Lufia and the Fortress of Doom (SNES): an average RPG in every sense

Of course this is my opinion because the game actually sold relatively well and there are some die-hard fans out there that really thought it was a great game: I am not one of those people.

When Final Fantasy shocked the world by releasing a turn-based RPG game that not only managed to keep the company afloat (it was called "Final Fantasy" because it was meant to be the final game releases by Square, who was running out of money,) it managed to completely fascinate an entire generation of fantasy gamers.

Almost immediately many other studios jumped on this bandwagon of sorts and released similar games. In the case of Lufia, it basically the exact same thing as Final Fantasy as it seemed to absorb all the tedious parts of Final Fantasy but not build on it at all.

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During the 8 bit age, there wasn't really a great deal that could be done with RPG games and turn-based combat games all appeared relatively the same out of necessity. When we fast forward a few years to the 16-bit age, graphical capabilities, overall processing power, and storage kind of dictated that a game should be made better than they were in 8-bit times, and most of them were. Lufia's graphics are just so so and honestly, probably could have been done on the NES aside from some interesting fake 3-D portions of the game that don't even happen very frequently.

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Navigating the world happens exactly as you would expect in a very familiar way akin to pretty much every RPG game that existed at the time and that is fine. The battle system was very basic as far as graphics were concerned consisting of very little animation on the part of both the party and the enemies encountered.

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One of the most irritating aspects of all of these RPG games of yesteryear is something that i refer to as the "random encounters" where you are walking along and then all of a sudden get sucked into a battle. This could happen after 25 steps or 2 steps and it seemed to be completely random how long it took to get into a battle and also what enemies you ended up facing.

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Boss battles would have the same uninspired interface as normal battles and after a while combat just became boring. One could forgive all of this if there was a fantastic story behind it all, the likes of which we saw in all the Final Fantasy games on the SNES, but Lufia's story just seemed like a cookie-cutter version of "go here, do that, now move on to the next thing that isn't really connected to the over all story." Many people never finished this game not because it was hard (it wasn't) but because it was monotonous.

One of the worst aspects of the game is that fact that pretty much every step of the chain leading to the eventual victory was a "fetch quest" which was mere a method of getting you to open up the next section to get to the next town, cave, or tower. This is the major problem that I, and a majority of other people who didn't really enjoy this title had with the game in an overall sense.

The overall story is completely overshadowed by the amount of completely unrelated to the story filler that is contained in between. In one general example there is only one way of getting to the other side of this one mountain range and the person who can get you through there will only do so if you can find his friend who is in a cave. You go and rescue his friend only to find out that he can not go with you until you find these three things that he needs, which are located in 2 other caves and a tower. At the top of the tower there is a king that will not give you his piece of the puzzle until you got to yet ANOTHER cave to retrieve what he needs. To complete this arduous part of the game will take several hours if you don't take breaks... all simply to get to the other side of a mountain range on NONE of this is in any way related to the main story.

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I'm not going to say that Lufia was lazy because I have no idea what actually goes into making a game but I will say that I think that the developers didn't really try to make anything particularly good but rather knew that people would buy this based solely on the fact that it looked like the wildly popular Final Fantasy games and others that were selling like hotcakes.

A disappointing title for sure, this game went on to spawn 4 more titles, the 2nd of which is very highly sought after and was a fantastic game. But i'll save that for another time....