Lunar Sega CD vs. Lunar PSOne

[Zigfried]

Whether you pick up Sega CD Lunar: Silver Star, or PS1 Lunar: Silver Star, you're getting a real RPG. The PS1 version cuts a lot of the fat, but it also weakens several key scenes (and Ghaleon isn't nearly as cool in the remake). I prefer the original, but both are respectable.

Lunar 2: Eternal Blue is a different story. The PS1 version is barely a real RPG, mostly because the dungeons are so linear... not just by comparison to the original version (which had some of the most amazingly complex dungeons in any JRPG) but by comparison to the first PS1 game. Also, the cinema scenes are better on Sega CD. They're essentially the same from a design standpoint, but the colors are brighter on Sega CD than on PS1, and the original lacks the remake's heavy artifacting.

Finally, the difficulty was screwed up. In the original, each character's "terror from the past" boss was insanely hard. In the remake, those guys are super-easy and the hardest bosses are a bunch of random dragons. Boo! Hard bosses should be meaningful characters. The Eternal Blue remake is an example of how to take one of the greatest RPGs and make it one of the lamest -- the story survived, but the game used to be so much more than a vehicle to tell a tale.

[spongerob]

Sounds to me like a big part of the problem is that you're just not enjoying those battles, which is understandable for FF games.
I wouldn't want to get rid of random encounters/ambushes completely. I mean where would the excitement in exploring be if you could always control or predict what's going to happen?

That's exactly the problem lol. I hate turn based battles. I've always been a ninja twitch gamer. Though even when I don't mind the battle system, like in VI or X, I just don't like being on a path somewhere and being stopped every 20 seconds. I'm riddled with ADD and impatience.

[courtesi1]

it's been a while but i prefer the sega cd port due to:
1) better music
2) call me nuts but i like the sega cd text font better
3) the ps1 port seemed to have a lot more "bitching" between the characters that started to grate on my nerves.

the random battles kind of sucked but I've beaten it in under 18 hours so they are not too bad.

i never played lunar 2: eb on sega cd. i played about 12 hours of it on the ps1 and shut it off. i was so bored! if its truly better on sega cd i might give it another shot.

[Zigfried]

It's truly better.

[j_factor]

Funny you say that. I find it the complete opposite. When in a labyrinth in a game with random battles my initial instinct is to make a beeline for the exit since I know randomly wandering down tunnels looking for treasure will result in X number of hours spent fighting.

I purposely wander, and fight, because if I don't, I'll be weaker and have a harder time with bosses. I would rather fight as I explore, than make a beeline to the exit and then have to do some power leveling. Random encounters as you wander a dungeon may be annoying, but having to pace back and forth to get in random battles on purpose so you can level up is much more annoying.

[TonyTheTiger]

Well that ties into a related aspect of classic RPGs I consider a design flaw. If you go from point A to point B without taking any unnecessary detours and don't mindlessly flee from the battles you do get into, you should never find yourself grossly underpowered. Because...you know...you just played by the rules and did what was asked of you. You should be at a respectable level if you gave it a respectable effort. I think that, too, relates to respecting the player's time.

One thing about the original Lunar that came across as amateurish was that certain bosses would go from "insanely impossible" to "a button mashing joke" based on the acquisition of a single spell.

You walk through a dungeon and get into a boss fight (with as little warning as a random battle, mind you) and find yourself up against a number of raging dog monsters. You have a flame spell that kills each dog in two hits but you get decimated while going through the process. You fight a couple more random battles and earn the upgraded version which is the same exact spell except now it hits all targets. Two turns and you win.

Lunar actually did it better than most in that it usually didn't take much to power up your guys. But such heavy reliance on the basis that "you fought only 10 random battles instead of 20" sets players up for annoyance one way or the other. Either you feel obligated to go looking for fights now or save it for later.

That's a big reason why I like RPGs that don't have random encounters. Yes, the main reason just has to do with the pacing aspect. But a meatier reason is that it seems like a lot of games use random encounters as a cure all for any balance problems the game may have. "The boss is too hard? Fight more." "You can't afford that new armor? Fight more." Your inactive party members annoyingly don't gain any experience and now you've hit a plot point where they must take part in a major boss battle? Fight more."

Without that crutch, with a finite number of enemies and a ballpark predictability of the approximate number of fights a player will have, it forces the designers to take a fine toothed comb to the spoils of each fight and what's actually required to win the big battles.

[Edmond Dantes]

To add on to what I said earlier, I find being able to see encounters adds two things:

A) the knowledge that if I need to see what's down a certain passage or am trying to find out how to get to a treasure chest, I'll have all the time in the world to do so once I clear out the local baddie population.

B) Even if I have to grind, being able to see enemies both allows me to see and be prepared for what's coming up next (so I don't end up fighting the Warmech) and gives me a feeling like I'm actually making progress when I see their sprites disappear. It may all be an illusion (Earthbound for example) but at least I get to believe for awhile that "I cleared this part of the dungeon"

To put it another way: Remember those totally annoying parts in certain NES RPGs (Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior II in particular) where one set of passages would loop unless you walked through them the right way? Imagine how much less irritating they would be if you could see enemies.