So I found these copies back around the beginning of this year, since I heard some pretty good things about these two games, and me being a collect-and-play kinda person, I started looking around for the PS1 versions, since that was the closest thing available for me, console wise. However, it did prove to be a challenge while I was searching around for some good copies and also trying to stay as low as possible on prices. The first Lunar, I was able to find for a bit cheaper alongside an offer, despite it being a bit beat up, but I was still happy to find that one, and as for Lunar 2, that one was my most difficult game to find that was a good copy with everything inside while staying at a lower price (at least one item was missing, mostly the pendant), and when I finally found this one, everything was in there; this ended up becoming my most expensive PS1 game in my PS1 library, but I was more happy about finding and adding it to the lineup.

I really like all the extra things that are included with each game, especially the second one. Although the soundtrack disc got stuck inside the disc slot of the soundtrack box, I was able to get it out and clean it without ruining it; but I’d just have to be careful with storing it whenever I bring it out to listen to music. So overall, I’m really happy to have these and hoping to play through them in their entirety very soon, however if the PS1 versions are too difficult, I can always look for the remasters and play through the game on there. Otherwise, one of my favorite finds in game collection!

Playing on Delta Emulator on iPhone

The US release (SLUS-00628) still contains the developers' test room, "Monster Test", and their debug menu, in Japanese. I made a memory card save that starts you inside it.

From the menu you can warp to any region, town or dungeon, fight any boss, add or remove party members, learn every spell, fill Nall's bag with every item, and jump to points in the story. The images translate every page.

Download: Google Drive (memory card, single save, readme, translation images)

Setup

1. You need the US version, disc 1), and a PS1 emulator. I used Duckstation.
2. Use the save's card as memory card 1:
3. DuckStation

1. Settings → Memory Cards → Memory Card 1 → "Shared Between All Games", then Browse to `lunar-sssc-debug-room.mcd`.

(This will work with other PSX emulators, but the method to load the memory card will differ)

Start

1. the game and load the save called "Monster Test".

In the room

* In the memory card save I replaced the talking ice pillars with characters. You start below Kyle: press ✕ to talk. Kyle opens the main menu, Jessica the world map, Mia the towns, Nash the dungeons.
* Each box shows one option, with つぎ ("next") under it. ✕ picks the option; Up or Down skips to the next one.

Careful

* Don't pick "Monster Test" from the world-map list. You land back in this room, empty and with no exit; load the save again.

No save? Cheat codes

From a new game, in any emulator that takes GameShark codes. Start a new game with them on, and after the opening walk down the path from Dyne's Monument and you will be teleported to the debug room. Walk right into the ice pillar and press ✕ to talk to it.

D00B8CDC 0022
801E6B2C 0909
D00B8CDC 0022
801E6B34 3164
D00B8CDC 0022
301E6B36 0002
D00B8CDC 0022
801DD48A 0000
D00B8CDC 0022
801DD48C 0004
D01DCC48 040E
801DCBF8 040E
D00B8CDC 0009
800B8BFA 0001
D10B8CDC 0009
800B8BFA 0000

With the gameshark method the “walk through walls” cheat will be enabled, which is certainly how the original developers used this debug room.

I’ve never seen this specific box art before, it was automatically chosen by the box art scrapper app.

I do think that it looks very nice, but I wasn’t able to find absolutely anything abt this art, maybe a translated Japan only art?

***EDIT: I managed to pull the file out of my mini device to have a look ai it and sadly it is AI, we can’t have anything exciting anymore.

Hello all, so I missed the whole preorder for the remasters with the Althena's Treasure box that came with purchase. The items that I really like from that set are the Alex, Luna, Lucia, and Hiro pins. If anyone who has them would be willing to part with them, I might be interested in buying. Please DM me if so.

(It goes without saying, but please no scams. We're all united in love for these games, fam).

Someone asked me to paint these for them a few years ago. I hope you like them. Thanks for looking.

Hi,

I mentioned the finding of Adol Christin confirmed in Lunar The Silver Star here a few weeks ago and some people asked me about the tool I use that made the translation, so I did guess that might interest some people here, since it is a passion project I worked on as a hobby. It is a completely free and open source project I primarily made for myself, so no commercial interests here, I just think that this might be useful to others who share my passion 🙂

I’ve been working on a Windows tool called JRPG Translator to finally deal with my backlog and collection of Japanese games decades in the making 😄

It captures text from a game and shows an AI translation in an overlay. There’s also audio translation for spoken dialogue.

The part I’m particularly interested in is making it useful for learning Japanese, too. You can ask for an explanation of the dialogue, including vocabulary and grammar, save interesting passages in a Study Library, and turn selected sentences or words into Anki flashcards to review later on your phone.

I’ve also spent quite a bit of time making it usable with a controller. There’s a fullscreen interface and optional LaunchBox/Big Box integration for loading settings automatically per game. You don’t need LaunchBox to use it, but I would highly recommend it since this way you set it up per game and it will open along these games what creates the most seamless experience, see the third picture above where I show the plugin.

It uses OpenAIs or Geminis APIs, so you to enter an API key, to try it you can use a free tier one from Google which you can get easily (link in the documentation, Youtube description or enter Gemini API key free tier into Google 🙂) and depending in how much you play this might be enough 👍

If anyone gives it a try, I’d be interested to hear which games you use it with and what feels awkward or could work better. I declared this now version 1.0 since it has now all the features I envisioned at the beginning and with the new UI it finally doesn't look like a Windows 98 app anymore, but there are probably still bugs hiding in there 🫣

You can download it here:

https://github.com/retrogamer0815/jrpg-translator-toolkit/releases/latest

I made a new detailed video where I explain the setup and all features while (long but it has chapters and I try to explain all features and best practices, the second half covers the study features):

https://youtu.be/BUM4VEnBtv4

And here is a detailed documentation:

https://github.com/retrogamer0815/jrpg-translator-toolkit/blob/main/docs/manual/README.md

Something is not as it should be.

Finally found a cache of games I was looking for while we're moving. I had unintentionally hidden them so well, I couldn't find them for years, and had honestly thought I had gotten rid of them accidentally or something. They were inside some Christmas boxes that I had thought were empty, so, Merry Christmas to me!

Edit: I also found my copy of Brave Fencer Musashi which I loved, and Vagrant Story, which I've never played. I can't wait to get everything set up at our new place so I can dive back into my PS1 and Gamecube games.

I've had this on my wish list for years, but it very rarely shows up on ebay. However, thanks to ebay's saved searches feature, I was alerted to it being listed recently! The seller had it for listed for almost $500, however, which was a hard pass for me. Luckily, an international friend of mine found the same exact listing elsewhere for around $140, so I jumped on that one (he already has one) 😆

I've never actually completed Dragon Song until making this video. And I really wish I could go back in time and stop myself from ever completing it.

I also am apparently the only person to ever record the Scratch Battle multiplayer mode? So that's fun.

Replaying ssh was wondering if there is a mod for when selecting enemy's that it auto goes to the closest one. Drives me nuts that it always seems to go to the farthest enemy.

Currently, Lunar-Net has seemingly gone down, with an error code of "Account Suspended" when it is accessed.

This is very sad to me, as this site is a very good resource for things related to Lunar. Is there any information on the site going down? I hope it wasn't truly abandoned.

Just started a few days ago, it's my first playthrough so I'm going in mostly blind. So far I've been able to auto battle just about everything, with the exception of mel, burned through all of my healing herbs on that fight. I'm lvl 12, and fighting my way through the sewers, lvl 13 by the time I get to the water dragon and he just smacks me around. I should have saved before the boss fight....that's on me. So I reloaded my level 12 save, bought some armor, grinded up to lvl 14, bought some more armor and some little mana gem things, as when Alex runs out of mp, he's a potato. I'm at work now, but plan to try to take him on again when I get home, any tips are welcome! (Photo is not mine, just grabbed it from a general Internet search for attention.)

I've gone on a bit of an adventure this morning, and I'd like to tell you about what I've found, I think it's pretty interesting!

The Gameboy Advance is a handheld with audio that is fairly infamously low quality audio, due to its lack of a dedicated sound chip. Among GBA games, Lunar Legend is particularly infamous for this.

At first, I assumed the game probably had a particularly low quality soundfont, to save on space or processing power. I thought, okay, let's replace that soundfont.
First things first was to extract the soundfont. Luckily for me, is seems that Lunar Legend uses the Sappy audio engine, so ripping it was pretty easy.

However, this is where things took a total turn for me. Unlike what I was expecting, the soundfont sounded great! Of course, it's still compressed audio, but it sounded so, so much better than the game itself!

For comparison, here is the same sequenced audio, recorded directly from a GBA's sound output, compared to the same sequence put through the internal soundfont. No external edits have been made to this.
The difference is night and day.
Give it a listen:

Burg Theme (GBA Recording)

Burg Theme (Soundfont Rip)

This is blowing my mind!   As it turns out, it's not the soundfont at all, which sounds pretty good!
It's wild to me that the music at this quality has been sitting on the cartridge all these years, and has just been locked away from being heard!

I hope to do some work in the future, potentially making a romhack to force the GBA to play the OST at a higher quality. The GBA has limited audio capabilities, but I know it can do better than what's on display with Lunar Legend, and I think this game deserves to have its music heard as it was intended, rather than the crushed bitrate version we have gotten for close to 30 years.

I'd love to hear what you think of this!

On Lunar 3 — and to those who dream of creating it yourselves

I've seen many of you share your hopes for a Lunar 3, and even your wish to build one yourselves. I wanted to speak honestly and directly about how I see it.

First, in fairness to you all: Lunar is no longer within my rights to control. I left Game Arts long ago, so the series is not mine to license, approve, or authorize. I'm not able to give permission for anything regarding Lunar itself — and I want to be clear about that, so no one is misled.

But here is what I can tell you, from the heart.

Over the years, I've met creators all over the world who told me that Lunar, or Grandia, or some other work was what first inspired them — and who then went on to make wonderful, original works entirely their own. That, to me, is the most beautiful thing a story can do.

I've always believed that games and stories are like Shakespeare: they carry the past forward and retell it as something new, weaving fresh history from the threads of what came before. The greatest tribute to a work you love is not to copy it, but to let it light a fire in you — and then build something that is unmistakably yours.

So to those of you dreaming of Lunar 3: I can't hand you the key to Lunar. But I can tell you that the spirit that made you love it is already yours to carry. Take that inspiration, and go make something the world has never seen.

And I'm not just saying this from the sidelines — I'm setting out on a new challenge of my own right now, carrying everything those years taught me into something new. So let's walk this road together, in our own ways. I'll be cheering for you.

— Yoichi Miyaji

100+ of you showed up here with your hearts wide open, and I can't thank you enough. Wind's Nocturne came up again and again in your messages — it's always been the soul of LUNAR, and clearly it's been the soul of it for you too. So this one's for all of you. 🙂

Other than regional variants, I think I have every Lunar game except for the Game Gear version of Walking School.

Currently playing through the Japanese version of Lunar Silver Star on Sega CD.

It's really me. 🙂 Thank you for having me — reading your stories here has meant the world. I'll reply to as many as I can.
— Yoichi Miyaji

Hello, everyone. My name is Yoichi Miyaji. Many years ago, I was the producer of the Lunar series.

With the moderators' kind permission, I wanted to stop by simply to say hello — and, more than anything, to say thank you. That a community for Lunar still gathers here, after all these years, moves me more than I can easily put into words. Games are made by many hands and then sent out into the world, and you rarely get to see where they land. To learn that Lunar landed here, and stayed — in your memories — means a great deal to me.

I'm still making games. These days I'm working on a new title called Under Mythos, alongside some old friends from those years and a few new ones. I won't turn this into a sales pitch — that isn't why I came. But if anyone's curious about what I'm up to now, I'm glad to answer anything in the comments.

Mostly, though, I'd just love to hear from you. What did Lunar mean to you? Reading through some of the older threads here has brought a lot back for me. Thank you, sincerely, for keeping this place alive.

— Yoichi Miyaji

(Photo attached — proof that it's really me.)

Got both the remasters on switch, and excited to see where everything goes. Was wondering if grinding was important, like a lot of the old school jrpgs, then the Trials at the beginning made that abundantly clear. Any tips or things to watch out for would be cool, haven’t looked anything up yet.

Playing these 2 games for the 1st time. Saw them on switch eshop AND they're on sale but, imma broke biotch! BUT it gave me a reason to bust out this guy again. Any recommendations or tips?