Nostalgia Retrospective: Lufia 2
Back when I'd first gotten a SNES, video rental places were still on every corner and my third actual RPG for the system (after Mystic Quest and FF2) was a relatively early title called Lufia & The Fortress of Doom. It was the purest essence of Early SNES JRPG - attempted to have a shoestring plot with a Chosen One and a tragic love interest, but still clung to 8-bit design aesthetic (Even if color depth had increased, tiles were still 8x8 and battle systems were clunky and imprecise, challenge was in endless random encounters and attrition than in complex individual encounters) and was... honestly pretty generic. It was good, but it wasn't amazing.
Then came Lufia 2. A prequel to the original, it improved things in every way - the music was amazing, the graphics were great, and there were even some quality of life things that wouldn't be adopted until years later such as actual on-screen monsters to avoid instead of random encounters, and special tools you could use outside of battle to help you solve puzzles.
In a lot of ways, it was kind of like a prototype to Wild Arms, and nobody really cared that Natsume... well. They Natsume'd the fuck out of it. It's probably just as infamous a mangled localization as the Harvest Moon hackjobs they've done, both in translation (amongst the monsters you'll fight are gorems, leeches, and the dreaded La Fleshia) and in programming (notably, at least one location's name was corrupted and an entire plot-important area got turned into a pokemon-esque Glitch City), and yet people adored it anyway. I was one of them, in fact, and for a good long while this game could do no wrong, even with the absurdly shitty localizing job that Natsume was known for.
On top of all that, it had the Ancient Cave. Narratively a holdover from one of the original game's sidequests (a bonus dungeon that had high-end gear in it but that you could only go a certain number of floors deep into based on how far in the plot you'd gone), Lufia 2's developers realized that they had all the tools in place - most importantly, a monster movement algorithm that only moved monsters on the map when your player character moved - that they could take the battle and equipment system and put it into a full-fledged roguelike minigame. In fact, I'd argue that Lufia 2 was the first encounter that a lot of console gamers had with the genre, since it wasn't until Chocobo's Dungeon 2 that America would get a taste of procedurally generated brutality without actively seeking it out.
Naturally, all of these bullet points meant as soon as I got my SNES Classic, Lufia 2 was one of the first games to get shoved onto it, albeit with a graphic fix patch to fix the glitch city situation shown above. (Hilariously, said patch appears to have completely turbofucked the ending credits - guess there's no getting away from Natsume)
After about 20 hours spread over 3 weeks...
...it hasn't aged well, or rather, I'm more aware of its flaws than I was before.
Don't get me wrong, the Ancient Cave is still exactly as you know it (though frustratingly the game mode that is That And Only That requires two full playthroughs to unlock, so yeah, pass for now), but the original game is... you know how people complain that Final Fantasy 10 and 13 are just linear tubes of disinterest? Lufia 2 is that, but without even the pretense of a reason to keep going down said tube. It's incredibly barebones in a way I haven't seen since early Dragon Quest. You go to a town, you talk to an NPC who says something like "oh no there is a fish in a cave" and so you go into the cave and fight a fish and then you go to the next town because that's what you do. Everything feels disjointed and rushed in the narrative, you meet your third permanent party member and then three plot points later your protagonist gets suddenly married to her because oh hey these characters had a bloodline together in the first game so we've gotta make sure they get hitched, dungeon puzzles start out interesting, build to infuriating, and then blatantly vanish in the final two dungeons, leaving you just to slog through enemies who, thanks to game progression, now have sprites that take up way too much of the screen's real-estate to avoid, sometimes. (It's easy to walk around a one-tile large frog or slime. It's much harder to avoid a dragon 4 times that size.)
Money and EXP is also relatively tight in the game, though ironically that's remedied by your New Game + option (or "Retry Mode", rather) which just gives you 4x EXP/Gold for every encounter, forever. For that first playthrough, though, I'd say I spent a good hour or two grinding money near the 75% mark just to get my spellcasters the spells they needed to stay on top of things.
Overall, a 10/10 game got downgraded in my head to 7/10. It's still good, great even, but it's not some holy grail of JRPGs. That's still Chrono Trigger. That said, always remember: we are all little hoochees.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Original at https://swordianmaster.dreamwidth.org/112020.html
Then came Lufia 2. A prequel to the original, it improved things in every way - the music was amazing, the graphics were great, and there were even some quality of life things that wouldn't be adopted until years later such as actual on-screen monsters to avoid instead of random encounters, and special tools you could use outside of battle to help you solve puzzles.
In a lot of ways, it was kind of like a prototype to Wild Arms, and nobody really cared that Natsume... well. They Natsume'd the fuck out of it. It's probably just as infamous a mangled localization as the Harvest Moon hackjobs they've done, both in translation (amongst the monsters you'll fight are gorems, leeches, and the dreaded La Fleshia) and in programming (notably, at least one location's name was corrupted and an entire plot-important area got turned into a pokemon-esque Glitch City), and yet people adored it anyway. I was one of them, in fact, and for a good long while this game could do no wrong, even with the absurdly shitty localizing job that Natsume was known for.
On top of all that, it had the Ancient Cave. Narratively a holdover from one of the original game's sidequests (a bonus dungeon that had high-end gear in it but that you could only go a certain number of floors deep into based on how far in the plot you'd gone), Lufia 2's developers realized that they had all the tools in place - most importantly, a monster movement algorithm that only moved monsters on the map when your player character moved - that they could take the battle and equipment system and put it into a full-fledged roguelike minigame. In fact, I'd argue that Lufia 2 was the first encounter that a lot of console gamers had with the genre, since it wasn't until Chocobo's Dungeon 2 that America would get a taste of procedurally generated brutality without actively seeking it out.
Naturally, all of these bullet points meant as soon as I got my SNES Classic, Lufia 2 was one of the first games to get shoved onto it, albeit with a graphic fix patch to fix the glitch city situation shown above. (Hilariously, said patch appears to have completely turbofucked the ending credits - guess there's no getting away from Natsume)
After about 20 hours spread over 3 weeks...
...it hasn't aged well, or rather, I'm more aware of its flaws than I was before.
Don't get me wrong, the Ancient Cave is still exactly as you know it (though frustratingly the game mode that is That And Only That requires two full playthroughs to unlock, so yeah, pass for now), but the original game is... you know how people complain that Final Fantasy 10 and 13 are just linear tubes of disinterest? Lufia 2 is that, but without even the pretense of a reason to keep going down said tube. It's incredibly barebones in a way I haven't seen since early Dragon Quest. You go to a town, you talk to an NPC who says something like "oh no there is a fish in a cave" and so you go into the cave and fight a fish and then you go to the next town because that's what you do. Everything feels disjointed and rushed in the narrative, you meet your third permanent party member and then three plot points later your protagonist gets suddenly married to her because oh hey these characters had a bloodline together in the first game so we've gotta make sure they get hitched, dungeon puzzles start out interesting, build to infuriating, and then blatantly vanish in the final two dungeons, leaving you just to slog through enemies who, thanks to game progression, now have sprites that take up way too much of the screen's real-estate to avoid, sometimes. (It's easy to walk around a one-tile large frog or slime. It's much harder to avoid a dragon 4 times that size.)
Money and EXP is also relatively tight in the game, though ironically that's remedied by your New Game + option (or "Retry Mode", rather) which just gives you 4x EXP/Gold for every encounter, forever. For that first playthrough, though, I'd say I spent a good hour or two grinding money near the 75% mark just to get my spellcasters the spells they needed to stay on top of things.
Overall, a 10/10 game got downgraded in my head to 7/10. It's still good, great even, but it's not some holy grail of JRPGs. That's still Chrono Trigger. That said, always remember: we are all little hoochees.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Original at https://swordianmaster.dreamwidth.org/112020.html