Lunar Legend (Game Boy Advance) Playthrough [1 of 2]
134A playthrough of Ubi Soft's 2002 role-playing game for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance, Lunar Legend.
This is first part of a two-part playthrough, showing from the beginning through the party's arrival on the frontier. Part two can be found at (link coming soon!)
Following Lunar: Silver Star Story (PlayStation) and Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete (Saturn), Lunar Legend was the third remake of Lunar: The Silver Star ( • Lunar: The Silver Star (Sega CD) Play... ), a game originally released for the Sega CD in 1992.
If you've played any other version of Lunar, Lunar Legend will immediately feel familiar. The story generally follows the same track, it features the same cast of characters, and many of the locations are similar, but this no mere "port" of a previous release. It's essentially a new game, built from the ground-up for Nintendo's 32-bit handheld.
The story has seen some tweaks. A few events were dropped, a few new ones were added, and the order in which they occur has been shuffled. (Notice how much earlier you meet Nash in this version?) The script is also new (not based on Working Designs' translation), abridged for the portable format. The dialogue is a little terse and awkwardly translated, but I like how direct it is.
The new battle system feels a lot like Final Fantasy's: encounters are random, everyone stays in formation instead of wandering around the battlefield, your characters have limit breaks, and enemies now drop collectible trading cards. Fights are simpler and faster than before, and enemies give tons of money and experience, so there's no longer any need to grind. That makes for a much, much easier game.
The graphics have been completely overhauled and look great on the small screen. The chibi style fits the game's vibe like a glove, and the character sprites are animated with more personality than in the older games. The FMV sequences were cut, of course, but the colorful art used in their place gets the job done. The sound was overhauled too, though with less success. The tunes are the same, but they sound awful on the GBA. The instrumentation has been thinned, and the harshly compressed instrument samples are chock full of hiss and distortion.
Complaints over the sound quality aside, Lunar Legend is a good time on the GBA. It's a jaunty, fun JRPG that retains a lot of the original's appeal, and it's enough of a novelty to be worth a look from anyone who enjoyed the console versions.
*Recorded with a Retroarch shader to mimic the look of the original hardware.
_____________\nNo cheats were used during the recording of this video. \n\nNintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!