The Lufia series was something I had admittedly not heard of before Mr. Bond suggested it, but considering it was Yet Another SNES RPG™, I decided to give it a shot and added it to our list of things to play. The game itself is a prime example of early SNES RPGs, considering the music, graphics, and dialogue - all of which are admittedly enjoyable, but have that early-90s "charm" of being somewhat laughable, especially in regards to the iffy English translation of the script. Stats, battles, and leveling are all straightforward if you've ever played an RPG, and battles themselves are done in Final Fantasy Mystic Quest style where your party faces the enemies head-on, party stats being listed in the lower third of the screen. Unique to the genre, though, is Lufia's battle menu system: rather than having options listed for each character, to save space, a D-pad grid lit up with icons replaces the standard "FIGHT, MAGIC, ITEM" menu from Final Fantasy's day, leaving the player to default to the "FIGHT" command if a button isn't held while pushing A to achieve a different action.
Returning to the "interesting" translation of the game's script, item and magic titles are often extremely misleading, with items entirely missing descriptions in-game. Spells such as "Drain", which in other games would leech HP away from a target, instead lower a target's defense; "Stun" raises a target's attack; "Dead" revives a target to roughly 5% HP. When viewing spells, however, and as something I didn't realize until the very end of the game, the Y button can be held to see a brief description - it's too bad I didn't realize that until I was so far along in the story, instead relying on level grinding and spells like "Stronger", "Champion", and "Valor" to restore HP to the party.
Rather than the relics found in games such as Final Fantasy VI, rings are found throughout the game, augmenting various stats and occasionally having undesirable effects, such as doubling the character's encumbrance. Typically, rings are found and worn, with new finds often replacing what characters already have. Any character seems to be able to wear any ring, and it's up to the player to decide which characters get the best stat boosts.
Character stats are noteworthy as well - the "hero" character has a strong blend of attack, defense, magic, and magic resistance; Aguro has high attack and defence, no magic, and low magic resistance; Lufia has low attack, low defense, high magic, and high magic resistance; and Jerin has average attack and defense with higher magic and magic resistance.
Certain items in the game are cursed, as well - while, say, the "Luck Blade" is the highest-stat sword in the game, Aguro's (the only character who can equip it) accuracy drops to around 60%. While some might say that the benefits of occasional huge hits outweighs predictable attacks, it's often desirable to switch to a different weapon. Considering the weapon is cursed, the game only allows priests to bless the bearer, unequiping the item, but even with the blessing, the item remains cursed and needs to be removed by a priest again if reequiped. Priests are also able to save progress and raise dead party members, and while saving is free of cost, reviving characters costs a hefty sum, often in the thousands of gold, which can be painfully expensive early to mid-game.
The distribution of money in the game also fails where other RPGs do, too - after a certain point, enemies drop such a ridiculous amount of gold that anything in the game can be purchased with ease, even without emptying your maximum-five-pages-of-inventory. Of course by that point, you're likely grinding to defeat bosses, anyway.
Once the party reaches an average level around 55, it's fairly doable to plow through the Fortress of Doom and try to end the game, but the game, for some unfathomable reason, decided that the end boss, Guard Daos, would simply spam "Flood", a mid to high-level water spell that hits all party members, and "Figual", which has a high rate of confusing party members - again, targeting everyone. "Flood" is manageable, considering it, by this point, should only hit for around 100 HP per character, but "Figual" is a complete screwball, with no way to counter it other than "Mirror", which reflects all magic that targets that character, and even then, the magic mirror only lasts a handful of turns. While every other Sinistral and normal enemy up to this point could be thwarted by a level-55 team, really the only way to power through Guard Daos is to level high enough to gain enough speed to get more attacks in before he "Figuals" everyone to oblivion. This necessity drove me absolutely crazy - no boss in a game should require a ridiculous amount of effort just to have a chance at defeating it. If the other Sinistrals were as difficult, or at least ramped up with each battle at the end, I might have appreciated this "feature" more, but difficulty scaling in the game ultimately failed hard because of this. It's also worth noting that the party can entirely leave the last dungeon between these final battles with the Sinistrals, which left me fuming that the game knew the difficulty of the final one or two fights were entirely too high, allowing the party to leave, heal, level, reequip, what have you. In short, it's a very terrible way to end an otherwise cheesy, but fun game.
Lufia and the Fortress of Doom was delightfully 90s, and truly was a fun romp, but poor spell and item naming, frustrating difficulty scaling at the end of the game, and jagged story left me a bit disappointed, even if only slightly. Mr. Bond and I started Lufia II last night, which already looks to have evolved tremendously, at least in terms of SNES games. Look for a review of that and many more in the next month or two!
Love and lava cookies,
Tormod