Magazine Coverage
Lunar the Silver Star (Sega CD)
Magazine Text:
OVERVIEW
Monster slayers, magic users, warriors and guardians - warm up your Sega CD and get ready for the first big-time adventure role-play game to hit the Sega discs. One of the best-selling titles ever in Japan, Lunar: The Silver Star by Working Designs is a huge game that takes you above and below ground, through the skies, across a planet and into other dimensions in a magical question to become a Dragon Master. Using all the Sega CD’s capabilities, Lunar features comic book-style stills, digitized voice and music, super sharp graphics and an AI feature that automatically selects the best combat attack.
The real merit of Lunar is the game play. There is a lot to do. Plan on spending 60 hours or more mastering the sometimes complicated twists and turns of the plot. That’s if you’re good. You begin the game as Alex, a young man destined to become a Dragon Master. Your constant companion is a white cat-sized flying creature with a sharp tongue and sense of humor named Nall. Interaction with good and evil characters, beasts and battles…many battles…build you into a character with abilities of heroic proportions. Other characters in the game will ally themselves with you from time to time, in parties large and small, trusting their fortunes to your quest. Others will leave you to join forces with your enemies. Some will even work both sides of the fence. Lunar’s AI feature gives the characters the ability to act on their own, as the situation merits. You’ll find that Nall is often ready with a smart-alek reply, and that Kyle, a warrior, has an eye for the ladies. There are opportunities for you to get into some trouble as well!
AI has another meaning in combat. Select this optio and your character will automatically attack the nearest enemy with the weapon they have in hand. Using advanced attack skills for non-magic users and spells for those so suited calls for direct guidance on your part.
Completing the game calls for solving a big series of adventures while you seek out the magical Dragon Armor, other Dragon items and your destiny. Each adventure usually takes you into a dungeon/tower for combat and a twisting, maze-running search for an important item. The game offers good clues for advancing. If you reach an area and nothing happens, go out and fight for a while, bumping yourself up a level or two and increasing the skill of your weaponry. Or review the clues people have given you in the various towns and zones. You either are not strong enough or are missing a character. Put it all together and the next adventure is revealed, ending you to another zone and a new series of mysteries.
Rated MA-13
HOT HINTS
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Commentary:
Wow! The coverage in this two-page spread in Sega Visions is the most comprehensive review of Lunar that I’ve found. It’s clear that the reviewer played the game. If I were to read this back in 1994, I’d be very excited.
Many of the hot hints and captions to the screenshots were very interesting. I don’t recall Laike ever being referred to as “Peter Laike” in the game so either the magazine took some liberty or it was something that was given by the press kit.
Posted on: 07 October 2024