LUNAR Remastered Collection Review

Lunar: Silver Star Story and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue first found their audience on the Sega CD in the early 1990s before being remade and expanded for the original PlayStation, where they earned a devoted cult following that has spent decades quietly insisting these are two of the finest JRPGs ever made. LUNAR Remastered Collection bundles those PlayStation "Complete" versions together in 4K, and reviewers overwhelmingly agree it's a respectful, well-executed way to bring them back for both nostalgic veterans and an entirely new audience who missed them the first time.

A remaster that knows what it's remastering

The collection's approach is conservative in the best sense. The visuals have been rebuilt at 4K Ultra HD resolution while keeping the original 2D sprite work intact rather than replacing it, and an optional Classic display mode is available for players who want the unfiltered original look. Reviewers describe the result as bright, crisp, and immediately more presentable on modern monitors than the PS1 originals, which rendered in sub-standard-definition and either appeared tiny and letterboxed or blurry when stretched to widescreen. The music, drawn from Noriyuki Iwadare's well-regarded original score, was left largely unmodified, a decision reviewers seem genuinely relieved by given how often remastered soundtracks get remixed into something less recognisable.

Quality-of-life additions round out the package sensibly. Combat can be sped up to three times its original pace, a welcome option for veterans replaying a game they know by heart, and party inventory can be toggled between the classic per-character system and a more modern shared pool. One detailed reviewer, who has owned every prior version of the Lunar games across multiple platforms, calls this simply "another version" rather than a definitive one, but a genuinely good one that preserves what made the originals beloved while smoothing over their rougher edges, including what several reviewers describe as Working Designs' notoriously punishing original difficulty curve, now brought closer to a fairer, better-balanced experience closer to the original Japanese intent.

The voice redub: the collection's real dividing line

If there's a single issue reviewers keep circling back to, it's the fully re-recorded English voice cast. The original Working Designs dub, particularly its performance as the villain Ghaleon, is remembered with genuine affection by longtime fans, and its absence here is consistently the most-cited disappointment in an otherwise glowing review base. One long-time fan describes it as "eating a food you loved from your childhood but just one small thing is off," docking an otherwise perfect score specifically over the recast voices. Others are more measured, praising individual new performances as solid while singling out one or two as a poorer fit for the character, and acknowledging that reusing the original decades-old audio simply wasn't technically viable. It's worth noting this isn't presented as a quality issue so much as a nostalgia one: reviewers generally agree the new performances are competently delivered, just different from what longtime fans grew up with.

A related and smaller controversy involves script changes: some 1990s-era pop culture references, crude humour, and a small number of specific words were trimmed from the localization. One especially thorough reviewer investigated the claims directly and confirmed that most of the original script's tone, including its suggestive humour and the game's collectible "Bromide" artwork, remains fully intact, with only a handful of targeted, defensible edits — enough to suggest the censorship concerns circulating before launch were considerably overstated relative to what actually shipped.

Two games, uneven reception

As with most JRPG duologies bundled together, reviewers don't rate both halves identically. Silver Star Story is broadly beloved and seen as holding up cleanly. Eternal Blue draws more mixed reactions: most reviewers rank it as the stronger, more ambitious of the two and even compare it favourably to genre high points like Phantasy Star IV and Skies of Arcadia, crediting it with meaningfully influencing the JRPGs that followed. A vocal minority disagrees sharply, with one detailed negative review calling it "vastly inferior" to the first game, criticising its localization and pacing, and rating the duology as solidly average rather than a genre highlight. That dissent is a clear minority position against an otherwise strongly positive consensus, but it's a useful reminder that even celebrated classics don't land the same way for everyone revisiting or discovering them decades later.

Who this collection is for

The review base makes a fairly clear split visible once you look past the aggregate score. Newcomers approaching Lunar with no prior history consistently report the strongest reactions, several describing it as an instant favourite discovered decades late, with one reviewer explicitly noting they went in without nostalgia clouding their judgement and still came away calling Eternal Blue one of the best JRPGs they've ever played. That's a meaningful signal: this isn't a collection that only works as a nostalgia trip, the underlying games hold up on their own merits for players encountering them for the first time.

Longtime fans are more particular, as is often the case with beloved classics getting revisited decades later, and the voice cast is where that particularity shows up most. Even so, the actual negative reviews in the sample are rare and specific rather than broad rejections of the remaster itself — most dissatisfaction centres on the redub or on Eternal Blue's pacing and combat depth compared to the first game, not on technical issues, missing content, or poor value. Players who specifically want the exact 1990s Working Designs experience, voices included, may be better served hunting down the original discs or emulating them; everyone else, including anyone who's never touched a Sega CD or PlayStation controller in their life, is well served by what's on offer here.

Final Verdict

LUNAR Remastered Collection succeeds at the one job a remaster like this needs to do: it makes two genuinely important, beloved JRPGs accessible again without diminishing what made them special in the first place. The 4K visual work is tasteful, the quality-of-life additions genuinely improve the experience without compromising the originals' identity, and the price for two complete games comfortably undercuts the collector's market for the original PlayStation discs. The recast English voices will keep dividing longtime fans for a while yet, but for the far larger audience discovering Lunar for the first time, or simply happy to have it back at all, this collection is very easy to recommend.