Lufia is the living definition of generic jrpg. It's possibly even more generic than BoF, which at least had some clunky character fusion dynamics and multiple party members. Lufia gives you four party members the entire game, so I hope you're willing to put up with their kooky adventures for like 25-30 hours. There is exactly one side quest, which is a glorified fetch quest that in the later stages reaches near impossible levels to complete unless you break down and take out an faq. Combat is basic as imaginable, even having the (every baby console gamers rage now) "targetting an already dead enemy group leads to a missed attack on air" trait.
Easily my biggest problem with Lufia, though, lies within the graphics, especially in dungeon areas. Here's an easy to understand pie graph that details literally the proportion every non-overworld area in the game where you fight a monster:
It should also be noted that when I say caves, I'm not fudging the numbers and including variants on the cave theme, like maybe some crypts or a dragon's nest or something. No, they are all goddamned caves with the same elements in all of them, the biggest change being that some have a slightly different color scheme. I take back all the mean stuff I said about Breath of Fire having unimaginative settings. At least BoF had those cool rats running around in the caves.
And yet. And yet. While eventually I just went FUCK THIS SHIT to BoF, I played through and beat Lufia with a bare minimum of teeth gnashing. What gives?
Challenge, for one. I can't think of a single point during my illustrious BoF journey where I felt vaguely threatened by the baddies. Lufia, on the other hand, is very good at utterly wrecking your life. The vast majority of battles in the game force you to consider the capabilities of all your party, adjust tactics, and then scream at the monitor when 3/4s of your party is paralyzed and slowly picked off. It's a good thing the battles are generally fairly engaging, because the game's encounter rate is patently ridiculous. Sometimes there's some mercy, but I experienced multiple instances of "step fight step fight step fight" phenomena. As noted above, the biggest challenge in fights is usually derived from status effects, which roughly 2/3rds of the monsters in the game have the ability to inflict, often casting on the entire group with a 50/50 chance of success for each member. DO THE MATH, and shake your fists at the heavens.
One should note that this challenge factor does not apply to bosses. While they can hit hard, they also seem to be more obviously designed to challenge your party's specific capabilities at that time, rather than a designer coming up with an enemy that is sort of annoying by itself and suddenly the game decides you need six of them. The final bosses are especially jokes, with several of them casting magic and status effects that might be threatening if you didn't have a magic mirror spell that doesn't fade away after it is hit.
With such challenge, one naturally looks for any sort of advantage, and here comes what really kept me going for thirty hours: trying to figure out the game's bizarre stat system.
Nothing you do in Lufia seems to really affect your character's roles. Your main guy is the dude that hits things hard and has alot of buffing magic, the green haired guy hits things really hard, the blue haired chick casts magic and gets hit really hard, the yellow haired chick also casts magic but has an enemy group-affecting bow. It took me the entire game to eventually learn this, but there is no tinkering with what your characters do. In one of the more humorously cynical motions by whoever was in charge of mechanics, there's even a set of color specific rings that correspond to each character's hair color and naturally bend towards that character's statistical strengths.
But say you do what the game wants and just give your dudes the equipment they're supposed to have. The game doesn't care. There's never a point in the game where you get some piece of equipment that makes you feel like a king badass, even for a little bit. Most successful jRPGs succeed by effectively hiding your limited choices through lots of distracting bells and whistles. Lufia proudly hangs a picture on your wheel stating that "no enemy will ever be more complicated to kill than 'have girl hit it then have a dude hit it' so keep buying those swords we've already adjusted enemy defense." In addition, the game's RNG for damage taken and received is large enough that if you really did a sword that meaningfully affected your mean damage, it's going to take awhile to calculate.
In the midst of all this, we have the rings. Lufia stuffs your face with rings. Some are obvious, doing various stat buffs that naturally affect nothing. But others I was never able to figure out. The hell is a "Fly Ring," I ask no one in particular. The game sure doesn't want to tell you, as it certainty doesn't change your stats. But it's worth 2000G!!! That must be pretty important, right? It was only after I finished the game with all my rings taking up a full page in my 5 page maximum that I learned that the Fly Ring made you stronger against flying enemies, and most of the other unexplained rings had similar, utterly worthless bonuses. Jesus Christ. It's a testament to how awful the lack of explanation of equipment is that Taito apparently felt bad enough about it that Lufia II leaves no leather helm un-lored.
Perhaps the worst thing, stat-wise, was the conundrum of agility. The strangest part of Lufia's combat system is that while you generally start out your battles by giving everyone a command, one combat starts flying, your character's turns and actions appear seemingly appear at random. Sometimes my executioner green guy would attack first, other times he would go last. This wouldn't be such a problem if not for the whole "no enemy means whiff" and the fact that one screw up can easily mean, at the very least, spending more minutes of your life on the magic screen, trying to wrangle the malevolent cursor to actually heal your people. So, in total frustration, I ended up placing as much agility boosting power on my bow-user, even feeding her all the microscopic agility boost potions, since theoretically that means she would go first and I could soften up as many bads as possible.
If anything, she was even slower.
Ultimately, I guess I did sort of hate Lufia, but perhaps out of residual guilt of Breath of Fire, I kept going. In retrospect, it probably would have been easier to pay some young boys money to put on a puppet show of the plot so I could get all the amusing references in Lufia II, which after playing for roughly fifteen hours I can say is so far second only to Chrono Trigger for favorite SNES rpg. oh boy a review where I don't have to grit my teeth and bitch, fun
No comments:
Post a Comment