Is the GBA Lufia game any good?
...Umm, kind of? I replayed it last year and this was my review:
Eldin’s father was a hunter, and left one day on a quest but never returned. Years later—and shortly after Maxim and company defeated the Sinistrals and sank Doom Island--Eldin and his best friends Torma and Rami become hunters, and get embroiled in a plot by the Gratze empire to resurrect an ancient Beast and conquer the world.
I last played this in 2005-2006, and it took me over a year to get through because I played it very sporadically. It’s pretty glitchy (from a spot in the second town where there’s a double Torma; to the fact that only a quarter of the monsters drop money and they never drop items; to the total lack of skills for Bau; to the various infinite-money tricks you kinda have to abuse) and a bit scattershot—there are too many systems and too much stuff for the amount of actual game: There’s a class system that you get cut off from too often (and that you might get cut off from entirely if you don’t realize there’s a secret passage back into the town that holds it) and isn’t well-documented enough (I eventually figured out that XP drives your class upgrades, as it took me three-quarters of the game to max one class but then started maxing a class in every dungeon from then on). There’s an alchemy system that gets you some mediocre accessories if you do a lot of searching for hidden recipes. There’s a monster catching system that gives you sub-optimal party members that further divide your XP and need guides to be useful (which can give you a broken semi-invincible, uncontrollable party member if you do it exactly right; but you won’t). And there’s a randomly-generated Ancient Cave roguelike sidequest, mostly useful for grinding.
The dungeons are very long and don’t have a lot of direction, which was probably why the game took me so long the first time: You really need to do them in one sitting or you’ll never remember what you were doing or where you are. But despite that length, the puzzle density is much lower than Lufia 2, so you’re mostly fighting tedious random battles and trying to remember your way through the mazes. (It really could have also used a minimap, upon reflection, but I’d put that request far behind various bugfixes.) And clearly they decided the game wasn’t long enough and needed padding, so you have to do three dungeons twice and one three times, with the puzzles resetting each time.
The plot is far too sparse for the length of the game, but the real problem is dialogue—or lack thereof. The characters don’t get enough to make them feel “real”, which was something earlier Lufia games were actually very good at. Lots of plot threads either are dropped without really exploring them (Eldin’s dad was just exploring for a decade and never bothered to come home, but that’s never discussed. Eldin gets cursed in the Tower of Guidance, but that curse never does anything. Ragule killed the Emperor of Gratze and took over and his corpse is still just sitting there on your second visit.) or they come out of nowhere when they are needed (Eldin is apparently descended from the Ancients, which we learn right at the end when it becomes necessary. Rubias is a twin and has all sorts of issues because there was only supposed to be one priestess.)
And this wasn’t so much of an issue in the era of save states, but still: You can only save at churches in towns (and only some towns, at that!) or use a quick save that deletes when you load it, which is an “Oops, this is a portable game, we need to be able to save more often but we can’t let you cheat like naughty little cheaters” last-minute fix that I find barely acceptable in ports and absurd in games made for portable systems in the first place. This is not a deeply competitive game where save-scumming will break your leaderboards; it’s a single-player jrpg in a minor franchise. Get over yourself and let me save when I want.
The real problem was the game needed more development time. They clearly hadn’t finished building some of the systems or fully fleshing out the game—or doing a final pass of the plot to make sure it all worked--and had to cut a lot of corners.
I knew I wasn’t going to be interested in a dozen hours of raw grinding to play through this again, and I wanted to play it on a handheld, so I needed to do some fiddling. I discovered that there are two commonly-found rom rips of this game, one of which has a custom intro screen and freezes if you try to sell anything; and one which works. I also discovered that SPsp, a popular emulator on retro handhelds, can’t render half the game’s text properly. ReGBA handles it nicely, though. I actually loaded this in VisualBoyAdvance, used cheat codes for a full inventory and full skill lists for Eldin and Torma, and then transferred my save file to the RG350. That got around the issue of cheat codes on the RG350 nicely.
Overall: The Lufia series peaked with Lufia 2. This was an attempt to get closer to that but they clearly ran out of time and money and released it unfinished, and there’s nobody in the hacking community who wants to put the time into a “Frue Lufia” treatment for it. Which is a shame because there’s a lot of potential in this game, but the unfinished nature ultimately leaves it mediocre at best.
