Lunar: Eternal Blue

1994 · RPG · Sega CD

About Lunar: Eternal Blue

Lunar: Eternal Blue (1994) is Game Arts' Sega CD sequel set a thousand years after The Silver Star, a larger role-playing game with nearly fifty minutes of voiced animation and twice the dialogue.

Lunar: Eternal Blue in Depth

Play follows the first game: top-down 2D exploration, quests and conversations, and story told through text and animated cutscenes. Random battles are fought with attacks and magic, with characters moving into range, but the battle system now allows characters to be positioned in advance and has improved AI. Besides experience, battles award magic points used to strengthen spells and unlock skills. In the North American version, saving costs magic experience, a change Working Designs made so that players would "think about where and when to save", and the game remembers each character's last command.

A thousand years after The Silver Star, young explorer Hiro and his winged companion Ruby take a gem called the Dragon's Eye from a ruin and use it to enter the Blue Spire, where they meet Lucia, a girl from the Blue Star who must see the goddess Althena to stop the evil being Zophar. Hunted by Leo, captain of Althena's guard, who believes she is the prophesied Destroyer, they are joined by the gambler-priest Ronfar, the dancer Jean and Lemina, money-grubbing heiress to the magic guild, and discover that the Althena now ruling is false and that Ghaleon, the first game's villain, is her Dragonmaster.

Making Lunar: Eternal Blue

Director Yoichi Miyagi returned to lead Game Arts and Studio Alex, with Kubooka directing the in-house animation and Noriyuki Iwadare composing the music, narrowing his range to give the score a unified feel. The game has over an hour and a half of recorded speech against the first game's fifteen minutes. Game Arts released it in Japan in December 1994, where it sold well and became the second best-selling Sega CD game there, though fewer copies than its predecessor. Working Designs released it in North America in September 1995, adding humour, fourth-wall breaks and balance fixes for battles found "near impossible".

US sales were low, which Ireland blamed on the arrival of 32-bit consoles and talk of the Sega CD's "death". Critics liked it: EGM praised its "great story and witty characters", named it the best Mega-CD game of 1995 and later ranked it 40th among console games, while Game Players and Next Generation felt something of the first game's charm had been lost. It was remade in 1998 as Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete for the Saturn and PlayStation.

Lunar: Eternal Blue Trivia

Writer Kei Shigema took the idea of an oppressive god from the image of Sun Wukong unable to escape the Buddha's palm in Journey to the West.
It took three years and over $2.5 million to make.
The team first planned to set it a few years after the first game with an older cast, but feared the new characters would lose focus.
Its Japanese price of ¥9,900 was nearly $100 in 1994.
GameFan's preview called the translation "ingeniously written", a quote used in ads, then its review criticised the jokes, which Victor Ireland called "a complete about-face".