33 Years Later, a Beloved Pair of SNES RPGs Are Finally Getting Remakes

Sep 23, 2026 - 22:06

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33 Years Later, a Beloved Pair of SNES RPGs Are Finally Getting Remakes

Published Sep 23, 2026, 1:26 PM EDT

Jen Glennon is a New York-based journalist and editor with more than a decade of experience covering games and entertainment. She has previously worked at Kotaku, Inverse, and Newsweek. Jen joined Polygon in 2025 and has a relentless appetite for Final Fantasy, Yakuza, and Costco rotisserie chicken.

Zelda meets Dragon Quest with a dash of Pokémon

The 16-bit era of the early 1990s is widely hailed as a golden age for RPGs. It's the period that gave us classics like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 6, Earthbound, and Secret of Mana. But there are plenty of gems from the Super Nintendo era that are awfully difficult to find today. But that's about to change, at least for one lesser-known (but beloved!) franchise. Developer Taito has partnered with Sweden-based publisher Clear River Games for a new port of Lufia 1 & 2: The Sinistrals Saga to be released on Windows PC and consoles sometime in 2027.

Lufia 1 and 2 are some of the best-ever SNES RPGs

The first game in the duo, 1993's Lufia and the Fortress of Doom, opens with an epic showdown between four heroes — Maxim, Selan, Artea, and Guy — who must infiltrate a floating fortress and destroy the four supervillains known as the Sinistrals. (Get it? Because they're sinister.) As tends to happen in RPGs, the floating fortress begins to collapse once the baddies are defeated, and Maxim and Selan remain trapped while Artea and Guy escape to safety. Peace reigns for nearly 100 years, until we pick up the story with one of Maxim's descendants and his childhood pal, Lufia. From there, they embark on a quest to save the world again from the Sinistral threat, because we all know sealing away ancient evil doesn't actually work very well.

Much like Konami's recent remaster of Suikoden 1+2, the first Lufia game is really an amuse bouche before the main course. Lufia 2 is widely held to be the more interesting and impactful game of the series. Where Lufia 1 was pretty much a straight-up, turn-based RPG in the vein of Dragon Quest, the sequel adds intricate puzzles involving grappling hooks, bombs, and arrows that make dungeon crawls a lot more memorable. Lufia 2 also includes a light Pokémon-inspired "capsule monster" mechanic, where you can use randomized elemental creatures as a fifth party member, feeding them items and equipment to customize their skills.

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There's also a whiff of the roguelike around the game thanks to the optional dungeon known as the Ancient Cave, which consists of 99 procedurally generated floors that have a different layout every time. Within the cave, your party members start with zero experience and have only bare-bones equipment and items. The team behind the series also realized the frame story about the four heroes was way more interesting than the actual plot of Lufia 1, so they just let you play as Maxim and his pals for this prequel.

Lufia 1 & 2 The Sinistrals Saga will launch digitally in 2027 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Windows PC. Clear River Games plans to release physical copies of the collection for consoles as well.