This board is for general discussion of Lunar. Especially things such as Lunar merchandise, general discussions about the story that span more than one game, etc.
Hi! (it's been a long time since I last posted here)
I was wondering if anybody is interested in a Lunar, or a Lunar Inspired Visual Novel?
I had always wanted to make a Lunar VN, but I was never able to
If so, what kind of storyline would you want it to have?
Would it be within the SS time period? Or the EB? About the Lunar History? Or something totally new?
When I played my very first visual novel back in early 1997 - Season of the Sakura published by JAST - I always thought at that time the LUNAR series would be interesting in some sort of visual novel form as there's a good handful of stories that can be told. Now that there's so many visual novel game creators out there too like Ren'Py for instance it's easier than ever for people to create these type games. However now that I have played so many visual novels and for so long, I do feel there are some intricate instances that can affect anything of LUNAR being created in visual novel form.
For one, LUNAR like many other JRPGs of the time is fairly well-focused on fighting. There have been visual novels that have implemented rather primitive fighting engines, but for a good majority of them the fighting is almost an afterthought - like a side-aspect or a mini-game. You would have to be careful how such aspects would be implemented into a visual novel since it's typically not the focus. I guess one could simply static animate the scenes into the novel without any player accessibility, but that would have to be a whole lot of fights to throw in to make the story seem more inline with the LUNAR games. Including any sort of external fighting elements to the novel would not be completely unsound though. If Moero Downhill Night can have Initial D -style street racing & drifting in it, then a LUNAR visual novel could potentially have any sort of mini-game element incorporated that you could think of.
Resources would likely have to be completely "scratch-built," which wouldn't be a problem if you can find a competent artist. At the least you would need somebody that could animate full character silhouettes in a couple of poses, facial expressions to go with the poses, and then an artist that could create LUNAR-believeable backgrounds (you wouldn't be able to use the ones that game with the game due to their perspective - not to mention probably no kosher to use such items for a fan-game).
I don't see why a similar score could be composed for the game depending on what LUNAR game you wanted to base it off of - if any. If you based it off TSS for instance you could just use cover tracks of the songs or similar.
The big thing though is story. Fortunately the great thing about a visual novel is it can be the ultimate form of fanfiction if it is presented in that way. You bring both fanfiction writing and fan art together as one, which when brought together can be a fairly powerful story telling device.
I think in all of this consideration above, what would be a good visual novel for the LUNAR series would be a side-story telling of a particular location or set of characters that was fairly focused in nature. For instance, I could see a side-story of the Vane magic school students in their time in the TSS time line. Or maybe even the same character and setting idea but within EB. The great thing about it being a side-story with a specific setting is that you can not only focus on one setting and one specific set of characters, but you could also implement aspects of the main game(s) into the story. For example, if your visual novel's timeline was in TSS and was based in Vane, you could have instances of Nash and Mia appearing - like said main character in the visual novel assisting Mia to free Alex & Nall from the Vane prison. All the while these mainstream plot devices can be implemented sporadically while focusing on said side-story characters for most of the novel. Because of the ambiguities in the characters you could create any sort of circumstances you wanted and relate it to LUNAR fairly easily.
