Played the Demo

[Ardent Fox]

I downloaded the demo of the game to my PSP and decided to give it a whirl. I'm probably late to the party on this one, but it's just like the old game to me. Sure it looks nicer and there's a bit more polish and the old battle system returned to make a cameo. And yes, the voices threw me off, especially Nall when he came up, thought he'd been feeling under the weather and smoking a bit too much. All in all though, from what I've played it's the same game I enjoyed both on the Sega CD and the Playstation.

Picking up my special edition without a doubt now.

[Silver Phoenix]

Good to hear, but.... smoking too much? His voice is not raspy in the least. He has BALLS now, and hasn't been taken to the pitch shift vet of death to get them cut off.

None the less, glad you like the demo. The game on a whole is really going to bring a fresh new spin on some good time memories.

[Vyse of Arcadia]

Speaking of the demo, did anyone else get annoyed by how the music fades out and in every time you enter an area? Please tell me that's not in the final version.

[Lunar Eclipse]

It's in the final Japanese release, at least. It might be something XSEED's planning on addressing since it was one of the few major complaints, but I wouldn't really count on it. You get used to it after a while, and at least the music loop doesn't start over all the time, which would be even worse. ^.^;

[Silver Phoenix]

Um, perhaps you didn't notice but the loading of music also occurred in the PlayStation remake in certain areas, and it restarted every time. I think I noticed this when I wanted to see how it looked when I popped it into my PS3. This also happens moreso in the original Sega CD game as well.

[ShindoW]

I think Nall sounds a little off, but at least he doesn't sound like a chick. I think they should've pitched his voice just a tad, but nothing overbearing.

I haven't noticed the music problem.. Good, I guess? XD

[Vyse of Arcadia]

Um, perhaps you didn't notice but the loading of music also occurred in the PlayStation remake in certain areas, and it restarted every time. I think I noticed this when I wanted to see how it looked when I popped it into my PS3. This also happens moreso in the original Sega CD game as well.

Sure, it happens, but it's not every single screen. I fail to see why the music needs to fade in and out to walk into a house.

If it restarted every single time I think I'd have to become violent.

[Aaron]

There is no arguing with zealots just fyi.

To him and others Lunar is above criticism. There are no flaws. Only different ways of looking at it.

[Silver Phoenix]

It's called being objective. Never once have I claimed Lunar to be flawless, and quite the opposite. If you want to blame someone for the loading then blame GungHo. It's most likely due to the way the music is streamed from the UMD. It may or may not make a difference if you download the game onto your Memory card, but I don't think it will change anything. The entire game would have to be recoded to get rid of the loading between screens but it's minimal wait time. I wasn't bothered by it, but it could be worse.

Kizyr just beat the game, so why don't you ask him if it's really that bad. Aaron, you just like to complain for the sake of complaining sometimes so don't be surprised when people come to correct you or offer their own input.

[Shiva Indis]

Y'know what? I'm not going to blame Gungho. I'll blame JAM. I think the music fade-in/fade-out is meant to be a buffer against the UMD access time, but better programming could get around that, I bet. Based on the demo I don't think running it from the memory stick would help.

I think Nall sounds a little off, but at least he doesn't sound like a chick.

Agreed. I still think a woman in the role would've been preferable, but I want to give the guy the benefit of the doubt.

[ShindoW]

Im a little biased towards new Nall -- I love Evangelion and I'm used to hearing Spike as Shinji. I think once Im used to the pitch its gonna be cool.

[Vyse of Arcadia]

I think Nall sounds a little off, but at least he doesn't sound like a chick.

Agreed. I still think a woman in the role would've been preferable, but I want to give the guy the benefit of the doubt.

Ditto. It's weird; most of the Japanese audio I've heard usually has women cast for high-pitched male characters, like children and baby dragons. Here, they seem to cast grown men for the same roles as often as not.

I don't think this is a technical issue. The very notion is nothing short of retarculous. I'd be very, very, very surprised if the game was streaming audio off the UMD. For one, it would be murder on PSP battery life. For another, I bet they're on the UMD with some kind of lossy codec. And even if they were lossless, even something with as little RAM as the iPod has been able to seamlessly play lossless audio for several hardware generations. They should to be loaded into RAM in entirety as needed, which is much better than spinning up the disc every couple of minutes to grab more audio. For that matter, I'd be surprised if they grabbed every single screen off the UMD. Surely they can have a small section of Burg and the interior of Alex's house in RAM simultaneously.

No, no. This has to be design choice, and an incredibly bizarre one.

[Lunar Eclipse]

Ditto. It's weird; most of the Japanese audio I've heard usually has women cast for high-pitched male characters, like children and baby dragons. Here, they seem to cast grown men for the same roles as often as not.

Eh, not in most games. Women usually voice act young boys, at any rate. Brianne Siddall is a pretty popular one because she's kind of throaty. Julie Ann Taylor's another. Exceptions tend to pop up if you have a flashback sequence to an already older male character's childhood, in which case they often have the male actor try to pop up to a higher register to imitate a young voice. Here, I think they just wanted to make Nall more clearly a boy.

[localflick]

The audio fading in towns can get annoying if you're going from house to house, but I love the audio. The little touches like the sounds when you go up and down stairs were nice.

It also seems like they really paid attention to detail to make a faithful Lunar game. The menu icons have a style similar to the PSX spell icons, and the character models are great. I really liked Lunar Legend because it was portable but once this comes out I probably won't play it as much. The psp doesn't have as big of a memory restriction so they're able to do so much more.

My real hope is that it sells well, a psp version of EBE comes out and sells well, then after going through the development of those 2 a truly worthy new Lunar game comes out. I'm not saying that's realistic, but it would be great...

[whitedragon_nall]

My real hope is that it sells well, a psp version of EBE comes out and sells well, then after going through the development of those 2 a truly worthy new Lunar game comes out. I'm not saying that's realistic, but it would be great...

That's really what I'm hoping for too. I recall a quote in an RPGamer interview where someone from, I think, Game Arts said they were interested in where Lunar is going to be 10 years from now....so that gives some hope. Lemme see if I can find the interview.

EDIT: Found it....comment is about halfway through.

http://www.rpgamer.com/features/2009/ro ... ssint.html

[ShindoW]

Ditto. It's weird; most of the Japanese audio I've heard usually has women cast for high-pitched male characters, like children and baby dragons. Here, they seem to cast grown men for the same roles as often as not.

Eh, not in most games. Women usually voice act young boys, at any rate. Brianne Siddall is a pretty popular one because she's kind of throaty. Julie Ann Taylor's another. Exceptions tend to pop up if you have a flashback sequence to an already older male character's childhood, in which case they often have the male actor try to pop up to a higher register to imitate a young voice. Here, I think they just wanted to make Nall more clearly a boy.

Don't forget Mona Marshall. =) She's awesome as well. Most know her for Butter's Mom and Misc voices on South Park or her role as Izzy / Koushiro on Digimon Adventure / Zero Two. ^_~ She was in Star Ocean 3 and Trigun as well.

In regards to a Lunar sequel: I've always wanted to see what they would do with a cute flying blue dragon. I wonder what ability it would have... Sleep maybe? Isn't the Blue Dragon the snoozy one? XD

[Silver Phoenix]

I think the next batch of baby dragons should be twins. Black and Blue dragons. We could always have a baby Star Dragon, and he would be green.

[Vyse of Arcadia]

Working Designs did an excellent localization job, but their text has a lot of 90's pop culture references and possibly some copyright issues that might have been okay when the original was released, but something we need to be more careful about today (such as "Tootsie Rolls", "M&M's", "Wheaties," etc.)

This makes me sad. It's ridiculous how much copyright law has strengthened in the last two decades. How the hell does an NPC mentioning Wheaties in passing (clearly not in a negative light) infringe on anyone's IP?

I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm glad they're getting rid of some of the more ridiculous pop culture references, but citing copyright as a reason to do it..

Reminds me of how not too long ago, Nintendo of America announced that Earthbound would probably never be on the Virtual Console because some of the songs sound just a bit too similar to real songs.

[Old_School]

I remember that old SF2 commercial that showed a copy of the game sitting on a shelf beside a copy of Mortal Kombat. Blanka's hand comes out of the SF2 box and crushes the MK box to indicate that SF2 is superior. I can understand why modern copyright law wouldn't allow stuff like that, but not even being able to passively mention "wheaties" does take it a bit far.

[Silver Phoenix]

It's considered advertising, and unless said company allows you to mention their product they will demand compensation or retraction. The future of gaming is even going to include in-game advertising for real life products and places. Totally ridiculous, but just more oversaturation of crap. The term is presently referred to as "Double-Fusion."