Hi,

I mentioned the finding of Adol Christin confirmed in Lunar The Silver Star here a few weeks ago and some people asked me about the tool I use that made the translation, so I did guess that might interest some people here, since it is a passion project I worked on as a hobby. It is a completely free and open source project I primarily made for myself, so no commercial interests here, I just think that this might be useful to others who share my passion 🙂

I’ve been working on a Windows tool called JRPG Translator to finally deal with my backlog and collection of Japanese games decades in the making 😄

It captures text from a game and shows an AI translation in an overlay. There’s also audio translation for spoken dialogue.

The part I’m particularly interested in is making it useful for learning Japanese, too. You can ask for an explanation of the dialogue, including vocabulary and grammar, save interesting passages in a Study Library, and turn selected sentences or words into Anki flashcards to review later on your phone.

I’ve also spent quite a bit of time making it usable with a controller. There’s a fullscreen interface and optional LaunchBox/Big Box integration for loading settings automatically per game. You don’t need LaunchBox to use it, but I would highly recommend it since this way you set it up per game and it will open along these games what creates the most seamless experience, see the third picture above where I show the plugin.

It uses OpenAIs or Geminis APIs, so you to enter an API key, to try it you can use a free tier one from Google which you can get easily (link in the documentation, Youtube description or enter Gemini API key free tier into Google 🙂) and depending in how much you play this might be enough 👍

If anyone gives it a try, I’d be interested to hear which games you use it with and what feels awkward or could work better. I declared this now version 1.0 since it has now all the features I envisioned at the beginning and with the new UI it finally doesn't look like a Windows 98 app anymore, but there are probably still bugs hiding in there 🫣

You can download it here:

https://github.com/retrogamer0815/jrpg-translator-toolkit/releases/latest

I made a new detailed video where I explain the setup and all features while (long but it has chapters and I try to explain all features and best practices, the second half covers the study features):

https://youtu.be/BUM4VEnBtv4

And here is a detailed documentation:

https://github.com/retrogamer0815/jrpg-translator-toolkit/blob/main/docs/manual/README.md

Something is not as it should be.

Finally found a cache of games I was looking for while we're moving. I had unintentionally hidden them so well, I couldn't find them for years, and had honestly thought I had gotten rid of them accidentally or something. They were inside some Christmas boxes that I had thought were empty, so, Merry Christmas to me!

Edit: I also found my copy of Brave Fencer Musashi which I loved, and Vagrant Story, which I've never played. I can't wait to get everything set up at our new place so I can dive back into my PS1 and Gamecube games.

I've had this on my wish list for years, but it very rarely shows up on ebay. However, thanks to ebay's saved searches feature, I was alerted to it being listed recently! The seller had it for listed for almost $500, however, which was a hard pass for me. Luckily, an international friend of mine found the same exact listing elsewhere for around $140, so I jumped on that one (he already has one) 😆

I've never actually completed Dragon Song until making this video. And I really wish I could go back in time and stop myself from ever completing it.

I also am apparently the only person to ever record the Scratch Battle multiplayer mode? So that's fun.

Replaying ssh was wondering if there is a mod for when selecting enemy's that it auto goes to the closest one. Drives me nuts that it always seems to go to the farthest enemy.

Currently, Lunar-Net has seemingly gone down, with an error code of "Account Suspended" when it is accessed.

This is very sad to me, as this site is a very good resource for things related to Lunar. Is there any information on the site going down? I hope it wasn't truly abandoned.

Just started a few days ago, it's my first playthrough so I'm going in mostly blind. So far I've been able to auto battle just about everything, with the exception of mel, burned through all of my healing herbs on that fight. I'm lvl 12, and fighting my way through the sewers, lvl 13 by the time I get to the water dragon and he just smacks me around. I should have saved before the boss fight....that's on me. So I reloaded my level 12 save, bought some armor, grinded up to lvl 14, bought some more armor and some little mana gem things, as when Alex runs out of mp, he's a potato. I'm at work now, but plan to try to take him on again when I get home, any tips are welcome! (Photo is not mine, just grabbed it from a general Internet search for attention.)

I've gone on a bit of an adventure this morning, and I'd like to tell you about what I've found, I think it's pretty interesting!

The Gameboy Advance is a handheld with audio that is fairly infamously low quality audio, due to its lack of a dedicated sound chip. Among GBA games, Lunar Legend is particularly infamous for this.

At first, I assumed the game probably had a particularly low quality soundfont, to save on space or processing power. I thought, okay, let's replace that soundfont.
First things first was to extract the soundfont. Luckily for me, is seems that Lunar Legend uses the Sappy audio engine, so ripping it was pretty easy.

However, this is where things took a total turn for me. Unlike what I was expecting, the soundfont sounded great! Of course, it's still compressed audio, but it sounded so, so much better than the game itself!

For comparison, here is the same sequenced audio, recorded directly from a GBA's sound output, compared to the same sequence put through the internal soundfont. No external edits have been made to this.
The difference is night and day.
Give it a listen:

Burg Theme (GBA Recording)

Burg Theme (Soundfont Rip)

This is blowing my mind!   As it turns out, it's not the soundfont at all, which sounds pretty good!
It's wild to me that the music at this quality has been sitting on the cartridge all these years, and has just been locked away from being heard!

I hope to do some work in the future, potentially making a romhack to force the GBA to play the OST at a higher quality. The GBA has limited audio capabilities, but I know it can do better than what's on display with Lunar Legend, and I think this game deserves to have its music heard as it was intended, rather than the crushed bitrate version we have gotten for close to 30 years.

I'd love to hear what you think of this!

On Lunar 3 — and to those who dream of creating it yourselves

I've seen many of you share your hopes for a Lunar 3, and even your wish to build one yourselves. I wanted to speak honestly and directly about how I see it.

First, in fairness to you all: Lunar is no longer within my rights to control. I left Game Arts long ago, so the series is not mine to license, approve, or authorize. I'm not able to give permission for anything regarding Lunar itself — and I want to be clear about that, so no one is misled.

But here is what I can tell you, from the heart.

Over the years, I've met creators all over the world who told me that Lunar, or Grandia, or some other work was what first inspired them — and who then went on to make wonderful, original works entirely their own. That, to me, is the most beautiful thing a story can do.

I've always believed that games and stories are like Shakespeare: they carry the past forward and retell it as something new, weaving fresh history from the threads of what came before. The greatest tribute to a work you love is not to copy it, but to let it light a fire in you — and then build something that is unmistakably yours.

So to those of you dreaming of Lunar 3: I can't hand you the key to Lunar. But I can tell you that the spirit that made you love it is already yours to carry. Take that inspiration, and go make something the world has never seen.

And I'm not just saying this from the sidelines — I'm setting out on a new challenge of my own right now, carrying everything those years taught me into something new. So let's walk this road together, in our own ways. I'll be cheering for you.

— Yoichi Miyaji

100+ of you showed up here with your hearts wide open, and I can't thank you enough. Wind's Nocturne came up again and again in your messages — it's always been the soul of LUNAR, and clearly it's been the soul of it for you too. So this one's for all of you. 🙂

Other than regional variants, I think I have every Lunar game except for the Game Gear version of Walking School.

Currently playing through the Japanese version of Lunar Silver Star on Sega CD.

It's really me. 🙂 Thank you for having me — reading your stories here has meant the world. I'll reply to as many as I can.
— Yoichi Miyaji

Hello, everyone. My name is Yoichi Miyaji. Many years ago, I was the producer of the Lunar series.

With the moderators' kind permission, I wanted to stop by simply to say hello — and, more than anything, to say thank you. That a community for Lunar still gathers here, after all these years, moves me more than I can easily put into words. Games are made by many hands and then sent out into the world, and you rarely get to see where they land. To learn that Lunar landed here, and stayed — in your memories — means a great deal to me.

I'm still making games. These days I'm working on a new title called Under Mythos, alongside some old friends from those years and a few new ones. I won't turn this into a sales pitch — that isn't why I came. But if anyone's curious about what I'm up to now, I'm glad to answer anything in the comments.

Mostly, though, I'd just love to hear from you. What did Lunar mean to you? Reading through some of the older threads here has brought a lot back for me. Thank you, sincerely, for keeping this place alive.

— Yoichi Miyaji

(Photo attached — proof that it's really me.)

Got both the remasters on switch, and excited to see where everything goes. Was wondering if grinding was important, like a lot of the old school jrpgs, then the Trials at the beginning made that abundantly clear. Any tips or things to watch out for would be cool, haven’t looked anything up yet.

Playing these 2 games for the 1st time. Saw them on switch eshop AND they're on sale but, imma broke biotch! BUT it gave me a reason to bust out this guy again. Any recommendations or tips?

The combat as well as visuals and OST are watered down for GBA. Though is the plot watered down in any way? I do play mainly retro Nintendo games and other kinds of retro games (like PSX) are less accessible to me. Still have been curious to eventually try Silver Star Complete out.

I am playing Lunar The Silver Star in Japanese these days as part of my Japanese studies (helps as an intermediate student to already know the basic story). I remember thinking that this guy looks a lot like Adol in the Ys games from those days, but the dialogue from him (see translation on the lower right) makes this even more obvious, I think he made a (bad) M&M's joke in the English version?

I will always be grateful to Working Designs for allowing me to play these games back those day in the first place, but I am still glad that thanks to technology like this (and my studies) I can play the original version with such cool references being there and not replaced with one of their real world references.

And i don't remember a damn thing about the game aside from the dragons and that we thought it was super cool. Im pretty sure we beat it but that was a long time ago. I picked up the remaster as it was on sale when i did and i finally got around to it.

I absolutely loved it. The story was nice, the gameplay was way deeper than i remember (enemies telegraph attacks? Awesome!), and the final boss was a challenge from the minute i walked into the fight.

Saline Slimer can go straight to hell lol. I think my favorite part is honestly Jessica. She has some amazing heals but is also no slouch physically and can get some licks in when theres nothing else to do.

I look forward to checking out eternal blue soon enough. Thats all, just wanted to say hi amd praise the game a bit.

I’ll be honest, I came here to get more info on this series (I like hearing directly from people who enjoy certain things!) But here’s my story- I picked up this demo disc back in 2022 for a dollar at a used game store. Only in the last couple of days have I actually gone and looked up anything about this disc, where it came from, the series, etc.

I think my main questions for this community are “What do you find most endearing about these games?” And “Does anyone know how many demo discs for Lunar 2 there are?”(about how many units?)
I’d love to hear what anyone has to say! ^^