Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete

"Good, but not as good as the original"

I was a huge fan of the original Lunar (Lunar: Silver Star Story), both in its Sega CD incarnation and doubly so for its remake on the Playstation. It was my favourite PS1 game and is one of the few games I believe deserves a perfect 10 rating. It then comes as no surprise that I was quite excited to hear that Working Designs was remaking the sequel, Lunar 2: Eternal Blue, and porting it to the Playstation. I never actually got the chance to play the original Lunar 2, so I was thrilled to finally have the opportunity to do so. Regrettably, the game does not measure up to its precursor, but still stands as a reasonable game on its own merit.

Just to give you a little history on the game, the Lunar series originally debuted on the Sega CD as Lunar: Silver Star and Lunar: Eternal Blue. It was a popular game but, due to the poor market penetration of the console and the series' relatively unknown status, it received little attention from the gaming community in general. The games were then remade for the more popular Sega Saturn as Lunar: Silver Star Story and Lunar: Eternal Blue. However, they still received very little recognition.

It was not until 1998, when a small company called Working Designs decided to remake the remakes and tune them up a little in the process, that the series finally achieved a reasonable following. Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete (SSSC) was released to overall excellent reviews. Working Designs puts lots of love and attention into their games and the game came packed with a whole bunch of extras, including a hard-cover manual, a soundtrack, a cloth map and a making-of disc. Unfortunately, these features drove up the price and the high cost, coupled with a small shipment size made the game quite rare and very expensive.

Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete followed up 2 years later to much the same tune. This time, Working Designs actually tucked in an Omake (extras) box with little cardboard cut-outs, and even a full-size replica of Lucia's pendent. The presentation is nice, as always, and if you can find a mint copy of the game anywhere, I highly recommend you grab it, as it has some wonderful display pieces in it. But what about the game itself?

Graphics: 6/10

People who played SSSC know what to expect here. Given that the game is a remake of a remake of a Sega CD game and the graphics come straight from that era, it really doesn't compare all that well to today's games, or even to games of the 32-bit generation. The game features the small, pixelated sprites that are your characters wandering around environments that are actually nicely detailed. The battle sequences feature similar sprites facing off against enemies. The enemies are big enough that they actually look half-decent, but for the most part your characters look like they came straight out of an NES game.

All this gives the game a very “retro” feel, and providing you're not a stickler for gorgeous graphics, it doesn't detract from the actual game at all. To the contrary, it actually enhances the “feel” of it. That said, the quality of the graphics isn't great and I couldn't in good conscience give Lunar a good rating in this category.

The game does have newly-added anime cutscenes that showcase important events in the game. They pop up fairly frequently and are nicely done. It at least gives you an idea of what the characters are supposed to look like, so you can picture them in the battle sequences if you don't want to think of them as blocky, pixel-sprite things...

Sound: 8/10

The music in SSSC was one of the game's most memorable points. It featured one of the most beautiful soundtracks I've ever heard in a game and remains among my favourite game soundtracks ever. Regrettably, Lunar 2's soundtrack is nowhere near as impressive. The songs serve their purpose well enough, but can be downright annoying at times, particularly some of the dungeon themes, which are largely drab and repetitive. Considering how ridiculously long some of the dungeons in this game are (more on that later), you'd think they could've at least spruced up the music a bit so you're not listening to the same two chords for an hour or more... Complaints aside, there are still a good number of catchy tunes tucked away in the game and the music is by no means terrible.

The game does feature voice acting during battles, cutscenes and other important story bits. The voice acting is very professionally done, aside from one or two awkward lines. The remainder of the game's sounds are the usual assortment of bells and whistles with nothing spectacular to speak of.

Gameplay: 7/10

Lunar 2 does not stray very far from its roots and those who have played the original SSSC will be able to jump right in without a hitch. The formula is more or less unchanged from the last game. For those of you that are new to the series, Lunar as the very definition of a traditional, turn-based JRPG. You move from town to town and explore dungeons in between, fighting enemies as you go. Rather than the usual random encounter method of battles, Lunar follows the school of thought featured in games like Chrono Trigger, Xenosaga and Mario RPG and shows enemies on the dungeon map. Battles only occur if you come into contact with these enemies.

However, this is where Lunar 2 deviates from its predecessor, and not in a good way. First off, the dungeons are much longer. By the time you get halfway through the game, you'll be exploring dungeons that have 10 levels or more in them. This in and of itself is not a bad thing. However, in the original Lunar, you could move through a dungeon at full speed, dodging enemies as you went and fighting the ones that you simply couldn't avoid. In Lunar 2, you move extremely slowly while in dungeons. You have a “run button” that allows you brief bursts of speed, before you slow down to recuperate. Unfortunately, the speed you move when not running is painfully slow. Couple this with the increased dungeon lengths and you find that dungeon-crawling in Lunar 2 becomes an exceedingly tedious task. Add into this already shaky situation the fact that the bosses in Lunar 2 are not scaled to your level as they were in Lunar 1 and often require some serious levelling up and you find that running from the enemies is not an option if you do not want to be horribly underlevelled while fighting a boss, making your dungeon trips longer still.

All this throws the pacing of the game off. Lunar 1 mixed story segments with battle segments in an almost perfect ratio. Lunar 2, on the other hand, throws in very little story in between the lengthy dungeons, giving the whole game a plodding type of feel. The problem, while a major nuisance, is not game-breaking, but it will turn off those of you with little patience.

The battles are relatively unchanged from the first game. Standard turn-based RPG fare. Your characters can attack, defend, use items, or cast magic. In an interesting move, you can also assign the game's AI to control any or all of your characters. In theory, this would completely remove you from any part of the game that required skill, so I don't really see the appeal. However, given that the AI has all the intelligence of a monkey with half its brain removed, attacking randomly, wasting MP and using expensive items for seemingly no good reason, this feature seldom gets any use anyways. The only real change from the first game is the fact that you can no longer assign each character to run from battle individually. This tends to be a good move, as it gives you less of a chance to get away from a fight, whereas in the original, assigning each character to run would virtually guarantee that at least one of them would get away.

Story: 8/10

The story is the shining point of the Lunar games, aided greatly by Working Designs colourful and unique translations. WD tends to add in random pop-culture references and jokes that add a good chuckle into the game.

Once again, Lunar 2 does not stray far from its roots, but delivers a less spectacular performance than its predecessor. You play as the appropriately named Hiro, accompanied by his flying cat Ruby in a quest for adventure and excitement (which, for veterans of the series, may conjure up memories of Lunar 1's hero Alex and his flying cat Nall in THEIR quest for adventure and excitement). The close resemblance to the first game's cast does not stop there and for each new character that joins the party, it takes little imagination to spot their counterpart from Lunar 1. In a somewhat refreshing change, Hiro takes a more active role in the story than Alex did (Alex being the Lunar equivalent of FF7's Cloud... not a silent protagonist, but darn close to it).

Set on the moon (called the Silver Star in game) sometime in the far future after humanity has buggered up the earth (or the Blue Star) good and proper, the game starts when a mysterious, blue-haired stranger named Lucia arrives on the Silver Star from the Blue Star with an important message to deliver to Althena, the goddess of the Lunar universe. Shortly after she arrives, she is attacked by a disembodied evil spirit named Zophar who is bent on corrupting the Silver Star and all who live on it. And so begins your adventure to stop Zophar from accomplishing his nefarious goal.

In this sense, the game is more straightforward than its predecessor, and your end objective is relatively clear from the start of the game. That said, the story does take some twists and turns as the game progresses, including a few fairly predictable plot twists. Like the first game, Lunar 2 does an excellent job of moulding and developing its characters in a very colourful way. You will grow attached to the various members of your party in a very short time. Those of you who played the first game will get to see how the world has changed in the 1000 year gap between Lunar 1 and 2. You can revisit some areas from the first game and even meet some characters or their descendents.

Overall the story is not quite as timeless or beautiful as SSSC, but it is still an excellent yarn.

Overall: 7/10

I know I've referenced Lunar 1 a lot in this review, but I tend to do that with sequels as inevitably they get measured up against their predecessors. Lunar 2 fails to break out of Lunar 1's shadow, but to give it its due, that is a very difficult thing to do. It's still worth buying, assuming you can find it, but in the sea of excellent RPGs available for the PS1, Lunar 2 doesn't tend to stand out as much as Lunar 1 did.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 10/31/07

Game Release: Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete (US, 12/15/00)