Played with the frue lufia patch:

I'm putting the game on pause for now cuz I actually just lost the energy completely to finish it for the moment lol. You've likely heard of this game from discussions about snes rpgs, where its usually praised as one of the best on the system for its puzzle-focused gameplay and character focused writing. As a kid it was definitely one of the coolest ones I've played, and I was hoping to still love it as much in this current replay. Unfortunatelyyyy I was kind of disappointed with a lot of things about it.

The gameplay is easily the most excellent part about the game. While it has the regular jrpg presentation and turn based combat, all the dungeons have a very heavy emphasis on puzzles. It's all well-designed; a lot of interesting puzzles placed throughout the game that provide a decent challenge without feeling frustrating, with more difficult ones leading to usually quite useful treasure for the journey. Enemies are on-screen and their movement patterns depend entirely on how you move, which is sometimes incorporated into certain puzzles too; its a good way to let you fight enemies at your own pace (for the most part).

Combat is regular turn based just like its predecessors though with some new changes or features to make it more fresh. Most notably, spells are bought from stores rather than learnt, and a new meter, IP, fills up with more damage you get which lets you use skills your equipment has. IP especially adds a nice element to what equipment you want to prioritize for your characters to handle enemies more easily. Unfortunately I do feel attack magic at least is pretty meh especially when you can just rely on IP attacks, and though magic types are restricted to certain characters it largely diminishes any uniqueness a character would have from learning spells naturally or not having enough spells only specific to them (rip maxim). Speaking of, playable party members often switch in and out during the game, but generally the party structure has two physical type characters and two magic type characters.

Capsule Monsters are a new feature, they're basically pets you can find to help you in battle. This is one the features I loved a lot as a kid but now its just kind of weirdly frustrating and not so worth it. You need to feed them equipment to evolve them and that can take a lot of time and money to achieve, and some of them also don't have particularly helpful ai from what i noticed (hi blaze). Its just ok, idk.

Ancient Cave is another major feature where its like a game within a game, you explore 100 randomly generated floors fighting through monsters and getting various treasure. Its probably one of the most fun parts of the game and postgame lets you try it with any party team as well.

The game has amazing graphics and a fantastic ost. Love them to bits, definitely would say best of the system.

The story of the lufia series is typically pretty generic in that you're a chosen one that needs to defeat the evil beings to save the world yadda yadda and this much is true for lufia 2. It provides some extra lore details when it comes to its villains, the sinistrals, which is neat and makes me want to see it being expanded upon. The worst part is probably just how everything devolves into a fetch quest of some sort as you reach a new city, find out there's something wrong, go to next dungeon to retrieve something or find someone, blah blah. Its what made put the game on pause, I got really tired of it.

Regardless, the real strength of the series' writing normally lies in its character writing. Both lufia 1, 2 and ruins of lore have a good chunk of dialogue of characters chiming in on the story or having banter with each other, and from what little I played of lufia 3, it does so as well. It's pretty charming and keeps me engaged with the story.

But, well.

On this replay I really wasn't all that into the character writing lol. While some characters were always a joy to see and ended up being great, others would just frustrated or annoy me. Since the character writing is primarily with the playable ones, I'll go over them briefly to show what I liked and didn't like:

Tia: the best character for me, easily. She's somewhat of a pitiful and even pathetic character who's deeply devoted to her childhood crush, Maxim, to the point that she joins his journey and tries to keep up with him with all the fighting and danger, despite her love being unrequited. Ultimately, she has her character growth in realizing that she just isn't cut out for battle, that she needs to move on from her unrequited love and live her own life, while Maxim continues his own. I always was moved by her story and still am now; to some extent i resonate with the theme of eventually losing contact with childhood friends as well as the importance of not forcing yourself to do something you know you cant do, and realize life has more than one possibility. Maybe I'm overthinking it? Idk, but I really like Tia.

Artea: This guy is a weird one for me cuz I was for no apparent reason obsessed with him. I really don't understand why, but I do still quite like him even if he's not particularly that interesting.

Dekar: Funny and boisterous. He ends up being very entertaining with interesting banter to boot with Guy. I dont really have much else to add, lol. He's a fun guy. Also love how strong he is, even if he's the slowest in gameplay.

Guy: He's kind of boring, especially when he doesn't really have anyone to banter with like Dekar or Artea. He also displays a chauvinistic attitude at times which bugs me, even if expected. He also starts feeling underwhelming in gameplay too, especially when compared to Dekar even though both characters present themselves as the hard hitting types.

Lexis: he's. there. Lexis is an eccentric inventor who can be kinda funny but he doesn't really have much of a presence for most of the time he's in your party. He prevents pollution, i guess.

Maxim and Selan are the two characters I have the most beef with so expect this part to be even longer. Maxim is kind of just bare bones in general that I can't really describe his personality other than hero dude that has a talent for fighting loves to fight and has a strong sense of justice yadda yadda. What particularly annoys me about him is how dense he seems to be to Tia's advances and ultimately doesn't really have any sort of final talk with her or anything (and seemingly may have just lost contact with her entirely). This is great for tia's character but also manages to make Maxim worse in my eyes. The dense male character that doesn't understand a female character is in love with him is a pretty regular trope, i just don't like it much in this case. Another annoying trait he displays is his chauvinistic attitude, particularly at an important point in the story, where he refuses to take Tia and Selan with him to fight Gades with seemingly vague reasoning of wanting them to not risk their lives and help the citizens of Parcelyte evacuate. While I can understand saying this to Tia, it's particularly bad with Selan (more on that later) considering we're to believe she's an incredible warrior despite her gender, according to the story, so not wanting her to accompany him just comes across weird. IDK. I had more thoughts on this before but now im just like this dude kinda sucks when it comes to women and pretty blank otherwise.

Selan is pretty disappointing, especially for the latter half of the game as well as how her performance in gameplay contradicts how the writing shows and describes her in the story. She's depicted as the leader of her kingdom's army as well as its best warrior, and we see her being physically strong as well. Her gameplay does not reflect this at all besides letting her equip swords, as she's primarily a magic-focused character whose battle sprite depicts her signature weapon as a staff. It ends up making it hard to believe how the writing presents her at all as a result because in action she is nothing like that. Her character arc is about accepting the help of others which is fine and all but the attempt at it makes it feel more like her role as a capable leader and fighter gets diminished the more she journeys with Maxim (insert scene where she's asked to not accompany him to fight gades womp womp). The worse is that after she marries Maxim, her role almost entirely reduced to being Maxim's wife. She's there for him and supports him all the way and then Guy makes a joke calling her the "Magical Wife'' and I'm just like are u ok? are we just not gonna acknowledge her previous feats or her skills are we just gonna consider her the mage that is the wife of the protag its eujbnkrgnkfgn I'm very annoyed. I used to really like Selan and now it just feels like she was an interesting character that ultimately got reduced into one specific role catering to her romantic partner. Ugh idk

Idk when I'll continue but I don't think most of this review will change, I'll update regardless for anything else worth mentioning. I'd still recommend giving this game a try, overall its still a fun jrpg to play.

Lufia II was one of the later games released on the SNES. Despite the release date, it's graphically unimpressive and looks worse than a lot of SNES RPGs released the same year. It doesn't try to be a Chrono Trigger or an FF6, and it doesn't need to be.

The highlight of this game, especially for me, is its dungeons and puzzles. They're basically just better Zelda dungeons, to be honest. You're given tools throughout the game, and the game design will make great use of them throughout the whole journey. There are also a ton of branching pathways with treasure chests, which, for the most part, have very useful items for your party. I can't stress enough how incredible the head-scratchers are in this game, though. I've yet to find an RPG that even holds a torch to this game in that regard.

This game has an interesting equipment system. Not only do I have to decide which equipment has the best stat allocations for the characters, but there is an IP system in which some equipment pieces will have a special move that you can pick from when your IP meter is charged from taking damage in battle. There are many variables for equipment to take into account in the form of rings and rocks, which all raise different stats and have their own special move most of the time. This game also has shops to learn magic instead of getting spells from leveling up. I like this because I have to choose which character most needs certain spells to not waste all my money. In addition to party members, there is a new type of member called capsule monsters. There are 7 to collect in the game, and you can evolve all of them by feeding them equipment, items, or whatever they desire in the form of a menu telling you what to feed them. This was fun, as they could all help out a bit in their respective manners.

My only complaint about Lufia II is that the characters and story are really boring. The pacing is bad later on in the story, as it starts to get really repetitive and the characters are not interesting at all. They don't get any development for the most part, instead substituting for bad humor in the cutscenes. The gameplay more than makes up for it though!

My favorite SNES game, without a doubt. It's a shame that this series kind of gets neglected now, only getting a mid remake on the DS in 2010. The series as a whole isn't very good, to be honest, with this being the only one worth playing, and it is very much worth playing.

The biggest issue with Lufia I was how redundant is was past its 5 first hours, being stuck with its long chain of fetch quests which hardly related to the main story, which is a shame considering how nice the dialogues were when they were any.

Lufia II, its prequel, feels like it understood in more ways than one how monotonous the first game was. It feels like every improvements and changes made to this game was an answer to this, and I can't help but compare them.

A lot more dialogues, better characterization, dungeons with actual level design obviously borrowed from ALTTP and no more random encounters inside them, etc, etc.. This game screams "We don't want you, the player, to be bored".

And for the most part, it works. As I said, the dungeons are the obvious exemples of these changes. You have access to tools in order to progress in rooms filled with puzzles in contrast to the aimless roaming in Lufia 1, meaning surviving isn't the only goal now, you actually get rewarded for thinking hard enough, with better equipments or even Capsule Monsters, which are additionnal party members you can't control but can come handy. Thanksfully, no random encounters mean you can move around and solve these riddles without too much worries, a change that may seems obvious today but clearly shows hindsight for the time it was released. You still alternate between towns and dungeons to move the story forward, but now it feels less like a chore and more like " I'm looking forward to the next dungeon " for most of the time. In term of design, some of these puzzles can be tedious, but that's not the majority, especially considering how Lufia II is the first JRPG to my knowledge with dungeons like this.

Lufia I and II share the same structure too, but there's much more dialogues now, stuff I would consider boring fetch-quests in Lufia 1 are now funny little antics making me grow attached to the characters (it's always funny to see Guy and Dekar interact), balancing the more serious and touching bits of the story. Not to mention if you played Lufia 1, you know how the story will end, it's interesting to see how the game try to bait us with characters that come and go in your party, before the final confrontation against the Sinistrals mirroring the brilliant intro of Lufia 1.

With all that being said, man am I glad to have played the first Lufia before this one. In its quest to be a more pleasant experience than its predecessor, I can't help but think some things were lost. Take the battle system, I actually really liked how you had to think before acting in Lufia I because of the game choosing for you which ennemy you will hit when targeting a specific group, combined with the game not changing target when hitting a dead ennemy. Don't get me wrong, Fortress of Doom was a tedious grindfest 50% of the time, but when that was done, random encounters were actually dangerous and fun. In Lufia II, the battle system was streamlined to something more traditionnal, you can target ennemies precisely with no downsides whatsoever like most JRPGs at the time, and while the IP system giving special abilities depending on your equipment is an interesting idea, in practice, battles are far easier and somewhat more boring than in the first game. An other thing to consider is that the progression is way more linear than Lufia 1, you simply won't get lost most of the time. It's not like the first game wasn't linear too, but you could visit 2 or 3 towns simultaneously in some parts, which is just not the case in Rise of the Sinistrals. Personally, I like getting lost in JRPG, it gives a slower pace and feels like time is actually passing, making some relationship and events more credibles. Everything in Lufia 2 might happens a bit too quickly for my taste, such as how Selan fall in love with Maxim.

I don't want to spend too much time comparing the two games, but I wanted to give some response to the " skip Lufia 1 and play Rise of the Sinistrals ". In most parts, Lufia 2 is clearly the better game, but I feel like sometimes it lacks a bit of atmosphere in order to lives up to the " hidden gem" status i've read a lot. Maybe I wouldn't have minded spending a little less time in dungeons in exchange for more interesting events happening in towns or the worldmap.

Still, Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals was a solid experience, and I was pleasantly surprised with how much the developpers really wanted the players to have a good time with this title, whever it's for its fun mecanics or its extremly charming writing. I didn't even mention the Ancient cave, a 99 randomly generated levels dungeon in which your party is reset to level 1 with no equipments in the beggining. Yes, a totally optionnal roguelike in your 1995 JRPG.

Anyway, if you like JRPGs of this era, it's still a must play, but try to finish Lufia I before.

the characters actually talk like characters in a story now, much more compelling than the dialogue in most of the other rpg’s from this era. the music moved me. the sleeping jingle sounds like it couldve been a sample in that terrible soundcloud era from 6-7 years ago but i don’t mean taht in a bad way. my fav songs are the boss battle song, the overworld song, narvick song, ship song, underwater song, the song for the gades fight , the final dungeon song, and town song. no order. the ending song is a goddamn rnb babymaking hit.

arriving at the city of aguero was genuinely shocking and i felt more strongly than i ever expected to feel from a random snes rpg i picked up absentmindedly.

the puzzles were for the most part easy enough to solve and they made me feel smart for solving them but sometimes there were those that i had to look up solutions for. but tbh i actually had a lot of fun figuring out the solutions to these puzzles. way more fun doing that than anything else. can’t believe im saying that.

i also always love a rpg without random encounters. i mean there’s random encounters in th overworld but not that many. in the dungeons you can strategically avoid battles if you just don’t feel like fighting.

i also love how the capsule monsters work in combat. a lot like the pets in adventure quest in that you can’t control them, although they can be attacked and killed, but it’s good bc it distracts the enemy and they always respawn. i had jelze the entire time and he ended up getting a crazy attack that dealt 1k damage and a shitty ass attack that did 9 damage. guess which one he used every single time.

unfortunately, as with most rpg’s of this era, not a lot of thought is put into the towns. they all basically have the same culture and architecture and talk the same and conveniently every next stop on your adventure has a shop that sells weapons slightly better than the ones you have now. stuff like that kinda breaks my immersion. dragon quest does similar things but i am more forgiving of those games bc of how much i love them and also how storybookish the whole thing is.

lufia 2 is not the same. it, like pretty much every snes rpg, overstays its welcome several stops before the end. by the time you’ve done the same thing a hundred billion times, you get kind of tired.

it’s weird, i found myself relishing the time spent solving puzzles and dreading the grinding and combat. usually it’s the opposite. i hate puzzles and i love grinding cuz i love to see numbers go up but i guess my relationship to both have changed. i think dark souls broke me. ever since playing that game, grinding and combat in games has felt so different to me. it sucks cuz in lufia 2 the last few dungeons are all combat no puzzles. in a zelda game i would be jumping for joy.

i also started to dread talking to villagers and npc’s towards the end. that’s usually my favourite thing to do in an rpg game and in lufia it’s very good about giving characters personalities that stick in your mind and in your heart. the 2 guys who have a crush on selan in parcelyte. the 2 boys who bully the girl. the old lady who’s mad she didn’t get abducted by the villain. but even still, the fatigue this game put on me made me dread even those interactions i cherished at the beginning