YMMV / Lunar: Eternal Blue

• Accidental Nightmare Fuel: Zophar in the shojo manga adaptation. Trying to draw a Humanoid Abomination in a flowery shojo manga art style only manages to make him look even more terrifying, even though the intention was likely meant to be the opposite.
• Adorkable: Hiro is this to a great degree. He gets flustered easily and blushes a lot - especially when Lucia's involved. At one point he tells Ruby he wants to get on the helm of the Destiny and pretend he's in charge of it, and asks her to look out for Leo so she won't make fun of him. He's lying through his teeth and just wants to ensure he can speak with Lucia alone, though Ruby points out that he does like to pretend he's Dragonmaster Alex sometimes.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Depending on whether Ghaleon knew about Zophar during the first game, he could be considered a Well-Intentioned Extremist.
• Breather Level: In the remake, the Blue Dragon Cave is this, sandwiched between the White and Black Dragon sections. Most of the enemies have fewer HP than the previous dungeon, and it is also full of Metal Slimes that are relatively easy to kill with a full barrage of attacks, and yield 3500 per battle, the highest non boss yields at that point in the game. Applies to the Blue Fiend at the end of the dungeon too, who is slower than the previous Fiend.
• Catharsis Factor: After every horrible thing that Zophar has done, it's very satisfy to see him reduced to screaming in disbelief as he finally dies.
• Complete Monster: Zophar is the self-styled lord of darkness and the one responsible for the Blue Star being stripped of all life. As we see in flashbacks, Zophar led a campaign of conquest on the Blue Star that only ended when his arch-nemesis, the goddess Althena, was forced to seal him at the cost of all life on the world. Even through his prison, Zophar reached out to corrupt mortals, twisting the church of Althena into a Corrupt Church that was responsible for centuries of suffering and cruelty. Zophar excels in twisting and corrupting hearts to even turned loved ones against one another, and unlike most dark lords, Zophar fully understands goodness and righteousness enough to exploit it: manipulating heroine Lucia's love for her friends so she wouldn't have the will to destroy him at cost of the world. Zophar takes her captive to use her powers to remake the world in his twisted image, not caring about the death toll. When he decides the world is too much trouble, Zophar merely elects to destroy it utterly with every living soul.
• Epileptic Trees: Fertile ground for these thanks to the Left Hanging sequel hooks. The relationship between Althena and Lucia, the nature of the Blue Star, the nature of Althena, Lucia and Zophar, and just who built the infrastructure connecting the Blue Star and Lunar — all popular topics. Unless Lunar 3 comes along some day, these questions may never be answered.
  • Lucia really has to be noted here in particular because there are so many theories around her. Okay, she isn't "human"... so what the hell is she? An "enhanced human"? A demigod? An actual god? Althena's sister? Daughter? Something else? Naturally, there's room for all of these interpretations and more.
    • Some of these have been answered by Kei Shigema in the Lunar 2: Eternal Blue manga published by Asuka Comics DX. The towers connecting the Blue Star and Lunar were erec/ted by Althena, Goddess of Creation (either directly through magic or at her command). Lucia is a goddess who was forgotten after the passage of time, although what purview she is a goddess of remains undefined... as well as her exact relationship to Althena. Lucia's divinity is cited in the prologue, and mentioned again when Hiro describes her depiction on ruin engravings matching Althena's, but not being a known incarnation of Althena... thus his initial belief he discovered an unknown chapter of scripture.
• Even Better Sequel: Lunar: The Silver Star was a charming if somewhat derivative JRPG with memorable characters and a fun story. Eternal Blue, however, improves upon the game in almost every way with a more mature storyline, better developed characters, a better soundtrack, and an improved menu system that does away with the more cumbersome aspects of Silver Star Story's system. The Sega CD version was also, for its time, an absolute technical marvel, especially for the aging hardware it was on, and managed to look and play substantially better than a number of early Playstation 1 and Sega Saturn games.
• Fair for Its Day: The translation itself — at the time, a lot of translations were simple literal translations, sometimes with a "Blind Idiot" Translation thrown in here and there with proofreading being somewhat limited. Working Designs was one of the first companies to attempt to produce a more cultural translation, change sentences around (so they made more sense), removed jokes and references that would confuse American viewers, and change NPC dialogue around so they had more to say. What would have been a Woolseyism in the 1990s wouldn't exactly fly today.
• Fridge Horror: Based on a fan analysis here:
  "So what now? Lucia, now having learned emotion, continues on to watch Hiro age and die and leave her alone again on the Blue Star but now MISERABLE?"
  • It's also worth pointing out that Zophar says to Ghaleon, "Use what's left of your head," at one point in the PlayStation remake. Puts that patch of scales on his face in a whole new light.
• Guide Dang It!: Locating Ronfar for the first time in Dalton is fairly easy. He's the only gambler in the bar in the town of Larpa. And, he's the only NPC in this town with an avatar image in his dialogue box, implying he's an important character. It's getting him to admit he is Ronfar that's the tricky part. Basically, you have to venture to his house first to discover he isn't home. This tips Ruby off that the gambler in the bar is in fact Ronfar. Only then does Ronfar confess his identity, and the story can progress. The problem is Ronfar's house is in a pretty out-of-the-way area, where you'd have to almost stumble upon it by accident, as well as the fact that many NPCs in the town pretty much tell you that the gambler in the bar is Ronfar. It ultimately makes the trip to his house seem rather meaningless.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Hikaru Midorikawa voices a character named Hiro. One year later, his most famous role is a guy named “Heero”.
• Magnificent Bastard: Ghaleon, manipulating the heroes for their own good right under Zophar's nose.
• Narm:
  • Lucia's very flat "Oh no. Lunar" at the beginning of the Sega CD version. Thankfully this line wasn't in the remake.
  • Gwyn's constant yelling of "We've got to keep our strength up!" in battles eventually starts to sound goofy.
• Never Live It Down: The Bill Clinton joke ("You'd call me Clinton and I'd be president."), only found in the English release of the Sega CD version since the line was created by Working Designs. Critics of Working Designs will never, ever stop bringing this up, criticizing how their localization works weren't necessarily Woolseyism, especially since it's now a dated reference that'll make nobody laugh. The fact that it was removed from the remake still won't stop people bringing it up.
• Periphery Demographic: As pointed out in the "Making of Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete" CD, more girls showed up than guys at an event to meet the creators in Japan, much to their surprise.
  • Worth noting is that there was a shoujo manga adaptation of the game, told from Lucia's perspective. This may have done a lot to increase the game's popularity with girls.
• Scrappy Mechanic: In the English localization of the Sega CD original, you had to spend magic points earned in battle, usually reserved for upgrading your skills, to save. Working Designs thought it would add more "risk" to the game's save-anywhere mechanic.
  • Unlike its predecessor and remakes, the Sega CD version has no fast travel mechanic, forcing you to slooooowly drive all over the huge world map in the Destiny to re-vist old towns and regather your party in the epilogue.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Not sequel exactly, since it's not that different from Silver Star. But the ruin maze where the party meets Ghaleon for the first time was greatly simplified from the Sega CD version to the Playstation update. The player will be in and out in a fraction of the time.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: "Running Hiro" and Yakety Sax. "Promenade" also sounds an awful lot like the opening to Creamy Mami, the Magic Angel.
• That One Boss:
  • Borgan in Eternal Blue, especially in the Sega CD version. He has a spell that, if cast twice without healing, results in a Total Party Kill. And he's fast enough that you couldn't be guaranteed a chance to reactively heal in between castings, nor did you have the MP to toss out the healing constantly.
  • In Eternal Blue Complete, the Black Fiend. Its speed can beat out Jean (the party's fastest character), and its favorite move, an Affect-All MP drain, tends to be that fast every time, and it also has a party wide attack that can inflict paralysis and a single target attack that can inflict a random status. And to top it off, the best defense against this, White Dragon Protect, costs a whopping 60 MP, and is best equipped on Jean, forcing one of your best attackers into a defender/support role. You're in for a long fight. What also makes it difficult is this fiend is one of the only bosses in the game who is resistant to physical attacks, which means your strongest moves will barely scratch it. Hiro at least has Cross Boomerang which does wind damage, but Jean and Ronfar will likely need spells from equipped crests to do any notable damage at all, if they aren't just healing.
  • Zophar; even by Final Boss standards he's ridiculously tough in both versions. His first form isn't so bad, but his final form scrunches your party members into an enclosed space so area attacks affect multiple members, he gets around 4-6 attacks per round via his separate hands, is insanely fast, and if you kill one of his hands or take awhile in fighting him, he gets angry and can do an attack which hits for over 7000 damage when your max HP is 999, and in the remake you pretty much need to do that because one of his hands heals the others and his main body. One of his attacks hits the whole party, others can drain HP and MP, and he can also heal himself. All of his parts have a load of HP (in the original, they have as much his body), and each hand has different weaknesses and abilities. Before you start the second form properly you have to fight the invulnerable first form, forcing you to waste turns defending or buffing. Both forms have unskippable, lengthy cutscenes in between them.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The remake, despite its often very good additions to the story, gets flack from some long-time Lunar fans for the plot details that were cut from the Sega CD original. The English translations of the two versions were done in a slightly different style; many people thought that Working Designs went overboard with the jokes and pop culture references, so they toned it down for the remake, which angered fans who liked the first version's changes.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • The Working Designs translation for the Sega CD includes a line for "Killing Barney made easy" as a small Take That!. Barney was a huge target in the 1980s and 1990s, but quickly faded into nigh-irrelevance in the new millenium. This really makes the joke, and script, seem dated.
  • And then there's the kid who wants to see Mortal Kombat-style violence. And the infamous Clinton joke. And Sally Struthers exploding... The original Sega CD version just has too many to list.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The Sega CD version has some of the most immaculately drawn cutscenes ever played on the platform, with several frames of fluid animation in any given scene.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The game has plenty of blood, partial nudity, swearing, sexual innuendo, and heaping helpings of Nightmare Fuel, but for some reason ESRB (which was newly-formed at the time) gave it a "K-A" rating. Thankfully the remake for PlayStation gave it a more fitting T rating.

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