LUNAR Legend is an insult to everyone who enjoyed the originals.
When I was 8 years old, I read a segment in GAME PRO magazine that had a real impact on me. It was a short article on a Sega Saturn game that I had never heard of, a game called LUNAR 2: Eternal Blue. I didn’t own a Saturn, but I knew from the article that this was a game I had to have. Unfortunately, my parents weren’t all that fond of the idea that I needed another game console, and I certainly didn’t have the money to buy it myself, so I was unable to play this game, no matter how much I wanted to. But years later, on my thirteenth birthday, I received a gift that would change my life: LUNAR: Silver Star Story Complete, a remake of the original LUNAR game for the Sega CD. It was brilliant, and when the second LUNAR game, the one I had yearned for all these years, finally came to the PSX, I loved it more than I had ever anticipated. These are the games that turned me into the hardcore role-player that I am today.
Naturally, when I heard that LUNAR was coming to the GBA, I was ecstatic. I thought that I would be able to play the game I loved so dearly anytime, no matter where I was. LUNAR: Legend was one of the biggest letdowns of my life. Of course, I had expected it to be simplified, because after all, the GBA is no Playstation. But “simplified” and “watered down” are two completely different things. No, “watered down” isn’t even the right phrase. When you water something down, the water mixes with the original liquid, simply overpowering the beverage’s flavor. But LUNAR: Legend doesn’t have ANY of the flavor of the other games.
The originals had menu-driven combat, so victory was based largely on who had better stats. But positioning on the battlefield was also a factor, because you needed to make sure that a character could reach their target in order to hit it, or they would have to forfeit an attack in order to get close enough, adding a strategic element to the game. In Legend, you simply select an action and a target and that’s that. Now, this is understandable given the GBA’s limitations, but there was no reason at all to weaken the enemies, give you a spell restores your entire party’s HP, MP and status all at once, or put a character in your starting party whose high-level equipment makes him invincible against the monsters of the early game. When your Mage is impervious to the strongest physical attacks your enemies have, you know a game is imbalanced.
But while the original games did have fun and challenging combat, it wasn’t what they were really about. No, they were about the story, and that’s where LUNAR: Legend screws up the worst. Yes, the originals had generic stories, but they told theirs better than any other game I’ve ever played. They were witty and cleverly written, and had unparalelled character development. You actually cared what happened to these people, and by the end, you even understood the villains. Most games just take the same old heroes, give them different names, and pit them against some generic, inherently evil villain who wants to conquer/destroy the world for no apparent reason. When Aeris died in Final Fantasy VII, I really didn’t care. When Nash betrayed the party in LUNAR: Silver Star Story, I was just as horrified as the characters onscreen. It was the depth of LUNAR’s stories, and the connections you shared with it’s characters that made it truly great. But when Ubisoft got the rights, they decided that the game was “too complex” and needed to be dumbed down for younger gamers. All of the character depth is gone, and the story has been altered to be less interesting. Legend hardly even tries to be witty, and when it does, it fails. The characters are uninteresting shadows of their former selves, hardly worth caring about at all. Yes, the very things that breathed life into the LUNAR series have been sucked right out of it.
Working Designs took a cliche idea and made it something amazing. They spun straw into gold. Then Ubisoft went and melted it back down. LUNAR: Legend is an insult to everyone who enjoyed the originals. Don’t play it. Just feed it to a horse.