Lunar: Eternal Blue

Lunar: Eternal Blue picks up centuries after the first game and tells the story of a young treasure hunter who discovers a girl bound to the blue star in the sky and to a religious order with far too much interest in her fate. Compared to its predecessor, the story is darker and more focused, with a stronger thread of faith, manipulation, and sacrifice, but it keeps the same sense of humor and characters who talk to each other like a real group of friends. Gameplay-wise it's again a turn-based RPG with positional battles, where characters move around during a round, combine the range of attacks and spells, and where choosing the order of actions often matters more than raw numbers.

Technically, it's one of the best-looking titles in the whole Mega-CD library. The animated cutscenes are longer and smoother than in the first game, character portraits have more expressions, and battle effects are strikingly colorful. Once again, the music from the disc is a major draw — the melodies are written as full-fledged compositions, and songs again carry the story's strongest moments. The dungeons are noticeably more elaborate, with traps, switches, and shortcuts, and the game gives the player more freedom in how they equip and develop the party. There's even a special rating that tracks how well you handled character situations along the way.

At the time, Eternal Blue was received as a more mature and ambitious sequel, but it arrived just as attention was already shifting to new consoles — so its reach ended up smaller than it deserved. Among genre fans it nonetheless kept a reputation as one of the best RPGs ever released on Sega systems, and the series later got remakes precisely because people remembered it. Today it delights mainly through its storytelling pace and how much time the game devotes to ordinary scenes between characters. Anyone who likes classic JRPGs will find one of the best-written stories of its era here, albeit at the cost of a slower start and more frequent battles than is common today.