CGA-2026-07 🕹️🔥⚔️ REMOVE CARTRIDGE ⏏️ Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals

CGA Announcement: We have officially ejected the cartridge for Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals.

This topic is for people to share their parting thoughts and experiences. Spoilers are NOT required to be hidden for this topic, so if you're reading this before you've finished, be careful about reading any comments here.

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I actually really enjoyed this one, though I did only play for three hours and fifteen minutes, according to my save file.

This is my first experience with Lufia and I am very typically not a fan of JRPGs, with a handful of exceptions. Upon first starting the game and seeing the art style, I really didn't expect much of this one and went in thinking, "Oh, another one of these.", but ended-up pleasantly surprised.

I very much enjoyed the combat in this game; I was expecting something akin to Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy, but it felt decently different and each encounter I did felt pretty fun and interesting. I also very much enjoyed the music and I think the battle music will be stuck in my head for quite a long time.

One other thing that very much pleasantly surprised me was being able to see the enemies before I encountered them. One of my biggest bugbears with the genre is random battles and in Lufia, it felt like I could avoid them if I wanted to or, most often, engage the enemies. Going into any given room, it felt like there was life there for lack of a better term and not just an empty dungeon with random battle screens. I really, really liked that about this one.

Ultimately, as much as I enjoyed it, I'm probably good on this one and don't think I'll be continuing and have no real desire to go back to it. It just isn't my style of game, but again, I very much did enjoy what I played of it.

Hmm! I thought I'd be behind here, since I started a little late and then was occupied with business travel and illness. But reading through the comments, maybe I got farther than everyone but @zod000?

Anyway, my last play session ended at the door to the Tower of Sacrifice. So I basically got far enough to see the time skip, the aftermath of that, and then get access to the Ancient Cave and finally make it to the eastern continent. My party's around level 31-33ish after just under 14 hours played. (So I didn't get to the end like I'd hoped or even surpass my original playthrough from the early 00's where I'd got up to level 50ish after 20 hours, I think. But that's okay; I can still finish on my own time at some point.)

Probably the most interesting thing of my play through was beating the first Gades fight (which you're scripted to lose) at the top of Gordovan West Tower with a level 25 max party and everyone alive at the end. Granted, it took liberal use of emulator save state scumming to allow for some precognition on where to target my healing each round. But I did it!

Some things I enjoyed, or at least thought was ahead of it's time:

• Visible enemies instead of random battles.
  • I had this in my DQ 11 XS playthrough this spring, but for a 90's game, this was ahead of its time. I feel like random battles create a tension between exploration and going straight to the exit when you find a path. You can continue exploring every nook and cranny searching for loot, but it's surely going to cost party resources in MP and potions. Going forward conserves those resources, but then you miss loot and XP. Visible enemies mean that I'm not penalized for exploration. If I backtrack to see what's at the end of a path I haven't gone down yet, I can just choose to skip fights I've already done.
• Snappy battles, where each round takes just seconds.
• The D-pad menu for actions in battle is pretty cool.
  • I feel like I might have seen that in some other JRPG at some point too, but I thought it was well done here. I remember pie menus were a fad back in the mid-late 90's, so I'm guessing that was some inspiration here.
• Spells can be focused or split freely.
  • Even beyond just single-target vs. target all, it was nice to be to say, mark just two party members for heals.
• I can click a button on any spell, equipment, or item to get a description of it and what it does.
• Auto-equip option when purchasing equipment.
• Stats comparison to current gear when considering equipping or purchasing.
• Capsule monsters as free damage sponges and minor damage dealers or healers.
  • Though I wish they had even a rudimentary AI! The actions seemed consistently random, leading to things like the cupid repeatedly wasting turns casting Restoration to dispel status effects on characters who didn't need it.
• Sinistral boss battle music!
• The puzzles in the dungeons were kind of fun. Good variety, and nice little challenges to add some spice in between the battles.
• Fast travel!
• Surprisingly decent dialogue for the required terseness
  • Yeah, not perfect. But given the large font, they were fairly constrained on how many words they could fit on the screen, and I felt like it was pretty coherent, given that limitation. Part of this, though, might have been colored by playing Aria of Sorrow last month, where I felt like I was getting only have the dialogue from the translation, given the number of non-sequiturs.
• Buffs and debuffs show you the numbers for the stat changes.

Some negatives

• Repetitive plot structure!
  • Go to town, get sent to tower or cave to retrieve plot coupon, defeat boss at top or bottom for said plot coupon, return to town to turn in, advance to next town. Rinse and repeat. It was starting to feel a bit like a shaggy dog story. I feel like the SNES-era Final Fantasies do better here with the variety of settings for the dungeon equivalents and the excuses for going through them. Mountain passes! Rivers! Enemy encampments! Spooky forests! Psychopomp trains (suplex, LOL)! Ghost ships! Volcanoes! Ancient temples! Etc.
• Simplistic environmental sprite work
  • It wasn't bad per se; I'd call it more serviceable. But it reminded me mainly of Final Fantasy Mystic Quest (1992) or maybe Final Fantasy V (1992), more so than a 1995 late SNES-era game that came after Final Fantasy VI (1994).
• Forgettable towns
  • I think the combination of repetitive plot structure, similar seeming dungeons (mostly towers and caves) led to me to start forgetting which town was which. About the only one that really stood out so far was Parcelyte, because you kept returning to help them and the main character settled there with another character before the time skip. But almost none of the towns seemed particularly different in character from the others. Compare that, to say, Narshe from FF6. You think of Narshe and you remember the ice and the snow drifts, the cliffs and the mines, the wintry dark outside contrasting with the warm lights of the interiors, the ponderous music and the howling wind sound. That town had character! Then consider the moving castle town of Figaro, the super sketchy Zozo, noble castle Doma, dystopian industrialized magicpunk Vector, etc. - each with its own unique and memorable character.
• Magic feels underpowered
  • I think I'm used to games where magic tends to be big and powerful, but fairly costly until late game. So it can still be worth it to have your magic users swing their staves or whatever. Here, though, it felt like magic wasn't too costly, but it was pretty underwhelming. Often when having my magic user cast their most expensive offensive spell on a boss, it still did less damage than my physical damage dealers did swinging their weapons. As often as not, that tended to mean the magic users were relegated to being heal bots during the biggest fights and it usually wasn't worth bothering with an occasional offensive spell if should be ahead on healing. And if any of the enemies had particular elemental weaknesses, I never really noticed. The elements on the spells didn't seem to make an appreciable difference. It felt like the element of the spells only made cosmetic graphical differences.

Anyway, despite my complaints, I've still enjoyed my time playing it and I'd like to beat it one day. And maybe even try the Ancient Cave.

Sadly, I wasn't able to play this month's game but it won't stop me from weighing in on what I remember. I puzzles in this game were far more abstract than I remember other SNES titles being. Also, having a story that plays out before the original game was also great.

Be it Zelda, Phantasy Star or Lufia, there's something magical and ancient feeling about ordinary people fulfilling a cosmic destiny by taking on a known foe that comes around once a generation.

I drifted away from Lufia II pretty early on. I think I played for about 6-7 hours. Some of it was backtracking and a part of it was grinding early on to be able to beat the fish in the cave.

I can definitely understand why some people love the game so much, but I can also see why it isn't more popular. Personally, I found it (well, the beginning of it) interesting in its unevenness. The highs were quite high, but there were also many aspects that annoyed me. Ultimately, it was the repetition, both in the gameplay and the music, that made me stop playing.

The music in particular. While some of the soundtrack is excellent, there were bits that I developed a very visceral negative reaction to. And unfortunately, they were the tunes that I kept hearing the most: the dungeon music and the battle music. For some reason, the repetition in the dungeon theme in particular drove me absolutely nuts.

But Lufia II got me thinking about jrpgs again, a genre that I have never been all that comfortable with. And through that process, it accomplished something that no other title has: I finally booted up Final Fantasy VII. A game that I have heard so much about over the years, but which I had never tried. I thought it could help me understand why my relationship with jrpgs is what it is.

I didn't find the beginning of FF7 much more interesting than Lufia II. As with Lufia II, I felt I was being pushed forward in a pre-determined story, with game mechanics little more than an excuse to tell that story, rather than the story serving the game experience. And while there is nothing objectively wrong with that, it's just not all that enjoyable for me as I rarely find video game stories interesting. They just aren't the kind of stories I would seek in other forms of narrative media. And neither are they typically told in ways that I would find very exciting. For some reason, most games just try to be films or books, but films and books are so much better at being films and books.

I then remembered that FF7 is currently being remade into a trilogy games. And since I had just reached the point in Final Fantasy VII where the first Final Fantasy VII Remake ends, I decided to continue the story in the new trilogy's second part, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, which came out a couple of years ago.

This was an interesting experience because it made me appreciate both the original Final Fantasy VII and Lufia II more. Not that there is anything objectively wrong with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. By all accounts, it is a very well made game, at least based on what I have played. But it doesn't solve the main issue that I have with these games: the feeling that I'm just being pushed around in a theme-park ride through a pre-determined story that doesn't quite interest me, with none of the interactive bits (what I would call the "game") really mattering all that much.

In fact, the new game makes it worse. The way Final Fantasy VII Rebirth tells its story engages me less than what I experienced in the original Final Fantasy VII, or Lufia II for that matter. This puzzled me for a while, but then I realised that it's likely because of the new game's heightened presentational realism.

In the early 1980s, text adventure company Infocom ran an ad claiming that they utilise the world's most powerful graphics technology. In that ad, they pointed out:

You'll never see Infocom's graphics on any computer screen. Because there's never been a computer built by man that could handle the images we produce. And there never will be. We draw our graphics from the limitless imagery of your imagination -— a technology so powerful, it makes every picture that's ever come out of a screen look like graffiti by comparison. And nobody knows how to unleash your imagination like Infocom.

And I don't think it's just graphics. In all sorts of ways, technological limitations that older games faced left more gaps in the end product that my own imagination needs, nay, gets to fill. When I play the original Final Fantasy VII, I imagine it as a grittier, more grown up world than what Final Fantasy VII Rebirth gives me. Text based dialogue always sounds better in my head than what voice actors can produce. Symbolic representation is more meaningful than realism to me. In other words, even if the main story-beats are largely the same, in the original game I have to supply a lot of my own interpretation to join the dots and colour between the lines. Rebirth is of course very likely closer to the original creators' intentions, but I do like my version better.

Like I said, I only played Lufia II for about 6-7 hours. But it actually felt a lot longer. So much seemed to happen. The same is true of the opening section of the original Final Fantasy VII. In roughly seven hours, it had me play an eco-terrorist responsible for untold death and destruction, before plunging me into a world full of sex trafficking, slavery, corporate power dynamics and something of a eugenics program. That's fairly much.

In contrast, I have now played Final Fantasy VII Rebirth for about the same length of time and time seems to have flown much quicker. But not in a good way. It feels like neither the story nor the gameplay has really moved forward. This is partly because of the way Rebirth structures its narration, and also because they have really stretched out the story, but I think also because of what playing these games requires of me. In older games, I am a much more active participant than in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, where much of the time I feel like a passive observer. Fewer things seem to happen to me, fewer memories are generated, and that I guess makes subjective time pass faster. I feel like I'm getting far less out of the remake than I did from the original.

I suspect this is the main reason why I generally find stories told by older video games if not better, at least more memorable than those found in newer titles. In older games, I am a more active participant in the interpretation of what is going on, almost a co-creator, and therefore their stories, or at least the style in which those stories are told and the thoughts that they generate in my brain, are more to my liking.

Having said all that, the Final Fantasy VII remake series seems to be attempting something interesting when it comes to narration, storytelling and the game's relationship with the original game. Or at least there appears to be a level of self-awareness in it of being a remake, baked right into its narration. Whether it develops anywhere interesting, I don't know, as I'm still at the beginning of that second game. But I'm mildly curious to see where it all leads.

I'm sorry I can't really say much more about Lufia II, the game I was supposed to play. But it did lead me to some useful reflections and gave me a better understanding of some things, which I consider a definite win.

Just checking in to say that I'm still working on this one, and so glad that it was recommended! I've made it past the time skip, and am still chugging away happily.

I expected to like this one, but I was surprised at how much it clicked with me right away. Old school RPG plus pets plus puzzles? Oh yeah, that's my style. I also really liked how easy it was to reset the puzzles, so I felt like I could just start going at them and play around to figure them out. I've enjoyed exploring all the dungeons and only got lost a few times. I definitely did some backtracking but I also feel like the ability to avoid monsters OR kill them to gain more xp meant I wasn't as frustrated as in some games where I have to backtrack in dungeons.

I had to consult outside guides as to the capsule monsters, because they really weren't making sense to me as I never seemed to have the right items for them. I didn't mind that they weren't controllable because that's one less button to press, but I didn't like having them be able to flee.

The stuff I have enjoyed the least - I think the sprites are kind of meh for most of the monsters. I find myself sometimes trying to make out what the details are supposed to be, and I suppose they are just not an art style I love. I also found the dialog to be kind of meh and the character development, but maybe that changes in the rest of the game. The time skip had me watching all these scenes and wondering why I'm supposed to care? But that didn't stop me from plunging forward to explore the next dungeon, which I'm going to get back to now!

I am like 99% positive that I rented this game from Blockbuster back in the day as a kid. But I don't remember any of it. Which I guess isn't that unusual; I don't remember every game I ever rented. As such, playing Lufia II this month is basically a completely new experience for me.

Context: I played about 11hrs total. The last place I got to was the tower west of Gordovan, after it just got destroyed. I played the US version via emulator (the new ZSNES emulator is pretty nice btw).

I'll start with two things I liked. The first one is the puzzles. It's a nice way to break up the monotony of moving through a dungeon. While I didn't need a guide for most of the puzzles, there were definitely a few times I was like "Screw it, give me the guide," if I couldn't figure it out after a few attempts. But there was never a time I was exasperated by them.

The other is that I think the game did a good job of explaining what various spells and IP skills (special moves attached to various equipment) do. I feel like games of that era often didn't do that. Like you got a new spell or ability, and really the only way to tell what it did was to use it. If you were lucky, you got a brief though almost cryptic description. But with Lufia II, you actually get stuff like "3 times more damage than normal attack. Effective against enemies vulnerable to ice." Nice! Honestly, sometimes even more modern JRPGs aren't that descriptive!

And those descriptions are super helpful. Case in point, the spell "Poison." What's its description? "Antidote for poison." Wait, wut? Well glad that the descriptions are decent! 😅

On the other hand, I found the dialog to be pretty disappointing. It's super basic. And the little dialog that is there feels forced. Nothing the characters say feels worth remembering. Many times, I just found myself quickly skimming dialog so I could see where to go next.

Additionally, the overall gameplay loop felt pretty basic, too. By the time I got to the tower in Gordovan, I was like, "Again? Another tower already?" I understand that JRPGs have a pattern. Start in town, get quest to save/retrieve person/item, go to dungeon to save/retrieve person/item, head back to town to turn in person/item, then go to next town and do it again.

But it's very in your face here. It doesn't feel very "hidden" underneath the overall story. Hell, where are the sidequests? This is a surprisingly linear game, even for a JRPG. Almost felt like Final Fantasy XIII, where you're just constantly, go, go, go, go, go!

Which got me thinking, "When did this game come out?" Because it feels quite dated. And not just in dialog, but like...everything. Well almost everything. The whole Pokemon-esque thing, which I didn't really understand why it's there, is obviously a bit forward thinking.

Anyway, surprisingly, it was 1995 (released in 1996 for NA). Hmm...Wait, what other games came out around this time?

• Chrono Trigger in 1995
• Super Mario RPG in 1996
• Final Fantasy VI in 1994
• Earthbound in 1994 (1995 for NA)
• Secret of Mana in 1993
• Illusion of Gaia in 1993

Quite the competition. As such, Lufia II feels like it could be a late NES game or super early SNES game (Final Fantasy IV came out in 1991, for example).

Perhaps I need to play more of Lufia II. And I think I will. I probably won't finish it; I don't finish most JRPGs. It's definitely not what I was expecting. I place a lot of emphasis on story, characters and dialog, and world building and lore. And I'm just not really seeing much of that here. Yet, anyway.

Maybe that's why I don't remember playing Lufia II back in the day.

Regardless, great choice by @zod000 and the rest of the community for CGA! I get that Lufia II stands in the shadows of its more well-known peers. But that doesn't mean it's not part of the "JRPG canon." And as someone who really, really enjoys JRPGs, I'm glad to have had the opportunity to play it.

I didn’t finish unfortunately. I got through what I assume to be about the midpoint of the game after saving the world from the apparent big bad.

Lufia II has some great ideas and I think they are generally well implemented but the problem I have with the game is that it is just too mechanical and regimented. While I never felt like I should be spending too much time grinding the overall pattern - going to town, reading some extremely rudimentary dialog, going to a dungeon, rinse and repeat - got incredibly repetitive. The game desperately needed more time with its characters, both in terms of its main party members and the minor ones in town. It was really disappointing to be able to go back to Elcid and hearing all of the NPCs repeat the same dialogue as they did when I first set out! The world has changed just a bit in the entire year I’d been gone! It really illustrated the lack of overall dynamism that even contemporary RPGs were offering. In spite of clearly expending a great deal of budget and effort, it kind of made the game seem like a cut down minimalist gameboy RPG à la SaGa.

I haven't tried to play the original Japanese version (because I likely couldn’t read it), but the localization effort seemed to also be lacking. The default text speed is just a tad too fast, and I wouldn’t want to slow it down simply because the wording is usually awkward in some way and I don’t want to focus on it too much.

But as I mentioned earlier, the mechanics are fantastic. The battles are mercifully short, and even the magic animations are not too long. The game is really well balanced and I’d say combat in general is pretty easy. The puzzles are fairly well designed and don’t feel like they’re “in the way” of the overall experience, and I particularly like being able to shoot monsters in dungeons to walk past them and the challenge of getting them where you want them to be. I’ve got to say though, I really don’t get the capsule monsters. It’s nice to have an extra damage sponge who doesn’t need pampering but they are such a mixed bag and the evolution system is extremely vague and unclear. And what the heck is IP supposed to stand for?

My overall arbitrary rating for this game is a 4.5 out of 10. It’s a mechanically super solid game but it commits the cardinal RPG sin of having a world, characters, and plot which are completely unmemorable. The art and music are very well realized but they don’t stand out much in the echelons of SNES RPGs.