For all the flack it gets the Sega CD is still to this day one of my favorite systems ever released. It had a small library compared to the Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis, and many of these titles were interactive videos, but aside from this the library is surprisingly high quality. One genre that flourished on the short lived add-on was role playing games. This owes a lot to the CD medium which was new at the time, but offered enough memory per disc to support games huge in scope with voice overs and animated sequences to boot. Lunar: The Silver Star is the most famous Sega CD RPG, and it’s one of my absolute favorites of all time. Unfortunately the soon released sequel, Lunar: Eternal Blue, doesn’t fare quite as well. It’s not that the developers suffered a lapse in inspiration or passion, rather, the publisher Working Designs (whom I’m generally a fan of) made some alterations that would completely ruin any lesser game.
Eternal Blue is a direct sequel to the first game taking place in the same world one thousand years after dragon master Alex saved his gal pal Luna from the magic emperor Ghaleon. The protagonist this time is an adventurous youth named Hiro who, along with his baby dragon Ruby, spends his days investigating old ruins to find treasures beyond his wildest dreams. One day a mysterious structure called the Blue Spire begins emitting strange lights. Hiro, his grandfather, and Ruby manage to enter the sealed off place and they encounter an otherworldly girl named Lucia who has traveled from the Blue Star. This sorceress is on a mission to stop the evil god Zophar from reviving himself, and she can only do so by meeting up with the goddess Althena. Hiro decides to join the mysterious girl, and gets swept up into a quest full of colorful characters wherein he must save the world. It might sound like a standard Japanese role playing game story, but there’s something intimate, charming, and downright memorable about this tale. The scenario, while similar in many ways to the Silver Star, is actually better in my opinion.
Lunar Eternal Blue is a traditional Japanese RPG with some very interesting twists. As per normal gameplay conventions you wander across a world map which contains within it towns, dungeons, and other points of interest. You guide an avatar of Hiro and your party members, and the view is strictly 2D and overhead. Characters join your entourage as per their introduction in the story, and you’re never given a choice of who to use because this process is entirely automatic. While in hostile areas battles occur at random while you move about, and take place on a different side-view screen. This is all standard stuff so far, but there are a few twists to combat that make this one (and the previous title) stand out from the pack. Sure, you still input commands from a menu and watch your characters carry out each selection in turns, but the battlefield is dynamic. Most attacks in this game are short range, and your party members (as well as the enemies) need to be up close and personal with the target to carry out their attack. This means they must move about on the battlefield, and while you can’t control this directly it adds a huge layer of strategy.
Each character has typical numerical statistics such as attack, defense, etc. What’s unique about this game is that they also have a designation for the number of attacks they can perform per turn. This is limited to just physical attacks, and each strike gives individual damage. What’s interesting about this is the fact that, for close range weapons, your characters can only move a certain distance per attack. This means that for distant enemies you might waste one of your attacks just moving toward them, but when you have more than one they will only briefly stop before continuing on. In addition your characters stay in the same spot where their turn ended. Many spells in the game cause splash damage and hit all nearby targets. It’s a really interesting system that’s a great precursor to Grandia. The only issue is that you have so little control over this; you have to waste an entire turn to change their placement which is a little annoying.
I really do like Eternal Blue, however as I mentioned earlier Working Designs almost completely ruined the experience. You earn SP as your characters gain levels and these points are used to enhance and learn new abilities for use in battle. Unfortunately this publisher thought it would be a good idea to limit the number of times you can save, as well as make the game more difficult for those who do so often, by charging SP to save your game. In some games a design choice like this makes perfect sense, but here it’s a useless feature that makes things more artificially difficult. It ruins a lot of the game’s charm, and severely knocks down its score. Another issue (though one that’s also in the original Japanese version) is that enemies gain levels with your party. This means that grinding does not help here because the enemies get increases in stats as well. I’ve always hated this feature in other games, and it does no favors here.
Lunar: Eternal Blue is one of the best looking 16-bit RPGs. It’s only challenged by Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI in my opinion, and if you take into account the full motion video it even surpasses them. Outside of battle the backgrounds are lush and full of detail, and the characters animate fluidly. One thing I particularly like is how the game recycles the sprites used for each member of your party for both inside and out of battle. The art style is one of this game’s strongest attributes and paints an incredible and memorable fantasy world. The soundtrack fares even better with some truly memorable music. The battle theme is by far my favorite standard track from any RPG, and there are several different pieces of music for the world map, dungeons, and town areas. The voice acting is surprisingly good for its time, but this is commonplace for Working Designs releases even back then. The CD quality audio is exceptional here.
This is an exceptional RPG with an amazing battle system, great graphics/music, and a memorable story that’s overflowing with charm. It’s very sad that Working Designs added the changes they did because it just makes the experience worse. It may sound like no big deal, but it’s a dreadful feeling to be limited in the number of times you can save, and to have each time count against you. This is a long game and this feature nearly ruins the experience. Thankfully the PlayStation remake omits this ‘creative’ change, and I recommend going with that instead of this version. The Sega CD edition of Lunar: Eternal Blue is still pretty decent though.
