"Walking School"

[LunarRaptor]

This has always struck me as a very odd title. Anyone know why they went with it?

[Leo]

As in you can walk around with it. It's Magic School on Sega Saturn but it's Walking School on Game Gear.

[LunarRaptor]

Oh, right. That never even dawned on me.

[Leo]

Of course you couldn't walk around with it for very long because it's the God damn Game Gear....the archenemy of the double A battery.

[LunarRaptor]

Very true. I never owned one, and I do not regret that fact.

[Leo]

Very true. I never owned one, and I do not regret that fact.

It was basically the early 90's Vita except the games for it weren't intended to help gamers achieve orgasm.

[Sonic#]

The Game Gear Sonic games were a lot of fun, and in graphics and power it was much better than the Gameboy. Until the Color/Advance, I'd rather have had a Game Gear than a Gameboy. The battery life was a limiting factor, but it wasn't as galling to me as it would be today.

Just from what I know of the backstory, I find it interesting that they focus on a magic school on an island (Ien) that isn't Vane, a school that to my memory goes unmentioned in the other games. That presents issues similar to what we were discussing with Dragon Song: the Silver Star is a world that changes so radically between iterations that a lot of unseen nooks and crannies of the world can open up or disappear.

Actually, and this may deserve its own topic, it feels like the geography of Lunar 2 is more bounded. We can use the Dragonship Destiny to cross the water in the second game, whereas the first makes the journey by water automatic. Paradoxically by limiting my movement across water, the first Lunar opens up more to the imagination. Other islands and a vast ocean can exist, certainly enough to support pirates and Meribia's trade, whereas in Lunar 2 the mountain boundaries make the world feel a little more closed.

[Kizyr]

To be a buzzkill here, the main reason for the name was that the school was on a moving, floating island, so the school "walked" around the world like that. "Walking" in the title is an adjective that describes the school itself, not the students or the player.

My own theory is that it's also supposed to be a reference to the "peripatetic" school of philosophy (literal Greek translation is "walking" school), founded by Aristotle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripatetic_school). That might just purely be coincidence, though, since the word for a school of thought is different from the word for a physical school. KF