Although the SNES has a reputation for being a haven for JRPGs, we didn’t actually own any on ours. Didn’t help that quite a few skipped our entire hemisphere: Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, Super Mario RPG, even Final Fantasy 4 and 6, all never released in PAL. Sure most of that is Square’s fault, looking at the list. My experience of console RPGs was Secret of Evermore, Mystic Quest, and Lufia 2 (none of which have universal random encounters—what a skewed view of the genre I must have had!); all borrowed from friends or played at their houses.

I caught up with a lot of them through emulation later on, and one I was especially pleased to revisit was Lufia 2. It’s got a few good hooks to it, such as finding capsule monsters, the action/puzzle elements, and the optional random dungeon. A lot of the rest was novel to me at the time but on retrospect has been done. Still, the connection was there and the gameplay and story held up for me.

This game is a remake, or rather a reboot of Lufia 2, which is a prequel to Lufia… confusing. It changes the gameplay to action RPG, removes the world map, and streamlines the whole plot, drastically shortening it (no bad thing in my view: it moves along well and hits the important notes). The capsule monsters are gone unfortunately, but a new system is the mystic stone board which lets you power up characters by placing gems on a grid with bonuses and such on it. The customisability was nice and collecting and upgrading gems feels good, but I miss those little friends. Still, they wouldn’t have fit with the gameplay as they reimagined it.

Although the characters have also been redone, they’re all there in the same roles, but tweaked for the better. The writing is really entertaining and the secondary characters are memorable. More importantly, I felt a good connection to the main players, helped by the voice acting which although sparse was well done. I love all those goofs and in fact they inspired me to get into pixel art; scroll back in my blog to see some examples.

The streamlining of the plot helps give it more impact; the story of a pantheon of gods turning against the people of the earth and having a flipped evil nature is scary and effective. Gades serves as the main villain for the first half of the game, there’s a climax, and a lengthy epilogue-type series of scenes, before the characters find out that there are more Sinistrals to deal with. It’s a unique structure and although I knew about the late plot twist, it’s still emotional and the New Game Plus also hinges on it thanks to a nice post-credits scene. The second playthrough contains a few small additional lines sprinkled through the game in addition to an expanded Ancient Cave (the random dungeon I mentioned earlier).

The Ancient Cave is essentially the end-game content, but it’s a bit tedious and when you play for four hours only to fail at floor 99 of 100, it can feel very unfair. But I took up the challenge and I’m happy to say beat it the second time. The combat system is robust enough to sustain essentially four straight hours of dungeon crawling, or I thought so at least. Unfortunately due its nature it doesn’t contain the puzzley bits of the normal dungeons, which were a highlight.

I feel very positive about this game, it’s a real labour of love. The original game’s team got together again to do it, this time under Square Enix. They managed to redo the most popular game in the series very well, albeit with lots of changes, big and small. It’s inspired me to follow up with the series and play the other games; chronologically, of course. I also have opened a new comics project with the 32-page Lufia 2 special from Germany’s official Nintendo magazine, Club Nintendo. Look out for that later. After all, translating comics is the other thing I’m the best in the world at (psst, it’s a quote from Dekar in this game).