Thanks to Number One Lufia Fan Sinrevi for scanning these pages from various Estpolis books and guides. Here we have some 3koma (3 panels as opposed to the usual 4), 4 of them relating to Estpolis Denki/Lufia & The Fortress of Doom and 6 for Estpolis Denki 2/Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals/Lufia.
Knowledge of the games probably helps and knowledge of Japanese culture and language is also useful for a couple of these: for example, knowing how strict they are with sorting waste is important for the gag with Lexis, and one joke is simply untranslatable due to a distinctly Japanese pun (so I sort of left it and explained it in a sidebar note). Also, the North American version of Lufia 1 has a stuffed pig item which in the Japanese version is a monkey.
Anyway I translated these into English myself so that Western Lufia fans could appreciate them. Please share them! Remember, read right to left. And if you know about any more comics you’d like me to translate, let me know!
So now I’ve played all the Lufia games. This one was very good, just tweaking the formula of the series while inhabiting the Game Boy Color very well. Let’s start with my understanding of the development of the game.
At one point there was a prequel to Lufia 2 being made for the GBC. There were also plans to produce a sequel called Ruins Chaser set several hundred years in the future, to be released on the PS1 (more here and here). After its publisher folded, Neverland had to scrap these plans and made an alternate sequel on the GBC, also scrapping the “younger Maxim” game to make way for this game. As it stands, this is the final game in the continuity and although it’s not a definitive conclusion (it ends much like Lufia 1), it’s satisfying. (EDIT: There’s no evidence the prequel would have been about Maxim, that was just speculation I read and accepted.)
The plot is pretty familiar: Sinistrals appear and each one harasses a particular continent in their own way (this aspect is done well in this game), a hero with red hair and a mysterious heroine with blue hair gather allies to combat the threat, there’s an airship, and a twist in the tail that is by now no surprise because it’s the same every time. (That doesn’t stop it being emotionally impactful, though.) There’s a total of 12 playable characters + 1 secret bonus dragon, so characterisation is perhaps spread more thinly, but each one is distinctive and likeable despite (or in some cases because of) the silly translation quirks.
Having so many characters is handled well for gameplay purposes; unlike something like a modern Final Fantasy or Chrono Cross with a plethora of characters but only a few slots, you go into battle with a grid of nine. The grid is important as each column gets one action per turn, but you select which character in the column takes that action depending on the circumstance. This allows for flexibility that is greatly appreciated. There’s also a sort of elemental stat in four colours that each character embodies, and they contribute that stat to others in their row or column. This informs stat bonuses and also what IP skills they can use. It all sounds complicated but you quickly get your head around it and it allows for deep customisation and ultimately a good RPG experience.
On the other hand, we have the dungeoneering which in this game is completely randomly generated. Gone are the puzzle dungeons of Lufia 2, but there’s still wandering monsters and interactions: cutting bushes with your sword, finding hidden treasure in walls, and a longe-range stunning attack to ambush enemies. It’s just that every floor of every location, while looking different, will end up playing the same. If you view it as less brain-intensive dungeon crawling the repetition can be almost relaxing, at the expense of challenge. It also means the end-game optional mega-dungeon, the Ancient Cave, is just the same as the usual game—but in this case, it’s even bigger and with better rewards.
So what we have is a colourful and deep 8-bit RPG with a wicked awesome chiptune soundtrack, a sometimes laughably poor localisation, repetitive dungeons, pleasingly economical use of a limited-pixel display, and a unique battle system. That’s Lufia 3, a gem on the GBC and in my opinion, worth your time. It takes time too, the random dungeons really pad out the experience, but as long as you can mentally switch gears for those sections there’s a lot to like. You can see another review and official art here, and here’s some alternate official art thanks to the ever-reliable Lufia superfan Sinrevi.
For my final Lufia/Estpolis pixel art, here’s the characters from the cancelled Lufia III for Playstation, called Ruins Chaser. It was to be set further into the future, with a bit more of a modern spin on the usual Sinistral formula. Even though the game never got beyond concept stages, it had some nice-looking character concepts. My favourite’s Lily, how about you? Although I like how Cion and Cecil turned out here. More information on the game here and here.
Lufia: The Legend Returns, low-detail pixel style!
As expected of a Lufia/Estpolis game, the characters are fun and I’ve become attached to them. It’s impressive to have a cast so large and for so many to still be useful. Their designs especially are cool, lots of unique colours which makes them interesting to draw. Plus, you get a dragon in your party!!
This is the point at which playing the Lufia games in chronological order falls down. You see, this is the first game in the series in terms of production. As it turns out, many of the elements that made Lufia 2 unique and interesting, such as visible encounters, puzzles, a rotating roster of characters, the IP meter, etc. were all implemented first in that game. What does that leave this first instalment? A pretty generic RPG, unfortunately.
The plot and characters do approach the level of Lufia 2, albeit much simpler here. The writing is still good, even though the forced jealousy between Lufia and Jerin rankled more than Tia and Selan’s rivalry. There’s a good range of spells and items to spice things up, although I mainly just attacked to keep things moving quicker. There’s still a huge world to explore. It’s just that it seems a little primitive with its random encounters and clunky menus.
I even found myself in retrospect appreciating some of the things Ruins of Lore did, with its dynamic events, its take on the map screen and exploration, and its visual variety. In Lufia 1 (and 2 for that matter) you end up with a long list of towns on your warp list that all look very similar when you get into them. It’s a problem a lot of old-school RPGs had, unfortunately.
It’s too bad I found so much that compared unfavourably to the sequels, because playing the game is fine in the moment. There is a lot of repetition though, and RPG busywork. It ends up feeling like it’s dragging. Ah, what would I have thought as a youth had I sought out RPGs instead of platformers and found this first (impossible given it wasn’t released in Australia ever)? But I played Lufia 2 first, which simply exceeds this in every way. I suppose if you are looking for a strictly old-school style game without the action and puzzle elements, a more simple and basic game, this could be the ticket?
As it is, what I took away from this most was seeing all those bits and pieces that would be called back to in later games. The Ancient Cave in Ruins of Lore is based on this game’s version, and there are lots of little references that in retrospect tie it in closer to the series, as well as events in Lufia 2 that are inspired by this game. Not to mention character archetypes that are set up here. Although I was a bit puzzled to see that—I think—none of the towns are carried over to either 2 or RoL? Odd. Well, given all that I’m really dying to play the final game in the series: The Legend Returns on GBC. It’s the only Lufia game on the Virtual Console, and I’m happy to buy it even though I won’t have the emulator’s turbo button that helped so much in this game (although not as much as in the slower GBA one).
Oh and I finally met Lufia in this game; spoilers, but there is kind of a good reason the series is named that despite Lufia herself only appearing in this one game—Curse of the Sinistrals convinced me that the whole series is really Erim’s story. At least this one had a happy ending.
I’m playing through this now. The characters are quite well written (aside from the aggravating forced jealousy), but the protagonist has no canonical name. The character designs as seen on the game’s two cover arts are indistinct; these drawings are based on the art made for the 2009 rerelease on mobile phones in Japan. You can see it here by clicking the portraits. There’s official art elsewhere (like strategy guides) but it’s hard to find.
miloscat asked: Sinrevi, you're the biggest Lufia fan I know. What can you tell me about Energy Breaker and its connections to the Lufia/Estpolis series?
The most obvious one is Lufia herself (with Roman) making a cameo in the ending of the game, while the track Priphea Flowers plays.
At one point of the game you can’t enter a basement you need to go into to progress the storyline. To get permission to enter,a NPC makes you plant a flower seed she created (she couldn’t get it to grow herself, she says it only blooms after getting alot of sunlight.) When you get to grow the flower it shows up as Priphea Flower in your inventory. (The main character grows it by planting it in a sunny spot and then uses a time machine to pick the flower in the future, then travels back in time to give the flower)
Then you can also get the Dual Blade in the game. There was a cutscene where someone (Selphie? sorry forgot who, it’s been a while since I played) purifies the air of either the island or the whole world with something. You can’t pull out whatever the object is, but returning to the dungeon later and trying to pull it out again reveals it’s Dual Blade.
I’m now playing the Lufia games in chronological order, so the last game made in the previous continuity is actually the second to play (I played Lufia 2 a few years ago). It’s supposed to be around 20 years after Maxim & co’s initial confrontation with the Sinistrals. This event is alluded to in Ruins of Lore’s intro but is barely ever brought up in the game; the only thing that places it is the presence of Dekar. This game is a sidestory and named as such in Japan, and it shows.
The plot has no bearing on the overall series; fair enough too, as it’s a different team to the one who made every other Lufia game. As a result it feels a little off, like it was made as a cash grab. A lot of elements are here: enemies, items, adventure aspects in the dungeons, a few songs. But it also tries several interesting new things, which is not a detriment in itself.
Any monster can potentially be captured and used as a party member; I never used them much because they replace a regular member, and why would I want that? The mechanics around using the monsters are very confusing, and were left largely untapped by me, but I didn’t feel the loss. It sometimes feels like party members are forced out in the early stages simply to leave you with an open spot to fill with these—boo!
Speaking of poorly explained things, again the plot. I had no idea what was going on half the time, we traipsed around half the world, seemingly happening upon magic stones that we then used at the end to get to some ill-defined magical realm to confront a vague threat. The cliche anime-style set-up of ten year olds passing a test to get a monster hunter’s license also put me off. Much of it was not in keeping with what I expected in a Lufia game, unfortunately.
Traversal is fairly unique, as each route between towns is a kind of dungeon in itself, and once completed becomes a fast travel location from the world map. Since you hop around so much it works well.
This game implements a job system to acquire skills. I picked one for each of the three who could get one (why not Bau?) and stuck with it for the whole game. So another mechanic that seemed unnecessary that I didn’t fully utilise. I had no trouble with difficulty by the way, except for the very final boss which takes a huge spike upwards. So there are some balance issues. Battles are also very slow and without my emulator’s turbo button (this game has never been released in my region, as with the first Lufia) I would have given up on the whole thing. Add on to this a clunky menu system and you can see how it approaches mediocrity.
Which is a shame, because there’s a fair bit to like. The areas, towns, and enemies have colour and character (despite a lack of recurring antagonist apart from the vague evil empire which you infiltrate no sweat). Dungeons are decent with each character having skills to help you through. It’s just that it doesn’t hang together so well.
All in all, I’d only recommend it if you have a turbo button. The Lufia-ness is about half of the game’s identity, with the other half being a range of other good and ill-formed ideas and tropes. It’s a decent RPG in its own right, but on a system overflowing with great ones like Golden Sun, the Final Fantasy remakes, and even Mother 3. Plus Dekar was a little underused, and they set him up with a young dancer girl! Quite a rude shock after the lovely relationship with Tia in Curse of the Sinistrals. Poor Dekar, he should get his own game that’s not this one.
I’m still playing through this game currently. Enjoying the different things it’s doing and the ties to the greater series. One complaint is that it spends too long without the best characters: Bau and Dekar. And yes Dekar is ported here directly from my Lufia 2 picture because his look is essentially unchanged in this game.
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…
Oh, interesting that even this stuff was mirrored in the Netherlands too. I wouldn’t impose to ask you to scan the whole thing in (it’s too late anyway) but could you scan the introductory page you mentioned? The German one I mean, since I have more experience with that language. And by the off chance do you also have the special edition for Banjo-Kazooie, Lylat Wars, or Terranigma?
No I only own the Lufia one.
The next two are the last two pages. Also, though it seems like in Germany the comic was a special edition for the Club Nintendo magazine, in the Netherlands you were able to pick up the comic for free in some stores. So the Dutch version of the comic just has another ad for Lufia instead of a page where you can subscribe to the Club Nintendo magazine.
(I’ve bigger versions of the scans, seems like Tumblr shrinks them)
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 intro text; there’s a lot of it over a textured background, and I think the comic contextualises itself pretty well. But there’s some nice Doom Island art, and confirmation in the credits that other artists than CN’s usual contractors Work House Tokyo worked on it, which may explain why the style is quite different to other comics they’ve published. Plus some interesting native info about the distribution from sinrevi. Thank you!
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!)
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).
While I suck at art, apparently if the tools are large enough I can do a passable job. I suppose it’s because when I have less options, it’s easier to do something with it. In fact I’m very happy with this.
In case you have trouble recognising the characters, they are from left to right: Maxim, Tia, Lexis, Iris, Guy, Dekar, Artea.
By the way, I made these to be the credits page art for my next comics project. Maybe a bit pre-emptive because I’m not really ready to start translating it yet!
