Over at Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games, the author notes a number of parallels between Lunar: The Silver Star and Lufia and the Fortress of Doom and asks: what's up with that? Well, friends, we've already answered this: it's Ys, as detailed copiously here. Lunar and Ys, as noted by the poster quoted here, shared some personnel, and Lunar took a hell of a lot of Ys's plot points, including the red-haired, sword-swinging hero and the naive blue-haired girl with a yen for him who's really an incarnation of a goddess. As for Lufia, the article asserts that the game began life as a PC-98 title, and it is impossible to overstate in the Japanese PC market around that era how Everything Is Ys or Hydlide (or eroge with curiously-intricate art).

I will note, though, that despite the parallels described by the author of that blog post, I've never found Lunar and Lufia ripoffs of another, really. Part of that is due to some very salient differences in the development of their respective parallel twists, as players familiar with both games will well know. Part of that, though, is What the Stories Are About is very different, and told in markedly different ways. But that...is a story for an upcoming post. (Or a revision of this one? Stay tuned.)