"Get politics out of video games!" I screech as one of my party members asks if they look like Bill Clinton after a homeless NPC asks them for a handout.
Lunar: Eternal Blue is a game I have a lot of nostalgia for despite having never played, and in order to get into that I'm going to need to take you all back to the 1990s, when my taste in media was still in its formative stage. This was one of many games that I read about in magazines but lacked the means to actually play, and which in the years since have hung over me like a specter. Specifically, it was a print ad for Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete, which not only featured an impressive spread of pack-ins, but promised a cinematic experience that would lean heavily on a genre of animation I was in the middle of falling utterly in love with: Anime.
Like any kid growing up in the 1990s, Dragonball Z acted as my main gateway into the genre. However, it was hardly my first exposure to it. This is where things get a little tricky, as I have two distant yet crystal clear memories of my first experience watching anime, and I'm unsure which came first: seeing a scene from the original dub of Akira where Nezu shoots Ryu while escaping from his office (the source for this would only click over a decade later when I finally watched the full movie), and seeing the entirety of Galaxy Express 999, nudity and all. At the time, I thought I had seen something forbidden. The arresting way in which Ryu is shot was unlike anything I had seen before, it was the first time I could conceptualize "real" violence in a cartoon, and Galaxy Express had boobs. Ok, in particular Galaxy Express had the scene where Tetsuro's mother's corpse is presented as a trophy, mounted on Count Mecha's wall. The cruelty of that stuck with me just as much as the art style, and the sense of wonder and adventure that colored Tetsuro's journey.
I had known about anime through my very limited exposure to it, but around the time ads began to run for Lunar 2: Eternal Blue, I was beginning to understand it. It didn't matter to me what kind of game it was, it had anime in it, so I needed to play it. This thought process continued to drive me for quite some time after, at least until my late teens when I had been bullied so much for liking anime that I decided it was time to "age out" of it. My relationship to the genre remains fairly estranged today. I don't really watch much, when I do it's on recommendation and I never actively seek out anything new.
However, Lunar 2 always kind of stuck with me. That print ad is in a few old issues of EGM that I've hung onto and periodically reread, a fun little exercise to remind myself how much games media has changed over the years, and to reexperience the conversation around old games before release. At some point I got it in my head that I really need to just sit down and play it, and as it happened, the same seller who I bought my reproduction copy of Snatcher from was also selling copies of Lunar: Eternal Blue... for the Sega CD. Alright, so it's not the exact same game I was obsessed with, but it was close enough! I bought it along with the original Lunar, which I have previously reviewed, and finally gave it a shot in 2020, well over two decades since I was first exposed to that ad.
Turns out Lunar: Eternal Blue is an extremely bog standard 90s JRPG outside of those anime FMVs, of which there's not a terribly large amount! The writing is what you'd expect from Working Designs, which I've talked about at length already; it's just crammed full of then-current pop culture references that date the game harder than its antiquated mechanics and low-res FMVs, which I find charming for the most part. It's also a perfect encapsulation of the sort of attitude and cheesiness of that era of localization, something which was reflected just as much in actual anime shows and films as it was in games. So, yeah, back in the day I would've ate this up. Had I played it then, I'd probably be beating this drum now that it's one of the greatest JRPGs ever made because my brain was still developing when I played it.
However, as I mentioned in my review of Lunar, it's a little hard to distinguish these games at times. Characters are often reduced to very basic elements that are then played up and exaggerated, and while their backstories do feel more thematically tied to the main narrative in Eternal Blue, they're still pretty generic in the grand scheme of things. Mechanically, there's not much different between the two games. Difficulty balancing is probably more "fair" in Eternal Blue in the way a sequel often is, but combat is still pretty rudimentary, if not braindead.
I'm not sure how much this game changed between the Sega CD release and Complete, though I'd have to assume stuff like the FMV quality is improved. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you feel compelled to check this one out, Complete is likely the better way to go, and the only reason I didn't bother with it is because I wanted to get at that repro. I have a weird problem where I just like owning copies of games even if they're not legit, when I could emulate them for free. Besides that little sense of joy I get from displaying games on my shelf, there's just something about the simple act of clicking a disc into a drive or punching a cart into a system that just feels really good to me, and which can't be replicated by loading games off an SD card. But I don't know, man, I saw cartoon boobs at an early age and it screwed my head up.
Thank you, anime.
Lunar: Eternal Blue is a game I have a lot of nostalgia for despite having never played, and in order to get into that I'm going to need to take you all back to the 1990s, when my taste in media was still in its formative stage. This was one of many games that I read about in magazines but lacked the means to actually play, and which in the years since have hung over me like a specter. Specifically, it was a print ad for Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete, which not only featured an impressive spread of pack-ins, but promised a cinematic experience that would lean heavily on a genre of animation I was in the middle of falling utterly in love with: Anime.
Like any kid growing up in the 1990s, Dragonball Z acted as my main gateway into the genre. However, it was hardly my first exposure to it. This is where things get a little tricky, as I have two distant yet crystal clear memories of my first experience watching anime, and I'm unsure which came first: seeing a scene from the original dub of Akira where Nezu shoots Ryu while escaping from his office (the source for this would only click over a decade later when I finally watched the full movie), and seeing the entirety of Galaxy Express 999, nudity and all. At the time, I thought I had seen something forbidden. The arresting way in which Ryu is shot was unlike anything I had seen before, it was the first time I could conceptualize "real" violence in a cartoon, and Galaxy Express had boobs. Ok, in particular Galaxy Express had the scene where Tetsuro's mother's corpse is presented as a trophy, mounted on Count Mecha's wall. The cruelty of that stuck with me just as much as the art style, and the sense of wonder and adventure that colored Tetsuro's journey.
I had known about anime through my very limited exposure to it, but around the time ads began to run for Lunar 2: Eternal Blue, I was beginning to understand it. It didn't matter to me what kind of game it was, it had anime in it, so I needed to play it. This thought process continued to drive me for quite some time after, at least until my late teens when I had been bullied so much for liking anime that I decided it was time to "age out" of it. My relationship to the genre remains fairly estranged today. I don't really watch much, when I do it's on recommendation and I never actively seek out anything new.
However, Lunar 2 always kind of stuck with me. That print ad is in a few old issues of EGM that I've hung onto and periodically reread, a fun little exercise to remind myself how much games media has changed over the years, and to reexperience the conversation around old games before release. At some point I got it in my head that I really need to just sit down and play it, and as it happened, the same seller who I bought my reproduction copy of Snatcher from was also selling copies of Lunar: Eternal Blue... for the Sega CD. Alright, so it's not the exact same game I was obsessed with, but it was close enough! I bought it along with the original Lunar, which I have previously reviewed, and finally gave it a shot in 2020, well over two decades since I was first exposed to that ad.
Turns out Lunar: Eternal Blue is an extremely bog standard 90s JRPG outside of those anime FMVs, of which there's not a terribly large amount! The writing is what you'd expect from Working Designs, which I've talked about at length already; it's just crammed full of then-current pop culture references that date the game harder than its antiquated mechanics and low-res FMVs, which I find charming for the most part. It's also a perfect encapsulation of the sort of attitude and cheesiness of that era of localization, something which was reflected just as much in actual anime shows and films as it was in games. So, yeah, back in the day I would've ate this up. Had I played it then, I'd probably be beating this drum now that it's one of the greatest JRPGs ever made because my brain was still developing when I played it.
However, as I mentioned in my review of Lunar, it's a little hard to distinguish these games at times. Characters are often reduced to very basic elements that are then played up and exaggerated, and while their backstories do feel more thematically tied to the main narrative in Eternal Blue, they're still pretty generic in the grand scheme of things. Mechanically, there's not much different between the two games. Difficulty balancing is probably more "fair" in Eternal Blue in the way a sequel often is, but combat is still pretty rudimentary, if not braindead.
I'm not sure how much this game changed between the Sega CD release and Complete, though I'd have to assume stuff like the FMV quality is improved. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you feel compelled to check this one out, Complete is likely the better way to go, and the only reason I didn't bother with it is because I wanted to get at that repro. I have a weird problem where I just like owning copies of games even if they're not legit, when I could emulate them for free. Besides that little sense of joy I get from displaying games on my shelf, there's just something about the simple act of clicking a disc into a drive or punching a cart into a system that just feels really good to me, and which can't be replicated by loading games off an SD card. But I don't know, man, I saw cartoon boobs at an early age and it screwed my head up.
Thank you, anime.