Lunar Threads

Okay random music rant. Why has Iwadare's musical skill seemingly decreased over the past few years?

The original soundtracks... especially EB's- the music quality and overall appeal is so much higher to me. Playing SCD vs PSX tracks next to each other comparatively- especially epic ones like "Zophar vs Lucia" makes it blatantly obvious that the music quality from SCD was vastly superior than the PSX remake. I don't know if it's because of the system limitations, but the music is so synth-sounding and Casio keyboard-ish that I want to rip out my eardrums. You'd think that with the CD soundtracks WD made for the remakes would have more orchestrated sounding music, and not Casio-ear-vom rampages... but alas, the only real track I dig is the Star Dragon Mix. Heh.

The EBC music seems so uninspired and boring. Even in Iwadare's other work, like Grandias and his ending theme for Rogue Galaxy (helloooooo generic!) seem so bland and pale in comparison to the original Lunar: Eternal Blue, in my opinion.

Sorry Iwadare. =(

Wait, are you complaining about the compositions themselves or the sounds produced by the hardware? Because I doubt Iwadare has much to do with the latter at all, especially with regards to the port from Saturn to PlayStation. The remake's music sounded much better on the Saturn than on the PlayStation, so if you haven't listened to the Saturn version, you should. There's a thread around here somewhere with links to it.

Go, go, necropost! Whee!

But anyway I think I agree with the message here, especially where overall sound quality is concerned. The sequenced music in the Playstation version of Lunar 2 doesn't compare favorably to the streaming music in Saturn version. (Of course, I think the port developers did a pretty good job with it considering.)

Now that I think about it, we've always gotten short-changed a little bit on Lunar 2's music - I remember that WD lowered the sampling rate on the SCD version to squeeze some extra content onto the game disk. (I can't honestly say it's ever bothered me though.)

It's a shame we've never gotten quite the level of quality on it, since the original Lunar 2 set the musical tone for all the games that followed it. I agree that it's the crowning achievement of Iwadare's career. Iwadare still writes beautiful music, but I've never heard anything from him since that was as consistently engaging and evocative as the Lunar 2 soundtrack.

Meh. I still say TSS has the best music of any Lunar game, and possibly the best of any game ever.

You're all allowed to disagree with me, though. I'm writing this in the USA, where people are allowed to be as wrong as they want.

ilovemyguitar wrote:Meh. I still say TSS has the best music of any Lunar game, and possibly the best of any game ever.

You're all allowed to disagree with me, though. I'm writing this in the USA, where people are allowed to be as wrong as they want.

GET OUT OF MY COUNTRY

Now I'm curious to hear a comparison between the US release and the Japanese release of the Sega CD Eternal Blue. I have the import of EB for the Saturn, and the US release for the PSOne. For some reason I think the remake even looked better on the Saturn overall, but the PS version had better transparencies. It's been so long that I could be remembering things wrong. Either way, the Sega CD will always have the best versions of Lunar.

JWL (Hatless) wrote up a list of differences between the audio tracks of the Japanese and US versions of the SegaCD EB. It used to be up at the DS Grotto along with samples illustrating his comments. I'll see if I can find it on archive.org sometime, or just paste the text; I saved the page and the samples but am not quite up to posting the latter.

I appreciate it. Let me know if you are able to find the comparisons, or the info regarding them.

I found it:

http://web.archive.org/web/200107300712 ... /music.htm

I rather doubt the music clips themselves are archived, but if you PM me I can probably get them to you.