The Lunar II That Wasn't

Ah, the Lunar games. Perhaps they're now archaic, but the first and best two introduced many a sheltered American kid to the ways of Japanese RPGs, including that honored convention of setting a sequel hundreds of years after the first game. Lunar II did exactly that, and it abandoned most of the original Lunar's characters in the process.


That wasn't always the plan. GameArts' original ideas for Lunar II: Eternal Blue called for the main cast from Lunar: The Silver Star to return, older and perhaps as supporting characters. That's what some early concept illustrations from Softbank's Lunar I and II artbook show, anyway. I've never seen these online anywhere, so I decided to scan them and finally get some use out of the book. I bought it in Japan during the height of my RPG obsession, after giving up on finding the Xenogears art collection.




Alex, the hero, was a kid with a harp and a fur hat in the first game. For the second, he became a lumberjack and grew one hell of a mullet, while his passive love interest, Luna, started wearing makeup.





Mia looks a lot like she did in the first game. Oh well.



Alex's fat, worthless friend Ramus, who stayed in the party for about five minutes in the first Lunar, got a monocle and cigar for Lunar II. From the look of it, Jessica didn't change much at all.



The book also has illustrations of Nash and Kyle, but they looked exactly like they did in the first game. You can see Kyle drunk and passed out in this storyboard shot. I don't know if it's a planned scene from Lunar II or an unused movie sequence from The Silver Star.



Finally, I scanned this. It could be a discarded idea for a mini-game, but that's...unlikely.