1. Metal Slug (MVS)(Run and Gun)2. Puzzle Link (NGPC)(Puzzle)3. Illusion of Gaia (SNES)(RPG)4. Warhammer 40,000: Rites of War (PC)(Strategy)5. Shadowrun: Dragonfall (PC)(RPG)6. Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (PC)(RPG)7. Drakkhen (SNES)(RPG)
8. Flight of the Amazon Queen (PC)(Point and Click Adventure)9. Shadowgrounds: Survivor (PC)(Top-Down Shooter)10. Lufia & The Fortress of Doom (SNES)(RPG)Nice ending. For a second there I was about to applaud Lufia for being the only series willing to punch the player in the gut with its endings, but then it backpedaled and made things kinda ok. Still, even if it pulled its punch in a way that Lufia II did not, I'm happy to knock this one out of the park and generally enjoyed myself with it. I'd recommend it to all JRPG enthusiasts, even if I find it a bit rudimentary at times. Yes, it does get blown away by many of the SNES JRPGs that came after it, including its sequel. But there is a lot that I found I liked.
I need to bring up the combat system first, because this makes for an initial source of frustration that eventually changed into a touch of brilliance in my opinion. In Lufia, you do not target individual enemies, you target groups of like enemies. This means that if there are three enemies(let's say brown newts) in one group and two in another(let's say purple mushrooms) in your encounter, you have to pick which group you'll be focusing on to attack and sort of hoping for the best. There is some system(generally your characters will spread out attacks), but there is a touch of danger in developing your strategies. This is further compounded by your attacks not moving from one group to another if you wipe one out. What I mean is, if one attack kills the last enemy in a group while another attack is queued up to hit that same group, the second attack will instead swing at the now dead group, effectively wasting that character's action. As a result, you have to think about your strategy in nearly every fight, causing encounters to become an active affair unlike in most JRPGs which can simply be won by spamming the Fight command.
There's a downside to this though, in that you have to pay attention. Lufia's encounter rate is bizarre, so occasionally you'll fight an encounter, take three steps, fight another, take three steps, fight another, and then take 50 steps without so much as a monster's sniffle in your direction. The sudden fluctuation feels schizophrenic, though on average you'll still encounter enough enemies to generally necessitate little grinding, particularly towards the end. There are also items in the game to let the player manipulate the encounter rate, though since I'm assuming it works on some kind of percentage multiplier, you can still experience a surprisingly low or high number of encounters while using these.
Status effects are also a monstrosity in the game because of how common they are. At first they're limited in use, but over the course of the experience nastier effects become more and more common, eventually resulting in swarms of enemies that can do things like confuse the player, unleash instant death attacks, and call for backup anytime one of them gets killed. While there are items and spells to treat these effects, the spells are generally only available on one or two characters(so if they get hit with an effect that stops them, good luck), and there is no way to prevent the status. There are no items that I could tell which prevent effects like confuse or poison, unless it comes from a spell, and then you have one spell to reflect it. The final boss only has two attacks from what I can tell, one of which is to cast confuse on the whole party. I had one character in that fight whose sole purpose was to use magic to reflect that specific spell.
Oh, speaking of items...there is no way to tell what they do, so even if you have one to stop a status effect, good luck figuring out which item it is. Lufia & The Fortress of Doom kindly offers a means to see what each spell does, lets the player see how their stats will change with any particular piece of equipment, and even gives the amount of experience points needed for each character to level after every battle, but it says nothing about what items do. This felt like a gross oversight, and as a result, I just didn't use items for most of the game. Hell, there's even an island in the game with a town where I could buy back any object I had ever sold! But no info on items, not at all. I figured out what the wind flute did on a fluke, and it became the single most useful item in the game.
Moving on to story presentation, Lufia's is a bit rudimentary. Instead of scenes to convey plot, often you end up just talking to people, which results in a long back and forth of dialogue. Rush through, and you might end up restarting that dialogue, forcing you to go through it again. This stays the same for some early characters throughout the game, so despite the fact I had an airship and was about to assault the final base, the princess of the starting town was more than happy to tell me that I should go explore the next town over to seek answers. That was a little awkward. Now when it does switch over to a scene, the game handles itself pretty well, but those are unfortunately not as common as it probably could have used. Also an in game map would have been helpful.
Finally, let's talk about side stuff. Lufia is for the most part linear, but it has a few side activities that I enjoyed. As I mentioned earlier, the island of Forfeit which allows players to buy back sold items was a genius step, and there is also an old cave and a quest to collect 8 dragon eggs in exchange for wishes at the dragon shrine(no Dragonball jokes, thank you very much). The old cave is limited, but it forms a nice progenitor to the ancient cave in Lufia II. The dragon egg quest is perhaps the most interesting, since it will cause eggs to appear in chests worldwide after each wish is granted, causing the player to backtrack to explore. While in-game clues would have been nice, it gives a good opportunity to return to old areas to muse on the changes. There's also an element of danger here because eggs spawn in specific chests, regardless of whether those chests were previously opened. Go to the dragon shrine with your eggs too early, and you may end up missing out on valuable items that the dragon eggs replace.
There are positives and negatives to Lufia & The Fortress of Doom. Some things are on the old school side of things, while some are on the new. While I feel Lufia II is the superior game(and should be played first), I found Lufia enjoyable and worth the effort and, at times, frustration. Just be prepared to plan a little on how to conduct your battles, and I recommend looking up a map online. And a guide, so you know what all of those stupid items do.
