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Lufia and the Fortress of Doom
Lufia 2: Rise of the Sinistrals was a great game, possibly one of the greatest releases the Super Nintendo ever had. Its visuals were lovely, if SNESsy, it had one of the best scores for a SNES-era game that didn't come out of Square, and despite its often-dodgy, buggy translation, it had a well-told story with a cloud of melancholy hanging over its head because we knew the game would not, could not come to a completely happy ending.
Because, the deaths of two of the main characters served as the introduction, the tutorial, even, of the game it was a prequel to: Lufia and the Fortress of Doom.
The original Lufia game is probably one of the biggest cases for the LP concept: it has a lot going for it, which we'll be discussing as we go, but my god, nobody should be playing it for the first time in this day and age. Many will remember Lufia 2 as being one of the first games to largely (albeit not completely) dispense with the concept of random battles. Lufia 1, on the other hand, is so riddled with them that it makes Tales of Phantasia look sedate. Ending a fight and getting into another two steps later is literally a thing that happens in this game.
The 'fun' doesn't stop there-- Lufia may not have invented the fetch quest, but it refined it to a science. Lufia 2 wasn't free of this either, not by any stretch, but you can hardly move on to the next town without encountering a bridge outage, a lost child, or a king who needs his tastebuds wowed in this game.
Oh my god! We're suddenly in FAQ format, and also this sounds terrible! Why would anyone suffer through this game?
All nostalgia and crippling gameplay flaws aside, there are any number of things that this game does really well. First off, its soundtrack is absolutely amazing. Whether it's better than Lufia 2's is an argument that nobody can lose, because it's all great.
Graphically, it's a SNES game from 1993. But it's bright and cheery, and generally cartoony. Those of you who've only played Lufia 2 and not this one will notice the colours are a lot more saturated. This actually carries through to the music, too-- a lot of the instruments used in Lufia 1 have a quality that just sounds to me a lot like dripping water, and a lot of the songs are filled with cheerful trills and a lot of brass. Especially when looking at the audio and visual differences between it and Lufia 2, it's clear it's very intentionally and deftly setting an overall tone. (So is Lufia 2, of course, albeit a different tone).
The upside of the fetch quest-related padding is that it presents a very big gameworld, and it feels large. Going to the next town feels like a journey. There's any number of little villages that don't really matter for anything besides set pieces (or frames for a fetch quest, but same difference, really). The world is a place to explore, in this game.
Where Lufia 2 had its bugs -- graphical glitches in dungeons, some untranslated text, a buggy config screen, Lufia 1 came out, as far as time has been able to tell, bug free. Furthermore, in an era where even Woolsey's work had yet to come out in North America, in Lufia we were presented with a lucid, fluent translation into conversational English that took few to no liberties outside of localizing names, items, and the expected mandatory Nintendo censorship. What very few oddities or differences that are even remotely worth noting, we'll discuss later.
I remember this game! Wasn't it great when that amazing thing happened?
It's an old game, and I expect a lot of people have played it and, hell, the manual had a walkthrough for about the first 2/3 of the game. That being said, I expect even more people have only played Lufia 2. So, let's put it like this: this game plays you fairly straight and there's not a lot of twists and surprises to it, so I don't really care if people discuss what happens in this game. However, there is one particular plot twist, and if you've played this game you know what it is, that let's maybe not discuss until it happens.
So are you going to be trying to be funny, or write some kickass bad fanfic for this LP or what?
I'm not very funny, so I won't really be telling many jokes, and I think this game's script stands well enough on its own that it doesn't need me punching it up that way. We're going to be strictly informative here; there's a lot to look at and enjoy.
Here is where a nice list of updates will go, when they exist
Hooray!
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So let's hear some more about the game!
Here is the world map from this game, with one of those lovely little flowcharts that was the style at the time. We'll be going everywhere in more or less but not really the order shown.
Player Characters
You get four party members in this game, and there's none of the shuffling that comes in Lufia 2 at all. These guys are in the manual so I categorically declare them Not Spoilers, and will at the very least give the manual blurbs here, and later discuss what they actually do in a fight as they come in.
This is our main character, who has no default name at all, poor thing. He is primarily used for hitting things, though he also learns an impressive bank of healing and a few support spells as he levels. He is decidedly not a silent protagonist, and spends the game having an actual, if somewhat generically heroic personality.
Of him, the manual says: Your fiery hair marks you as a descendant of Maxim. You are heir to his power, his moral strength, and his devotion to duty. Your greatest talents are those of a warrior, but you know some magic.
Lufia mysteriously appeared in Alekia when she was seven, and she is your closest friend. She gladly joins your quest and vows to use all of her tremendous magical skills to destroy the Sinistrals.
Aguro, the commander of the Lorbenian army; his strength is as great as Lufia's magic abilities. Once you meet him in Treck, he becomes devoted to you.
Aguro's name is a case of one of the few non-censorship related changes to this game, and it's very typically minor. His original name was Aguros. The one-letter cut was almost certainly due to the five-character limit on names and is consequently not a big deal.
As a half-elf, half-human, Jerin has been outcast by both races. Only her wondrous skill with bow and arrow and magic have kept her alive. Because you save her, she joins your quest out of gratitude.
Jerin is another victim of the five-character name limit: she was originally Jerina which is interesting if only because dropping the last letter here gives the resultant name a different inflection and makes it sound a bit more androgynous or tomboyish. On the other hand Jerina sounds kind of dumb.
Other characters
You play them briefly at the beginning; these are the four heroes who comprise your final Lufia 2 party, and who were the first to save the world from the evils of the Sinistrals nearly one hundred years ago.
Maxim was the leader of the party and played a role in combat analagous to the main character of this game; in this game, since it predated the odd multiple world maps of later games, he is considered a knight of Alekia. Of course, he is a generally all-round heroic and stand-up guy.
Selan is a character who is by far more fleshed out in the second game than the first. She mostly magics the hell out of the things for the brief sequence where she's playable. What little we do see of her isn't necessarily flattering; she's somewhat typically reliant on her man, so to speak, and generally given over to the usually stereotypical girl-ness. The nature of the sequence doesn't really give over much for her to break out of that mould, though, and Lufia 2 does a far better job with her.
Guy's job is to hit things, and Lufia is not really a game that's afraid to give you a character who can only attack and use items. He generally does even more damage than Maxim, albeit not a lot more. One of the survivors of the battle of Doom Island, he's rumoured to still be alive today, though since this would make him a hundred and twenty-four years old, give or take a year, he's got to be just about ready to keel over if he is.
Artea is the original party's token elf, and he gets a different set of attack magic than Selan, as well as some more support magic than she does. Additionally, the weapon he uses, a bow, is able to hit a whole group of monsters at once. Consequently he's really good both at ensuring the numerous random encounters you get even in the intro sequence die quickly, and in keeping the party going through the bosses. Being a relatively young elf at the time of the original battle, he's certainly alive and kicking somewhere. Proably somewhere filled with asshole elves. Because there's no real attempt by this game to break from the notion that elves are jerks.
Artea is a full-on name change from the original. He used to be called Arty. Whoever localized this game, I hope they're still getting work today.
We'll be adding a few more characters here as we go, but honestly, not as many as you might think, if you've played Lufia 2. There's really only a few supporting characters in this game.