Lufia & the Fortress of Doom (1993)

The first half hour of this game is a major nostalgia trip for me, as I played it a lot as a kid. However, being a little kid, I couldn't get very far into it, so after about an hour, this was a completely new experience. Overall, it was an experience that I really enjoyed! This game's strengths are in the plot at large, the character development, and the charming visuals. I feel like it's going to sound like the game sucks because I have much more to say about the weaknesses, but it really doesn't. It's really just a nice, pleasant RPG that you can pump out in a couple weeks without too much grinding or stress. But it does have its fair share of weaknesses, many of which stem from it being made in 1993.

There are two big issues that last the majority of the game. The biggest by far is the extremely high random encounter rate. This makes dungeon crawling a nightmare because you're constantly being taken out of the dungeon to fight, and once you get to the point where you can't one-shot monsters anymore, it gets quite tedious. And yea, this is how turn-based RPGs work, but like, it's ridiculous in this game. Most games have an item that stops or at least drastically reduces encounters. In Lufia, this is called Sweet Water. But even with Sweet Water, I still sometimes had encounters every two or three steps. It wasn't until close to the end that I realized that going without Sweet Water was actually more effective. I think it may have been a flaw in the programming; however, this may also just be a glitch in my emulator, because I watched a few videos, and other people didn't seem to have this problem.

The other big problem is only exacerbated by the first: every cave and every tower looks exactly the same. Granted, a select few dungeons have puzzles here and there, but for the most part they revolve around switches and warps. Visually, a cave is a cave and a tower is a tower no matter where you are on the map, with perhaps minor colour changes at best. It's just uninteresting level design, and they only ever become difficult because some of them are so big and have a lot of path branches.

I take it back, there's a third major problem: the lack of an overworld map. Just, come on.

Again, I think this was just before maps were standard in RPGs. It was also before they really nailed down the levelling up and enemy balance and stuff like that. I'm not a programmer, so I don't understand all that stuff, but it just felt off sometimes. Like you could never really grind because enemies would quickly start giving you too little experience to be meaningful, and bosses would be way more powerful than sometimes seemed necessary compared to the other enemies around them. At the beginning, magic is way more powerful than regular attacks, but in the middle it almost becomes useless. A lot of the good items aren't sold anywhere, so you can't stock up when you need to, and if you use them in a fight that you lose, those are gone forever, because instead of giving you the option to restart at a save point, it just sends you to the nearest town and takes half your gold. And there are no save points before bosses, so you can't properly prepare. Sometimes they just appear out of nowhere, so your party might be close to death before you even enter the fight. And for Pete's sake, the game doesn't even tell you what items do.

Oh, and one more thing: in the overworld, the terrain doesn't affect what enemy you face, so when you walk in the desert, for example, you encounter the same enemies as you do in the grass and mountains.

All of these issues are things that I feel like the gaming community figured out over time, and you don't see them as much after the mid-90s. That's why I feel like Lufia, to a large extent, is just a product of its time. I'd say that an HD remake that fixed everything would make it an amazing game, but there's one other problem: while the overall plot is great, much of the adventure itself is pretty dull. A lot of it is just, "go get this, so you can do this, so you can do that, so this will happen." It's extremely linear, and there's rarely a clear, overarching goal until closer to the end. While I appreciate that they made an RPG that didn't revolve around collecting x number of arbitrary items, that sort of narrative at least gives you an idea of where you are in the game. In Lufia, you have no idea when you're halfway or reaching the end of the game. And when certain quests just have you walking around a cave for an hour, this can be a problem.

Well, I just ranted for a long time about everything wrong with this game, but I still stand by it. I had a good time. Like a previous reviewer said, I recommend it for people who love old-school RPGs but have already played all the mainstream ones and are looking for something a little different.

Tl;dr:

Pros

• Overall plot
• Character development
• Charming visuals
• Laid back

Cons

• High encounter rate
• Repetitive visuals and design of caves and towers
• No overworld map
• Pacing of levelling-up felt off
• No save points before bosses
• No option to go back to a save point when you die
• No information about items or rings
• Terrain doesn't affect enemy encounters
• Boring subplots

Death count: 5

Battle count: 1,009

Lufia and the fortress of doom, for SNES

Rating: 7.0/10; Good

Worth playing for the RPG fan that has already played all the top old school RPGs.

Lufia is a traditional JRPG most similar to the Dragon Quest series. The story is good with an exceptional start and finish, while most of the middle story is fairly generic. The characters have interesting things to say and their personalities are established fairly well. The beginning stands out because you play as the cast from the sequel in the final dungeon and final boss fights of that game. This doubles as both backstory and a tutorial, because those characters are high level and fully decked out with items and magic, allowing you to get used to the battle system in a safe setting. I was especially amazed that they made character sprites and animations just for this opening part.

Most of the game has the characters travel in mostly linear fashion through the world, and all of its towns and dungeons. Fairly generic fare, though some dungeons are slightly complex with teleporters, a few simple puzzles and holes in floors. The battle system is also fairly standard with two features that stand out: One is the fact that characters get turns in battle depending on their speed, so some characters can get 2 turns to another’s 1. This is similar to the Final Fantasy ATB system, though there is no visual representation of when a character can next act. The second feature is that enemies can appear individually or in groups. Some attacks and spells (such as bows) target every enemy in a group without dividing damage, while single target attacks randomly attack a single enemy in a group. There are also spells that hit all enemies regardless of grouping. This leads to the main tactic in the game of using single target attacks to focus down individual enemies, while using group attacks on larger groups. Unfortunately, this game has the NES era problem of having characters attack nothing if their target is killed before their attack (even though speed determines when you can select something for a character to do, it is actually put into a queue and not carried out immediately). Combat is reasonably enjoyable for the entire game, though it becomes almost absurdly easy when your spellcasters learn absorb (which allows them to spam magic attacks and keep the group healed without items).

While far from the best SNES era RPGs, this is still a game that is worth playing through at least once, at the very least for the story. The flaws of the game are not serious, though I would say the most annoying ones are having to mash the button several times after every single battle just to get past the xp awarded lines, and the lack of a world map.

Pro

• Button to get description of what spells do
• Good story and ending
• Logical “hidden” loot in the world. For example, searching someone’s dresser will probably get you clothes. There is one point with a sword stuck in a grave; you can get that sword
• Good weapon and armor progression, with realistic names and properties (you start off with knives before getting swords for example)
• Some weapons are cursed and cannot be unequipped without paying a priest. However, cursed weapons are still useful and come with interesting negative effects
• Enemies can randomly drop equipment that is a bit better than what is currently available in stores
• Can freely sort items and spells (though they swap positions rather than insert at a point in the list, which makes it more tedious than necessary)
• Interesting tutorial where you play as a different set of characters at very high level with maxed gear and spells
• Mana drain spell only drains mana from enemies that cast spells

Con

• Characters attack enemies that are killed before their turn, rather than switching target
• Too much info displayed after each battle (xp gain and xp remaining for each character, and all stat gains on level up). Takes too many button presses after each battle
• Button to get descriptions does not work for items. This caused me to sell status recovery items because I had no idea what they did
• Large number of rings in the game, but without item descriptions it is very hard to tell what they do
• Final boss regularly uses mass confusion. How is this fair on a final boss? (think Final Fantasy malboros)
• Some weapons are only usable by casters, even though there is no reason the warriors could not use them (example: long knife)
• Uses save points
• No area or world map
• Limited inventory capacity
• High random encounter rate