200. Some monsters are unique, such as the chocobo, but many of them are palette swaps with attributes raised for higher level monsters. Monsters can be captured by throwing a purple stone at them when they are nearly defeated. The progress of the game can be saved using the church buildings in the town, and the character (consisting of additional data such as max hit points and attack/defence levels) can be used in the arcade and versus mode. Development Like the first game, the characters in Tobal 2 were designed by Akira Toriyama. Tobal 2 was to be released in North America, with a planned launch date of March 7, 1998, but the release was cancelled. It would have been the sixth and last title to be part of Square's publishing deal with Sony Computer Entertainment America; the companies instead opted to release Einhänder. According to a Square official, the game was not localized due to the disappointing sales of Tobal No. 1, and the assumption that most of the people who did buy it only did so for the included playable demo of Final Fantasy VII. Square also stated that because they were working on the translations for Final Fantasy VII and Bushido Blade, they lacked the time and resources to translate a text-heavy game like Tobal 2, and their publishing deal with Sony prohibited them from contracting translations of their games to third-party companies. However, according to a feature in the February 2006 issue of Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine, Square representatives claimed that the game was not released because the PlayStation's limited memory prevented the English dialogue from fitting in the game's text boxes. A fan translation was completed little more than three years prior to Square's official statement. The Tobal 2 Original Sound Track was scored by Takayuki Nakamura. Like the soundtrack for the game's predecessor, it includes a fusion of many different styles such as jazz, funk, and rock and roll. When asked in an interview concerning the soundtrack who he was most influenced by, Nakamura stated "...the music styles of Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock and Jeff Beck." The 20 track CD was released by DigiCube on April 21, 1997, in Japan. According to Ken Kutaragi, when tested with a "performance analyzer" which Sony's engineers had developed to test how much of the PlayStation's potential a piece of software uses, Tobal 2 was shown to use