Time once again for a brief look at the Sega CD games that made us women and men (if you're currently a twenty-something, I mean).
The full-motion video in games like Lunar, The Silver Star is unique stuff for a few reasons. First, it was an unfiltered assault of glittery, shojo-eyed anime during an age when most game localisers struggled to hide any cultural evidence that video games indeed come from Japan. Of course, Working Designs is still known for taking some, er, extreme liberties with their own translations and localisations, but by God that's another tome for another night. All you need to know is that Lunar saw its US release in 1993, ages before Pokemon made anime mainstream (bonus fact: anime became mainstream in Canada in 1996, thanks to Sailor Moon recieving an after-school time slot).
The intro for Lunar is also made special by its...lack of animation. Maybe we were too busy drooling on the television screen at the time, but when you watch Sega CD intros in today's age of a thousand frames per second, you begin to notice that the "cut scenes" that wowed us over a dozen years ago are little more than kindergarten-grade cut-outs with pinned, movable limbs.
I'm being a little cruel, however. Lunar might not be the best-aged RPG out there, but like Sonic CD, it contains a lot of heart. And the voice acting, though nothing spectacular, is still a few notches above the horrors that would assault us on the Playstation five years later.
Still, a friend of mine claimed that the singing practise scene in Lunar (about 5:40 into the video) beat the hell out of the opera scene in Final Fantasy VI.
I'm...I'm really not sure about that.
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