I played Lufia & The Fortress of Doom
This is a SNES game from 1993. it was released in Japan under the name Estpolis Denki, and was never released in Europe at all.
I played the US version via emulator.
Lufia is a fairly typical Dragon Quest-style JRPG developed by Neverland, the same developer who would eventually go on to develop Rune Factory. ...I was not aware of this connection before I started looking into this game. I think Lufia was in fact their first game!
The story involves a group of heroes who go on a journey to defeat the evil warriors known as the Sinistrals, who have revived after being defeated by a previous group of heroes 99 years ago.
This is an RPG that is extremely derivative of Dragon Quest. It has a very similar structure, a similar style of overworld, a similar style of dungeon design, a similar battle system - basically everything in this game reminds me of Dragon Quest, mostly Dragon Quest 3 in particular.
The exploration in this game is your typical RPG fare - the world has lots of towns dotted around a large overworld map comprised of multiple continents. At first you explore on foot, going across the overworld and through connecting caves in order to reach new towns. Eventually you get the boat, giving you more freedom, as well as a Warp spell to easily return to previous towns. And finally, towards the end of the adventure, you get the flying boat that grants you full freedom to explore every part of the map. This is very typical of not only Dragon Quest, but Final Fantasy and many other classic JRPGs too. But to me, it felt closest to Dragon Quest, specifically with how it feels to accumulate all the town warp locations, as well as the way the overworld feels to explore. It's difficult to describe exactly how DQ and FF and other JRPGs differ in this regard, but there are subtleties there I suppose. Lufia is mostly on the DQ end of the spectrum.
The way the dungeons are designed reminded me of Dragon Quest 3 in particular, because every single dungeon in this game is either a cave or a tower, with the exception of the titular Fortress of Doom seen during the prologue and ending.
The dungeons are all mazes with the occasional puzzles to solve, and plenty of treasure chests to find. The mazes are not bad individually, but there are quite a lot of dungeons in this game, and the encounter rate is very high, so I did find myself getting rather fatigued as I played more and more of the game.
I also found the treasure chests in this game to be disappointing, as there are just too many of them, and they generally don't contain unique or interesting items. Mostly potions and stuff. ...didn't stop me from compulsively wanting to open them all of course.
The tower dungeons let you fall off them - if you walk off the edge of a tower, you get to drop all the way down to the overworld map, as an easy escape. ...which is something pretty much taken directly from Dragon Quest.
The combat in Lufia is a very typical turn-based JRPG combat system. You have a party of four heroes (you start with two, and meet the other two as you progress), and you select Attack, Defend, Item, or Magic. Nothing out of the ordinary here. You can get attacked by multiple types of enemy at the same time, and when this happens, you cannot select individual enemies to target. If you get attacked by three frogs and one scorpion for example, you can decide to target either "frog" or "scorpion", but you can't select which frog to target - instead it's chosen randomly. This, yet again, is a gameplay thing lifted directly from Dragon Quest. And at this point, I'm starting to get a little annoyed with how on-the-nose Lufia is about copying its inspiration - especially considering this inability to target specific enemies is something I never liked about the early DQ games.
The four heroes in Lufia are:
The main hero, who doesn't have a canon name (so I called him Benjy). The main hero has the strongest stats, and gets access to healing and buffing magic.
The second hero is Lufia, the hero's childhood friend, and the mage of the group. She has extremely strong spells, but is rather fragile.
The third hero is Aguro, the captain of the guard in one of the later towns, and is the only hero who has no magic. His only strategy is to do regular attacks, or occasionally use items.
The fourth hero is Jerin, the half-elf who we rescue from being sacrificed to a monster. She uses a bow that hits multiple targets as her regular attack, and also has access to powerful magic spells.
The main hero is the son of Maxim, who was one of the four heroes who defeated the Sinistrals 99 years ago. Maxim was accompanied by three friends: Guy, Selan, and Artea.
One interesting thing Lufia does is that the prologue of the game takes place in the original battle from the past - you play as the party led by Maxim, travelling through the final dungeon, the Fortress of Doom, on their quest to defeat the four evil warriors known as the Sinistrals. This prologue is quite interesting - it's a way for the game to show you the high-level spells you will get to use later on, and it also lets you see the main bad guys right from the start, which is a good way to introduce them into the story.
I also like how the front of the US box for the game says "Battle in the opening story!" as a selling point. I guess they were really proud of this prologue, huh?
After the prologue is over, the game begins with the hero and Lufia in the present day, as they learn about monster attacks suddenly occurring in other towns after 99 years of peace. They go out to investigate, which eventually leads them on a quest to hunt down the Sinistrals who have revived themselves through unknown means.
The plot of the game is not all that revolutionary - the hero decides to confront the Sinistrals in order to restore peace to the world. Lufia, his childhood friend, also plays a key part in the story, as she has a mysterious past that connects her to the Sinistrals in a way neither of them were aware of.
Overall, the story is nothing to write home about. Each new town you explore has a few scenes here and there to set up the local quests that progress the game, but there isn't all that much actual plot development throughout.
Some of the story scenes struck me as rather poorly-paced. The one that comes to mind in particular is when the team meets Guy, one of the original heroes who is now old and retired. The scene starts with Guy saying "I'm still alive and kicking!", but it immediately transitions to "well, it seems my time has come...", and then it immediately goes to show the heroes mourning at his gravestone. ... Like.. hold on a minute, this scene is moving way too fast! ... I mean, I get it. The point of showing Guy's death is to give our hero more resolve for completing his mission. I've seen storytelling before. But the way they handled this scene was very jarring and abrupt. Feels like it comes out of nowhere, just so the game can claim that it includes some important plot moments here and there. Not really a fan of how it was handled.
Regarding the story, there were some other minor moments that didn't make sense to me - for example, there is a thief boy who steals a ruby from a town in order to take it to his friend in another town. He seems perfectly able to travel between towns on foot by himself, yet whenever I have to travel between towns, I have to fend off random encounters with monsters. ... the game makes no attempt to explain how the boy is able to travel safely at all. It's a minor thing, but to me, it shows a lack of consideration for consistency in how the world works.
There was also a dungeon room that has a signpost outside of it saying, "Only women can enter this room" with no further explanation or justification. Lufia needs to enter this room by herself to retrieve an item. ...... but why though. Why can't the hero just go in with her. Why does he unquestioningly respect the signpost's authority over Lufia's safety? It's never even brought up again later or anything. There are no other points in the game where this happens. They don't even attempt to make it make sense. This completely baffled me.
Speaking of arbitrary gender things, there are quite a lot of stereotypes in the game. Early on there's a town known for its big shopping centre, and of course Lufia is sooo excited to try on the dresses. ...I guess it's not too big a deal, but the game seems to lay it on quite thick. Lufia is very much a stereotypical girly girly anime girl, and it seems like the game is trying to make the player sympathise with the hero, who has to put up with her silly girlisms. ....kiiinda not a fan of that tbh. I prefer my stereotypes thoroughly subverted in my rpgs. ...but I guess I'll let it go.
Oh, and as long as we're talking about parts of the game that don't make much sense, I guess I'll mention the game's translation.
The dialogue is fine for the most part, but there are a few translation choices that made me question things. We recruit Jerin into the party by saving her from becoming a ritual sacrifice, however the game doesn't call it a sacrifice, it calls it a "ransom" instead, which is.... kinda not really the correct word? I mean, I guess you could say it applies, but it's certainly not the commonly-used term for this trope. Just comes across like the translator didn't know what was going on.
More annoyingly are the spell names. Spell names such as "Poison" or "Sleep" don't inflict statuses, but instead cure statuses. You need to cast Poison on a poisoned friend to cure them. Or cast "Death" on a downed ally to revive them. It's unconventional, but you can get used to it. But then we have some of the other spells. The main healing spell is called Strong, and the full-heal spell is called Champion. The party-wide heal is called Boost. The attack-raising spell is called Trick, and the agility-raising spell is called Fake. .... huh. it's a weird uncanny area, where the word choices don't make enough sense to be useful names, but still make just enough sense that you can kind of see where it's coming from. somehow.
The spell that inflicts silence on a foe is called Bounce, which is very confusing because the spell that casts a reflect shield on an ally is called Mirror. ........ these names are not so easy to get a handle on.
There is a spell called Float that lets you walk across swamp tiles without getting hurt. But it doesn't actually make you float for real it seems - if you walk over a hole with Float active, you'll still fall in the hole. ....... i mean come on guys. that's just poor. It feels to me like they just didn't even consider this basic interaction when they decided to name the spell. ....they should have just called it Stepguard or something, like how it's called in Dragon Quest. ... because, again, damage-dealing tiles with a spell to counteract them is a game mechanic lifted straight from Dragon Quest. Of course.
Item names are weird too - there's a shield called a "Brone Breast". what the heck is a brone? did they mean bronze? or bone? And if it's supposed to be a breastplate, why does it go in the shield slot?
One of the magical staves that Lufia can equip is called a "Glass Robe". I'm sure they meant rod, not robe lol.
Sometimes you can come across cursed equipment - they have negative effects such as damaging the user, and can only be unequipped by paying the church in town. But I wanted to point out that two of the cursed items are called "Broad Sword" and "Broad Rod". ... ....do you think they meant it to say Blood instead of broad?? that would make more sense to me. Because otherwise, why would a regular old broadsword be one of the cursed items.
anyway.
...
I do want to mention that some of the battles in the game are not too bad. I do remember thinking that some of the boss encounters were quite challenging in an interesting way. One of the earliest encounters is against three goblins, and they were tricky enough that they forced me to re-equip my party to maximise defense on Lufia so she could focus on healing the others. Later on, there was an evil spirit on top of a red tower who was so strong, it forced me to adopt the strategy of buffing up Aguro with attack up, buffing down the boss with defense down, and focusing entirely on healing with the Hero, Lufia, and Jerin - only ever attacking with buffed-up Aguro. I couldn't squeak by unless all three of my magic-users were on constant healing duty.
The fact that the game can force me to come up with strategies like this is a good thing, I say.
Though ... I will complain about how the game doesn't ever tell you when buffs and debuffs run out and return to normal. You just have to pay attention to the damage numbers I suppose.
Despite liking some of the fights, I did feel like there was an important part of the battle strategy the game was not letting me take part in. You get so many rings with weird names like "Dragon Ring", Undead Ring", "Ghost Ring", Heavy Ring", "Sea Ring", " etc etc etc..., yet unless they provide a stat boost, there's no way to know what they actually do. I worked out that some rings boost the power of specific spells, but aside from this, I have absolutely no idea. There are no in-game descriptions for items, only for spells. It makes the game a lot more shallow because, without this knowledge, there is no way to make use of all my available options.
Aside from these few interesting bosses, though, combat is on the whole extremely extremely repetitive and overly frequent. There is an item, Sweet Water, which can help reduce the rate of encounters, but I still felt like the encounters were way too much, even when I had a Sweet Water active for pretty much the entire game. Since I was playing on emulator, I made ample use of that speed-up function.
Enemy encounters have decently interesting strategies to them - such as which order to take them out, which ones to use spells on etc - all good RPG combat stuff.... and it's even possible to inflict statuses like confusion on enemies, which is a good thing - there are too many games where enemies are immune to statuses, so I'm happy to be able to here. But yeah. On the whole, there are just too many encounters, and it makes the game as a whole feel like a real drag.
There is one section in particular that struck me as overly pointlessly annoying - in order to repair a bridge in a cave, you have to find the architect in a distant town. He then moves to the castle of the town nearby the broken bridge. He tells you to go look at the bridge before he starts working on it. He doesn't join you, he just stays in the castle until you go. So you go there, look at it, and come back. Then he goes there himself ready to repair the bridge. So you have to go all the way to the bridge again. Then he says "ok now go stand on that ledge". So you have to leave the cave and enter via a different entrance to reach the high ledge area. He builds the bridge with you watching from the ledge. And then in order to actually cross the bridge, you need to go back out, go back to the other entrance, and go back in. What the heck is this part of the game, it's ridiculous. How many times do you except me to go back and forth? And for what, a scene where a bridge is repaired? That's not interesting enough to justify this much hassle!
Later on in the game, in order to create our flying ship, we need to collect 7 pieces of Alumina Ore. And each one is located in a different cave area. ..... it's at this point I was starting to really feel the fatigue of the dungeon exploration, and I finally resorted to using maps from the internet in order to get through the mazes more efficiently. That's sooo many caves in a row, come on. :( Give us a break.
Immediately after the 7 Alumina quest, the game throws the absolute worst puzzle at you:
You have to figure out a four-button combination lock by trial and error, and every failure forces you into an encounter with four pirates that cannot be ran away from, even if you use the Smoke Ball item that guarantees runaways. And these guys use party-wide sleep attacks and confusion attacks, too, so they're extra irritating to deal with.
There are four buttons you have to hit in the correct order. So 24 possible combinations. And... that's all there is. You have to just guess??? Yeah. You need to just try each of the 24 combinations, one by one, until you get lucky. And... yes. That's literally it. That's actually all there is to this puzzle.
There are two hint plaques, one that simply tells you that you need to hit the switches in the correct order before trying to open the door, and another that says "The door won't open if all the switches are already down". ...but this is an ICNREDIBLY BAD hint! Because it's NOT TRUE. You do need to hit all four switches before trying to open the door, otherwise it will summon the pirates every time.
This hint is trying to inform the player that the puzzle isn't doable before the point in the story where you're supposed to do it - if you get here early, the switches are all sunken into the floor and uninteractable. But if you didn't see what this room looks like beforehand, you'd never know - you'd assume that the hint meant that the switch puzzle requires you to only hit three of the four switches, and you'll be here forever trying wrong combinations because of it. Wow, what a horrible misleading hint to an already horrible puzzle. Honestly inexcusable. Especially bad considering this comes immediately after the quest to get 7 Alumina ores, which already was making the game feel like a huge chore. This puzzle is the icing on top.
I gave up around 10 failed guesses. After having to fight the most obnoxious pirate encounter ten times in a row, I just looked up the answer online. ...What an absolute disaster of game design this puzzle is.
... Any goodwill this game still had with me was entirely out the window after that ordeal.
So anyway. Toward the end of the game, we finally reach the Fortress of Doom and confront the Sinistrals. Interestingly, the final dungeon is in fact the very same dungeon from the prologue. It even has the same hint tutorial signposts, which is kind of funny to see right at the end of the game.
But annoyingly, the game removes Lufia from the party for plot-related reasons. She's given back during the final fight, but this means that it's now impossible to re-equip her or level-grind her beforehand, since she's not given back before you trigger the end of the game. So if you save in an endgame state, you'll just be stuck in a world without your full team. That's rather annoying - I always feel like, in an RPG, the endgame just before the final boss should be the time to tie up all your loose ends, with free reign over the whole map. But since they take away Lufia, your options become significantly limited. Not a fan.
Anyway. I don't have much else to say. This game was okay, but not amazing. It definitely tested my patience.
It is pretty much just a decent Dragon Quest clone, with some questionable game design decisions, and nowhere near the level of quality as actual Dragon Quest.
A bit unfortunate. But I don't regret playing it.
I've heard that Lufia II is super amazing, so I look forward to playing the sequel in the future.
:)
