the english voice over is horrible. it ruins this masterpiece. it really really really needs a voice option.
Quick note for those interested: In the near future, we'll start beta testing a major new update. It's going to be great!
Nice. I have always recommended Lunar to anyone looking for a good RPG on the AppStore. That you guys continue work on it just makes it that much easier to suggest to people.
As a newcomer to JRPGs, breaking my cherry on the iOS ports of FFIII and FFIV, I am missing a huge amount of knowledge regarding JRPGs. Once I complete the FF's - and after the major update is out - I'll buy this, as I'm sold on all the good reports in this thread. Hopefully, the major update will resolve the bug issues. I'll even live with the 2D sprites (much prefer chibi art style in FFIII).
You most def should get this as its one of the best RPGs ever released and the only reason I'm glad I had a sega cd as a kid
Can you patch the file size down to 100+MB? Large file sizes are hard to justify for space limited iDevices... It can be done as the new XCom had been reduced from 20GB to 2GB, so logically Lunar should be...
This is an overwhelming consensus opinion about this game but here comes the grinch. This game was nothing special for me. I played the psp port (the one with good graphics, the ios is awful.). The story was fine but the gameplay and battles are just meh. Late, but not that late into the game u get a spell called dragon lament, it insta kills all non bosses. Can someone explain this to me? The whole last good chunk of the game all I did was go into battle, cast dragon lament, everything dies. No Dmg, just dead. Was pulling teeth bored just going from battle to battle casting this till the last boss. There's seriously no other attack needed but this spell. I've played dozens of RPGs, all the ff, all the snes popular games, the ios games, just a ton of RPGs. This doesn't crack my top 10 nor get anywhere close. This is all just my personal opinion, but I was just sorely disappointed since I played this game specifically because of the praise from this forum and many other sites.
That shouldn't be a developer's main concern, really; a game should be as big or as little as it needs to be, and most developers aren't padding their file sizes out unnecessarily. Because you don't actually need to keep any game permanently installed on your device, and there's no single game out there that is 16GB in size and literally unable to be installed at all on the lowest-capacity devices, this line of argument can really only be interpreted as, "I can't be bothered making room on my device for your game." Even somebody with a new 128GB device can still fill it up completely, and make the same argument about having no room - it's just a matter of scale. You're also only likely to see file sizes continue to increase when it comes to "real" games on iOS, as opposed to casual runners, mobile puzzle games and the like. That's not a logical extension. One of the major reasons that XCOM can be reduced in size so dramatically is that the original game was a PC/console offering in full 3D, and required textures and other assorted art assets that would still look detailed when viewed on a 40+ inch screen. This artwork took up a lot of space and clearly isn't needed at the same quality for the much, much smaller iPad screen; I suspect that if you output the iOS version back to a 40+ inch screen, it isn't going to look anywhere near as good as the original did.
You just made my point for me. Developer, open Photoshop and resize assets accordingly and save the resulting JPEGs with compression. There, halved the file size to 250MB. Do the same for the sound assets. Convert the stereo .wav files to mono 16KHz MP3 and again, the file sizes halves to 125MB. I just pulled out how to reduce to 100+MB out of thin air. Can't a professional developer do the same? Or are they only "designers" who outsource everything so they can't even figure out this rudimentary way of reducing installed space? But wait, there's more. Remove whatever middleware they are using and code directly to iOS, and the installed size now falls to 70MB. Just look at the Kemco RPGs and their tiny file sizes. They are the same style of RPG games with FMV, singing, cute cartoony graphics and they take up less than 100MB.
What a silly post. I, like most people,want high-quality assets, not smaller game file sizes. Your suggestions are ridiculous and would completely ruin the game. And comparing with Kemco? Really? Lunar has about an hour of FMV in it. An hour. What kind of god-awful compression do you want to fit that AND the rest of the game into 100MB?
For your high quality asset: Those were originally made for your 42" tv. Now you are using a 10" iPad, reduce sprite size and compress accordingly. That is also why after retina iPhone 4 appeared, file sizes of apps mostly doubled in size, because the art assets have to be redrawn for the higher resolution. Here with Lunar, you are facing the converse of that. Obvious really. For your hour long video: Just do what developers are increasingly doing. They just link to Youtube for their tutorial videos, so same thing here. Do I really need to do your thinking for you as a developer?
Maintain compression tosh ow well innate e resolution and idc. 1 play through is fine. Ill reserve my bitching to dayz and ff ports. Where the hell us my vi btw?
So, actually, I thought I'd point out that the iOS version is about HALF the size of the PlayStation game, and has much higher quality audio and video to boot. This logic works well on textures, but does not work very well on sprite-based art, especially at this size. LUNAR was designed for a device with a resolution lower than your iPhone, what you suggest would look terrible. Further, your sentiment is far outweighed by the people that would like to see HIGHER quality graphics. There's no uncompressed audio. All the music is already in MPEG4 and sound effects in compressed AIF. There's no middleware here. And even if there was, it would be a few megabytes at best. I do want to say I understand the sentiment, certain other RPG ports have extremely unnecessarily bloated assets. But that's not the case here; there's no major savings to be found in any of those spots.
I don't even no where to start. Am I just being trolled here or are you honestly suggesting that a single-player portable JRPG should be made online only? You do realise that your iOS device has a higher resolution than your 90s-era TV right? They actually cleaned-up the sprites in this release, why would they make them worse?
Just sharing what I see other apps doing. Putting movies tutorial stuff Youtube and manuals on the developer's website had also not occurred to me until I saw it done in apps. My initial reaction was wtf, and it was that way until I stumbled onto this talk about Lunar's installed size. Looking at nall's reply, It seems they had already shrunk down the file size compared to the original, so it can't go further.
All this talk about file size... I just don't understand why so many 2D games are so big. I mean this game is bigger than I thought it would need to be. AND then there's Chrono Trigger which isn't even universal. That game is about the same size as this one. Why are these game so huge?! Other 2D RPGs that are just as big are much smaller. It's not that it will prevent me from getting this... I already bought it. I just don't play it anymore because it was too big to keep on my phone.
We've linked to online video in other apps, but these are cutscenes meant to be played during the game. It does not seem appropriate to us here. This game is so big because it has an hour of DVD-quality animated cutscenes, plus roughly another hour of spoken dialog (in English and Japanese, for the purists) and several dozen audio tracks. Chrono Trigger definitely doesn't have any of that. (Also, they apparently couldn't be bothered to compress their audio.)
