TEXT PLAY: Lufia and the Fortress of Doom (Taito, SNES 1993): Issue #00: Something A Little Unexpected

This is kind of an odd game, far as I can tell.

See, when I think of game publisher Taito, I think more of fighting and action games than I do of RPGs like the Lufia series. I know there are at least two games in this series, but the first one is really the only one I've ever played. For as unexpected as this game is, considering at least my perception of the publisher, I gotta say, it's actually a very good game.

I actually remember the very first time I had a shot at this one. My brother and I had gone to the local video-rental place to rent games for the weekend. We got one each. I can't remember which one of us picked this game out or what the other game was, but this was the memorable one.

I suspect my brother and I had been enjoying Final Fantasy 4 for awhile by the time we came across the first Lufia game, and it looked good, too. Granted, it is pretty much your basic RPG story about an ancient evil that sweeps across the land and there's only the one party of heroes in the world that can save the day. But it works well in a lot of the cases we all remember.

One of the cooler things about this game for me was the prolog it gives us. This is the first, if not only, game I've ever had that has one quite like this. It starts out with a different group of heroes entirely who handily save the world. As luck would have it, this whole opening scene that we get to play through is a hundred years in the game's past, and two of these heroes are the ancestors, and a third of the four we get to actually meet later on in the game, too. But I'll get to that as the game goes on.

And yes, I did say that we can play through at least part of the prolog. This was something I hadn't seen before, not having played too terribly many RPGs before, and haven't really seen much of since. That latter part, of course, is mostly my fault. While the first bit was because I was young and only just getting into RPGs at the time, there really hadn't been much chance to see it before that. Since then, though, has been a different story. It's been because I've been one of those lame-o fanboys who's mostly played the Final Fantasy games, barely giving anything else a chance.

With that in mind, and since I know my mom is amongst my readers, at least on occasion, I've got another little story to tell about this game. Back before I started this blog, I wrote a piece about how Final Fantasy 8 had made me reconsider my life as a gamer. It can be found on my deviantArt page. Part of the reason that this process of reconsideration started in my parents' basement is because I had wound up wasting too much time playing this game several years before, when I should have been working on serious college projects. I realize now, a dozen years off that not-quite-achieved bachelors degree, that yeah, I kind of did screw myself by making the choices I did back then. Now, the fact that I still don't particularly regret having made those choices and how I really feel about how my life has gone since then is a story for another time and perhaps another place.

For now, though, let's get into the silliness that turns serious that is Lufia and the Fortress of Doom!

We'll see you next time in Issue #01: Men In Tights!