Game Reviews: Lunar: Silver Star Story and Last Bible

Lunar: Silver Star Story (1996)

Games like Lunar: Silver Star Story consistently knock me on my ass with their modest precision. I adore how Funbil put it in their review: "A quiet, unassuming first act gingerly constructs an expertly-arranged cavalcade of narrative dominos which cascades forward with an unrelenting momentum all the way to the end of the game." That's exactly it — Lunar takes its time quietly putting its pieces on the board, without feeling the need to dangle keys in front of your face to keep you invested. Then it plows forward inexorably towards its insane climax. It feels ahead of its time for 1996, and even more ahead of its time for 1992.

Lunar excels in ways that are mostly invisible, and if you haven't played a lot of RPGs they might not be super-obvious. But that storytelling care is always there, carefully weaving its magic under the surface. The difference between an RPG that nails this stuff and an RPG that doesn't is night and day, and it's something mainstream games crit has always been unequipped to discuss. I don't know if Lunar will hit you quite the way it hit me — its particular cocktail of over-the-top romance and "we have to choose our own destiny!" theming was concocted in a lab to make me cry. But it builds that theming with exact care, with gorgeous presentation and long meaty dungeons and chunky boss fights, and I think that's something any RPG fan should be able to appreciate.

Some practical matters: I had a nearly ideal play experience thanks to all extra options on the iOS version. I doubled the battle speed and set the difficulty balancing to match the original JP release (versus the jacked up NA difficulty). The pacing and battle balancing felt perfect to me; I never really struggled, but I always felt like I was just scraping by the big story fights. I don't think this story calls for the merciless, grindy challenge the NA version seemed intent on providing. I played with the JP dub as well. The actual translation (which is still based on the original Working Designs script) landed fine for me. The dumb pop culture jokes were mostly constrained to incidental NPC dialogue, and the big story and character moments had all the gravitas they called for.

The upcoming remasters seem to offer all the same QOL and authenticity options as the iOS version. If those are done well, they'll likely be a definitive way to play these games that isn't constrained to Apple platforms (and includes Eternal Blue, which I'm now very excited to play).

I've been in a bit of an RPG funk the last five months or so. It's very nice to play a game that reignites my passion for my favorite game genre. Excited for whatever's next!

Megami Tensei Gaiden: Last Bible (1992)

Pleasantly mediocre Megaten-flavored Dragon Quest riff; I can't complain because that's exactly what I signed up for booting the game up. Played the GameBoy Color version, localized as Revelations: The Demon Slayer.

Good: it has teeth for the whole game, the big fights never stop being scary and the random encounters ramp up fast enough that you never get comfortable. Bad: the dungeons are all really short! You spend maybe 10-20% of the game's runtime in capital-d Dungeons. Weirdly enough the towns are all really big and mazey, which makes it extra-taxing when you're sloooooowly walking in and out of them to stop by the inn, the bank, the stores over and over and over.

The basic Dragon Quest loop worked enough to keep me entertained for most of the runtime, but it started losing me near the end. Meaty dungeons are important for an rpg like this. Without them it all just feels too bare, especially when the overall structure is really linear. It has a decent finale at least (I like all the little optional endgame quests after you get the ark), although the actual last dungeon is as brief and spare as the rest of them.

There's a little bit of a haunting Final Fantasy Legend feeling of "a story is happening around you that you're mostly not privy too" where the half-bakedness almost adds to it. That's the main appeal of the package to me honestly. FFLegend/SaGa 1 is one of my favorite games; Last Bible is nowhere near as cursed or interesting as that game, but I still enjoyed getting a taste of that flavor again. I'm still on-board for playing the other two Last Bible games, but I definitely need something with real dungeons first.

(Selected review reposts from my Backloggd.)

Kit's Cookies & Kat's Cookies

New game! It's a Puzzlescript release called Kit's Cookies. I got inspired last week and slammed it out, then spent a few days polishing it. Thanks to Narf, Zeloz, and Rhete for playtesting; I really appreciate it!

My last Puzzlescript game blew up; this one's a lot easier, so I'm not expecting it to resonate with genre enthusiasts to the same extent. I'm certain you can make complex puzzles with this ruleset, but it's harder with the free-form nature of the match-3 win condition. There's just way more room for solutions I didn't anticipate, since you can line up the cookies in multiple places on the board. I tightened it up as much as I could though, and I still think the final game is a cute challenge.

I'm only a dabbler in puzzle design, but I've gotten a lot of joy out of making my puzzlescript games. I can see the path to being a real pervert for this kind of gamedev. I'd like to get there someday, but it'd definitely require making more than a handful of puzzles every few years.

I wrote the above paragraphs the day after putting out Kit's Cookies, but I held off on posting them because something neat was happening. Vextro friend Zeigfreid loaded up the project source in Puzzlescript's web editor, made a few cool levels, and shared them in our discord. After that, sraëka, sylvie, and wasnotwhynot joined in. I had a ton of fun playing their levels, and before too long we had enough to make a whole new game!

I'm really happy with how Kat's Cookies turned out. Kit's Cookies was a gentle game. Like I said above, I struggled to come up with challenging puzzles using the ruleset, and I was ultimately content to release it as a short, easy thing. My genius friends came up with some delightful and fiendish puzzles though, and I think together the two games form a satisfying, substantive package. Go give them a whirl!

My puzzle dev brain's leveled up through this whole process. I released a little game and was only somewhat satisfied with it. Then, unprompted, friends filled in exactly the gaps in the original release I'd struggled to fill. I like making tiny, single-screen puzzlers with simple rulesets — I don't feel any urge to make the next Baba Is You or what not. But next time I make a puzzle game, I want to sit with the ruleset longer, draft and discard more puzzles, and hold off on release until I'm confident I've made the best puzzles I can.

Oh, and for the record: puzzles 1, 4, and 7 are by sraëka, 2 and 6 are by sylvie, 3 and 5 are by Zeigfreid, 9 is by wasnotwhynot, and 8 is by me! Thanks so much again to everyone who contributed; this was the most spontaneous collab I've been a part of and it made me happy.

And thanks to Bart Bonte for plugging the original release on his excellent puzzle blog! He linked Gorgons' Gaze too a few years back. I'm still a puzzle dev amateur obviously, so I'm delighted any time actual genre connoisseurs enjoy my work. I hope to continue improving!