Lunar: Sanposuru Gakuen
released on Feb 12, 1996
This is a side-story, set in the same world as the famous Lunar RPGs: Silver Star and Eternal Blue. The town of Burg is populated by harvesters, and you take control of two girls, Ellie and Lena. One day, they are sent to the island of Ien where they should study magic, and there begins their adventure. The game is a traditional Japanese-style RPG. You navigate your party through a top-down world, visiting towns and hostile areas. Enemy encounters are random, the battles are turn-based and are viewed from first-person perspective. Whilst not officially released in English, there is now a completed fan-translation of this game.
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Played this one with my wife on Retroarch on our homebrewed PS3 from underneath our kotatsu during this chilly wintry week and that was basically the best possible context to play this silly cozy little game.
I’m a big big big time lover of Lunar, with the Mega CD Lunars being two of my all time favorite games, and despite the name on the tin, there’s just some “oh hey I know them!” style things for fans. Put another way, if you’ve never played a Lunar you’re not missing anything here
That said, this is a very frothy and pretty short Game Gear RPG, with all that entails. Mazes, random battles out the wazoo and dungeons that you revisit like 3+ times each. The charm comes from the really cute sprites and from just enjoying the Saturday morning cartoon vibes. There’s not a lot of gameplay depth or depth of any kind really.
Once you play this you should also check out the cute and funny anime short they released of this game attached to an Evangelion movie-theater release in 1997! Someone on YouTube ripped a VHS release of it that has a really cute interview with the voice actors in the end that my level of Japanese was sufficient to get the gist of but it I’d love to have a like N1 level person translate it!
I’m a big big big time lover of Lunar, with the Mega CD Lunars being two of my all time favorite games, and despite the name on the tin, there’s just some “oh hey I know them!” style things for fans. Put another way, if you’ve never played a Lunar you’re not missing anything here
That said, this is a very frothy and pretty short Game Gear RPG, with all that entails. Mazes, random battles out the wazoo and dungeons that you revisit like 3+ times each. The charm comes from the really cute sprites and from just enjoying the Saturday morning cartoon vibes. There’s not a lot of gameplay depth or depth of any kind really.
Once you play this you should also check out the cute and funny anime short they released of this game attached to an Evangelion movie-theater release in 1997! Someone on YouTube ripped a VHS release of it that has a really cute interview with the voice actors in the end that my level of Japanese was sufficient to get the gist of but it I’d love to have a like N1 level person translate it!