The island suddenly appeared in the sky. Let's Play Lufia & the Fortress of Doom!

Even from across the continent, Artea can sense that the battle has come to an end.



It seems Artea always knew the Sinistrals would be back one day, and gladly takes credit for the hard-fought battle we just won, because elves are pricks like that.



But he redeems himself slightly by being the only person in the game to acknowledge that Selan fought at the Battle of Doom Island or even mention her at all.

~~~~





Ainea and her uncle have kept a constant vigil over Guy's resting place, waiting for the moment of our victory.



With news of our triumph, he gladly conveys the message beyond the barriers of life and death to let Guy know that everything worked out. Medi and Lufia took care of everything, just like they said they would.

Remember?

We got this.

~~~





We got this.



Medi still hasn't moved, completely oblivious to the destruction of the fortress around him. Unable to wait any longer, Aguro and Jerin are forced to drag him out of the crumbling castle before they're all killed.



Racing back to the Falcon, the three warriors speed away from the rapidly descending Doom Island.

Parting

As per the laws of cinematic tension, our heroes escape from Doom Island just in the nick of time. The Falcon carries them to safety, landing just a bit west of Ranqs. We can assume that Doom Island is currently crashing into the sea in spectacular fashion somewhere off to the left that we can't see.

I'm sure it's totally awesome.





Now that everyone's safe and they're no longer in danger of dying, Jerin suddenly remembers that Medi is currently dealing with a staggeringly profound loss and tries to console him, but Aguro warns her better of it.



For them, the journey has come to an end, and they can go with him no further. His journey is only beginning, and it shall be longer, harder, and crueler than any of the challenges they faced together. And he must face it alone.




And...and thus does Medi's tale come to an end.

…




Wait, that's it? That's it?

That's how we're going to end this?

Seriously?

Lufia dies and Medi just walks off in a daze of shock and disbelief? That's it? Whoa, okay, hold on, back up for a minute. What the hell just happened? What the hell just happened? Is this real? Did I get the Bad ending or something?

Because holy shit.

Port

Well, this game got depressing in a hurry. I doubt anything further is going to happen that can bring it back from that bleak, depressing cliff it just ran off of, but I guess we might as well see. The epilogue picks up one year later.



Aguro has returned to Lorbenia, presumably to whip the army into shape so that the next time some manner of crisis comes about, the military will be able to deal with it effectively and promptly instead of whining. In time, perhaps it will set an example to all the worthless other nations of the world. Or maybe he'll just conquer them all. Either way, good on him.

He doesn't have to worry about superiors anymore either. Once you get a reputation as “the guy who killed the gods,” you don't have superiors anymore.



Apparently it's his day off, though. Once you're “the guy who killed the gods,” you can also take days off whenever you want.



He just might make decent soldiers out of these clowns yet.



He makes his way to the port of Lorbenia, where Jerin is waiting for him. Guess they've kept in touch the last year or so.



Looks like they're reminiscing on old times, and wondering what became of Medi after their battle.





Apparently Medi never returned to Alekia after Doom Island fell, since there's nothing left for him there. No one has seen him since. But Aguro and Jerin are certain they'll see him again some day.

It can't end like this.

Port

Meanwhile, Aguro has other matters he'd like to discuss.



Oh my...should we leave you two alone for a moment?



This was...apparently not the question Jerin was expecting?



Apparently Jerin has been living with Aguro for the past year. I imagine she wasn't too keen on going back to Belgen after they tried to murder her and all, and probably doesn't want to go live in Elfrea either, because elves are pricks.



Though one would imagine Jerin could probably live anywhere she wants, being one of the three heroes who saved the world and all.



But apparently having a half-elf who looks like a little girl hanging around all the time is cramping Aguro's style, and he requests Jerin seek alternative living arrangements.

Wow, this conversation got awkward fast.



Dude, did you even see how much gold you guys raked in over the course of your adventure? I should imagine money should never be a problem for either of you ever again...



Hey now, that's a little-



Oh what the-



Okay, I take it back, seeing the rest of the ending was totally worth it.



That's the last we'll ever hear of Aguro and Jerin. The implication, of course, is that they're stuck with each other forever because no one else can stand either of them. Presumably, they'll go on to star in their own sitcom. Can a rigid by-the-books military commander and a childish half-elven brat share an apartment without killing each other?

Although Lufia III makes it clear that both Artea and Milka are still around 100 years later, there is, to my knowledge, never any further mention of Jerin, despite the fact that her elven heritage suggests she'd probably still be alive.

This is probably because no one remembers this game.


Village


Let's check in on Medi. Hopefully he's feeling a little better by now.



Apparently not. Although he may have saved the world from evil, for him the world is a cold, empty place, and now he just wanders about aimlessly, searching for things that remind him of happier times.

This is getting depressing again.



Medi has come to Arus to see the Priphea in bloom. I'm sure Lufia would have enjoyed it.



I can just see her now, frolicking in the flowers...

Wait wha-?



….


...how many ghosts do I have to kill in this game?

Okay, calm down, we've already defeated two ghosts, that makes us super experts at ghost-killing. I mean, sure, this one looks like the ghost of your dead girlfriend-exactly like her, in fact- but that's no reason to oh lord you've gone crazy haven't you?

Poor Medi finally went mad from misery and loneliness, what a tragic end to such a fine and noble young-



Hi.



Medi takes this whole “going crazy” thing in stride, apparently, and acts like it's no big thing. Lots of great RPG heroes undergo periods of intense existential angst and have to face their past demons before they can tap into their true potential.

It's like a rite of passage.



Apparently it's a false alarm anyway. She hasn't tried to kill us yet, so she's probably not a ghost, and this girl has never left this village and has no idea who Medi is, so obviously it can't be-




A Reunion, and...



Yeah, I'm just as confused as you are...



Smooth.



Okay, seriously, are we dead? What's going on? Somebody explain something!

'

Oh thank Arek there's an All-Knowing Old Man around to tell us what's going on!



You might not remember this guy since he was only in one scene earlier in the game, but this is Flake, the elder of Arus who watched the Battle of Doom Island from atop the Tower of Grief. He's the one who took an interest in Lufia's sorcery a while back.



Wow, Lufia(?) is being awfully forward considering she just met Medi like not even 30 seconds ago...



Flake, being a wily old scoundrel, immediately figures out what's happening and plays along. No doubt this only adds to poor Medi's confusion. Just smile and nod.





Okay, that was by a wide margin the strangest conversation Medi has ever had. Exposit for us, all-knowing one!

A Reunion, and...



Far be it from me to question your all-knowingness, sir, but I watched Lufia get blasted in the face with the Dual Blade's full power and then drop about 40,000 feet from Doom Island into the sea. I can't really imagine anyone being any deader than that.



But what's this? It seems after the battle of Doom Island, Flake found Lufia washed up on shore and nursed her back to health?



Is...is that good or bad?





And so, only now are the Dual Blade's true intentions revealed to us.

It didn't destroy Lufia at all. It only destroyed Erim.

Lufia was transformed into the form she was happiest in, as a normal, human girl; a goddess no longer. She was stripped of Erim's immense magical power, and all of Erim's memories, including those of her days as Lufia, but she is alive and well.



Flake, as it seems, still had a fondness and concern for the young magician who impressed him so much, and took her in and cared for her despite the loss of her magical abilities.

Apparently Lufia is really good at the whole endearing orphan thing...

There's something very familiar about all this...

I mean, there's priphea....



Cinnamon tea?





Bickering?



Scolding?



Ts-tsundere?!





Yeah, that's definitely Lufia alright.



Were you here just now, old man? I'm pretty sure she's exactly the same down to the smallest detail.







She still likes Priphea. She still likes cinnamon tea. She still likes Medi.

She may not remember his name, but she remembers the important things.


Journey's End



And with this, we have come full circle.

By the power of the Dual Blade, Lufia has been given a second chance at life, to live, to love, and to be with the person she cared for the most of anyone she ever met in all of eternity.

Besides, we're about a year overdue for that tea. We've kept her waiting long enough.











Go get her, Medi.

~
~
~

Above are some of the final stats for the game. Sixteen of the missing treasures were the second and third batches of Dragon Eggs I didn't get. Most of the rest are probably in Glasdar Tower because Glasdar Tower can die in a fire.

Haha Lufia died a lot.

...too soon?



Special Thanks: Kishi, Brickroad, Pajaro Pete, Lufia.net

Extra Special Thanks: Nich

Thanks for reading!

there's actually like one reference to jerin in lufia the legend returns
the description of artea's bow in the japanese version is something along the lines of "also has Jerin's power"

anyway congratulations dawg, you done a good thing here.

I liked this thread more than I like this game.

The best kind of LP are always the one where the LPer genuinely love the game.

Really like your writing style, Solitayre, go LP some more of your favorite underappreciated games.

I'll echo this and add a heart congrats and thank you to it for Solitayre!

Since someone asked:

Why Solitayre doesn't like Lufia III very much

Spoilers for all three games, etc.

I've adored the Lufia games since I was a child and thus perhaps give the series an undo amount of reverence that I feel like Lufia III did not do justice. I completely understand that the game's development was likely a nightmare but that isn't really an excuse.

Every game in the series should have a place, a story to be told. Lufia II was totally fine in that. The introduction of lufia I created all this sense of wonder and mystery around Maxim and his companions, and making a game that expands on that is totally understandable. But it's a story we already knew the ending to. Maxim destroys the Sinistrals. So they didn't really make the game about that destination, but the journey. It's a game where you have cool adventures and charming banter and explore a huge variety of puzzles and set pieces on your way to that final confrontation, and it did that very well. But ultimately, it fills its place in the narrative. The gist of Lufia II is that Maxim is awesome, gets laid, and kills the Sinistrals. Classic "confrontation with evil."

Lufia I goes a step forward in the grand myth arc. Rather than just a confrontation with evil, now we're dealing with a story about redemption. Lufia & the Fortress of Doom is about Erim learning the value and meaning of being a human and ultimately turning away from the side of evil. This too, totally works. In fact, it serves the story well. The Sinistrals are, when taken at face value, pretty boring villains. Their motives and goals might be considered interesting in the context of the great cosmology of the series' universe, but they're not meant to elicit any sort of emotional response in the player. They're just sort of generically evil beings who destroy everything because that's just what they do. Lufia I lacked the set pieces and design of its successor, Lufia II, so if it had just been the same generic story about killing all the Sinistrals, it wouldn't have been half so interesting a game. Instead, it throws the twist at you that one of the Sinistrals is a character the game has spent 17 hours building up as sweet and likable and who the main character would never, ever want to hurt. It's a much more emotional conflict.

I personally feel like Lufia II hurt this story arc a little with the retcon that Erim was never actually evil,but I can completely understand why they did it. As mentioned above, the Sinsitrals are boring. The subtext with Erim is the only thing that gives the final conflict any emotional weight.

Lufia III, compared to the other two, doesn't really have a place in the arc. There's no story here that really needed to be told. It's just a complete rehash of things that were already established in the previous games, and doesn't expand on any of it in any meaningful way. We aren't given any new insight into the Sinistrals or the land of Estpolis. Erim already turned from evil, so there wasn't any great revelation to anyone who had played the previous games. In fact, the twist was so obvious and so expected that the game felt the need to try to fake you out into thinking it wasn't true, only to ultimately reveal it to be true anyway. The only revelation in the entire game that's new is the fact that apparently Daos can summon an omnipotent space dragon when he's losing, which calls into question why he never did that before.

In the end, the game completely rehashes lufia I's ending pretty much verbatim, which is not just bad on its own but actually diminishes the poignancy of the original game's ending, especially since they didn't pull it off half as well, and did it with an annoying, abrasive character instead of one we're supposed to like. When I spend most of the game hoping someone dies in a fire, I won't be very upset when they die in a literal eternal fire.

The Sinistrals in Lufia III are treated like Saturday morning cartoon villains instead of gods. In the first two games, when a Sinistral is on-screen, shit is going down. There's a real sense of intimidation and menace until the end of Lufia II where you cut them all down like flies. The defeat of Gades halfway through Lufia II has a lot of build-up and plot significance and is treated very seriously, as though it has great significance for the entire world.

In Lufia III they just show up in random towns and act like jackasses, and your heroes just keep throwing themselves at them until they eventually triumph. It completely diminishes any sense of threat that they have, and sometimes your characters will ignore a Sinistral on screen and argue with each other instead, leaving a literal evil god standing there tapping his foot waiting for you to finish. Could you imagine Daos suffering that kind of behavior in this game?

There's also an unforgivable lack of style.



Finally, what Lufia III does with Erim is weird and inconsistent with the rest of the series. It diminishes the significance of Lufia's sacrifice if the Sinistrals are just going to come back anyway, Erim included, and splitting Erim and Lufia into two separate beings and then splitting Erim again causes 'Legend of Zelda timeline' levels of convolution.

Super secret nerd theory: Since Lufia has no parents, I postulate that she has only half of the chromosomal diversity a normal human being would have, and that this is the reason why the hero of Lufia III (presumably her descendant) is so dim-witted.

I was going to say, if Minim's the descendent of the greatest of human heroes and (later on) the literal Goddess of Death, what the hell does he need the rest of the schmucks for anyway? And doesn't that make his relationship with neo-Erim vaguely incestuous?

Nothing indicates that Minim is descended from Medi. He's a descendent of Maxim, yes, but it's not like they each only had like one kid.

But to answer your question: He needs the other cats to soak up hits while Aima tears shit up with her fists.

I will not disagree that Lufia 3 is super unnecessary.

The intro crawl in Lufia III strongly suggests that Medi killed Lufia. That's not what happened at all! I don't even think he pointed his sword at her as the text explicitly mentions.

That's kind of the point! That's what makes the intro so awesome.
"Humankind could only be saved by the sacrifice of the girl he loved."
(Pause)
"The Sinistrals disappeared."

It's a cool one-two punch.
(My interpretation of the scene where Lufia walks up to Medi and is all like "Hold your sword, let's finish this" is meant to be her like physically placing the sword in his hands)

He doesn't.

I'd sure like to know where the other lazy descendants of Maxim were while Medi had to do all the heavy lifting. Lufia I predated the notion that multiple continents/lands existed and sort of implies that Medi is Maxim's only living descendant. I guess that could change if you assume by that point they've propagated across the entire world and Medi was just the only one in Westland when the Sinistrals showed up.

I like that we've evolved beyond calling the hero of Lufia III by his real name.

Also Lufia 3 had those terrible random dungeons.

So how to you feel about Lufia 4?

Never played it, don't care to.

I've been somewhat interested in checking out Energy Breaker though, which takes place in the Lufia universe.

Good stuff, Solitayre... Sorry, I think I have something in my eye...

Well... Maybe she's not only the goddes of death but also of dying.

Well, Minim is a better name than Wain.

I will give Lufia 3 a little bit of credit for doing something different with a multiple character battle system. But I take all of that credit away for all of the missable hidden items in the game.

Anyway, I wanted to thank everyone who followed along for reading and all the encouragement. This was my first LP and I had a lot of fun! I hope I was able to do this game justice.

Here's a GIF I probably should have made a long time ago.

Is that Bum Rush?

Actually it's Lufia's scold no jutsu.

Speaking of Japanese things, I also found a speedrun of the Japanese version of the game, which shows off some of Guard Daos' attacks that were cut out of the English version. Check it out.

This speedrunner uses some kind of glitch to boost the hero's attack power to astronomical levels. Medi hitting for 700 damage is not something you'll see in a typical playthrough. In fact, he boosts it so high that I think it actually overflows the number display.

A far more powerful and terrifying technique.

+200% damage to oblivious love interests.

Thanks for this.

Great job, Sol. Thanks for sharing this with all of us.

I just wanted to reiterate this. And hey, this inspired me to replay this game, which I hadn't done in over a decade!