is still pretty big for a 16-bit JRPG town, but it doesn't really have the same impact today. A leisurely and thorough exploration takes about 15 minutes tops. But it's a well-designed town that successfully conveys that you're in the Big City.

The big talk of the town is Master Mel, the governor of Meribia and one of the Four Heroes who fought alongside Dyne. Before joining up with Dyne, he was a pirate, and he has a rough, but friendly personality to match. He's also the first major character we meet who's a beastman. The people of Meribia seem to love Master Mel; everyone who speaks of him, speaks of him highly.

Mel is a widower who dotes over his teenage daughter, Jessica, who is half human from her mother's side. Jessica is away studying to be a priestess at the Shrine of Althena. Everyone also seems to love Jessica, but they note that she's a tomboy at heart who only acts ladylike in her father's presence. A handful of townsfolk also allude to Jessica's crush on Kyle, a young swordsman who is stationed at the Nanza Barrier, the dividing line between civilization and the wild, untamed frontier.

All of these people will be important in the future, although we aren't going to get to learn more about them just yet. But Lunar does do a pretty good job here of setting up the wider world of characters who will play a part in the story.

Anyway, back to selling the Dragon Diamond: You come across a jewelry shop in the city run by a jeweler named Dross. You agree on selling the diamond to him for 4,000 silver, but after you hand it over, he splits, disappearing down the stairs of his shop into the sewers. Seriously, we're doing sewers already?

Unfortunately, the monsters in the sewers are immune to your physical attacks. The only way to defeat them is to use magic, something your party no longer possesses since Nash left. So you have to return back to the surface and head to Black Rose Street. While a handful of townsfolk mention that Black Rose Street is a little sketchy, it's really just full of some dorky magicians. You come across Nash, but he doesn't join your party again quite yet as you might expect. Instead, his friend tries to bring out the magic power latent in Alex and Ramus. Alex has the power of magic within him and learns the simple Flame spell; Ramus does not have any magic powers.

At this point, you technically have everything you need to dive back into the sewers and confront Dross, but you're likely still too weak to handle the monsters you'll face. This is where you'll likely have to grind a bit. Thankfully, you can exit Meribia to the overworld. Slightly to the east of the city, you'll find the Shrine of Althena, where you can fully restore your HP and MP for free. You might also expect to meet Jessica here, but apparently she's dipped to hang out with a "friend."

Attitudes differ greatly on the place of grinding in RPGs. Some folks find any amount of grinding anathema, while others love games that reward extensive grinding to min/max characters to fine-tuned perfection. I'm not the kind of person that regularly grinds characters to max level in RPGs, but I find a bit of well-placed grinding to be enjoyable, especially in a game with as smooth a battle system as Lunar. It's not just about numbers going up; it's a chance to relax and "hang out" with these characters while they hone their skills.

This is also around the point where it becomes clear that Ramus has fallen far behind Alex. While he was a pretty useful fighter in your early adventures on Caldor Island, Ramus now lacks magic and can only attack once per turn. Meanwhile, Alex can physically attack twice per turn, causing roughly the same amount of damage as Ramus each time, and he quickly masters more magic after gaining a few levels, first a handful of incredibly useful healing spells, then an upgraded version of Flame, Flamer, that targets every enemy.

After grinding for a bit, you'll find the Meribian sewers no match for Alex's magic prowess. It's a fairly small dungeon, bigger than the lighthouse but not as big as the White Dragon Cave. It's capped off by your first boss fight against a Water Dragon that emerges from the sewers' murky depths. He's easily dispatched by Alex's Flame spell, but Ramus is completely useless throughout the fight.

After defeating the Water Dragon, you confront Dross, who coughs up 3,000 silver, claiming that's all he's got, then scurries off. When you exit the sewers back up to the shop, Nash is waiting for you. He's impressed with Alex's magic abilities and suggests you come with him to the magic city of Vane to study magic further.

But first, Ramus decides to leave the party, realizing that he won't be of much without magic powers. This is a down beat, but it's a pretty minor one. The game has been heavily foreshadowing that Ramus wasn't cut out for bigger adventures from the beginning, and he only gets a few text boxes to say his goodbye.

Our introduction to Meribia and the mainland is a memorable one. While the sewers aren't a particularly exciting dungeon, the journey to sell the diamond has laid the groundwork for much bigger things. We'll soon be learning more about Vane, one of my favorite locations in all of Lunar, and we'll meet even more brand new faces soon.

Previous installments

• Gretchen Leigh plays Lunar: The Silver Star | Evil forces take heed!

Upon returning to Burg, Ramus tries to sell the Dragon Diamond to a local merchant, only to be told that he'd need to take it to Meribia to find someone with sufficient coffers to purchase it. But traveling to Meribia would require crossing the bridge to the port town of Saith, something that's not possible with the bridge still out. And this is where an extended series of fetch quests leading you to Meribia begins.

Near the bridge, you'll come across a cabin where a woodsman and his wife live. The woodsman has lost his axe in the Weird Woods, so you need to go there to retrieve it. The Weird Woods is a small, straightforward area with a cabin containing the axe at the end, so there isn't much to it. But it's also where you first meet "Liake," a mysterious but kind older man. This guy looks kinda familiar, huh? foreshadowing intensifies

After you return the axe to the woodsman, he tells you that repairing the bridge will take a bit of time, so you return to Burg for more exposition dumping. While Ramus leaves to say goodbye to his family, Alex does the same, receiving a letter from his father that he says will help the party secure a boat in Saith. After reuniting with Ramus at the edge of town, the party regroups and is on their way.

Saith isn't too far from Burg. It's not a particularly large or exciting town, but impressively, it has its own unique tileset. Lunar goes to great lengths to flex its CD muscle in more ways than just anime cutscenes, music, and voice acting. Many towns and dungeons have their own tilesets, and the level of detail in unparalleled for a 16-bit RPG of the era. Enemies on battle screens are animated, and the battle backgrounds are quite varied. The limited color palette even seems to work in the game's favor; lending it a kind of sepia-tinged air of melancholic nostalgia.

The fetch quests continue in Saith. When you give your father's letter to a man behind the counter of a tavern by the dock, his face lights up: He reveals that he went on an adventure in his youth with your father and Dragonmaster Dyne, but your father and him stayed behind while Dyne went on to glory. Something that's pretty fascinating about Lunar is that the events preceding the plot of the game are fairly recent. We aren't talking about centuries-old lore or mythological tales here; this is shit your dad was doing with his teenage buddies. No one doubts the existence of the dragons; it's just been a few decades since they've revealed themselves to humans.

Anyway, two more important things happen in the tavern. You learn that the ship cannot set sail because, through a bizarre chain of events involving a poker game and a thief, the sea chart is now in the hands of an "old hag" (the game's term, not mine, and trust me, Working Designs milks it for every last drop). Add another fetch quest to the pile. You also meet your next party member, a cocky young magician named Nash. The party (Alex, Luna, Ramus, and Nash, if you haven't been keeping track) heads off to retrieve the sea chart from the hag, exchanging Nash's water cane for it.

Finally! You can get on board the ship to Meribia and continue on your journey, right? Bah gawd, that's fetch quest's music! Your final task is to go to the top of the lighthouse near Saith and light the beacon so the ship can find its way. This is barely a dungeon; you just go up a few tiny floors to the top.

So this is a weirdly paced little bit of the game. It's setting up a lot of things that will pay off down the line, but so much of this feels like unnecessary padding. The combination of retrieving the sea chart and lighting the beacon feels particularly egregious and unnecessary.

It's right before your board the ship to Meribia that one of the key moments of the game happens: In a tearful goodbye, Luna decides to stay behind to keep Alex's parents company. You won't see her again until much later in the quest, and she really only shows up briefly until the end, despite being a key figure in the game. That's true in the Sega CD version at least; the remake for Saturn and PS1 has her come along for the trip and stay in the party much longer.

The change made in the remake feels like a very weird form of fan service, giving players more time with a character who's otherwise largely a cipher: She's Alex's idealized love interest, a pure-hearted girl on the cusp of womanhood who enchants all who see her. Other than some weird misogynistic shit that was presumably added by Working Designs where she gets jealous whenever Alex talks to another woman, there isn't much to her personality. Having her stay with the party longer just makes her shortcomings as a character that much clearer, especially in contrast with the rest of the main cast.

When I look at Lunar fans' preferences online, opinions are mixed, but it does seem that more people prefer the PS1 version. This is understandable: It's on a more advanced and much more popular platform, and it's technically a lot more polished and refined. I'm sure the PS1 version sold way more copies and was most folks' introduction to the Lunar series. But the older, wiser, and probably more attractive folks who played the Sega CD version first tend to prefer it, often specifically because it has the restraint to separate you from Luna before her character reveals itself to be paper-thin.

Regardless, in this version of the game, we set sail to Meribia with a party of Alex, Ramus, and Nash. Caldor Island is just a prologue. This is where the real game begins.

OK, so to start, I'm playing the Un-Worked versions of the Lunars. This isn't too big of a deal for Silver Star other than introducing a proper mixed case font TO SOLVE THE INCREDIBLY OBNOXIOUS ALL-CAPS ORIGINAL, but it will be a big deal when we get to Eternal Blue, where the Un-Worked version is practically necessary unless you're a masochist or a sad dysphoric 13 year old in 1995.

Two more notes:

• I'm not going to mark spoilers or anything. The game is over 30 years old.
• I'm going to use the tag #GretchenLeighPlaysLunar if you want to follow and or mute these.

This whole thing is probably going to be more of interest to people who already have some familiarity with the games, but the basic gist of Lunar: The Silver Star is this: The protagonist is Alex, a teenager from a small town named Burg on Caldor Island, far from the mainland. Alex worships the legendary hero Dragonmaster Dyne. He has a small winged companion, Nall, who likes to talk a lot of sass. His childhood sweetheart is Luna, who also was raised by Alex's parents and lives with them, which you'd think would result in some kind of Westermarck effect, but the story is clear that they're absolutely ~soulmates~. Rounding out the early cast is Ramus, Alex's neurodivergent-coded buddy who kicks off the whole adventure by suggesting they go on an adventure to the nearby cave, where supposedly a dragon lives or once lived.

Burg is stuck in a mountainous corner of the island, and the only bridge to leave the area is somehow inconveniently out of order. So you pretty much have no choice but to head to the cave to move the plot forward. Some initial exploration and grinding later, you'll find your way into the White Dragon Cave. After a few floors of intro dungeon, you'll meet Quark, the white dragon. To the surprise of no one who has ever played a JRPG, he senses a great power in Alex, much like the power he sensed in Dragonmaster Dyne. And double surprise! He feels a deep connection to Luna as well. And then Ramus asks for the Dragon Diamond, and Quark gives him one, with a remark that I can only assume was added by Working Designs that the diamonds are his turds.

So far, this sounds like a pretty generic JRPG plot, and it is. Lunar: The Silver Star is a pretty straight shot of an RPG. So what makes Lunar so special? The parts that would generally be compressed down to "it has a good story" in 90s Western JRPG discourse don't really have much to do with the story beats themselves. For one thing, the characters are fantastically well-written and contain depth that goes way beyond almost any other JRPG of the era. They shine through even when Working Designs makes clumsy localization decisions. The world-building is also spectacularly rich. It says a lot that I still remember almost every character in this cast and many locations decades later. Remember, this game was released in North America in December 1993!! Its only real competition in this regard was Final Fantasy II/IV, which is obviously a classic, but its broad-stroked characters don't really stand up to Lunar's personality-rich cast.

Lunar: The Silver Star's secret weapon, though, is that the battle system kinda fucks. It's very basic in most respects, but your characters and the enemies move around the battlefield and need to be within range to attack. So you can have a character be overwhelmed by enemies surrounding them, pick off enemies with ranged weapons, and even have characters flee from enemies to the other side of the battlefield. It's ultimately fairly simple and a little chaotic, but it makes for a much more enjoyable turn-based battle system than the Dragon Quest-esque systems that most non-Square RPGs were still clinging to at the time.

The dungeons are unusually complex and clever, especially as you get deeper into the game. They are windy and occasionally a little too easy to get lost in, but they're leagues above most contemporaries. Combined with the ability to save almost anywhere and plentiful free healing spots in the form of shrines, it makes for an unusually brisk-paced 16-bit JRPG.

Having now gotten through the first dungeon, I've found that the game's charm is intact. I cannot wait to get further into this game and blab on about it.

A few more notes:

• Maybe the one disappointing thing that I forgot about is that the game really lacks in modern QoL. You cannot see item stats at shops or even compare stats in the equip menu.
• I don't really like the opening song, especially the English version, but the rest of the soundtrack still slaps.
• Outside of a few bits like the thing with Quark saying the diamonds are his shit, I haven't hit on any Working Design-isms that are too bad yet. My recollection is that they don't really start to get bad until Eternal Blue, but we'll see.