Lufia and The Fortress of Doom: The Dangers of Putting The Best Part First

Lufia and the Fortress of Doom is a mostly forgettable RPG on the Super NES, save for a surprisingly good opening sequence. Unfortunately, the rest of the game never quite reaches this level of quality, thus presenting a cautionary tale against putting the best part first.

The game starts with the battle against the Sinistrals. The first playable sequence has you control the party of legendary heroes- Maxim, Selan, Artea and Guy- as they assault the Sinistrals' lair. In gameplay terms, you're playing through the final dungeon and fighting the final bosses, but this is far easier than it seems, since Maxim and his party are overleveled for the task.

Eventually, you face the Sinistrals themselves- Gades, Amon, Erim and Daos- although when you actually reach them in the game proper, you skip over Erim and fight Guard Daos after the three male Sinistrals are defeated. The battle concludes on a bittersweet note, as while evil is defeated, Selan and Maxim die as the Fortress of Doom collapses, leaving behind their child.

The game flashes forward 90 years later, to when Maxim's descendant, the hero of the story(whose name you can choose) meets a young girl named Lufia. Nine years later, the hero and Lufia are grown up, and living in a time of peace. After some expository dialogue about the hero's status as Maxim's descendant and the hero being worried about the possibility of peace ending, the hero hears about trouble in the kingdom of Sheran.

At this point, the hero must travel north and through some caves to reach Sheran, battling standard low-level monsters to get there. Upon arriving, the hero learns that Sheran was attacked, and must go back to get help, with Lufia in tow for the second trip. As you can imagine, this is hardly the most engaging sequence.

When you return to Sheran, you retrieve the king from the castle dungeons. On the way out, you encounter Gades(the first of the Sinistrals to be fought), with the hero fighting him one-on-one while sending Lufia and the others away. While Maxim and his companions could do up to 250 or so damage to Gades, the hero does damage in the single digits. While Maxim and his companions generally didn't take more than half their health in damage from Gades, Gades hits the hero for hundreds of damage, enough to kill him several times over. Only the return of Lufia, which causes Gades to retreat, saves the hero's life. If nothing else, this effectively serves to show that the hero is nowhere near his ancestor's power, and thus Gades is far out of the hero's league.

From this point on, the story is about journeying to find a way to stop the Sinistrals from returning, and while the "real" plot has begun, it remains relatively slow-paced for some time. As such, while the game gets off to a strong start, the first few hours come off as a disappointment compared to the opening, which may make it difficult to stay engaged. As such, Lufia is a cautionary tale about how good video game stories not only need a strong opening, but need to stay consistently interesting in order to keep players' attention.

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