Can we stop pretending that Lunar EB on the sega cd (and probably a couple of handful of other 16 jrpgs) aren't technically better games than Final Fantasy 6? Its been, what, almost 20 years?
Lunar EB is technically an amazing jrpg. You just have to actually play it to know that. It did a lot of things that would become common on the play station and saturn.
Enemy sprites that had multiple move animations.
Backgrounds with animations on map and in battle.
Redbook audio.
Enemies that would give tells on what they were going to do so you could be pro active and not always be dealing with the badies last action.
Cut scenes.
spoken dialog.
The ability to position your characters for battle pre battle and it impact the outcome of the battle.
I'm tired of the FF6 fanboys. They roll their eyes if you even suggest that Lunar EB did anything better. The only game they will give any room for is Chrono trigger.
Lunar EB isn't even the only example of these things. Plenty of JRPGs did some or all of these things by 95.
FF6 gets a ton of praise but at the end of the day most of the actual game is old tricks from FF5, 4 and 3. Its got what, a couple strong story elements? The intro? The opera house?
You don't have to create this weird thinly veiled bait argument no one's ever made if you want to talk about this game.
Its rarely talked about and a Lunar thread would be refreshing, its one of the best jrpgs of its era.
The music was great too, and the setting was fun and original.
>You don't have to create this weird thinly veiled bait argument no one's ever made if you want to talk about this game.
I mean, he's not wrong. PS1 Lunar is the best Lunar thougheverbeit.
You're probably lucky and didn't grow up around snes jrpg kids. They are and we're still insufferable and revisionists.
They regularly shit on genny RPGs and strat games. They say things like FF6 is the best jrpg of the 16 bit era. Fire emblem is better than shining force. Phantasy Star is just a dumb slog. They were always like that.they could tell you with a straight face that the Redbook audio of lunar 1 and 2 was inferior to all snes music, despite the snes using a lot of compressed samples. They will discount all spoken dialog because it had to be compressed. They will discount allthe sprite animation of sega cd gsmes and hold up the edgy static sprites of FF6 as better. Lunar EB has sprites that walk around the screen and their eyes look around and their feet walk back and forth but it means nothing to them.
This all changes when they debate between themselves however. One will argue that chonw trigger is better because it has sprite animations galore while another will counter with trigger not having true town maps.
You are a lucky bastard if you never delt with these bastards. They plagued the early internet. The worst kind of consoles war fanboy was the snes RPG kid
Well they were pretty dumb then, because FF6 and Lunar don't belong in the same category. They may be sprite games but Lunar obviously came in during the next console generation as shown in the OP's image.
It's literally a 16 bit RPG. The sega CD only works with the genesis, its not 5th gen. and it kicks the shit out of Final Transtasy VI
>Final Transtasy
this is as loweffort as it gets. about what you'd except from a segatard.
not a segautist, just an appreciator of true kino. Eternal Blue is up there with Chrono Trigger while FF6 is the weakest 16bit FF
>FF6 is the weakest 16bit FF
Now you just have to be trolling.
>FF4
Best story and characters
>FF5
Best gameplay
>FF6
Best my little pony romhacks
6 mogs 4's story and characters.
Agree on 5 having the best gameplay tho, but it's not much better and the bar ain't that high.
>6 mogs 4's story and characters.
maybe
Kefka is forgettable, making much of the end game forgettable. His motivations and behavior are cartoonish with little in the story to flesh him out.
The good writing of 6 ends around the start of the last part of the game. When they show Celes on the island and her dealings with Cid, thats it. After that its just side free world whatever content and a face off with the big bad.
For all the wiener sucking FF6 gets, the last section of the game is forgettable.
>Eternal Blue is up there with Chrono Trigger while FF6 is the weakest 16bit FF
eh, I don't know about either of those. EB is somewhere between FF6 and CT. And I don't know if FF6 is the weakest. Its really hard to say. The first third of FF6 is really strong. But the last quarter kind of meanders.
There is fun to be had with all 3 of them. And they all do different things really well.
>and it kicks the shit out of Final Transtasy VI
I don't know about that. Also, what? Who is trans in FF6?
Here is the thing, both do different things really well, especially if we are comparing FF6 to LEB and not the less polished LSS. FF6 has a really strong start. The first 5 hours of FF6 are amazing for a 16 bit game. That intro with the mechs is great. Everything from turning on the game to the train boss is snes perfection. The music squeezes out what it can from the snes and is great. There are lots of different systems to play with. You got your magic, your espers, your fighting techniques. And the art direction has this dark gritty scifi vibe to it.
But, Lunar EB has really charming art design. We take for granted now that we get so many charming games from japan, but there was a time when games that looked like Lunar were rare. WD even let the cover look like japanese anime in a time when everyone had the covers redrawn. Both Lunars start with anime cutscenes. They have spoken dialog. The sprites have several frames of animation. The games have full cd quality audio. The world maps use large robust tilesets. The world map of Lunar EB has aged a lot better than the mode 7 world map of FF6. The skills of the lunar characters are less robust BUT battles in lunar are more pro active. You often have to read the state of the enemy and preemptively act before the badguy's attack goes off, while final fantasy 6 battles tend to be reactive where you clean up the mess from the bad guy's last move. Lunar even lets you position characters on the battlefield to lower the damage and impact of certain attacks.
I'm not telling anyone which one is best or which one to like the most, but its just bullheaded to not agree that Lunar 1&2 were doing some stuff better. You can't say games like Chrono Trigger and FF7 are better than FF6 when many of the improvements of those games were already in Lunar EB and to a lesser extent in Lunar SS.
>I'm not telling anyone which one is best or which one to like the most, but its just bullheaded to not agree that Lunar 1&2 were doing some stuff better. You can't say games like Chrono Trigger and FF7 are better than FF6 when many of the improvements of those games were already in Lunar EB and to a lesser extent in Lunar SS.
I will also note that many of those things were not specific to lunar. Its just one of the first jrpgs to hit the west with them. Someone could probably cherry pick pc engine rpgs or western PC rpgs that already had some of that stuff.
So don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it invented everything it did well.
Never played but people back did praised him, that i remember well.
If I remember right, back in the days of old, so like 1998 or 99, maybe earlier, a lot of early web users were from families that had more money for computers and consoles. So you had a lot of kids that had owned a sega cd. There was a lot of love for WD JRPGS. Zophar's domain, for one, takes the site name from Lunar EB and has been around since like 1996.
Then around the playstation, the nintendo only kids started getting home computers and getting online. They read up on all the hype of sega cd, sega, turbographix and PC rpgs and started emulating them. Surprise, surprise most of these games did not make them jizz their pants so they wrote them all off. They put a lot of their fanboyism into the playstation and have continued to do that to this day. Some would dip their toes back into nintendo but most just followed square wherever they went.
you are talking about mid-90s, not late. in the us sega marketed to black people and pretty much ignored rpg players, so there was no reason to pick one up. i really enjoyed psiv when i finally emulated it.
t. had computer and console and internet in 1994
>in the us sega marketed to black people and pretty much ignored rpg players
EA isn't Sega. Sega's edgy advertising that started between Sonic 2 and 3 isn't specifically targeted at people with darker skin.
Anon...I don't know. You had a really weird interpretation and bias as a kid. I don't even know what to think of someone thinking sega was targeting specifically nonwhites.
SOA and walmart didn't give a shit about advertising sega rpgs that is true. For whatever reason walmart had a preference for sports games and platformers until the 32 bit period started. But you could walk into a KB Toys, Toysrus, EB Games and babbages and get pretty much any sega rpg. I for one got Shining force 1, Shining Force: The Sword of Hajya and Phantasy star IV all at KB. I got Lunar 1 at a suncoast. I think Shining in the Darkness was Toysrus. Sonic 1 was Toysrus and 2, 3 and S&K were all walmart.
>darker skin
it's okay, anon, you can say black. maybe it's because i grew up in the south then. but every sega commercial had a black kid or seemed to be a sports game. the five or so rpgs you'd see at a store or when browsing rental stores just didn't seem worth it. i went where the rpgs were, there was no brand loyalty involved, just genre taste.
>but every sega commercial had a black kid or seemed to be a sports game
I grew up in the south too and don't remember anything about nonwhites in ads until like EA sports and after the price drop on genny 2. AND even then, I don't remember it being some massive advertising scheme.
I'm about 4 minutes into this collection of sega ads and so far I've seen more midgets than black kids. And it should be noted that so far, it is only McDonalds that has had a black kid, something McDonalds has admitted to doing.
The shit some of you come up with some times.
>some of you
anon, i'm one guy. maybe it's a misperception due to youth and selective bias, but that shit was certainly never aimed at rpg players and no serious rpg enthusiast would buy a sega console to get their fix. it was a meathead oriented marketing push.
>but that shit was certainly never aimed at rpg players and no serious rpg enthusiast would buy a sega console to get their fix.
I don't think sega opting out of giving something like phantasy star IV the same advertising dollars that FF6, Chrono trigger and Mario RPG means the system wasn't for RPGs. Sega still brought out most of their sega made rpgs. Sega wouldn't become anti jrpg until the saturn for whatever reason, which is part of what killed them. They wouldn't switch gears until the Dreamcast and by then the damage had been done and the playstation was the new rpg machine.
Sega just didn't advertise as much as Nintendo, and when they did, they dumped all their cash into EXTREME edgy 90s shit. Which a lot of companies did at the time.
whoever sega hired to do their marketing caused that perception though. they aimed it at people who probably more likely wanted to go outside and play actual sportsball. the lack of rpg or strategy or simulation titles on shelves in rental stores just confirmed it for me. one or two good games didn't warrant a system purchase when i had so many other options.
>they aimed it at people who probably more likely wanted to go outside and play actual sportsball.
lol, so brown people?
not necessarily.
+1 data point here, grew up playing PC games in early 90s (386 w/ DOS), first console was a PSX and last a PS2. Always felt like PC games were more complex and superior to console games, but emulated the SNES era squaresoft stuff and liked it. Emulated some of the Genesis era phantasy star stuff because a friend like it, never really got into it. Last squaresoft game I played was FF10, which I liked, but I feel like I grew out of the genre. Only other one id ever consider playing is 12.
>FF10, which I liked
disgusting
FF10 was extremely comfy. Great soundtrack, beautiful world, emotional and powerfully moving story, big titty goth sorceresses. At the same time, it was a marked departure from the gameplay of previous titles, and was clearly the start of them wanting to make linear movie games. No world map, airship was just a menu, lengthy and cinematic cut scenes, etc. I can enjoy it for what it was, while also realizing that it was the beginning of the end for square, and it’s why I stopped there and never played another game of theirs. They went in a different direction than I wanted and stopped appealing to me.
i could not stand the characters and found the storytelling and gameplay tedious and repetitive. it did have spectacle. i still bought x-2 afterwards, thinking things would get better...
>gameplay tedious and repetitive
Yeah. For one, there was way too much endgame bloat and tedium. Two, while it’s a cool idea that you can swap non party members in and out freely, it became a chore when the optimal method was to methodically swap every character in to every battle to get one hit in to get credit. Sphere grid was a cool idea too but somewhat boring implementation (only choice was where to branch Kimahri off). I still like the plain ol job system, with ff7 materia being the most flexible (perhaps too flexible)