Lufia 2 ~ In-Depth Review

Genre – JRPG

Release Date: Feb 24th, 1995 (JP) May 1996 (NA)

Platforms: SNES

Total Gameplay Score: +7 Total Story Score: +5

Summary

Lufia 2 is one of the foremost games often cited as a golden child of RPGs in the SNES era. Just search “best 90s RPGs,” or “best JRPGs” and Lufia 2 will probably show up in the upper half of the results. Why is that? Why is there such a legacy to Lufia 2, while never reaching mainstream status? Well, one reason it never reached the mainstream is due to the series dying out over 10 years ago with the latest release being a DS remake of this very game. As to why it has such a strong cult following among the RPG crowd, perhaps we can look a bit further at the gameplay mechanics to see what players loved so much about it.

One of those reasons can be chalked up to the super traditional, yet snappy, combat system in Lufia 2. The turn-based combat has no loading in and out of battles, and the fights themselves are quick and fun with regular mobs, while providing decent strategic depth in the boss fights. This depth stems from the various active and passive skills that equipment bestows to the party members. Do you want a helmet that provides high defense above all else? Go for it, though be aware that it doesn’t have the agility or cool area skill the horned helmet has. As such, you’re always sacrificing one stat or one aspect of battle for something else in the equipment you choose. It’s a super simple, yet fun, ‘build’ system that ties stats, skills, and equipment together.

But really, the gameplay shines with its balance. Grinding for levels or loot isn’t mandatory to beat the game because enemies are generally the right level to beat if you’re doing most ‘mandatory’ encounters on the critical path. Boss fights are quite challenging and fun as well, forcing the player to think through resources and tactics. And one of the core reasons I can see why this game has such a cult status is its traditionally balanced difficulty and power progression curve. As you gain more resources and experience, the enemies and dungeons get more difficult, yet never quite too much to handle. It’s just such a smooth curve, probably one of the better examples from the era. The enemy encounters do a great job complementing the curve too since they’re on-screen in the dungeons. Removing random encounters in dungeons was a great, (and necessary, in my opinion) decision because of the complexity of the puzzles in each dungeon. Being able to manipulate the enemy encounters in the dungeons was convenient and novel; the puzzles themselves even more novel. I’ll come out and say it, this game has some of my favorite puzzles in any RPG I’ve played. I’m serious, if you’re craving some Legend of Zelda type dungeon puzzles, play this game. In fact, puzzles are so good here, they’re my favorite aspect of the whole game, even if one or two were unfair and unclear to solve (two out of like a hundred isn’t a bad percentage though).

But why are we getting lost in these labyrinthine dungeons anyway? What’s the end goal for this team of JRPG youngsters? Is it just to save the world and defeat evil? Well, yeah, actually. The story here isn’t the most nuanced or complex, it’s your traditional good guy fights evil plot. But the story really shines in its moments. Certain scenes manage to avoid melodrama and exaggeration that most game or movie stories feel a need to portray. There’s a down-to-earth realism with some scenes in particular. The music helps enhance these scenes tremendously too. In fact, music is my second favorite aspect of this game, if not my first. The battle themes are top-notch, some of the greats of the genre without a doubt. And the music that plays at the end will make you cry. Though, even amazing music can’t pull up the translation and localization issues this game has. While not as bad as Final Fantasy VII’s translation, there are misspelled words and mangled sentences in the English script. There are also some conversations that got completely lost in translation. At least the entire script isn’t ruined though; it’s mostly quite good, or serviceable. The plot itself is pretty cool too, mostly in how it ties together with Lufia 1 and the Sinistral threat. The pacing in the latter half of the game is generally great, while the first half has a bit of a halt as the hero is mainly just going from town to town fixing their little ‘crisis of the week’. It does get real good though, especially at the end, where I may have shed some gamer tears…

Overall, Lufia 2 is a quintessential 90s JRPG. It does what the golden era JRPGs do and does them pretty well. It even has some surprising twists like a 99-floor roguelike optional dungeon or the skill ring that resets dungeon puzzles. I’d say the motto I have finishing up Lufia 2 is, “I came for the JRPG, I stayed for the excellent puzzles.” Though, that doesn’t paint the full picture. To see a much fuller picture of my experience playing Lufia 2, continue reading the positives and negatives I posited to the game down below!

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Gameplay Positives and Negatives

+ Great Encounter design. No random encounters in dungeons and variable encounter rate through use of skills and movement manipulation is pretty awesome. Not only are encounters visible in all the dungeons, but enemies only move when you move, meaning you can stop to heal or strategize your next move without being interrupted by the enemy. You can also reset all encounters in the room at any time if you want to farm/grind for a bit. The overworld and ocean do have random encounters, but they are pretty forgiving and infrequent enough to actually encourage exploration.

+ Convenience features and quality of life are surprisingly good, and for the time, extremely good. Descriptions for every item and spell in the game is rare even in some modern rpgs, but unheard of in the snes era, and Lufia 2 does this. The general quality of life features like memory cursor, text speed, item descriptions, auto-equip, and resetting rooms are all good. Also, loading times are pretty much non-existent here, even when warping across the world map.

+ Aggregate plus to combat build variability and the monster capsule system. Combat build variability, though quite minimalistic, is effective and fun. You get to choose what passive stats and skills and spells you get through various equipment, which bestow you with IP skills. It’s pretty fun to get creative with setups, emphasizing stat boosts the equipment adds or the IP skills, and to mix and match them to make the team you want. This combat ‘build’ variability is only decently good, which is why it shares its aggregate positive with the monster capsule system. The monsters don’t have many moves and aren’t really interesting to fight with, but growing them giving your equipment to improve their effectiveness adds to equipment strategy fun. These two systems enable different playstyles and strategies and add up to some fun equipment strategies. You can even re-buy all the equipment you’ve ever had in a shop later in the game if you want to test various skills.

+ Dungeon and puzzle design in general is quite good. The puzzles are generally clever and straddle the line of being novel and simple. the sign hints help give some direction without spoiling the entire puzzle, which is nice. Enemies are well-balanced difficulty-wise throughout all the dungeons. Save spots with health/magic refills are also typically present in each dungeon, though usually there’s only one of these in the dungeon, it’s still checkpointed quite well.

+ Tutorial dungeon, as well as the first and second real dungeons, have some really nice puzzle design, up there with some of the best 2D Zeldas.

+ Puzzles continue to be excellent, with superb escalation in complexity. A good example of this is the colored blocks puzzle in the Sword Shrine.

+ Aggregate plus to good trash mob design, decent power progression curve, and no necessary grinding. I found Lufia 2 to be the absolute generic example of trash mob encounter design, which is not a bad thing, quite the contrary. Most common encounters are designed to be beaten in two to three player turns, which is pretty much the standard common encounter battle in the JRPGs I grew up with (SNES). However, this is only really true as long as the player is fighting around 80% of all on-screen dungeon encounters in the game plus whatever random encounters along the main path on the overworld. As such, the encounters themselves are fine-tuned for quick battles on the way to the bosses, yet with enough meat on them to keep the player awake and spark fun and strategy out of them, (and give exp). The power progression is tied to the encounter design since you’ll be appropriately over-powered if you choose to grind levels, yet you’ll be having just a hard enough time if you skip half the battles, but still be able to win if you’re really really knowledgeable about the game and skilled. As I said, this is pretty much the standard of JRPG Power Progression and mob design, which earns a positive because of the fact that ‘the standard’ is actually more difficult to do and rare to come across considering the amount of poorly balanced JRPGs out there.

+ Fast travel is among the very best of the SNES era, especially for a large JRPG such as Lufia 2. Fast travel is available immediately once you get the spell early on AND with the use of the warp item. You only need 8 MP to cast warp, which is a pittance when you’re in town or on the overworld and have resources to the inn and shops. You’re also not limited in where you can fast travel to, as long as you’ve been to the location already. Add to this the convenience of just how instantaneous warping to a location is; it’s literally a second or two, no loading! I actually had fun just warping to various towns and castles around the map because of how fast and quick it is. If being powerful enough to fight the Sinistrals doesn’t make you feel powerful enough, warping across the map in a second will. Also tied to warp is the ability to exit dungeons via spell or item. Again, using Exit is instantaneous and without a load, and it really makes going through dungeons and going back to town to refill resources so much easier and fun if you need to, though playing the game ‘normally’ will entail you can get through every dungeon in one go without the need to refill.

+ Aggregate plus to good difficulty curve throughout and fun boss fights. The difficulty curve would have gotten a separate plus all its own if the final boss fights were just a little more challenging and had more unique movesets to match the big jump in power and gear you get at the three towers, (no, i wasn’t over-leveled, nor completionist). Other than a dip in difficulty and a somewhat samey final boss fight at the endgame, the curve was well balanced with weaker opponents matching the low-level start and medium opponents matching the middle to end when you gain party, exp, and gear to match the growing Sinistral threat. Boss fights are fun and well-balanced throughout, though a bit on the simple side to earn a full plus.

+ The final dungeon and outro is a treat to go through gameplay-wise (and story-wise). Your party should be powerful enough with all the endgame gear and leveling to pose a serious threat to the Sinistrals, and the game really really lets you go on a power trip against them and makes you enjoy it. The Sinistrals are just difficult enough to get you thinking a bit and keep you engaged, but they don’t really pose a threat enough to feel weak against them. As a result, you truly feel just a tad more epic than them, and that’s just awesome in a JRPG like this, even if it defies difficulty curve law. The final dungeon sequences are short and serve to emphasize the Sinistral curb-stomping, but they’re still well designed and interesting enough. The final area’s music and boss music REALLY help this section triumph from a gameplay perspective as well.

– Aggregate negative to occasional bad backtracking, needing a walkthrough (called ‘walkthroughitus’), and for the Ancient Tower dungeon. To kill 3 sinistrals with one stone, i’ll use just one example that illustrates all 3 of these issues. The Ancient Tower guardian puzzle solution pretty much sums up the backtracking and walkthrouitus at its worst in this game. It’s vague and requires putting together ‘hints’ from tablets scattered throughout what is, up to this point, the largest most complex dungeon yet. If you made it to the 5th floor and don’t know what to do when the tablet says, “to defeat the stone guardian, read the stone tablet on one of the floors”, tough luck. Don’t know which floor the tablet is referring to? Tough luck, go backtrack. Yeah, your only option is to backtrack through the entire dungeon looking for 2, not just 1, tablets to somehow piece together the puzzle, or look up a walkthrough, which is the much better choice. Individually, this is not as cryptic as the really nonsense cryptic stuff like the random bomb solutions in Zelda 1, but it’s still sucky and in a huge labyrinth with backtracking that I hated spending more time in. I never would have figured this out without looking up the solution, which is just not good game design.

– Aggregate negative to occasional poor visual distinction/poor tutorialization and to the Karlloon Shrine. Karlloon Shrine’s first puzzle requires you to bomb a random pile of rubble. Up to this point, there have been numerous ruble piles that function as non-interactive doodads, no tutorial to bomb such things. As such it’s another puzzle that requires a walkthrough or sheer luck.

– Aggregate negative to overworld music restarting every battle instance and to Daos shrine being utterly glitched in the western versions of the game. Since the encounter rate isn’t so bad on the overworld, you’d think a restarting theme shouldn’t be annoying or bad, but it is because you’re not spending much time walking around on the overworld other than going from town to town, which make the overworld theme redundant and an example of poor audio implenetation. The real shame is you hardly, if ever, get to listen to the second half of the overworld theme, which is better than the first half, in my opinion. Regarding the shrine glitch, while it is fairly simple to navigate the broken tilesets in Daos Shrine, it more than likely results in making people quit the game for fear the cartridge is ruined. It’s a well-known bug that could have been prevented with more q-and-a time.

* The saving system would have gotten a positive if it weren’t for the fact that there are times you might need to use the Exit spell to leave a dungeon, and doing so will reset all the puzzles and encounters of the entire dungeon. If the dungeons had more unlocked shortcuts to enable the player to skip right to the later parts, via Dark Souls, this would have gotten more positives. Or just having the save-anywhere feature in dungeons could have worked too, (Though that’s unheard of in SNES RPGs). As such, the dungeon save checkpointing is just serviceable enough. The save system here is quite good with save anywhere on overworld and very ubiquitous, easy-to-reach saves at churches, but the dungeon reset backtracking due to the 1 save point on average per dungeon render it’s a wash.

* Minigames and optional side stuff are pretty decent in Lufia 2. You have the famous 99-floor Ancient Cave that was ahead of its time as a randomly generated dungeon crawl that gives you separate gear just for the cave, and resets the gear as you enter. This cave was basically a roguelike before roguelikes were even a thing yet. It’s a very forward-looking concept that is fun to look back on. Many reviewers would give the Ancient Cave a positive on its own due to its legacy as one of the first roguelikes, but I find that it’s not rewarding or ‘fun’ enough to really justify its own positive or lend itself to an aggregate. Quality over legacy bias here, I know. The other optionals are more standard to other RPGs. You have a casino where you play 3 games: slots, blackjack, and roulette. The RNG is a bit too unforgiving to really have a lot of fun here, for me, but the games themselves are decent and the casino rewards are very good if you can manage the slots well enough. The egg dragon minigame is decently rewarding and kinda fun to do, but the backtracking to collect all the eggs in the dungeons is far too laborious and tedious for this to be positive-worthy unless you’re using a walkthrough, which is in general probably the best way to experience the optional offerings in Lufia 2 in general.

+10 -3

Total Gameplay Score: +7

Story Positives and Negatives – (Lots of critically important story spoilers)

+ Right out of the gate, the opening movie establishes a hook and tone with the Sinistrals. The setting and its people are established quickly and we get a look at a potential villain, the entirety of the main party gets their own independent little scene even. This is all shown with strong scene direction and some truly amazing music.

+ Music is phenomenal right out of the gate. Up there with Uematsu, which says all it needs to.

+ Tia, Maxim, and Selan relationship dynamics have a really engaging and impressive conclusion. I was genuinely shocked when the wedding ceremony scene hit and one of Maxim’s love interests suddenly departs him without a goodbye. DIDN’T see it coming, and the game shows characterization brilliantly through the paradigm shift. Themes of lost love and compatibility are explored minimalistically, yet with a gut punch.

+ Maxim’s honeymoon year going by with the turn of the seasons is just so well directed. Music, storyboarding, characterization, and writing all contribute the feeling of temporary peace and give a nice calm before the storm section.

+ Lead-up scenes to the final battle atop Sinistral island have some of the most impressive animation and storyboarding in the game. Music direction is appropriately epic, and even stubborn characters like Guy start getting sentimental. I like the invitation to all have dinner when it’s over, and of course, the reappearance of one of the early party members is a nice thing to see.

+ Second music positive, most of which goes toward the Daos Shrine music and the credits theme, which are legitimately some of the most impressive tracks from the snes era. All the battle themes are incredible in general as well.

+ Final scenes with Maxim and Selan’s sacrifice are impactful, yet down to earth and honest. Of particular note, Selan’s body just staying on screen while Erim is revealing her true identity adds a touch of realism and tragedy that many games in the era tended to butter up with ‘gaminess’ or fake drama.

+ Ending and epilogue are such a fantastic close to the game. The music is frickin emotional as heck and is the closest SNES game I’ve seen to hitting that ‘end of journey’ tone from the main ending of Chrono Trigger. There’s sufficient closure with all the main characters and a nice carrot for the sequel (Lufia 1). Tia crying at the end was the closest the game got to making me tear up, and was directed in a subtle down-to-earth way.

+ Good connection to Lufia 1 with familiar characters and forces that strongly tie into the sequel (Lufia 1). Repeat playthroughs of Lufia 2 will reveal little bits of foreshadowing and other details that one may have missed the first time through. This positive goes to good connection to the first Lufia and a new perspective on repeat playthroughs.

– Aggregate negative to English translation being spotty with regards to grammar/spelling errors and general readability. Since it’s not that bad, its negative is shared with several small dialogue code bugs like responding ‘no’ to a question to have the npc proceed as if you said yes.

–  Crown theft plot in 2nd town tries to be slapstick and it just falls flat. Not only does this make the kingdom look beyond pathetic and incompetent, it also just wasn’t witty or entertaining in any way besides music. The full royal guard and the two main protagonists just stand there watching two buffoon ‘thieves’ limp their way with the crown with not a single effort. Just terrible placement of humor, and an example of cutscene incompetence at its worst.

– Plot structure early on is pretty unengaging and incredibly basic to a fault. You’ve got your MacGuffin plot hook early on to basically save the world, and every plot point up to the halfway mark consists of going from one town to another solving a basic town crisis of the day until the mayor lets you pass to the next town. It’s not really explained why you’re doing a grand tour of every single town on the world map in sequence like this, other than to be a hero and save the world. All this is basic and linear in an uninteresting way, all the more so when games like FF IV were released with a consistently engaging plot 5 years earlier, where everything you’re doing is for a plot-relevant reason. The early plot almost leads a player of Lufia 1 to go, “Oh, no. Here we go again,” and have them quit mid-game because of the town-hopping fetch quest nature of that game. There are no real fetch quests in Lufia 2 at least, but the plot structure suffers for following the seemingly random town-hopping structure of games with fetch quests galore. This section just feels like plot padding and could have been improved if the party discussed why they were just going from town to town like they are, or at least showcase more characterization of the party in the process like the skits in the ‘Tales of’ Games.

– General localization issues, of which there are several really noticeable ones. There are sequences and bits of humor that are lost in translation peppered throughout the game. Dekar’s introduction, for example, is just unintentionally awkward. It’s clear he was supposed to be humorously over-cocksure while standing up to one of the Sinistrals, but some of his dialogue just came out nonsensical due to poor sentence structure and the localization team not knowing how to use certain slang words. Some examples of small-talk flavor text being utterly mangled exist, such as this conversation between two people who just met for the first time with no prior familiarity with the locale, “Hmm, this is so good! I think today’s meal is just perfect!” “”Uh-huh! So you’re saying my cooking is usually bad, huh?” “Whew! Touchy, aren’t we?! Well … I mean … Ha, ha!”

This happens enough to hamper enjoyment of an otherwise simple RPG plot, but at least the main meaning and context isn’t all lost, and it’s not the worst in the genre by a long shot.

+9 -4

Total Story Score: +5

Overall Score: +12