Kizyr wrote:Alunissage wrote:Of course, I am not unbiased. I've said before that the only way I'd be likely to be happy with a Four Heroes game is if I were involved in its development, because otherwise unless some extremely dedicated and obsessive writers and developers work to include every little thing that could possibly relate, the same things that I (and fans in general, I suppose) are aware of, it will conflict with something and feel wrong.
I could work on it.
Then again, the Lunar series oftentimes isn't consistent with itself as-is, barring new additions. KF
It's more that that, though...correct me if I'm wrong, of course, but Alun appears to be talking about not only the obsessive nature of the niche fan (which we all are, or else why would we be on this board), but the inherent nature of the sequel/pastiche.
(I'm actually paraphrasing...broadly...here from Robert Price's introduction to
The Xothic Legend Cycle which is just about the best short essay I've ever read on the subject of pastiche...which is appropriate since the book itself is a collection of Lin Carter's Cthulhu Mythos stories, but I digress.)
The "sequel problem" is generated largely because the original material does not only consist of itself in our minds (words, pictures, etc.), but consists of our
interaction with it. That is, I hold a "Lunar" in my own mind, just as you hold one in yours and Alun holds one in hers, but those "Lunars" have significant differences because of who
we are and how we bring our personal perceptions and experiences to the table.
When a pastiche or sequel is created, the pastichist does not attempt to recreate the original material, but
the image of the original that they hold in their mind. That is, if I write a Sherlock Holmes story, that story won't be my attempt to duplicate Conan Doyle's writing, but to duplicate the feelings and ideas that Sherlock Holmes stories mean to me. Thus the perceived quality of a pastiche is affected not only by
the writer's ability to express their feelings, but
how close the writer's view of the original is to the audience's. Even a great writer can make a crappy sequel if they had a view of the original that doesn't "mesh" with the audience's (one reason among many why, for example, whichever came first among the movie or the book will almost always be perceived to be better, and generally speaking people prefer whichever of TSS or SSSC they encountered first).
This is one of many problems about Dragon Song--Lunar fans went into it with a particular idea about what Lunar was, and Dragon Song wasn't it. Since the original was
unsatisfying, a remake such as the one proposed in this thread, if completed, has a good chance of being seen as an improvement.
On the other hand, a
new Lunar game, made many years after the original, probably by a different design team, will likely incorporate elements or express the story in a different way than the original did. Moreover, since it would feature a number of characters well-known from previous Lunar games, it would be easy to fall astray of "betraying" people's mental images of those characters. Like Alun, I'm rather dubious that a Four Heroes game would actually
fulfill my hopes and would instead prove to be a rather large disappointment.
(My wife is both anticipating and dreading the new Gyakuten Saiban game, the one featuring Miles Edgeworth as the PC, for the same reason.)
I had a super ultra mega bad fever this last weekend and i'm finally well again. Phew... I'll be going up to Asheville, NC on holiday for the 4th,5th, and 6th. I'm working on shifting some graphics and changing a little bit of the format. It's going to be neat! I'm also working on a bible? of sorts for Lunar Dragon Song. This will help with the final layout for this project. I might post that here. I guess this works as a little update? 