Snes Central: Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals

Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals

Review by GoDSmurF

After reading someone else's review for Lufia II, I couldn't help but to note many MANY mistakes made in the reviews. The overall quality of the other review of Lufia II is very lacking. You could basically change all the places where the word "Lufia" appears and switch it with "Final Fantasy" or so and the review would still just be a generic babble-fest. The other review failed to mention all the unique gameplay options present in Lufia II. So here is my more accurate review of this game.

Graphics: 8/10

Everything in Lufia II is an update to Lufia I's graphics. The moutain tiles remain the same except with more details and colors. The battles now have a background instead of being transparent like Lufia I. The monsters are very detailed. The best aspect of this game's graphics is its spell effects. There are many great spell effects late in to the game. Everything from your capsule monster's spells to your own spells is done in exquisite detail. This game's graphics rival those of Final Fantasy 6's.

Music and Sound: 9/10

Very good soundtrack. Although not as memorable as Chrono Trigger's music, Lufia II's hold its own. The over-world's music gives you a sense of adventure as the town theme refreshes and relaxes your mind. Only a few games ever had been able to use music to add to the overall experience of a game. Lufia II is such a game.

Gameplay: 8.5/10

First, let me say just how much of a ridiculous job the other review did on gameplay section. There are MANY features the reviewer mentioned wrong and left out. It makes me wonder if that reviewer actually PLAYED the game before he reviewed it. Without further ado...

The Actual Features:

This game's battle system remains essentially same as Lufia I. To a certain degree, the fighting system is similar to Breath of Fire series and Mario RPG. In a lot of RPGs, there are a lot of stats for a character that won't matter at all in the gameplay. But not so in Lufia II. Lufia II takes advantage of all aspects of a character's stats. You see a clear difference between someone with a low agility and someone with higher agility. New to the game also is "capsule monsters". Along the way on your adventure, you'll have chances to catch little friendly monsters who will help you alongside you and your companions. You can feed them outdated weapons and other equipments to make them advance through 4 levels, and finally, with the use of a proper fruit, you can let them mature and really be of use to you. This is great consider it's like virtual pet within this game. The fighting does get repetitive, however. This game is not as challenging as the previous reviewer made it seem. This game has its balanced share of exploration, puzzle-solving. I do admit there, there are quite a few puzzles in dungeons. Two of which require precise thinking. You may not be able to pass the puzzles if you aren't a thinking person.

Replay: 9/10

Once again, the other reviewer made extremely stupid mistakes. He either did not play this game through or he didn't play this game at all. There are many features in this game to ensure a great amount of replay. The game itself will take about 40 hours to finish. Note: FINISH, not COMPLETE. If you want to find all the secrets to this game and entirely finish this game, it'll take you at least 80 hours and more. After you obtain an airship, you can travel to a certain island(not gonna spoil the surprise) and go in to the ancient caves. Each venture in to the caves would randomly put together a new set of dungeons. The ancient caves has 99 levels in total. Your mission around the ancient caves is to find many rare treasures(I'm not gonna spoil the surprise...). This wouldn't be so bad... except all your characters lose all their equipments upon entering the cave and start with the most basic equipments such as knife and staff, and they all get their levels reset down to 0. Even if your capsule monsters are matured, they'll be back down to level 1 and evolution stage 1. All these will be changed back when you leave the cave, but once you enter the cave, everything will be reset. And once you leave the cave, the cave would automatically rearrange itself to form a new set of dungeons, new set of monsters, new set of ... The ancient caves alone guarantees at least 40 hours of gaming. Plus, it's just like Diablo, you'll always have a new set of levels to conquor every time you re-enter the ancient caves.

Storyline (Special):

I set up this feature because of a grave mistake made by the previous reviewer. The fact that he says that the sinistrals are "once again" up to no good is completely false, utterly stupifying. This one single error made his entire review worthless for whatever little worth it had with the genericity.

Lufia II, in fact, is the PREQUEL to Lufia I. NOT its sequel. If you played Lufia I, you'd remember that the game started on the floating island of the sinistrals, with the main characters being "Maxim, Selan, Guy, Artea". These are exactly the main characters in this game. Lufia II tells the tale of how the Four Sinistrals were resurrected and defeated BEFORE Lufia I. I am appalled at the review by Chrono Digger.

Conclusion/Overall: 9.5/10

Lufia II is one of the last great RPGs the SNES received. Natsume proved itself to be worthy in the market of RPGs. Lufia II let the Super Nintendo go out with a bang in terms of RPGs. If you can't get a copy in store, email me and I'll upload my Lufia II rom on to my website. I simply can't let anyone miss this great game. You'll love it.