Oh, if there’s been a game saga that has given me a letdown it’s Lunar; Silver Star Story was awesome. Lunar: Legends was so-so, and Lunar: Dragon Song was dead awful. The good thing is that we can always look back and remember when games were good, offered a good difficulty, and gave a lot of good fanservice.

This awesome game is a retitled version of the 1996 RPG Lunar: Silver Star Story, developed by Japan Art Media and published by Kadokawa Shoten. Released originally on the Sega Saturn in Japan, was ported to other platforms, most importantly to the Sony Playstation. Translated by Working Designs to bring it to the US, they originally planned to release their English language version on the Sega Saturn, but somehow a Playstation port was more profitable and did it this way.

This game has what all fantasy/medieval RPG’s should take as a non-changeable factor: everything. This game was in the middle of the sprite-to-polygon era, but since it was an RPG, it was ok to leave the characters as sprites, use the power of the console to insert awesome anime cutscenes and have lots of good dialogue (yes, even though it was in English). The story although clichéd is greatly told and managed, and character relationships really got you into their personality. Ah, good times.

Here’s a video of the game with a lot of nostalgia induction. It’s the Luna’s boat song (Wind Nocturne) scene. And as a curious note, the character voice actor is different from the person who sang this song. Rhonda Gibson and Jenny Stigile, respectively. Sadly there’s no option to change the Voices for Japanese ones. . .

Here, Mirisha uses her awesome cosplay skills to sing the same song at the Anime Iowa’s 2006 karaoke room: Wind’s Nocturne. It’s pretty nice!

Karaoke AND cosplay: a world I’m very afraid to touch (for the fear I’d like it!).

Hope you liked this video. See you next week!

Are you desperately wondering if Sega Saturn games will ever come to the Wii Virtual Console? Then this rumor might let you have a good night’s sleep. Since Nintendo’s recent announcement that Neo-Geo and MSX games will be available on the Japanese Virtual Console, there are now even less retro systems up for grabs, giving Sega Saturn games a higher chance they will hit the Virtual Console. In fact a RumorReporter source claims to have heard confirmation of this from a DigiPen employee. For those who don’t know, the DigiPen building is right next to the Nintendo Of America building, so there could be some kind of information leaking going about.

Sega Saturn games? On my Wii? Talk about happy times.We can only hope this becomes a reality. . .and soon.

[RumorReporter via Joystiq]

It seems like it’s time to show you a Retro Video of my favorite game of ALL TIME. No, I’m not kidding, and also no, it’s not from Nintendo. What the hell is it? Well, it’s Guardian Heroes of course. That awesome and almost impossible-to-find-today game made an exclusive appearance on the Sega Saturn back in the good ol’ 2d (and sometimes 3d) era.

The plot was simple. It’s a generic middle-ages RPG style game with warriors, magicians, healers, and all those wacky jobs. Then you have an awesome gameplay; being able to hit normally, with specials, or with GREATER special attacks, add to that a combo counter and the ability to keep hitting an enemy until it falls, making some zany worth-taping combos.

My favorite character? It was Randy, the Magician. He wore some kind of middle-Eastern tunic, carried a magical staff, and had a rabbit-like pet called Nando (it would sometimes catch fire and start burning enemies!). His ability to do combos was awesome, and his spells could be able to hit half a screen worth of enemies. Ahhhh, happy times.

This video shows the 2nd chapter of the Story mode, in 1 player.

It’s a shame that this game was overshun by the release of Sony’s Playstation, but its memories will be kept in my heart, waiting to be reopened the day I go to a swap meet and find this gorgeous jewel of video gaming. . .Did I mention you could plug a multi tap and have 6 human players fighting at the same time? Well, yet another reason to weep asking myself why I didn’t buy this game when I could.

One of the main reasons I thought making a 20-minute walk daily from my house to a friend’s, who happened to have a Sega Saturn was worth the sweat was Popful Mail: A skinny, red-haired medieval sword fighter with a lot of willpower and a hilarious English Dub.

The game is a standard 2D Action-Rpg sidescroller, where you start with Mail, then along the adventure you meet Tatt and Gaw, who will join your party. Each char has different abilities and 5 different weapons. Along the stuff that make this game part-RPG (besides the cliched scenario, characters, everything. . .) is that you can get different items that affect your status or the health bar. It has pretty funny music, and as always (before the 2000 World Japanimation Project*) if they didn’t see some elements of the original game to meet their expectations, the US branch of the Developer’s people would modify them, starting with the spoken dialogue (and not being able to change it to original Japanese with Subs [as today {e.g. DBZ Tenkaichi 2 for the Wii}]), WORDS from some characters (Tales of Phantasia “…Like a Tiger” issue) and something I most of the time disapprove of*, the music is completely changed in some scenes.

And that’s why I’m posting the same 2 videos from the intro of this awesome game, the first one in the Original Japanese version and the latter in the Polluted US version. Have fun!

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