The History of Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete

The remake that outgrew its original, and the collector's edition that defined a publisher.

Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete is the 1996 to 1999 remake of Lunar: The Silver Star, the 1992 Mega-CD game whose own history already stands in this Library (linked below, and not repeated here). The remake rebuilt the game for the Saturn and then the PlayStation: roughly fifty minutes of new animation against the original's ten, a script expanded by a novelist, a villain rewritten into sympathy, and, in North America, a boxed collector's edition that sold out its entire run and made it Working Designs' best-selling title to that date.

THE MAKING, AS A REMAKE

What Game Arts chose to change

Game Arts developed the remake with Japan Art Media, with Toshiyuki Kubooka returning on art and direction and Noriyuki Iwadare composing nearly one hundred new songs alone. The changes were authored, not cosmetic. Novelist Keisuke Shigematsu expanded the script; Luna remains in the party far longer, with her past and dreams opened up; new villains Royce and Phacia deepen the Vile Tribe; and Ghaleon's motive was rewritten, from a dead lover's revenge to a misplaced concern for the world's future, making the series' signature villain sympathetic in a way the original never attempted.

Mechanically the remake imports the sequel's lessons: visible enemies replace random encounters, auto-battle arrives from Eternal Blue, and bosses scale to the party's level. The animation, now by Studio Gonzo, runs about fifty minutes, and its presentation became the remake's own technical story, told in the editions tile below: quarter-screen video on the first Saturn pressing, full-screen only with Sega's MPEG card, and a PlayStation version whose movies stayed full-screen at lower fidelity than the MPEG Saturn edition, a comparison Japanese reviewers made explicitly at the time.

THE DESIGN

A traditional RPG, presented like a film

Underneath the presentation the remake keeps the original's virtues: a compact world, a five-person party with distinct roles, and a story paced like an adventure serial, Alex the would-be Dragonmaster gathering his companions town by town. The remake's design work is in the margins that players feel: save files expanded from three to fifteen on the PlayStation edition, memory card slot switching, and DualShock support added for the English release.

The English script is the famous layer. Working Designs, under Victor Ireland, translated freely: pop culture references, contemporary jokes, and fourth wall breaks sit inside the fantasy, a house style that the Library examines directly in its Working Designs question page (linked below) and that reviewers of this game scored as a feature, Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine calling the translation spotless.

THE EDITIONS

Saturn, MPEG Saturn, PlayStation, and the box

Saturn · 1996

Japan, October 25, 1996, as Lunar: Silver Star Story. Quarter-screen, low fidelity video. Japanese sales: 200,035 by the end of 1996. Famitsu scored it 25 of 40.

Saturn MPEG · 1997

July 4, 1997: the version built for the Saturn Movie Card plays the animation full-screen, and it is this updated Saturn edition that carried the Complete name in Japan. 8,346 further copies in 1997.

PlayStation · 1998 to 1999

Japan May 28, 1998 (port by Alfa System; Famitsu 28 of 40; 44,802 Japanese copies). North America May 28, 1999 by Working Designs, after the planned Saturn localization was dropped amid the publisher's disputes with Sega of America.

The North American box · 1999

The collector's edition at $60: two game discs, a hardbound manual, a soundtrack CD, a Making Of disc, and a cloth map. The entire run sold within the game's first North American year (223,000 copies and up). A standard Fan-Art Edition, fan art on the discs and no extras, followed in February 2002.

THE RECEPTION

The panel loved the remake, with one loud exception

GameRankings · 86% (PS)

Metacritic 78. Electronic Gaming Monthly's panel gave 9, 9.5, 8.5, and 9, an Editor's Choice Gold, judging plot, writing, and voice acting about the best available in the genre.

GamePro · 2.5 / 5

The dissent: flat battle areas, wimpy spells, itty-bitty enemies, while conceding the story and acting. GameSpot's 7.6 and IGN's 7.5 both taxed the dated graphics, which GameSpot said could be recreated on a Super Nintendo, and praised everything else.

IGN, all time · #22

In 2000 IGN ranked the game 22nd among all PlayStation games; EGM placed it 75th on its top 100 games of all time in 2001.

The market verdict

North America: over 223,000 copies in the first year including the whole collector's edition run, the second best-selling PlayStation RPG of 1999 behind Final Fantasy VIII, and the best-selling Working Designs release to that date.

Japanese reviewers were cooler on both machines, and the comparison between editions is part of the record: Hyper PlayStation scored the Japanese PlayStation version 7 of 10, solid but visually a step down from the MPEG Saturn edition. The Western panel, meeting the game through Working Designs' script and box, rated it a classic of the machine.

THE LEGACY

The remake became the canonical Silver Star

For most players since 1999, this remake simply is The Silver Star: it is the version the Lunar Remastered Collection of April 2025 returns to, following earlier returns on Windows (Japan, 1999), iOS (2012), and Android (2024). Its North American box also set the template for the deluxe RPG release in the West, the cloth map and hardbound book as shelf objects, a full decade before collector's editions became the industry default. The Sega CD original's own record, and the question of what Working Designs changed across the Lunar games, stand on their own Library pages, linked below.