The latest word is that Lunar has been pushed back to 1998 and we all know what that means (maybe never). To all those folks who wrote editorials predicting this event, “your crystal balls were very clear”.
If you wrote an editorial against Working Design, the e-mail would come in so nasty that you would have to wear surgical gloves to push the delete key. The truth of the matter is that we have been trying to tell you that the sky was falling. All of the excuses about the full screen versus partial screen videos for Lunar made good copy and great food for WD loyalists. The full screen MPEG version was released in Japan several weeks ago to a luke warm reception. The little secret that no one was telling us (during Lunar “delay” talks) was that MPEG requires a special MPEG card to play these full screen videos. This is not an item that is available at your local Electronic Bout.. I will be very tasteful, this was all baloney! All this cultish following of WD, was shameful and degrading. They are just a business entity making business decisions. They threw up all this “we want to bring you the best” junk because it worked.
Rayearth should have been out a long time ago and it will be miracle if that title ever sees the light of day. Shameful! All this BS over naming of the characters, did anyone else think that people had lost their collective minds? This is still the best action RPG on the new systems and they are probable going to bury it.
This was all predictable and predicted. The word is that Alundra for the Playstation is coming out next. I have played that game and it is no Lunar. It is a nicely done puzzle-heavyyyyyy action RPG. The graphics are very muted and the game takes place around one (that’s one) town. This game couldn’t carry Landstalker’s jockstrap, in the immortal words of Larry Holmes.
Here’s what I recommend to all those disappointed gamers. Don’t wait on WD, it’s going nowhere fast! Buy the import games (you’ll need a cheap convertor); search the web (there are a couple of fine walkthroughs on Rayearth and Lunar out there); read the walkthroughs (most of the story line is usually included); play the game (the Japanese will give you an extra challenge, but both of these games have easy menus to figure out). These two titles have been out a long time and are probably available at a lower price than at release. Forget about WD’s release schedule, if they put the games out, fine, but there is an old rule in psychology: “Never let someone else control the things that are important to you”. Cut the cord, see the game now!
I played the Japanese Lunar all the way through and can’t read a word of Japanese. It was still lots of fun because it was a good game and it was in my Saturn now. The game did not look very complicated to translate and bring to this market! There were no load time problems to correct and the storyline was already history. In this writer’s opinion, we got taken, BIG TIME!