Lunar: Eternal Blue/YMMV


 * 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 any time soon, these questions may never be answered.
 * Lucia really has to be noted here 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.
 * 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.
 * Magnificent Bastard:.
 * Porting Disaster: Not a particularly egregious example, but the PlayStation remake was a port from Sega Saturn, and the conversion left it a bit worse for wear, particularly in terms of audio. The background music was converted into a MIDI-like format during porting, with significant quality loss (though it still sounds quite good on its own). Even the Sega CD version sounds like an orchestral arrange album in comparison (although the actual sound quality leaves a lot to be desired).
 * 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.
 * "Seinfeld" Is Unfunny: Alongside Breath of Fire II. Hard to believe that these games were actually Getting Crap Past the Radar with their Corrupt Church plots. While much Lighter and Softer than Breath of Fire II, it still had that plot in a time when it was uncommon.
 * 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 1990's wouldn't exactly fly today.
 * Suspiciously Similar Song: "Running Hiro" and Yakety Sax.
 * That One Boss: Borgan in Eternal Blue. 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. This was only in the SegaCD version, though. The remake toned down both his speed and damage to the point where he became an Anticlimax Boss to anyone who'd played the original.
 * While Borgan was underwhelming in Eternal Blue Complete, his companion "dragon" (the Black Fiend) ascends to That One Boss status in his place through sheer annoyance. Its speed can beat out Jean (the party's fastest character), and its favorite move, an Affect-All MP drain, tends to "suddenly" (read: only for this attack) be that fast every time. 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.
 * The  fight is like this too. Either you are at a slightly high level for the time of the fight (I was a couple levels lower because I didn't feel like fighting every fight in the rather long dungeon before this fight), and thus have enough firepower to win the fight before this attack happens, or you have to cast White Dragon Protect the turn before a happens--meaning you're either using a guide or you have already been killed by it once. Not sure if defend would work quickly enough to save you, but if it did you'd probably get overwhelmed in trying to recover anyway.
 * They Changed It, Now It Sucks: The remake despite its often very good additions to the story is not proportionally as good as the "16-bit masterpiece" that is the Sega CD original. Long-time fans tend to prefer the older version.
 * And the animation sequences are cheap-looking and make use of CG that was painfully conspicuous even in its heyday.
 * Furthermore, 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. YMMV on which version is better.