Lunar 2: Hope Springs

If Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete was in some way partly about becoming an adult and living a dream, then Lunar II: Eternal Blue Complete is much more about being an adult, dreams or no.  It is about making and living with the decisions of a harsher world that allows for fewer mistakes, and forgives them less often, less easily and less completely.  There is a running thread throughout Eternal Blue—I wouldn’t call it a theme, necessarily, but it feels broadly present— that what is best for everyone might not always be what makes them happiest.  Certainly the game is shot through with melancholy meetings and bittersweet partings.  From Nall’s quiet sorrow over long-absent friends, to the party’s final tearful farewells, the message is clear.  No one can escape the bitter choices, the compromises and the sacrifices that are imposed by reality.

I started playing Eternal Blue Complete in the Christmas season of 2000.  I was home from the middle of basic training during Christmas Exodus, and it was on the short list of games I felt I absolutely needed to play.  It was supposed to have come out before I shipped out the previous Halloween, but this was Working Designs we were dealing with, and I discovered that their trouble with delays wasn’t something isolated to Silver Star Story Complete, but was instead more like an unintentional company policy where RPGs were concerned.  I played it a bit at that time, but only a bit, because there were lots of other games to play (also purchased during this brief window: Final Fantasy IX, Breath of Fire IV, Mega Man Legends 2, RayCrisis: Series Termination, Mega Man X5, and, lamentably, Vampire Hunter D), and because there were friends and family to visit and spend time with who of course took priority, and holidays to celebrate.

I picked away at it in fits and starts, here and there, throughout my time in the Army and afterward, but could never seem to find the will to power through it.  It wasn’t as if the game was bad.  I suppose the mechanics had progressed, in this interval, from being quaint and charmingly retro to positively archaic, but I’ve played tons of equally antiquated games, so I’m sure that’s not all it was.  But that was a strange and uncomfortable period in my life, for the most part, and it was difficult to enjoy a lot of things.  I didn’t properly finish Eternal Blue Complete until the early winter of 2008, when I had been laid off from my job and the utter collapse and ruin of my life seemed nearly inevitable.  I was looking for work, but looking for work isn’t nearly as time-intensive as actually working.  I had a lot of free time to kill, and a lot of mental and emotional anguish about my situation that I didn’t know how to handle; I just wanted to be gone.  If I could have stepped out of my life and all its attendant miseries and problems and just become somebody else, I think I might have done it.  As Tolkien tells us, there are two kinds of escape: that of the deserter, and that of the prisoner.  And I think that the very best kinds of escape are those that take us, for a time, out of our own lives and teach us something, so that we come back better armed to handle our troubles.

Looking back, I could not have chosen a better time to play Eternal Blue.  I had never, and have never since, been more in need of hearing the things it had to say.

Eternal Blue is a darker game than Silver Star Story.  It’s not dark, per se.  Indeed, silliness still abounds.  But the circumstances are much more dire, the stakes higher, than the previous game.  The characters are a bit older, many of them a bit more worldly and world-weary.  These aren’t all a bunch of kids (and a couple of newly minted adults) trying to rise to a dream of heroism.  These are, for the most part, people who have gone out into the world and done some living.  Some of them have blood on their hands, some of them have made mistakes and fallen from grace, some have lost faith in themselves. 

But far from being a lament for the imperfection of the world and the people in it, the message of Eternal Blue is ultimately positive.  Hope, even amid the gathering dark, still thrives, and through Hope lies the victory of the Good and the Right.

The story starts us off with the protagonist, Hiro.  He’s been raised by his uncle, Gwyn, who is an archaeologist, and who has set up his household near a couple of ancient ruins sites to better study them.  Hiro himself has an interest in archaeology, but where Gwyn’s approach is thoughtful and scholarly, Hiro is more an archaeologist of the Indiana Jones persuasion.

But Hiro’s life takes an unexpected turn (as these things often happen in fantasy stories) when a bright light descends from the sky to the top of a nearby tower, called the Blue Spire, one of the aforementioned ruins near Hiro and Gwyn’s home.  It’s a mystery worth investigating, but Hiro isn’t the only one interested in it.

A thousand years have passed since Silver Star Story Complete, when Alex became the Dragonmaster and cast down the Magic Emperor, and the world seems to have grown more grim and solemn in the millennium interval.  It’s more than the knowledge that friends from the previous adventure are all long in their graves.  In the era of Eternal Blue Complete, the goddess is once more physically incarnate.  She dwells in the holy city of Pentagulia, surrounded by her worshippers.  But where the Goddess of ages past wished simply for people to be kind and good to one another, and employed force only to defend her people against the forces of evil, the Goddess of this more modern era has an army at her disposal to enforce her will.

It is one of her soldiers, the beastman Leo, who Hiro encounters on his way home early in the game.  The strange light that has touched down on the Blue Spire was predicted, it seems, and is identified as the Destroyer, sent from the Blue Star to bring doom to the world of Lunar.  Leo has been sent to find this Destroyer, and destroy it first, before it can begin its apocalyptic work.  Yet beneath all of this, there is a deeper mystery at work.

One of the things that draws me to Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete is the way that it examines the mystery behind the very existence of the world of Lunar and the purpose and origin of the Blue Star.  It isn’t as if these things weren’t touched upon in Silver Star Story Complete, exactly.  They were, in a minor way.  And it isn’t too hard to guess even from those few, vague clues what is going on—why the world is called Lunar in the first place; why the Frontier is a grey, crater-marked wasteland; and why the massive Blue Star dominates the skyline the way that it does.  But these things were hardly significant to the story of the first Lunar game, and were tangents to the main thrust of the story. 

Most of that story, we know from legend.  Humankind dwelt on the Blue Star once, eons ago, but some disaster struck, and that world became corrupt and impossible to live upon, and humankind stood at the brink of extinction.  It was then that the Goddess Althena took the remnant of her people and fled to the world of Lunar.  Once an inhospitable waste, through her powers she turned it into a lush, green world, save for a small portion of it which maintained much of its wasteland nature.  But the blight of the Blue Star was no accident.  It was set in motion by a being or a power of uncertain origin but clearly malign nature.  Though that power has lain dormant for a long age, as the events of Eternal Blue Complete unfold, it begins to stir, and it turn its attention to the world of Lunar, and the descendants of those who escaped its wrath an age ago.  But the Destroyer is not what we would expect, or who, and the evil that threatens Lunar is more insidious and more subtle than it seems.

This is one of the storytelling tropes that I love the most, the one I think of as the Mystery of the World.  So when it comes to evaluating Eternal Blue Complete, it’s perhaps unfair that it begins with an advantage regarding my own personal tastes.  Part of this sense of mystery requires unveiling  a little of the lore of the series.  We know the broad strokes, but Eternal Blue Complete gives us a hint at something greater, more horrifying, hidden and forgotten in the mists of time.  It seems to emphasize the ancient past of Lunar more than the first game did.  In terms of playing the game, this results in you visiting all kinds of ancient, tumble-down ruins which were nowhere to be found in the original game, although there are even more which you cannot access during the main quest—foreshadowing for the epilogue.

It’s interesting that Silver Star Story Complete and Eternal Blue Complete are such different games.  While they share certain themes and a roughly similar outlook, in tone they feel very different.  Silver Star Story Complete is very upbeat and positive.  The circumstances are occasionally dire, but they’re more Hollywood Dire than anything.  You know the heroes will prevail, because this is the sort of story where the heroes always must.  It’s kind of the whole point.  Eternal Blue Complete is never so certain in its victories.  On the one hand, you’re certain that the heroes must win.  It’s That Kind of Story.  On the other hand, some of your bitterest foes are fundamentally good people whose desires to do good are twisted by shadowy, insidious forces to the ultimate ends of evil.

Insidious.  I like that word.  Just the sound of it seems to hint at its meaning, and when it comes to Lunar 2, its especially apt, since that’s the way much of the evil you confront is presented.  There is a clear and obvious enemy who makes himself known (though he doesn’t exactly appear) near the beginning of the story, but the full nature of his intent, and the complexity of his schemes, are not apparent until much later, when the trap is sprung and nearly closed.

But that’s another difference between Silver Star Story Complete and Eternal Blue Complete: scale.  Silver Star Story had as its villain the Magic Emperor: a man whose evil lay mainly in his hideously, horrifically misguided attempt to correct what he believed to be flaws in the very nature and structure of the world.  He believed, as most evil people in the world today believe, that what he did was perhaps brutal and unfortunate, but ultimately necessary as the only certain means to achieving what he believed to be right.  But that’s just it: he was an evil person.  Bad as he is, there is at least a little essential humanity that makes him work.

The antagonist of Eternal Blue Complete has no such limitations on its nature.  It is not a man at all.  It has no desire to control the world, to correct its flaws; it has no delusions of making life better for others by providing them with what it sees as a necessary structure or authority.  It does not concern itself with these things.  It is a cosmic engine of fear, malice, corruption, and hate.  It isn’t quite a Lovecraftian monstrosity, but it’s in the ballpark.

And it inspires the tiniest thread of doubt in the story—doubt not about whether these particular heroes will win, but doubt about whether any sort of victory at all is possible.  After all, this is the power that laid waste to the Blue Star, rendering it a withered husk of its former grandeur and might.  This is the power which forced the Goddess Althena to flee.  When even the Goddess must abandon resistance in favor of mere escape, what hope has humankind for victory?

So there’s the narrative for us.  Considerably more grim and solemn than the previous game, as any tale of impending apocalypse should be.

I could talk about game mechanics, but why bother?  I did that for Silver Star Story Complete, and Eternal Blue Complete changes nothing.  Characters progress in exactly the same fashion as the previous game, learn new spells and techniques in the same way—there’s really no need to even acknowledge the manual, though you may want to for the artwork, if nothing else.  It was upgraded from the Sega CD original to match the look, style and mechanics of Silver Star Story Complete, and in that respect it is absolutely successful.

There is at least one continuity error in Eternal Blue Complete that I know of, though.  In the Sega CD original Lunar: the Silver Star, the Grindery (the Magic Emperor’s mobile fortress) makes its final assault on the city of Meribia.  There it is brought to a standstill by the efforts of the player’s party of heroes.  A millennium later, it is inhabited by a pseudo-bandit named Nall, who uses it as his headquarters, but his main activity is not so much real banditry as it is watching over a small host of orphans who have happened into his care.  In the PSX remake Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, however, The Grindery doesn’t attack Meribia, but instead is directed toward the floating city and headquarters of the magicians’ guild, Vane.  To me, this makes more strategic sense.  Vane seems like it would be able to mobilize the greatest opposition to the Magic Emperor, and its destruction would be the first order of business in any sensible plan of conquest.  So in Silver Star Story Complete, the Grindery comes to its final rest outside of Vane.

This becomes a problem in Eternal Blue Complete.  The party’s meeting with Nall has some significance for the storyline at the particular time it happens.  The party travels to Meribia fairly early in Eternal Blue Complete, and so the Grindery is right there.  To place it where it last stood in Silver Star Story Complete would put it much later in the game, requiring a rewrite of much of the story which occurs between those two locations.  I don’t know how that amount of reworking would have been handled, and the problem (if you can call it a problem) is that such a rewrite really feels unnecessary.  Because the fact of the matter is that Lunar 2, both the original Sega CD Eternal Blue and the PlayStation remake Eternal Blue Complete was a much better-made and better-executed game than its predecessor. 

Silver Star Story Complete was meant to improve on the execution of its first iteration, and that execution was flawed due to some combination of a compromise of vision or lesser capability of its makers at the time.  A fair number of the changes Silver Star Story Complete made seem to have been qualitative in nature.  But GameArts seem to have really found themselves with Eternal Blue, and so considerably fewer of the changes made between Eternal Blue and Eternal Blue Complete were qualitative.  Most of them were quantitative—updating the graphics, making the cut scenes full anime like Silver Star Story Complete, that sort of thing.  It was less necessary for them to remake Eternal Blue, because the limits of its execution laid less with the creators and more with the technology, where the same is less true for The Silver Star.  Eternal Blue’s remake seems to have been predicated less on the logic of making necessary improvements to tell the story correctly, and more on the logic of “well, we remade the first one, so we should probably update the second one to match”.

And I’m all for that, really, because any way you look at it, Eternal Blue Complete is still a fundamentally better experience than Eternal Blue on the Sega CD.  It’s just that Eternal Blue being a better-made game overall meant that the creators were less willing to rewrite major sections of the story for Eternal Blue Complete, probably out of a fear that, once you start changing one major thing, you have to change others, and pretty soon the thing bears no resemblance to the much-loved original.  And why should you do that when the story’s solid on its own, and all to avoid a single continuity flaw?  So I can see why GameArts did what they did, even though it will always bother that weird part of me that requires everything to fit just so.

So, is Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete worth playing today?  Well, the graphics and sound can be a little underwhelming by today’s standards.  Even when I was finishing it in 2008, it was beginning to look long in the tooth even by the standards of retro-style games.  The five-year interval has probably not changed that at all—not for the better at any rate.  Not to say that the game looks bad, just… dated.  But the fact stands that I still recommended Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete more or less without reservations, and God knows it has all the same technological shortcomings.  So why would the sequel be any different?  It’s a bit darker, but for me, that’s practically a selling point.

I like dark and grim stories because they make us confront the true perilous nature of reality.  I like to escape as much as the next person (possibly more so, it’s true), but I usually prefer not to lie to myself while I do it.  And the true heroes seem to be the ones who prevail over true darkness.  So I prefer Hiro’s story in Eternal Blue Complete somewhat more than Alex’s story in Silver Star Story Complete.  It’s not that I don’t think Alex is necessarily a lesser hero.  As a character, he had no certain knowledge of his victory, but the same was not true of me.  I knew he would win, not because I am so very wise, but simply because that’s how these kinds of stories go.  I couldn’t say the same for Hiro, not completely.  He, of course, was uncertain of victory, because remotely intelligent heroes always are.  But I was uncertain as well.  There was that thin thread of doubt.  Would he lose?  Would he win, but at terrible cost?  And that doubt was what made the difference.  Because there is no hope without its attendant fear; the former cannot pretend to reality without the latter.

When the characters feel hope and fear, that’s one thing.  When the player feels that hope, and that fear, that is something much, much greater.  More profound.  More real.

And it was that sense of hope that helped me through a dark time in my own life.  Maybe that sounds cliché, or trite.  Certainly there are other stories, similarly themed and equally well told, that might have taught me the same.  But they weren’t there at the time.  Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete was.  I’m not going to sit here and tell you that playing this game turned my life around, because that would be cliché, and untrue besides.  The situation was much more complicated than that.  But it helped me to see past the mire of the present into the possibility of the future, to strive for something better in that future, and to handle the present with grace meanwhile.

And that has made a difference.