Review of Lunar: Silver Star Harmony
By X-34 minus 5R1-6X36
I sighed a lot when I played Lunar: Silver Star Harmony, even though I didn’t play it for very long. Surely, in fact, this game completely wrecked curve of the “sighs-to-playing-time” ratio. It’s one of those games.
By which I mean that it comes from the alternate universe of anime-steeped Japan, wherein, and I mean this quite seriously, peculiar modes of narrative, character, emotion, and behavior steer the course of all kinds of media texts: videogames like this one, yes, but also films, manga, television shows, and so forth. Maybe I found this game so tedious because I am not fully versed in the world of anime, but I think it runs deeper than that. There’s something seriously off about Lunar: Silver Star Harmony, and it infuses everything about the game, right down to its bizarro, agrammatical title.
This game just doesn’t make a lot of sense. Or, I should say, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to someone who is not deeply familiar with anime storylines, modes of character behavior, and suchlike. Characters’ actions and motivations are opaque to me: they have goals for no particular reason; their traits seem arbitrarily assigned; their quests are dumb.
Moreover, the gameplay is deeply, deeply irritating – pointing, I think, to the fact that the makers of this game are addressing an audience to which I absolutely do not belong. Ever watch a game of field hockey? It’s an intensely annoying experience, because the rules of the game are such that play stops every 30 seconds for some infraction or other. You can never get a good “flow” going. My high-school friends and I used to bring board games to the field when our pals on the field hockey team asked us to come to their games. Lunar: Silver Star Harmony feels much like watching field hockey, but instead of being able to play Monopoly or something while your friends have to adjust to the fits-and-starts rhythm of the game, you’re subjected to it yourself. Your little bigheaded characters cannot take ten steps – no exaggeration – without being interrupted by some baddie or other.
What’s more, the battles with the baddies are SEVERELY annoying – again, evidence, I think, of some sort of mode of gameplay that evolved since I started playing these things some thirty years ago. This is a mode of gameplay that is NOT FUN. You play as the leader of a small group of kids who go out to find a dragon or some shit like that, I dunno. Accompanying you is an annoying flying cat that fails endlessly, groaningly, stultifyingly at crafting witticisms. Anyway, when battling the baddies – task which, again, occurs every time the field-hockey referee blows her whistle, which is to say: every 20 seconds or so – you must complete a tedious action-selection process that, when tallied up, surely consumes the lion’s share of game-time. You have to sift through drop-down menus to decide whether to run, fight, block, or use some special combo moves. And you do this for EACH character. And then, once you’ve entered your choices, the actual battling happens – and you have no control over it at all, since you’re locked into whatever you opted for in the drop-down menus. So, in other words, there’s no action, per se, in this game. Rather, the action happens automatically: the battles unfold turn by turn – apparently, in Lunar-world, no one can accomplish more than one task at any given moment. The game completely does away with any sense of action or adventure or – dare I say it – fun, relegating gameplay, such as it is, to random perambulations throughout some faintly Tolkienistic landscapes, and then entering choices into what are effectively actuarial tables. There’s nothing to DO in this game. It’s deadly boring. All the reasons for which, presumably, most people play videogames – action, speed, timing, tests of reflexes, pattern-recognition, interactivity – are inaccessible to the player of Lunar: Silver Star Harmony.
So, yeah, I don’t get it. I don’t get this game, I don’t get why anyone would play it, I don’t understand why the characters act like they do, why the action of the game has been so thoroughly stripped away, why anyone would this that stupid flying cat is charming or funny. There’s precious little left for the gamer here. No fun, no action, only failed attempts at humor, inexplicable and uninteresting characters and quests, irritating gameplay.
Ultimately, I wasn’t so much annoyed by this game as I was baffled. If bafflement is your bag, then by all means go for this one. If not, stay away.
