Magazine Coverage
Lunar: Eternal Blue (Sega CD)
Magazine Text
The original Lunar was a simple, guilty pleasure. While the game’s structure was standard RPG fare, it was packed with so much -off-the-wall - and occasionally off-color - humor, both intentional and unintentional, that you would up enjoying it in spite of yourself. Working Designs has since carved a niche for itself by importing fairly standard RPGs and adding enough goofiness to make them worth playing.
Lunar 2: Eternal Blue is both more and less of the same. When looked at purely as an RPG, it’s definitely a step up from the original Lunar. The graphics are noticeably better, the music is excellent, the cut scenes have actual animation this time around, and the adventure is just short of huge. However, while the game packs in plenty of humerous asides (including riffs on Fabio, The Fugitive, and other up-to-the-minute cultural references), the tone is decidedly less goffy, with more of an emphasis on drama and storyline. While normally this would count as an improvement, there’s no real analog to the original Lunar’s magicians who were obsessed with foot hygiene, or a town full of inbred hicks. There’s still plenty to chuckle at, and overall it’s a much stronger game, but you can’t help feeling something’s missing.
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
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Commentary
I had forgotten how much I enjoyed Next Generation so thumbing through digital PDFs of them was a lot of fun. The review doesn’t go into a lot of detail and really plays up the modern humor. It’s true there is less in Lunar 2, but I don’t know if I would have spent so many column inches on it. Lunar 2 is a fantastic game and I probably would have gone into the story and the mechanical differences between Lunar 1 and Lunar 2, but putting together a magazine every month has to be hard!
Posted on: 06 January 2025
