WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL - Lunar: Eternal Blue

Publisher: Game Arts/Working Designs Developer: Game Arts/Studio Alex Release: 1995

Lunar was the best-selling Sega CD game in Japan, and the second-best in the world behind Sonic CD. And here we have the third-best-selling game in the world with Lunar: Eternal Blue.

Unlike the more popular RPG series of the time – Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy – Lunar: Eternal Blue is actually a direct sequel to the original hit. In fact, early on in development it was meant to contain the same, slightly older characters found in the first adventure. And although that decision was reversed due to potential story complications, it's not hard to find echoes of the idea in Eternal Blue – Hiro and his eventual band of adventurers parallel the original crew in a lot of ways. Troubled rogue Ronfar feels identical to Kyle. Future leader of the Magic Guild of Vane Lemina is a carbon copy of Mia, and of course, there's the little pink “not-a-dragon” Ruby who takes up the mantle of annoying sidekick originally worn by Nall in the first game.

The scope of Eternal Blue is much bigger and more intricate, however. Rather than the fairly-straightforward story from The Silver Star, this game takes a much more circuitous route to its conclusion, and then throws in an epilogue for good measure. Alex and his friends are long dead, having passed into legend as the last Dragonmaster of Lunar. The Goddess Althena has changed somehow. Her heroes no longer seem to stand for truth and justice, but rather control and cruelty. Something is definitely wrong.

What follows is a story filled with some surprising characters, double-crosses and characters who have to face their greatest fears in order to restore Lunar to peace and tranquility.

Ambitious is the best way to describe this game. With a development time of over three years and a budget reported at around $2.5 million, Game Arts was definitely looking to knock it way out of the park with this one. Where the first game had about 10 minutes of animation, Eternal Blue featured almost an hour of better-quality animation with way more dialogue.

And for the most part, the endeavor was a successful one. The game was well-received and ended up becoming the second-best selling Japanese Sega CD game (behind its predecessor). In the US the game did pretty well, also, although it was bitten a little by the market's transition to the 32-bit Saturn and PlayStation. The media had already declared the Sega CD all-but-dead in North America by the time Working Designs released the English version in 1995 (less than a year after the Japanese release), and so it's not surprising that the game didn't exactly light up the charts over here.

On top of the standard translation quirks Working Designs added to the US version of the game, it also tweaked the difficulty and added a points-based system for saving the game. While the original allowed players to save wherever and whenever they wanted, the WD version required points that were earned via battles whenever they wanted to save. And while I understand the paper design behind this – balance the difficulty by adding a risk factor to saving – I absolutely hated the idea. Not so much from a game balance standpoint but from a practical standpoint. More than a couple times while I played the game back in the day I was faced with either losing progress or leaving my system on for hours at a time because of this ridiculous system.

Thank goodness they never did anything like that again.