Lufia & the Fortress of Doom Ranking: B
This is one of those obscure SNES RPGs with a small but dedicated following. I think much of that comes from Lufia II (which I also reviewed), since most people I’ve talked to – and myself – will tell you it’s the superior game. That said, the first Lufia isn’t a bad game, though it does have some pretty rough edges.
Gameplay-wise, the game’s a straight-up, by-the-books old-school RPG with some serious mechanical flaws. We’ve got random encounters, but the encounter rate has a huge variation, so sometimes you’re getting attacked every third step whereas other times you can traverse an entire floor of a dungeon without seeing a single enemy. During battle, turn order is…weird. You’ll input commands for your characters in seemingly random order and they’ll execute those commands in also random order. Sometimes they do it right away. Other times they wait a few rounds. I’ve tried to find patterns associated with the Agility or Weight stats, but I’ve seen the lowest-Agility, highest-Weight character act first and/or act often enough times that I have to conclude those stats don’t govern turn order (or, if they do, there’s some other significant factor going on that I’m not seeing). Also, this was all just with regular attacks, so the rumor you might hear about how more complex actions (like casting a high-level spell) take longer can’t account for this variation.
This game also has a Dragon Quest sort of setup where enemies are split into groups. All regular attacks except bows hit a single enemy. Bows hit every enemy in a group. Magic spells can, depending on the spell, do either of those and some spells hit all enemies regardless of group. Unlike Dragon Quest’s implementation, it gets annoying here because with single-target moves, you can’t choose which enemy to hit if that enemy is in a group. You just target the group and RNG decides which enemy gets hit. Oh, and there’s the original Final Fantasy battle system quirk where if an enemy dies between you inputting an attack command and the character attacking, that character will just attack the empty space where the enemy used to be and waste a turn. It all makes for a clunky system that isn’t too bad once you get used to it, but it can be annoying. I’d also like to point out that Lufia came out in 1993, and by 1993, both Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy had sent out their fifth main-line entries with battle systems that had long done away with these issues.
Early- to mid-game enemies will absolutely wreck your day. For example, there’s an enemy called the Yeoman and he’ll use Hi Arrows, which will hit everyone in the party for 30-40 damage each. They appear at a time where your highest-HP characters are barely hovering around 100 max HP. Imagine fighting 3-4 of those at once and they all manage to go before you do. Yeah. The game does eventually get easier as your characters get stronger, and I generally like games that start out hard and get easier – it gives me a sense of progression, so this isn’t a complaint. The difficulty is just something to note.
Get past the clunky battle mechanics and you’ll find a classic RPG with fun characters, a simple plot, and a strikingly emotional ending. There’s a fairly predictable plot twist, but neither the twist nor the predictability change how I feel about the story. I’m going to defer talking about the plot until my review of Lufia III, since it becomes important there. For now, here is the girl who gave the series its (Western) name at the end of Lufia I (technically, this is a bit earlier than the end, but it’s the last time you can access the menu and her stats/equipment don’t change between this point and the end).
This is one of those obscure SNES RPGs with a small but dedicated following. I think much of that comes from Lufia II (which I also reviewed), since most people I’ve talked to – and myself – will tell you it’s the superior game. That said, the first Lufia isn’t a bad game, though it does have some pretty rough edges.
Gameplay-wise, the game’s a straight-up, by-the-books old-school RPG with some serious mechanical flaws. We’ve got random encounters, but the encounter rate has a huge variation, so sometimes you’re getting attacked every third step whereas other times you can traverse an entire floor of a dungeon without seeing a single enemy. During battle, turn order is…weird. You’ll input commands for your characters in seemingly random order and they’ll execute those commands in also random order. Sometimes they do it right away. Other times they wait a few rounds. I’ve tried to find patterns associated with the Agility or Weight stats, but I’ve seen the lowest-Agility, highest-Weight character act first and/or act often enough times that I have to conclude those stats don’t govern turn order (or, if they do, there’s some other significant factor going on that I’m not seeing). Also, this was all just with regular attacks, so the rumor you might hear about how more complex actions (like casting a high-level spell) take longer can’t account for this variation.
This game also has a Dragon Quest sort of setup where enemies are split into groups. All regular attacks except bows hit a single enemy. Bows hit every enemy in a group. Magic spells can, depending on the spell, do either of those and some spells hit all enemies regardless of group. Unlike Dragon Quest’s implementation, it gets annoying here because with single-target moves, you can’t choose which enemy to hit if that enemy is in a group. You just target the group and RNG decides which enemy gets hit. Oh, and there’s the original Final Fantasy battle system quirk where if an enemy dies between you inputting an attack command and the character attacking, that character will just attack the empty space where the enemy used to be and waste a turn. It all makes for a clunky system that isn’t too bad once you get used to it, but it can be annoying. I’d also like to point out that Lufia came out in 1993, and by 1993, both Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy had sent out their fifth main-line entries with battle systems that had long done away with these issues.
Early- to mid-game enemies will absolutely wreck your day. For example, there’s an enemy called the Yeoman and he’ll use Hi Arrows, which will hit everyone in the party for 30-40 damage each. They appear at a time where your highest-HP characters are barely hovering around 100 max HP. Imagine fighting 3-4 of those at once and they all manage to go before you do. Yeah. The game does eventually get easier as your characters get stronger, and I generally like games that start out hard and get easier – it gives me a sense of progression, so this isn’t a complaint. The difficulty is just something to note.
Get past the clunky battle mechanics and you’ll find a classic RPG with fun characters, a simple plot, and a strikingly emotional ending. There’s a fairly predictable plot twist, but neither the twist nor the predictability change how I feel about the story. I’m going to defer talking about the plot until my review of Lufia III, since it becomes important there. For now, here is the girl who gave the series its (Western) name at the end of Lufia I (technically, this is a bit earlier than the end, but it’s the last time you can access the menu and her stats/equipment don’t change between this point and the end).
According to the report at the end, it took me 29 hours and 53 minutes to complete Lufia I. Nobody died, I stayed at an inn 74 times, fought 1997 battles, ran from 0 battles, and got 711 out of 791 items.