Like Nintendo Power did with all my Nintendo recommendations, I relied on the Official US PlayStation Magazine for my PlayStation recommendations. Each of their magazines had a demo disc featuring playable demos of recently released or soon to be released games, as well as trailers for upcoming releases. I'll admit, I was addicted to those demo discs back then. I learned of many of my current favorite PlayStation games through that magazine and its demo discs. Like Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy Tactics, Resident Evil 2, the list goes on. But one game that was featured in OPM's demo disc stands out above the rest, Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete. The demo disc featuring the game only contained the scene where Luna sings her intermediary song, Wind's Nocturne, the Boat Song. I was very curious as to why a game needed a musical number to promote an RPG with anime cut scenes. And at the time, I was a huge sucker for games featuring anime cut scenes, as this was also during the time Toonami and Saturday Anime was building my anime interests.
But what separated Lunar from the other anime influenced games were that there was way more than ten minutes worth of animated scenes, and the amount of effort that went into the localization of the game. The more I learned about the game, the more I learned about how much went into the packaging of the game, the more I needed it. Surely a game with as much anime in it, and as much physical bonus content for the price of one single game, surely all of that meant that this would be one of the greatest games ever made. That was what I thought. And when I finally got to play the game, I was not disappointed. I fell in love with the soundtrack, I was enamored with the characters, and I had empathy for the plot developments. Most importantly, it was this game that inspired the name Nitro, a name I would use for anything and everything I ever did on the internet. My first AOL screen name was Nitro Dagger, named after one of Ghaleon's attacks. And I've gone by some variation of the Nitro name online since 2000.