Not to tempt you to break your NDA, but could you possibly give more insight into what the original game was like? It sounded like a very faithful prequel to the Lunar series messed up only by some stupid decisions in the executive department.GhaleonOne wrote:You know, I wonder what exactly the legalities of things are in regards to what Kiz and I saw in early scenario documents stated. Our NDAs are long expired with UbiSoft and GameArts, so I'm not sure there's any reason I couldn't mention stuff in the early scenario documents. Still I worry about ticking off GameArts. But there was stuff in the early Genesis documents that would have made the game so much better. When I originally saw the documents for characters and story, I was really thrilled. The final product was obviously a disappointment, but it had a lot of promise. That's another reason why Shigema was probably involved in the beginning. I've always wondered if it would be worth it to ask GameArts if we could do a larger section for that game someday that spelled out a lot of the early scenario documents and the like. There was some very interesting stuff in there that fit Lunar lore very well.
I really loved many ideas in Lunar DS such as cards and a martial artist (read: not "Acrobat"????) protagonist. And the music was amazing, even without Noriyuki Iwadare! (Dare I say, maybe better?)
Having been playing through it now, I'm wondering how they could have messed up so badly when the game had so many cool ideas as well.
The beastmen vs humans conflict in particular was interesting, though the lack of maps and over world in general took away a lot of potential they could have used to illustrate the social class division between the two. But the Bridge area of the game had to have been an amazing highlight, motivating the player to investigate the vile tribe directly by sneaking in.
I do have my own questions though:
Was Rufus originally to be killed off in a stupid sacrifice? Or was it originally more meaningful and Jian or Gabriel started kicking ass with his sword?
Were there going to be more locations familiar with the Lunar universe? Vane?
Did Lucia have Blue Hair and have a different name?
Were spells always bad as they were in this game, with Jian and Gabriel only having one "Dark Magic" spell, with all white magic spells learned by MP and NOT level up?
Did the game originally use a style and mechanics more traditional to the Complete games? Could you target foes in battle? Any reason for changing that, and "blow" to run?
Dragon companion like Nall?
A bigger insight into why Althena banished the Vile Tribe? If we look at the Vile Tribe region of Lunar DS, it's really not comparable to the Frontier from Lunar 1, so we can assume something extraordinary went on.
So many questions! The original game sounded thrilling! What the heck could have made them mess it up so badly?