October sales figures...

[Alunissage]

Yeah, I think the first time I went to WD's site they had a thing on the front page about SSSC no longer being around after that year. I saw a magazine ad for it later on and it went something like "Soon the most [something], most [something else], most [another superlative] game will have a new title: most hard to find."

...I don't believe this. I actually have a game magazine with that ad in it, probably the first mag I ever bought (I've still only bought maybe a dozen total, tops). Perhaps I should scan it for the site sometime. It goes something like this:


The Most talked about
Most [satisfying magical romantic engrossing interesting recommended]
RPG of 1999 will gain one final title on January 1, 2000:
Most hard to find

On that day, sales to retail of LUNAR: Silver Star Story for the PlayStation game consle will cease. Forever. The end. Omega-time. Sales have far exceeded our expectations, and being the mentally-challenged non-MBA gaming-types we are, we thought it would be kind of cool to say "Enough! All the cool people that know what's up have already bought the game anyway. Had the experience. Are probably listening to the free soundtrack and fondling the other free stuff right now, laughing at the ignoramuses (or is that ignorami? We never can remember...) who still call anime 'that freaky Speed Racer stuff.' Why not keep this game at least a LITTLE bit of a secret and make the penny-pnchers who haven't bought it yet end up paying too much on eBay when they realize what a terible mistake they've made?"

---

There's another paragraph, but it's mainly insulting people who don't get it. Anyway, regarding doing it in preparation for the Fan Edition, no, I'm sure not. The FE didn't come out until 2001, and it was mainly to make up for cancelling Lunar PC; it wasn't planned from the start. Now, making room for that might have been a reason. I don't remember what its original release date was supposed to be. Sometime after EBC, though, because of the whole Alex puppet thing. But yeah, I definitely also recall seeing Vic or the letters section saying they didn't want it to go GH.

The WD news story on it is here. I could have saved myself the trouble of typing it up.

That reminds me, G1, you might want to archive the various news bits and stuff relating to Lunar on the WD site. I get nervous whenever information's in only one place. Looks like the Letters section is already all but inaccessible, with only the last update (from May 2002) visible.

[GhaleonOne]

Good idea. I'll get on that later.

[Rune Lai]

I forgot about the PC version. Hm... I'm still not sure why Vic/WD would want to avoid Greatest Hits though. I'm under the impression that it's not mandatory (since companies can choose when they want to start selling at the lower price point) and the only thing that would result is that more copies are sold. Of course, in the Playstation era that would have meant being branded with an ugly green label , but that's just cosmetic and I think fans searching for copies would rather have had a green label than no game.

[phyco126]

Not true. My roomate bought FF Tactics after it was made the greatest hits. However, he bought a original. He didn't want the greatest hits. Also, looking back on gaming convos with friends at school, alot of them refused to by greatest hits games and generally only looked for the orginal non-greatest hits version of that same game. Don't ask me why, cause I don't know.

So, do you think if someone paid 1 mil to WD that they would release EBC, SSSC, and the Fanart edition to one person?

[Shiva Indis]

You mean WD does a print run of one for each of those titles? Goodies included? I'm no expert, but that might run you more than 1 million. The larger the print run, the lower the cost.

[phyco126]

Okay, 5 mil.

Lets see, if you print SSSC, goodies and all, I'm pretty sure it'll run maybe, jyst maybe, a few thousand dollars. Maybe. To do EB*, TSS*, SSSC*, EBC*, all merchandise (including strategy guides) and the fanart edition... hmmmm. Dunno. I think 1 million should more than cover it. If not, 5 mil. should be enough to cover the costs AND give Vic a nice pay raise ^_^.

*Including demo disks, movie disks (if applicable,) and all versions of printed disks.

[Rune Lai]

Not true. My roomate bought FF Tactics after it was made the greatest hits. However, he bought a original. He didn't want the greatest hits. Also, looking back on gaming convos with friends at school, alot of them refused to by greatest hits games and generally only looked for the orginal non-greatest hits version of that same game. Don't ask me why, cause I don't know.

Oh I know there are people who won't buy Greatest Hits no matter what. (I try very hard to avoid buying them myself!) But at the same time, there are people who would rather pay $20 for a Greatest Hits for a game that would otherwise cost them $80 on ebay. If say Suikoden II came out on Greatest Hits (which it wouldn't at this point, but for example's sake), I think quite a few broke players would rather buy the $20 version than battle it out for the original. It's just cheaper that way.

[snaztacular]

There's something so...not hardcore about owning that ugly green case.

[Alunissage]

I'd avoid the Greatest Hits versions myself. The only reason I have the Japan equivalent (Playstation The Best) versions of the Lunars is because the auction didn't list them as such and didn't have a picture. Although I didn't know about the label at the time anyway.

When FF8 went GH the store I saw it in still had the non-GH version so I was able to get that for $20. ^_^

[Lunar Eclipse]

While I think it would be cool for WD to localize again, I don't really understand why there's been such a huge point made of them in this topic. The lack of sales is far from being UbiSoft's fault. The problem lies with the faulty game mechanics employed by JAM. Ubi even tried to make it more bearable by giving players the "speed up" option, but even that can't cover up for bad game design. The translation would have obviously been more polished and perhaps they would have gotten around to further tailoring the game if WD were in charge, but, well, it's still just a very subpar Lunar thanks to lackluster effort in terms of conception and creation.

[GhaleonOne]

The thing about UbiSoft isn't that they're the reason the game was had a lack of success. It's more that in the future, they very well may not be interested in any new Lunar games, due to DS's poor sales. The reason WD was brought up is that if, and this is a pretty big if, GameArts decides to put out another Lunar title, and Ubi isn't interested, it's certainly possible that WD would have a chance at it, assuming they're around come that time. As much as people love to hate WD, they had a good relationship with GameArts through the years, and GameArts knows that Lunar's surprising popularity in the US was largely due to Working Designs.

[Alunissage]

Agreed, but given WD's history of tweaking things there's no way they would have released this as is without fixing things, such as making the enemies targetable. But really, most of this thread has been about WD in general, not whether their involvement would have made DS a great game. They might well have refused to do it, as with MS, if they felt it wouldn't be worth it.

[PrettyGirlJean]

Do you think they (WDs) would've declined? I guess I can understand not wanting to translate MS and whatnot... but Dragon Song seems a lot closers to the original than MS... in that it isn't just a side story but an actual part of the whole.

After L:L and DS I actually do hope that WDs would take up the task of translating if they could.

[GhaleonOne]

To be honest, I highly doubt they would have picked the game up if given the option.

[PrettyGirlJean]

To be honest, I highly doubt they would have picked the game up if given the option.

True, I mean, I guess there's only so much they could do with it. They wouldn't have really been able to change the plot. And while some plot elements were interesting... yeah. I see what you mean. But maybe there's hope for a 4 Heroes or Lunar 3 console translation

[drumlord]

And if they changed the battle system or whatever to make it better, a lot people would raise holy hell because they hate that WD changes anything even if for good reason

[Agawa]

Also, looking back on gaming convos with friends at school, alot of them refused to by greatest hits games and generally only looked for the orginal non-greatest hits version of that same game. Don't ask me why, cause I don't know.

It's true. If I had a choice between greatest hits and non, without any huge price difference, I'd go without the green anyday. There's only one instance I can think of where that wasn't so, which would be Silent Hill 2. There was an extra scenario released on the greatest hits version, so I got that after, planning to sell my other copy. However, as it turns out, you can use Silent Hill 2 save data with Silent Hill 2 greatest hits.
I guess I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place...

[Angelalex242]

Still. They could fix much of Dragon Song if, say, they put it on the PS3. The work that'd have to go into a PS3 game would redeem it.

[Kizyr]

It'd need a complete overhaul. And I mean more complete than the number that was done on Walking School when it was released for Saturn as Magic School. They might even consider switching the name back to Genesis. KF

[Tigalys]

I think that if they do decide to do another entry into the series that it should be a brand new one. Plenty of series have had one bad entry in them and they continue on (Grandia, Suikoden, ect.) I think that they should just make DS the black sheep of the series and continue on in a new direction.