Lufia Curse of the Sinistrals was released for the DS by Natsume in 2010 and is a retelling of Lufia 2 for the SNES. It has the same overall story, but a lot of the events play out differently.
On top of the floating Doom Island, Gades spreads a message to the people that the sinistrals will destroy the world. A red headed adventurer named Maxim is traveling by the Elcid, which is currently a boat, with an inventor named Lexis to Soma Shrine and happens to come across Gades who defeats him in battle. Gades beats Maxim in combat, but not before a priestess saves teleports him from there back to town and the adventure starts where Maxim and his friends must save the world from the sinistrals.
Lufia Curse of the Sinistrals is a 3D action RPG with a lot of platforming and puzzle solving. You first start off with Maxim but you'll acquire six characters that you can swap to at various times, all of them having their own unique style of attacks, but also abilities that will allow the player to progress through the many dungeons puzzles. Maxim has a dash attack that will allow him to pass over gaps. Other characters can solve puzzles that Maxim can't, like Guy, who's nickname is not the wall crusher, but coincidentally, he can break through objects, or Tia that can pull items from across long distances or pull the party across a gap that Maxim can't dash across. Every single dungeon throughout the game except the Ancient Cave is platform heavy and puzzle heavy, and while early on some characters are required to progress at the time, two of the characters skills are required to solve puzzles in a single dungeon and that's it. There are puzzles that are added as you progress that are unique and don't require the characters spkills though.
Sometimes you'll have have all the characters at your disposal, sometimes you'll only have a few, but even if you don't need the characters to get through a puzzle, you can switch to any of them at any time to use as the player character. The characters all of have a single combo by repeatedly hitting attack, attacking in the air for characters might be the same combo or a completely different attack in some characters cases, while attacking during a double jump later in the game will be yet another attack, all of the special abilities that allow them to get through puzzles are usable as attacks, and each character also has two charge attacks. One charge attack is a character specific attack, another is attack is tited to your characters weapon, be it a skill or a spell. Everything except for your standard attack or attack combo requires what's called IP or item power. Item power is basically MP and it recharges fairly quickly, so you can use the skills indefinitely as long as you have enough item power to use them.
The puzzle solving, platforming, and combat are all good, but each one could use some work. There are a few parts in dungeons, mostly end game, where they want you to progress doing it one way, but you can actually do it ways not intended. It's not really much of an except during the end of the game where you can actually make it so you can't complete a puzzle and you're required to restart, which the game has a button on the touch screen allowing you to restart to your last checkpoint. The graphics look good, but there is slowdown during points in the game as well. The slowdown is usually kind of rare except when picking up things and one dungeon near the end of the game where the slow down is almost constant. Boss fights are also kind of glitchy, especially the last boss which can get really bad after certain things take place in battle causing not only slowdown but, graphical errors.
You can purchase equipment and items, but as you progress you'll also receive these blocks of two or three across, or four in a square called mystic stones. These blocks can be placed on a mystic stone board which gives each character bonuses. It's similar to Final Fantasy 12's license board but each block gives you bonuses as well as certain tiles that have extra bonuses. You have certain starting points and in order to gain any bonuses for the block or tile it's on, that block must be touching either the starting point or another block. Since you can switch your mystic stone board up at anytime, there's really nothing stopping the player from putting all the most powerful mystic stones on one character and switching them to other characters whenever you change characters.
Lufia Curse of the Sinistrals was actually a fairly long game for an action/platformer title and I enjoyed it overall. For a comparison it's actually similar to the new Ys games in gameplay so fans of those games might enjoy it also.
Gameplay - 6
Design - 7
Presentation - 5
Balance - 5
Overall - 5.75
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Here's the games Japanese trailer. The US trailer is pretty bad. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghHnOBKF_rw
Scoring system.
1-3 - bad
4 - 5 below average
5.5 - average
6 - 10 - good to excellent
Inflated score would be 7.9. The kuporeview inflation score. What the score would be if the average game was 7/10 like IGN, Gamespot, etc. Since I don't inflate scores and my scores are underrated compared to what people come to expect I came up with an equation to inflate my scores to make them similar to others. http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=177193&page=1#1
