Lunar Remastered Collection review: Let rise the dreams of your heart

Readers, if you recognize my name, you probably know I love the heck out of classical, turn-based RPGs. I’m always happy in front of games like Dragon Quest, SaGa, Shin Megami Tensei, Final Fantasy, and other weird stuff that doesn’t have huge brand power. But if you asked me to name the quintessential RPG, the one that defines the genre in my mind, it’s gotta be Lunar. These games, especially their PlayStation remakes that were lovingly packaged in boxes full of goodies, were formative experiences for me at an age when I barely knew what things like anime and “role-playing games” were on a conceptual level. So much so that when I booted up Lunar Remastered Collection and started hearing its newly-recorded version of “Wings,” a wave of nostalgic yearning hit me like a truck. So, that’s the angle I’m coming to this review from. Be warned. We might get a little cringe tonight, folks.

The most classical of classics

Lunar: Silver Star Story and its sequel, Eternal Blue, aren’t particularly novel or unconventional in a broad sense. Silver Star Story especially is as tropey as it gets, telling a story about an adventurous boy going on a textbook hero’s journey with his childhood friend who happens to be a girl skilled with healing magic. But the way this game is executed is special.

High-quality anime scenes introduce every major character, enthusiastic voice acting drives an already likeable cast, the visuals and sprites are bright, colorful and detailed, and there are even Disney-esque musical numbers that are as earnest and heartwarming as they are corny. It’s like someone took a Final Fantasy game, yanked out all the angst and melodrama, and replaced it with sunshine, rainbows, and tears of joy. Toss some cupcakes and those bouncy musical blocks from Super Mario Bros. 3 in for good measure.

Eternal Blue is a touch more ambitious, building off the success of Lunar’s polish and enthusiasm, going for some additional weirdness and heavier emphasis on lore. But it’s just as boldly fueled by the power of friendship and anime, with a pinch of eye-rolling titillation that also serves to make these games the perfect formative RPG experience for young teenagers. You take the good and the bad with games like this, although we’re not talking, like, Compile Heart levels of degeneracy. Think Sailor Moon but with a slightly broader audience.

I’m so nostalgia-poisoned by Lunar it’s hard to think about these games in terms of a new player. Seriously, back in the day I played through Lunar 2 with a friend after we found it at a Walmart or Toys 'R' Us or something, and we were so blown away we recorded the cutscenes on a VHS tape to watch back later. That’s the kind of childhood experience you can’t recover from critically. I own it though, and there’s stuff to cover here from that angle as well. But if you’re a younger RPG player and enjoyed things like the recent Dragon Quest 3 remake, imagine something like that but less rigidly old school and more whimsical and performative.

Legal issues, rumors, and who knows what else?

Now, Lunar oldheads know that the series has been in a weird sort of limbo since its Sega CD and PlayStation days, due to various factors involving localization and dub rights held by Working Designs (RIP) co-founder Victor Ireland. Most of that stuff is hearsay and scuttlebutt, but stories pop up from time to time in-between statements from Ireland himself. But needless to say, Lunar Remastered Collection finally popping up was a welcome surprise, but one that came with some questions. There’s also the matter of developer GameArts and publisher GungHo themselves, which didn’t do the best job re-releasing its other classic RPG series, Grandia.

The good news is that this is definitely not another Grandia situation. I have some relatively minor gripes but for the most part, Lunar looks better than I expected. It does something different in the way it achieves widescreen support, compared to other remasters like Square Enix’s SaGa treatments or Konami’s recent Suikoden set. In expanding the field of view, the developers opted to preserve the look and feel of the original game. The lighting is a little different, but the sprites and tiles are in the same style, almost as if the screen was simply expanded and hit with a magical “higher resolution” stick. It’s hard to tell the difference, even if you pop back and forth between the original games and the remaster.

Which, by the way, is something you can actually do in this release. You can hop between “Classic Mode” and “Remastered Mode” in a launcher menu, using the same save file between both versions. Classic Mode lets you use a set of decent CRT filters and toggle a border, while the game runs in 4:3. But you can also utilize changes made for the remaster, such as modifications to inventory management, auto-battle settings, and (perhaps the best part) cutscene subtitles. It’s a neat option, and shows that as much authenticity as possible was one of the goals with this release.

I say “as possible” because Lunar’s localization situation makes it a special case. That’s for better or worse, because Working Designs (WD), as beloved as it is, was also known for making games harder (to fight rentals) and taking a lot of liberties with pop-culture references and other silliness that’s divisive with fans. It’s hard to make a full comparison in a pre-release review due to time and resource constraints, but there are noticeable differences. For one, at least some of the difficulty problems of the WD versions were addressed, so grinding for money isn’t as needed for example. The translation seems very similar, but with some changes here and there. Notably, the opening song in the first Lunar retains the WD lyrics, compared to a more literal translation that was seen in a PSP remake.

Remastering the look, remaking the sounds

And speaking of the opening song, Lunar Remastered Collection has an entirely new dub for both games. While it’s always a bummer when something like this happens and voice performances people grew up with are just gone, there are benefits. For one, the recording quality is a lot higher. The new performances are totally solid, and in some cases oddly but appreciably similar to the original voices. The songs are just as effective as ever, and the lyrics not being retranslated is a welcome compromise. Still, Jenny Stigile and the rest of the original cast deserve a shoutout for the literal voices and figurative voice they provided for this series.

There are a couple ways the remaster does stumble, all of them visual. For starters, the upscaled cutscenes seem to have some really aggressive digital recoloring, the kind that messes up the line work of the original art. You can look at upscaled versions of the scenes on YouTube from fans that look better, which is a bummer. In this case, the clarity comes at a cost. The same cutscenes also look really bad in Classic Mode, with zero upscaling whatsoever. Considering how important the anime scenes are for the Lunar games, this is a sore spot on both sides. It certainly could’ve been worse (no obvious signs of AI for example), but it could’ve been a lot better, too.

Some of the minor texture art also doesn’t look good in Remastered Mode. Text looks fuzzy, menu icons look a little too heavily-filtered, and character portraits in dialogue boxes are super inconsistent. Those smaller textures are always problematic in projects like this, but considering how good the rest of the in-game visuals look, the missteps stand out more. It feels like GungHo wasn’t nearly as confident in deciding how heavy-handed to be with the cutscenes and UI textures, and the overall impact suffers as a result.

There’s also a weird blur effect at the top and bottom of the screen that achieves nothing but making the top and bottom of the screen look blurry for no reason, but thankfully there’s a toggle for that. Maybe the aim was for a photographic effect similar to what Square Enix did with Star Ocean 2, but it’s a swing and a miss. At the end of the day, at least the sins of Grandia HD were not repeated with Lunar.

Lunar is a tremendous series, a crucial high point of RPG history that doesn’t get nearly enough love today. And the reasons for that are complicated enough that the Lunar Remastered Collection existing at all feels like a small miracle. For the most part it’s a success, opting for more of a restorative, hands-off approach meant to make it look like a literal widescreen conversion of a PlayStation game. There are some unfortunate pain points that keep a great re-release from being a total slam dunk, but the other side of that is a brand-new dub that makes up for the awkwardness with its high quality and reverence for the original. Overall, I commend GungHo for mostly letting these all-time classics speak for themselves. That’s all you really need to do with Lunar.

Lunar Remastered Collection is available on April 18, 2025 for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC. A Nintendo Switch code was provided by the publisher for this review.

Lucas White

Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He's far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.