It’s been a long, kind of weird week at work. A lot of strange transactions that I’m tempted to blame on the upcoming eclipse, the same way people blame weird behavior on the full moon. But one thing that stood out against the craziness was something as simple as a shirt one of my coworkers was wearing the other day: It was basically black, but had this interesting green and purple iridescence to it, that brought to mind a beetle’s shell. Which, after a few detours, brings us to today’s word.
carapace, noun – the shell of an insect or other arthropod
Learned from: Lunar: The Silver Star (Sega CD)
Developed by Game Arts
Published by Working Designs (1993)
For as much as I love RPGs, I never really owned many of them as a kid. Aside from this, The Ancient Land of Ys on my Apple IIGS, and if you count action RPGs like Landstalker, most of my exposure to the genre was from my local video rental store (thanks for the memories, Major Video!). And they didn’t really have a ton of Sega CD games. But I’d begged my parents for the clunky Genesis add-on (as I would again a few years later, for the 32X, much to my lingering chagrin), and I wanted to make use of it. And Lunar looked amazing, from the previews in the magazines. I think I actually had to do a mail order for it out of an ad in one of those same magazines once I’d saved up the money, because the Internet didn’t exist in any real capacity yet, and it turned out Major Video wasn’t the only place that barely carried Sega CD games.
I remember checking our mailbox every day, afraid someone would steal something that was so hard to acquire if I wasn’t vigilant. And when it finally arrived, my 10-year-old mind was blown. The sprites looked crisper, the world was huge, it had an opening cutscene–with a theme song! (Which I still mostly remember to this day, actually.) I knew I’d made the right choice in tracking this game down.
Looking back at it all these years later, objectively Lunar is a fairly run-of-the-mill 16-bit JRPG, with a questionable translation (e.g. there’s a Wheaties reference at one point), an unremarkable overall plot, and some admittedly nice art. But at the time, I had a blast exploring its vast world, filled with bizarrely modern humor. Even when I expected that world to be more cohesive and immersive than it ended up being. Case in point: the carapace armor.
This was back in the day when games still came with (occasionally well-illustrated) instruction manuals, and reading through them on the ride home from the store, or in this case, simply before playing, was part of the experience. So when I saw that carapace armor was made from “shells of bizarre creatures on the southern continent,” I got it in my head that I shouldn’t wear that armor in that area, because I thought parading around wearing the corpses of the native inhabitants wouldn’t be a great idea. It…never became an issue–though there was some equipment-based, outside the box thinking they put in toward the end of the game, in a sequence that’s one of the game’s shining moments. So I was actually sort of on to something, in a roundabout way.
Brain Rot 