Rise of the Sinistrals

Day 375

Having put Fire Emblem behind me, I had to settle on a new game to play at work. It didn't take me long to choose Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, a classic SNES RPG that for some reason I have never completed. I have started it on numerous occasions but despite liking it and finding it interesting, I've never gotten more than probably a quarter of the way through the game. This is especially puzzling when one considers that I have completed the game's predecessor, Lufia & the Fortress of Doom--a game that is, by all accounts, a far inferior title.Although I haven't played enough of Lufia II to make a fair judgment, I can only assume this commonly held belief is true.

Lufia & the Fortress of Doom is not great and had an uncommon pitfall for games of that era. It drug on for far too long until the gameplay devolved into getting into random encounters while visiting a series of identical towns with swapped color palettes. It was a serviceable if dated JRPG until the point that it became apparent the game was winding down. I wouldn't consider 30 hours very long for an RPG, but when it's as needlessly stretched as Lufia was, I'd much rather it be concluded in half that amount of time. Still, I was determined to finish it--and when I did, my immediate thought was "Yeah! Now I can play Lufia II!"

But I didn't. At that point, I was all Lufia'd out and I just wanted to play something different. If I recall correctly, I ended up playing Suikoden and enjoyed it a lot. This was back when I started writing about games a lot. There are no words about Lufia on this blog but I wrote a considerable amount about it--and in fact, I kept a document chronicling my progress as I went. This is something I don't really do anymore because I update this blog every single day. I wonder though, if it's something I should consider doing once again? I very rarely do comprehensive entries once I've finished a game. I'll generally write about my impressions as I go and finally offer up some closing thoughts once I finish--over the course of several entries.

My point is that Lufia II seems like a really solid RPG and I should have finished it a long time ago. I should leave my criticisms of the first game behind me and approach this one with a fresh outlook. I'm sure it'll take me some time to get through if I'm mostly playing it at work, but at the very least it should be less trouble than Fire Emblem was. I'm playing it on my Android phone and the touch screen controls are surprisingly intuitive. New Mystery was occasionally a little awkward to control but if this works out, I might try to follow up Lufia II with Dragon Quest III, the only other SNES game left in my backlog.