Original Composition: Yasunori Shiono

Tracklist and liner note translation on-site

I once read a review of Lufia II which praised its score but claimed that its repetitiveness prevented it from breaking into the truly great SNES scores - and, after playing the game, I was inclined to agree - at the time, I thought it was due to the fact that certain tunes (like the Theme of Love, which is indeed lovely - perhaps the best Theme Of Love I've heard) were used too often. Now, though, after listening to the stand-alone Estpolis Biography, I'm more likely to attribute the score's repetitiveness to the lack of variety between tunes - the instruments used are very similar and aren't very unique or interesting (there's way too much of the very synthetic-sounding brass), the compositions are meandering and forgettable (the title theme goes on forever), and there are a great many tunes here than seem lackluster and uninspired and blah. In the actual game, it provides serviceable backdrops for the events transpiring, but as stand-alone listening, it's rather monotonous. Great love and grief themes, great Sinistral battle theme, loved the ominousness-personified of Narvick and the urgency of "The Turret Forgotten" and "For the Savior", but that's it. I've always felt that Lufia and the Fortress of Doom, the first game, had a much better score than its prequel (most of Lufia II's better tracks, in fact, are remakes of Lufia I's tunes) - though they lack the technological polish of the first, they had much more memorable fundamental melodies and effective instrumentation - every "instrument" stood out instead of blending together with the others into a bland synthetic background while one synthetic took the foreground (and, presumably, most of the listener's attention) and carried the melody, as happens most of the time in Lufia II. Lufia and the Fortress of Doom's score is given short shrift, though - it's squeezed onto the second disc as a "bonus", the tracks are played in the wrong order and run through only once, and the game itself isn't even mentioned in the packaging. A pity; the Lufia overworld theme is one of my favorites - it just has a great, bold sense of adventure and wandering - the Alekia town theme is strummy and catchy, and Lufia's leitmotiv - very tender and sweet and airy, yet with a kind of subtle confidence and maturity that grows as the piece goes on - is one of the great RPG character themes, up there with Magus's from Chrono Trigger and Surlent's and Sion's from Rudra's Secret Treasure, in that the music is not only strong compositionally but in that it so well reflects the personality of its subject. The Fortress of Doom theme variations have the heading-for-the-final-battle impending-menace thing nailed (and are much more stronger than the weak, watered-down Lufia II version), the bittersweet ending themes, particularly "A Reunion. And...", are some of the most moving in 16-bit RPGdom, and the score is further buttressed with a few other solid themes - the boss battle theme, the port town theme, etc. - which aren't Uematsu but fit their respective moments and work. A frequent problem in both discs - there is often not good versimilitude between the synthetic instruments and their real-life counterparts here, and it is therefore always apparent that this is video game music being generated by an electronic sound device within a 16-bit machine. This is not terribly significant in the way of being an insurmountable flaw in the discs, but it is significant as in that it is telling that more accomplished RPG scores on the same platform do not have this problem. So, bottom line: the second disc is good, but the first disc is mediocre, and the midis on the Forfeit Island Lufia fan site are oftentimes actually better executions of the tunes themselves. If you're not a big Lufia fan, Estpolis Biography is far from a high priority.

Notes:
1. Go to "Information" under the Lufia 1 section, then "Soundtrack" to get to Forfeit Island's track list. A track list here will be appearing shortly; Forfeit Island's maintainer has made a few (negligible, but still existent) errors in his.
2. I can't end this review without noting publisher Pony Canyon's shoddy packaging; the CD's come in two separate fragile cases (not in a standard double CD case) made of uncommonly thin plastic. There's decoration on only one side of each case; the other side is simply clear and affords a lovely view of the play side of the CD (which, by the way, is accessible to dirt, grime, and other nasty stuff that'll muck up a CD, thanks to the holes in the back of the plastic casings). The design on the CD's themselves is utilitarian; the liner notes were the only half-way decent aspect of the project. Shame on Pony Canyon.

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Estpolis, Lufia, and all assorted official paraphernalia are the property of Taito, Natsume, and/or Yasunori Shiono; this page and review are unofficial fan works and are not endorsed by or affiliated with any of the above. Please do not take any material from this site without explicit permission from the maintainer, R. Capowski.