Review: Lufia and the Fortress of Doom

This week, I'm going to be looking at two games: Lufia and the Fortress of Doom, and its vastly improved sequel, Lufia 2: Rise of the Sinistrals. Lufia 2 is a game that is very near and dear to my heart, and so I thought, why not play the first game in the series? Well, it turns out there are quite a few perfectly valid answers to that question. This is probably going to be an ongoing thing - look at two games that are related, and see just how one of them improves on the other, or doesn't, as the case may be. It's a good way to glean some design knowledge - look at what was dropped from a previous game, and what was added, and think about just why it was done that way.

(For more information about these games, see their wikipedia entry and, perhaps more helpfully, their tvtropes entry.)


Lufia and the Fortress of Doom

An SNES RPG, it embodies everything that has changed about RPG’s since then. First of all, the targeting system in this game was just awful – you could only target groups of enemies, not specific ones, IE if there were three bats and a spider, you could target either the three bats or the spider, and if you targeted the bats and were using a single-target attack, it would hit one of the bats randomly. The only thing I can think that the designers were thinking when they made this was that it would be a unique twist on combat. Well, it was unique, but the lesson to learn here is to actually think whether your “unique twist” is a good/fun idea. This is a lesson many game designers could stand to remember – just because something is unique does not make it fun, or even necessarily interesting.

And it’s not just the dumb targeting system that doesn’t age well about this game. Like so many old RPG’s, it has too many random encounters – and by proxy, it has truly random encounters in general. What I mean by “truly random” is that just walking around triggers them – there’s no way to avoid them, like avoiding their sprite on the dungeon map. Additionally, these random encounters can actually be quite hard – you have to burn a surprisingly high number of spells and items just to make it through a dungeon. And the bosses are harder than that, even – quite a bit of level grinding is required. Fortunately, most modern (but not all – Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner – Raidou Kuzunoha vs. the Soulless Army (what a mouthful) has truly random encounters, and even has them in cities) games have eliminated completely random encounters, and only rarely have ones that are hard enough to be a overbearing tax on your resources.

On a side note, people who remake old games could learn something from new games – there’s a reason very few games have truly random encounters anymore. I’d love to see some older games that, when re-released, didn’t feel the need to keep truly random encounters – Final Fantasies, for example. While I haven’t played the latest release of FF4 for the DS, all the previous remakes of older FF’s I’ve played have kept the truly random encounter system, and it bugs me that they did. Yes, it’s staying true to the original, and yes, it doesn’t require any rebalancing of exp/money gain if you just keep it like it was, but it would improve the game dramatically to fix this.

The translation is actually pretty good, and one of the few saving graces of this game – except for monster names. The team that did the story translation and the team that did the monster translation must have been completely different – the monster names are often completely nonsensical, or simply just strange. For example (while this actually comes from Lufia 2, both games have similar monster naming issues), there is the “Mad Gorem” when the sprite clearly depicts what should be a “Mud Golem.” It’s not that huge of an issue on its own, but it makes you question the quality of the game in general (not that you needed any help doing that for Lufia 1, with its other problems).

The dungeons were also quite boring. There was no spice to the dungeons – you simply walked through all of them until you found the boss, maybe finding some sort of key or other treasure – if you were lucky. There were no puzzles, no random plot events in the middle of dungeons, nothing to really keep you interest. Additionally, their layout was often boring and either too linear or too sprawling – and the aforementioned high frequency and difficulty of random encounters made dungeons in general quite a chore. I had thought this to no longer be the case in any modern RPG, but I recently played Star Ocean: Until the End of Time, and it has a very similar problem. The dungeons in that game are waaaaaaay too big, and frequently have no puzzles or anything to break up their monotony.

It’s not just the targeting system that makes combat in this game annoying. You have “Attack,” “Magic,” “Item,” and “Run” as your only options in battle (and the physical fighters don’t even get Magic). No game has done anything so restrictive in a very long time, and for good reason. You simply have far too few options in combat in this game.

The plot also deserves mentioning. It’s incredibly one-dimensional. I mentioned this in my pacing article, but the meta-plot of this game is always the same. You’re always trying to stop the Sinistrals. Occasionally you vary in exactly how you’re trying to stop them – finding someone who knows about them, finding a powerful weapon to fight them, actually confronting them – but it’s always the same overall goal. There’s also a few subplots, but they’re always very clearly subplots, and frankly, none of them are that interesting.

Lastly, there are a few smaller issues worth mentioning – first of all, you can’t see your numerical max hp/mp in combat, only a bar that was a representation of the percent your characters were at. While that usually sufficed, the difference between the HP of your casters and melee characters was large enough make this annoying. You also couldn’t see what items out of combat (and I forget if you even could in combat) – or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe it was that you only couldn’t see them when you were about to buy them. Regardless, you should always be able to see what the items you have can do. This goes for spells too, as I mentioned in my earlier post, “Things Games Should Never/Always Have.” Again, I thought that this was a thing that only occurred in old games, but Persona 3 had this problem for spells, and it was quite annoying – fortunately, Persona 4 fixed that problem.

So, you might ask me (and justifiably so), did this game do anything right? First of all, there’s something to be said for judging something outside its time. When this game was released, the RPG genre wasn’t was it is today – standards were different. (Excessive) Truly random encounters were the norm, and “Fight/Magic/Item/Run” was pretty typical as well. So in its day, it was probably a passable, but unexceptional, RPG. However, one thing that this game does do right is its characters. They are fairly compelling and deep, especially for their day. Even if the plot itself was fairly uninteresting, the characters still managed to bring it to life. Indeed, the indeed characters are probably the only reason that this game got a sequel. Not that I’m sad that it did – Lufia 2, as I mentioned earlier, is a fantastic SNES-era RPG not to be missed, even now, but after having played this game, it does make me wonder slightly just how it did manage to get a sequel.


Lessons to be learned:

Truly random encounters should be history. Encounters should be avoidable. More generally, make recurring potentially annoying things in games avoidable.

Make sure your gimmick actually works and is fun. (Combat targeting, in this case.)

Max HP – let me see it at all times. In number form, or in bars that are of different sizes. Basically, don't make the player work to see how much HP his party has left, and more generally, don't make the player work for information that he should have. Of course, this brings up a whole different issue of "just how much information should I give the player," but that's an article for a different day - for now, let's just go with: max and current HP values, what different stats do (generally), and what your different items and spells do.

Make your dungeons(and more generally, levels) interesting! Good backdrops, puzzles (mostly this), and some character interaction can go a long way. Something to break the standard pattern.

Let me see descriptions of anything at any time. (Items, Magic, in this case.)

Don’t make random encounters (and more generally, your repetative things that happen in non-boss encounters) too hard! Or if you do, autoheal to full after every fight. See: Baten Kaitos Origins.

Don’t make the meta-plot stale, or if you must, make the subplots interesting.