Every bit as charming as its predecessor, Lunar 2 is a game that diehard JRPG fans simply cannot miss.
Lunar 2 takes place many generations after the events in the original. This time around it is Alex, the hero of the first Lunar, who is the legendary Dragonmaster that many boys aspire to be like. Hiro is no exception, whom loves to go on adventures in the ruins around his home with Ruby, his pink female flying cat sidekick who claims to be a baby dragon. An ancient tower soon mysteriously comes to life, and at the top is Lucia. Lucia is from the Blue Star, the destroyed world that Lunar is orbiting, and is the planet's protector that will awaken when the time to rebuild has arrived. Something must have happened, as she woke up too early, and transported to Lunar to consult with the Goddess Althena. Sure enough, the evil Zophar the Destroyer that ruined the Blue Star has returned to finish his work. Oddly enough, the followers of Althena were told that Lucia herself is the Destroyer and are ordered to apprehend her. Presented with deciphering which story is the truth, Hiro uses a simple method to make his decision: Lucia is cute; therefore she must be telling the truth. Hence Hiro's journey begins.
Perhaps the biggest strength of the first Lunar was the wonderfully developed characters, and Lunar 2 meets the same high standards. Each character is very unique in their personality, dialect, motives, reactions, and thoughts on the journey. In many situations throughout the game, not only can you talk to your party members for their relatively lengthy thoughts on their situation, but talking to them a second time will often grant a second conversation. It's this little attention to detail that helps make the characters so endearing and easy with which to form an attachment.
The battle system itself is essentially the same as the first game, with some rather minor tweaks to the formula. Being the series GameArts worked on prior to Grandia, anyone who played one of the Grandia games should be immediately familiar with its similar but simplified system. Characters and enemies do not simply line up on opposite sides of the screen and just do a sword swinging animation to attack - they actually need to run up and hit them. Very quickly there will be both enemies and allies scattered all about the screen, which can have a huge impact on certain area effect spells. Characters this time around have a more robust selection of skills, but they certainly still fulfill defined roles such as healing, magical damage, status attacks, and so forth. One oddity is that Lucia herself is not controlled by the player, but by the computer. For the beginning of the game this is inconvenient as she often just stands around and does very little, but later in the game her AI improves and she heals or does magical damage as necessary.
Since the dungeons are a relatively brisk affair, they overall main story of Lunar 2 will take a bit over 30 hours to complete. However, players are given the option of continuing their game for a follow-up ending, adding a good 10 hours or so across about six dungeons that feature slightly stronger enemies than those found in the main portion of the game. Still, the balance is pretty good, as any player with prior experience in RPGs should have no problem managing their resources throughout dungeons, and the save anywhere feature sure helps as well.
Being a remake of a Sega CD game, Lunar 2 maintains the 2D graphics of the original, though they were certainly touched up to be sharper and more colorful. The benefit of this is that games from late in the 2D era have certainly aged better graphically than the early 3D offerings. Each major character has a character portrait in their text boxes in order to convey their emotions. The FMV cutscenes are done in an anime style, and make for great character introductions and wonderful plot twists. Unfortunately a good chunk of the soundtrack is directly recycled from the previous game, but both the old and the new tracks are good and convey the situational moods well. The voice acting during the cutscenes are rather good for the era, but some of the combat lines can get rather repetitive during the duration of the game.
Much like its predecessor, Lunar 2 is greater than the sum of its parts and has just about everything you could want from a JRPG. A charming story, a delightful cast of characters, a great fantasy world, and a competent battle system all combine to make Lunar 2 a masterpiece on the same level as the first Lunar. While some of the more modern JRPG's might be a better choice if you rarely play games in the genre or demand the flashy production values found after Final Fantasy VII changed the RPG landscape, diehard fans of the genre simply cannot miss the two Lunar games.