My recent playthrough of Lufia DS inspired me to tackle this big project: I scanlated into English a 32-page comic special from 1996, given away (presumably to subscribers) courtesy of Nintendo of Germany’s official magazine, Club Nintendo. (Since NOE’s headquarters is in Germany, they get all the best stuff.)

Since Europe was pretty starved of JRPGs, when one came out I guess they wanted to market it. Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals was released in Europe as simply Lufia, since PAL never got the first game. This comic is mainly serious/action with a few amusing moments, retelling the plot of the game up to the first encounter with Gades in West Gordovan Tower (although some bits are skipped and Guy gets a Dekar scene transferred to him). Tia is great when they let her have some lines, and Foomy gets a whole page to himself.

I like the look of the characters although the faces can look wonky at times. It’s interesting that Guy, whose look has been changed compared to his official artwork, actually looks a lot like his appearance in the reboot, Curse of the Sinistrals. Maxim is blond; go figure. Idura was also combined with Camu in terms of their plots and appearance, to speed up the plot I guess.

While translating this I discovered that the German script has unique names for many of the towns and a few other things. More details are on the credits page, but I changed them to the established English names. Of particular note though are the Sinistrals, who in German are called Höllenfürsten, meaning Princes of Darkness or Lords of Hell. There’s a few Hell references, although the theology is a bit confused with characters exclaiming “My God” but a villager referring to “the gods”. Also on localisation issues, because the art for these comics was done in Japan and sent back to Germany, some signs are labelled in Japanese and were left that way in the original comic.

Anyway overall the comic is very faithful to the game, and a treat for Lufia fans. The dialogue and character interactions are a highlight of the game and hopefully I’ve done that justice. The art is also quite unique. I’d love for some creaky old Lufia fansites to cough out a rare update just for me and my project, hehe! Enjoy! (And check out the comic tag on this blog for more scanlations and video game comics, or the Club Nintendo comics tracking spreadsheet I made!)

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4. miloscat reblogged this from sinrevi and added:

   Thanks to sinrevi, here’s the extra pages from the Lufia comic that weren’t in my scan. I don’t think I’ll translate the...

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12. tofukitten reblogged this from miloscat and added:

    thank you for translating this! i think sinrevi has this too but i don’t think she translated it (just notes, i think)

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