For Lunar fanatics only--and not even them really.
The story will be familiar to all RPG fans and extremely familiar to those who have played any of the other versions of Lunar: The Silver Star. The hero, Alex, seeking adventure, winds up losing his girlfriend and needing to go on a mission to visit dragons, defeat the evil overlords and save the world. The story is simple but the storytelling is well done and really the best part of the game. This seems to be a top-down remake of the other versions of the game and so the story is different in some particulars but nearly identical as far as its major themes.
Graphically, it's on par with the sixteen bit era, pretty much straight up 2D with small sprites but bright colors. The cut scenes suffer terribly with the small storage capacity of the GBA player as does the sound which was originally CD-quality audio but is no reduced to digitized midi-sounding tracks. A few samples are left in but the game is pretty much deprived of many of the elements that make other versions so wonderful.
Such embellishments as good graphics and sound would have really helped too since the gameplay does so little to further the story on its own.The battle mode is simple and the battles so easy that it is normally just easiest to use the attack-only AI on everything, sometimes even bosses. Most gamers will find themselves dozing off during battle sequences within a few hours of the start of the games. Once new enemies are encountered, it is fairly simple to figure out an effective attack order and after that there is no challenge. Furthermore, dungeon design is fairly simple w/ little in the way of puzzles and there is very little over-world exploring to be done at all. The world map is laid out practically like a Mario Brothers game where you can just pop from one area to the next w/o having to fight battles. There is really not much to game play here to keep it interesting.
Despite its weaknesses, this does remain playable due to the story so it is not completely w/o merit. If you are Lunar fanatic, this might be worth checking out. Otherwise, start w/ pretty much any other game in the series other than this or Dragon Song for the DS.