Well I took a while to actually play this game. But I definitely had to check it out no matter what, because it’s a remake of “Lufia 2: Rise of the Sinistrals” on the SNES. Lufia 2 is probably my favorite RPG ever. So of course I wanted to see what they had in store for a remake.

Sure, it’s in Japanese, and I can barely read what’s being said (I can read most of it, except for most Kanji, but I don’t know what half the words mean), so I’m not getting the full experience, but I can still follow a lot of what is going on nonetheless.

Since it’s an import, I can’t actually review it, but I’ll say as much as I can despite the game being Japanese.

So let’s go right away and talk about this thing! Read on!

Story
I’m not too far in the game, about 5 hours in, so I haven’t seen the whole story.
The game follows pretty much the same story as the original Lufia 2. It features the same characters, the same events take place, lots of scenes are taken from the original, and overall it’s not much different story-wise from before. But there are changes. While most of the same events take place, they basically never take place in the same places as the original games, the world’s geography seems sort of different from before, and a lot of areas that exist in the original don’t appear here.

So many events happen in Parcelyte that happened in like 4 other cities before it in the original. Something gets stolen that you have to recover from bandits, you have to save the glassworker, you meet Guy, Guy’s sister gets kidnapped, you get told to find the treasure sword, Gades destroys Parcelyte… all those events, other than getting told to find the Treasure Sword, happened in different cities during the original, but here they all happen in Parcelyte. Not a bad thing, but it’s a bit strange for all those things to happen in the same place.

Other changes includes characters staying in your party (seemingly throughout the game) despite them leaving in the original for various reasons. Tia wasn’t a permanent part of your party, neither was Deckard. Also, Lexis doesn’t join your party, but instead follows you around all the time, and Maxim knows him from the beginning of the game. Another change character-wise is that Iris also follows you around everywhere. In the original she was a cool character because she was mysterious, and she always appeared out of nowhere. This time she’s just always there for some reason… weird and definitely less interesting than before. And Gades not only has his normal human form, but he has various other forms as some kind of monster (the thing you fight at the very beginning), and a giant golem-like monster.

So while the story/characters has some minor changes, it’s still ensentially the same thing… from what I’ve seen. The story was good in the SNES version, and it’s seemingly just as good here. Kinda hard to tell when I can’t actually read most of the dialogues (and there’s a lot of them too)…

Graphics
Obviously a big upgrade. Going from the really nice-looking 2D environments and sprites, to almost as good-looking 3D environments and newly designed characters. Very nice things there, for sure. The areas look great, and the graphic quality is quite good for the DS. Sure, you don’t see the characters’ faces from far away, but that’s because the DS is so limited graphic-wise.

The character design changed is quite big. In the original, all the characters basically had the same “frame”, while here they all look unique. Maxim is basically the same as before with a different suit. Serena (known as Selan in the US) has different hair color/style and looks very different from her SNES incarnation. Guy is like twice the size as before (so much muscles) and he carries around a big hammer. Tia is now red-haired, cuter, and she’s a bit more tomboy-ish looking, which is a huge difference, and she acts differently too. Deckard now has pink hair and looks like the average bishonen… which is weird (at least he’s still stupid). Lexis is older and he looks crazier(he doesn’t join your party this time)… Haven’t seen Artea yet. And Gades looks pretty cool, despite looking like a Ganondorf clone. Haven’t seen any of the other Sinistrals yet.

Fighting
That was one aspect of the game that worried me a bit. The original was a turn-based RPG, and this went for a real-time system? I really wanted to play this just to see what they were planning on doing with the fighting system.

It’s actually quite straight-forward. There’s no seperate screen for battles, so enemies spawn directly on the field. Pressing B jumps. Y does a normal attack, X does a special attack. Pressing A dodges in the desired direction. Holding the R button charges your attack. While charging, pressing A uses your weapon’s super attack (each character has a variety of those super attacks, which are determined by the weapon they have equipped), and pressing X uses your character’s super attack. Some weapons have multiple super attacks, which you can switch between with the L button.

In battle, you control one of the characters in your party. You can switch between any one of them on the fly. Pressing the Y button multiple times links different normal attacks. Any other attacks, using X or charging with R, use up the character’s IP meter. The IP meter fills up automatically overtime, and it fills up quite fast, so unless you spam special attacks you should be fine. The fighting is fast-paced and quite fun, and very self-explanatory. I’m happy they didn’t screw it up.

Leveling
The leveling, in its basics, is quite simple. Kill enemies, get experience, level up. The character you control gets the full amount of experience points, the ones in the side-line get less, thus level up slower. Leveling up fully heals their HP and IP, and of course boosting your character’s stats. Yeah, pretty standard.

This adds a special system, where you put gems on a grid to boost stats. The stat boosts only work if the gem you put on the grid is connected to one of the 4 “entrances” (which lights up the gem to say it’s “active”), or connected to an “active” gem. The grid is actually sort of shared between each character. Rather than having seperate grids, you have 1 grid with sections for each character. The gems you put in the grid will be at least 2 spaces long, vertically or horizontally, so you can have a gem partly in one character’s section and partly in another’s, giving them both the stat boost offered by the gem. Later you can also fuse gems togheter to make more powerful gems, which is cool.

Otherwise the other way to boost characters is with equipment. Nothing different from the usual JRPG here.

Puzzle
One of the most interesting elements in the original Lufia 2 was the fact that every dungeon had some really interesting puzzles. That element is actually not lost in the game’s conversion to 3D. Each character has attacks that can be used to clear obstacles (Tia’s grappling hook, Serena’s remote-controlled blade, Guy’s hammer), or traverse gaps and such, there’s some platforming (falling down a hole takes away some of your HP), and there’s puzzles to solve too. Blocks to place on certain switches and such, keys to open doors… everything here is quite fun. I find that the puzzles are a lot easier than in Lufia 2 (which became sadistic near the end), but there’s still some nice puzzles here.

Game Flow
The game flows in a linear fashion, but you can go back to old areas whenever you want. Rather than an actual world map, you have menus when you’re out of towns or dungeons.

The menu has 5 options, respectively: the first (2 kanji I can’t read) brings you to the area selection so you can choose to which town or dungeon you want to go, the next (meniyu-) brings to the menu, the third one (again, 2 kanji I can’t read) lets you talk to Lexis where he tells you where to go next, the fourth (ro-do) lets you load your game and the final one (se-bu) let’s you save your game. Not too hard to figure out.

The game flow here is pretty simple: go to a town, talk to people, get a task given to you, go to the dungeon, get to the end and fight a boss, rinse and repeat. Since the game is in japanese (as of the writing of this article), figuring out where to go can be a bit tough, but there’s some ways of figuring out where to go, like talking to Lexis, or going everywhere until you find an area that starts a short cutscene just before.

One thing that might annoy me a bit, but not much, is that you revisit various areas in the game multiple times. I visited the Soma Temple (where you fight Gades) 4 times in the time I’ve played. Though that’s not such a big problem since, most of the time you revisit a dungeon, you actually go to different parts of said dungeon, which subsequently makes the world map menu a lot easier to navigate since there’s fewer places to check out.

Also, the Ancient Cave from the original is back. I didn’t get to the end yet (though I plan to), but I’m guessing there’s 100 floors. Each time you go in the floors are randomly generated, though they’re a bit more straighforward than in the original. Each room (other than corridors) have monsters and treasure chests. Getting to the floor’s teleporter brings you to the next floor. Occasionally, you’ll come across a blue chest. This gives you a blue item, which you can subsequently bring back to the dungeon when you revisit it (you can also find blue items in the normal games which you can bring to the Ancient Cave). Some rooms in some floors also require you to clear out all the enemies before moving on to the next. Oh, and when you enter the dungeon you go back to level 1, and don’t keep any of the gained levels when you get out. When you get out, you return to the level you were before entering the cave. The Ancient Cave, just like in the original, is a good way to find great equipment.

Import-friendlyness
This is not really import-friendly. The combat is self explanatory, and advancing through the game is not too hard if you screw around a lot (going to every place, talking to everyone, talking to Lexis in the menu). But really you’re missing out on the story if you don’t know japanese, and that kinda sucks, and the lack of japanese knowledge will make this really easy to get stuck in.

Overall
I really hope this gets an english release. Sure, I can progress through the game relatively easily without being able to read everything (going to the next part of the game is really quite simple even if you can’t read japanese), but I think I’m missing a good part of the experience.

The fighting is actually pretty fun and fast paced, I’m really happy they actually didn’t screw that part up. Each character plays quite differently, which is really cool. And the new leveling system is kind of interesting. It kinda sucks that you can’t get Capsule Monsters anymore though, they’ve been completely removed.

The changes made to the story (at least from what I’ve seen) aren’t anything major. Some characters may have different powers or something, other characters who left the party in the original stay in the party here, some events take place in different areas, but in the end you’re basically going through the same story.

Overall, this is a very fun game. Sure, I’d rather just have the updated graphics and leaving the rest like the original, maybe with new areas, puzzles, capsule monsters and gameplay elements, but this is still quite good. Fans of the series will like revisiting the best game in the series, and newcomers will discover a really fun new story and might really be drawn in by the new fighting style.

It doesn’t surpass the original for me, but it stands on its own very nicely. Good to see the original developer (Neverland) doing something new with their older game.

jobocan ds, Games, Handheld, import, impressions