Needless to say, after 6+ years, I had pretty big expectations for the "sequel," although the developer is new (Neverland) and the hardware is old (GBC). Unfortunately, The Legend may have Returned, but it doesn't extend, or even duplicate the experience of Lufia 2. That said, considering the hardware limitations and the competition, it still manages to provide a satisfactory gaming experience. How so, you ask? Read on:

The story of Lufia: The Legend Returns is set 100 years after Maxim and Selan slew the Sinistrals and destroyed the floating Island of Doom. You, unsuprisingly, again take on the role of a red-headed hero with latent superpowers, chosen by fate to impede the rise of evil forces. Sounds pretty cheeseball, right? Well, it is, but oddly enough, Lufia 2, despite having its story likewise summed up as such a painful RPG cliche, managed to be incredibly charming and yes, even a bit moving. Lufia: TLR doesn't handle its cloyingly unoriginal plot with the same degree of panache (mostly due to space and hardware limitations, I suspect), but it still rises to the occasion and brings us quite a few amusing characters and situations. And, hey, it's still got more story than any other portable RPG I've played, so that's gotta count for something, right?

The characters you'll be travelling with are an eclectic lot (save for our generic hero, Wain). Even the female love interest, Seena, manages to shrug off the silly Aeris submissiveness that reduces so many heroines to nothing more than two-dimensional male fantasies and offers up a strong and challenging personality. Others, such as the sexpot gambler Ruby, the naive princess Melphis, and the "wacky" inventor Isaac are your typical fare, but given the large cast of playable characters, do add the expected console RPG interparty dynamic. Oh, and Lufia series fans will recognize blue-haired pirate Deckard, who plays a non-trivial role in the plot's progress.

With the GBA now the portable system of choice, there's no doubt that the excellent graphic work in TLR is going to get overlooked. Towns and dungeons, especially when compared against previous portable RPG efforts, look spectacular - Neverland's art staff can work wonders with a limited color palette. Scrolling is smooth, and the GBA's transparency effect is put to good use. The towns themselves are often several scolling screens in size, with a lot of landscape variety. Each of the characters in your party has a full-screen anime portrait, although the faces would indicate cross-fertilization from FF Tactic's noseless populace. It's all good, though.

Sonically - well, it's a GBC game. It sucks. Neverland tried, of course; at least the blippy musak and harsh effects aren't especially grating, but the technological shortcomings of the GBC design remain apparent. It's kind of hard to fault Neverland for a blatant hardware limitation, but I've heard catchy melodies from that tinny GBC speaker before (Megaman and Gargoyle's Quest come to mind), and these guys seem like competent developers, so no dice: technically mediocre GBC music makes for crappy listening.

Thankfully, the interface design is almost impeccable; the game makes managing a party of nine characters and their equipment incredibly smooth, with clear colors providing feedback and clearly emphasizing statistical changes. There are a lot of menus, and what could easily degenerate into a chore (see: Vagrant Story, FF Tactics) is actually quite intuitive, despite having only four buttons (A, B, start, select) and a D-pad to work with. The game features a lot of equipment and customization options, as well as quite a few spells and IP skills, all of which would be largely worthless if the interface became cumbersome. As a result, the depth of the combat system is exposed, and the player is encouraged to muck about with equipment and formations.

The combat system is a very original take on the series' battle system, featuring nine - yes, NINE! - characters in your combat squad. Arranged in a 3x3 grid, your party might seem to be awesomely overpowered when matched against but three monsters, but there's a problem - the game is over when the front row dies. One good blast to the front line, and OUCH.

Now, the expected approach would be to place your "tanks" - the high HP/Defense types - in the front line, to absorb the hurt while the spellcasters dish out a little pain of their own. Not so fast, hotshot - you can do that, but you might be impairing your ability to use the brutal IP abilities of the characters, who require a certain color combination of Spiritual Points (SP) to activate their mega-attacks. See, each character has a certain color and amount of SP they bring to the party, and wouldn't ya know it, it requires more than one color to activate their IP abilities. Not only that, position in the formation is tantamount for the really BIG attacks - characters stack colored SP based on those they are vertically and horizontally aligned with. The guys in the front are favored, because they stack from the rear on up, and everybody gains from those adjacent to them.

Perhaps an example would help: Wain, our hero, needs 6 Red SP and 4 Blue SP to use Drive!, a powerful vertical attack. Wain himself brings the 6 Red SP needed, but he doesn't have any Blue SP. What's a generic RPG hero to do? Well, in this case, he needs to pal up with spellcaster Seena, who happens to be a Blue SP character, and keep her adjacent to him. Suddenly, he has all the Blue SP he needs to cast Drive!, plus Seena snags his Red SP, perhaps enabling an IP skill for her. And if you don't have enough of a particular color? Well, you can spend LP (Learning Points) to "buy up" your colored SP for a character, but be warned: LP is also used to purchase spells. Decisions, decisions!

You can rearrange formations right before battle or out of it, and experimentation is encouraged. You'll never find a formation that enables all of the best IP skills, and those that are the most IP-friendly also require you to expose a weaker HP character to the enemy. Bosses, especially, are weak against certain IP types and spells, and a little brainwork is required to really exploit the system to your advantage.

Sound complex? At first, it might appear so, but the game's tutorial dungeon, as well as a little futzing about (again, facilitated by the game's intuitive interface) will make it all apparent, and even fun. Besides this involved formation system, Lufia also has a very wide range of equipment, accessories, and spells, as well as quite a few different IP attacks with different properties. Spells are purchased at churches, but IP attacks must be gained by A) finding an Ancient Text, B) being the right class of character for the ability, and C) having the SP color requirements needed to learn it. Each of the 12 characters beings some unique aspect to the party (besides their color commentary), ultimately leading to a very deep combat arrangement.

Unfortunately, after all this praise, there's a big downer: the dungeons, well, suck. Horror of horrors - the one aspect that really elevated Lufia 2 above its competitors was its brilliant dungeon design and cunning puzzles that made clever use of tools, switches and level layouts whicht, to this day, has yet to be equalled in a traditional console RPG (although Wild Arms gave it the college try). Lufia: The Legend Returns flops miserably in this aspect, coughing up small, randomly-generated dungeon levels, which, despite varied graphic tilesets, manage to feel largely identical and somewhat monotonous.

Don't get me wrong; I've nothing against randomly-generated dungeon levels, if: A) they feature interesting aspects and don't largely lay out the same, and B) if the game implementing the random dungeons doesn't come from a series whose selling point was its excellent, puzzle-driven dungeon design. Lufia: TLR meets neither of these criteria, coughing up small and manifold levels which seem to all be the same nine rooms conjoined by twisty passages, and disappointing fans who loved the brain-wracking conundrums featured in part 2.

Neverland tried to alleviate the boring dungeon experience by adding bushes to slash and hidden passages to uncover (which almost always lead to middling treasure), but the samey-ness of it all gets tiresome. That said, the apologist in me takes over and acknowledges that this is made quite a bit more tolerable by the lack of random encounters - like the previous Lufia titles and the Lunar/Grandia series, you can see your enemies moving about. Once you've cleared most of a level, you can explore at leisure, and then we must ask: why bother?

My only explanation for the half-arsed dungeon experience in Lufia: TLR when everything else is so well-polished and assembled is one of design scale: there was simply no room left, either in terms of development effort and/or cartridge space, for complex dungeons like those seen in the previous Lufia titles. Too bad that well-nigh half of the game finds you trekking through these dungeons; at the very least, it makes apologism a little difficult.

It all comes together well enough, though. Clocking in around 40 or so hours (not including the massive Ancient Cave and its hundred or more levels), Lufia is an excellent portable effort. I would've liked a "save anywhere" system, ala Pokemon or the FF Legend titles, but save points are fairly frequent, and there is a semi-permanent Field Log (ala DW3) for those emergency saves. Lufia also tracks a ridiculous amount of play statistics, right down to the number of times you've fled from battle and the number of inns you've visited. Weird.

At the end of the day, Lufia appears to be a middling entry in the Lufia/Estpolis series, yet when matched up against its competition on portable platforms, it's a very solid effort. It has a better combat system and a deeper story than Dragon Warrior III and the Final Fantasy Legend titles, as well as an incredibly well-assembled interface and great (for the GBC, of course) graphics. The weak, poorly-randomized dungeon layouts are the only true caveat in what appears to be an otherwise solid piece of portable RPG design work. Dragon Warrior III still reigns as the king of portable RPGs (at least until Golden Sun hits these shores), but Lufia: The Legend Returns holds a worthy dukedom nonetheless.

Lufia: The Legend Returns is a mixed bag when judged by the stellar benchmark set by its classic predecessor, Lufia 2: Rise of the Sinistrals. The dungeons lack the engaging puzzle element, and the story has been scaled down along with the hardware, but despite these flaws, the game still manages to be an engaging experience and one of the better portable RPGs out there. For portable RPG fans, it's a keeper.