Saturday, September 27, 2014

Lufia and the Fortress of Doom Finale - The Whore of Doom Island

Time for the final installment of Lufia, as I take on Doom Island. Will Jeros have to fight Lufia? Will Aguro and Jerin make a litter of half-elves? Tune in to find out.


STAT UPDATE TIME! Before going into the final dungeon, let's see how everyone looks. Jeros, who I keep accidentally almost referring to as "Maxim", is looking good with Dual Blade. And..."Sword Shoes"? How does one walk in such things?

Aguro is swinging a mean axe at this point. He's my primary damage dealer, since the others are usually occupied with healing/buffing. The two ladies don't do much damage against endgame bosses with their spells, so it comes down to Aguro whacking away (....) to win the fights. The hero can contribute a bit with physical attacks, as well, when he isn't casting stuff.

Lufia is still rocking the Clear Silk. I don't know what a Catwhip is supposed to be. Cat-flavored whipped cream? Most likely, it's a Cat O' Nine Tails, a whip with multiple ends. Who knew Lufia was this kinky?

In this new file Jerin sports a Might Bow, which is why she isn't using Artea's Bow anymore. Might equipment (swords, bow, armor, helm, wrist) is the strongest tier in the game, but they're all rare drops that require tons of farming if you want to collect 'em all. They're hardly necessary to finish the game.

After criss-crossing through several caves acround Glasdar Tower, I find the key to get in.

More dragons attack inside this cave. They're weird-looking, and the Oil Dragon was a much better enemy model.

The tower itself is the last real dungeon in the game. It isn't much to write home about, just a fairly confusing maze of stairs and portals. I reach the top, only to fight a somewhat forgotten Sinistral goon... uh... what's his name again?

...Nazeby. I forgot already and I just fought the guy.

 Basically, Nazeby is the kid in the sweater.

Actually, he may be a Sinistral wannabe, but he puts up quite a fight. This fight is here to make sure you're at a sufficient level before you go to the Fortress of Doom. The Sinistrals are all marginally stronger than this guy, so if you can't win this fight, it's time to retreat and regroup.

Lufia comes down with a really bad headache at this point. Uh oh.

The Sinistrals then proceed to teleport her away, right out of the group. The others want Daos to blast our heroes, but Daos refuses because... uh...

...because it'd upset Lufia, even though Lufia is Erim?

It appears that Erim has latched onto Lufia symbiotically, like Dax in Deep Space Nine.

Yeah, thanks, Aguro.

Erim is Daos' sister? Oh, good. At least there's no danger of them having sex before I can get Lufia back to her senses.

...right?

At this point, Doom Island roared off. I had to find it via airship, but I didn't know where it went. So I flew around...and around...and around the world. I must have been flying around for 10+ minutes looking for it before I finally checked a guide. It's the one time the game has really frustrated me.

There it is, chilling in the middle of nowhere. Well, no big deal. Let's do this.

Doom Island itself is a sort of mini-overworld. It's very cool, as sky-continents go.

Here's the Fortress of Doom. It's impressive how fast the forests grew back after this island un-submerged, eh?

Here we are, yet again. This is the third time that the game has taken you through this very room. There's the intro, the sunken version, and now the finale. Unfortunately, "Sunken Shrine" doesn't play this time.

It's even weirder to have these plaques on the wall now. But hey, I'll take these over tutorials or Alias or Navis any day of the week.

OH, I forgot to mention...when they took Lufia, they also took Dual Blade. Apparently they broke it and left it here for me to find. And the worst part is... they broke it in Joe Dawson.

The good news is that the Dual Blade...er...heals itself up when we find it. So Jeros has it again. The bad news is that Lufia seems to be full-on Heel Lufia, with a goatee and everything.

Gades speaks. ...Gades shouldn't speak.

Time for the final battle. Wheras Maxim and company battled all four Sinistrals, Jeros and company only need to battle the non-Erim Sinistrals. Though there IS a fourth fight afterwards. In any case, Gades is a fairly easy fight. He has one potent attack, and it only hits one person at a time. It's tougher than the fight in the intro, but that's to be expected when Maxim's group was about thirty levels higher (and 33% bigger) than this crew.

What? Jeros didn't kill them a century ago! Why so blamey? If the Sinistrals were smart, they could have found a silver lining in being banished to the afterlife/void/whatever for 99 years. All I'm saying is, if they were existent enough to lament about it, maybe they could have found a hobby.

The next final boss is Amon. This guy looks awesome, and honestly I think he should have been the leader of the Sinistrals based on that alone. He's also well-balanced between physical power and magical power.

This is where things get difficult, with him putting characters to sleep and launching frequent hit-all spells. Luckily, I have a massive stockpile of Miracles on hand, which revive and fully heal a character. They restore all MP too. Most overpowered revive item I've ever seen.

Finally, Daos. The high priest of chaos isn't much stronger than Amon, but he has some highly-damaging spells.

I survive another one, and it's on to the next. While I had a chance to revive/restore the party between Gades/Amon and Amon/Daos, there's no such opportunity between Daos and the next foe. Which makes it unfortunate that I ended the battle in such bad shape.

Yep, there's one more battle to fight, as our three foes merge into one body. Lufia/Erim resists being a part of the merge, and rejoins our heroes.

The combined Sinistral is called Guard Daos. Odd name, surprised it isn't some fusion of their names. Given it isn't just a Daos second form, maybe it's a mistranslation.

I suspect that the fusion is so messed-up looking because Erim resisted being a part of it. Wonder what it'd look like with Erim included. Alas, for whatever reason, Lufia II doesn't have a fight with Guard Daos.

This is the final battle, and the music for it is rad to the MAX.

It's also the most irritating, infuriating fight in the game because he CONSTANTLY confuses the whole party. Jerin shines here because her bow attacks damage the entire group, and if she attacks the party while confused it'll do little damage while taking the effect off of everyone. On the other hand, if a buffed Aguro attacks another party member, they're probably one-shotted.

On top of that, he launches all kinds of spells at us. Often it's difficult to mount any kind of comeback because half the group is confused and half the group is dead. Regardless, the fight wasn't as difficult as it sounds, and was merely frustrating. This shot is probably the closest I came to a loss, but my stockpile of Miracles prevented that.

Victory nets us... NOTHING! YOU GET NOTHING AND LIKE IT!

"There is one more chip" says Lufia. "And it must be destroyed as well."

Time for sadness, as Lufia was injured during the final battle.

With that, she plummets off of Doom Island, and her story ends. Well, that's sad. But at least now the Sinistrals can't revive. ...or something. I'm still hazy on this whole thing.

Since we defeated the Sinistrals before they could even do anything, was the world ever really not at peace in this game?

Here's Artea, quietly living in a cabin somewhere. Because elves don't age and die the way humans do, according to Lord of the Rings.


One year later...


That isn't generally something men need to apologize for, Aguro.

Jerin and Aguro continue to bicker. What color do you get if you combine green and yellow?

A year out from Doom Island, our hero wanders around talking to himself.

...and hallucinating too, apparently. Get over it, man!

Wait, seriously? There's a girl here who looks exactly like Lufia? Don't believe it, Jeros! She's just a doppleganger created by Horton!

Huh. That's actually Lufia. She survived her fall from Doom Island, somehow, and lost her memory.

Also, thanks to deus ex machina Dual Blade, she magically isn't Erim anymore. As far as I can tell, her god-like Sinistral power allowed her to survive the fall in a way Selan couldn't have, and then after her landing, the Dual Blade distantly deemed her worthy to be free of Erim. So here she is, intact and normalized. The downside is that her memory is gone.

And that's the end. I feel like Lufia's return was a bit too deus ex machina-

Selfie Wakka: "DAMN MACHINA"

-but good for our heroes to have a well-deserved happy ending.

This is actually a higher-than-normal playtime, at least for me, and I'd guess that probably three to four hours of the late-game are me tabbing out to work on posts. Take those out and it would have been about 19 hours. It's pretty cool that the game gives you a statistics screen at the end.

To cap things off, here's a blog by one of the Taito employees instrumental in bringing this game to North America. It's part one of a five part series (all readily accessible from there) and it's well worth a read if you're a fan of the game.

Onward to Lufia II.



2 comments:

  1. Lufia tends to do around 400 damage with Thunder when you have the Flash Ring equipped, which is just about the most damage anyone can do in the game. Of course you won't have her for all of the late-game. Jerin's magic can be boosted by rings too, though she's got a more important spell for the final battles.

    It's also impressive to see Doom Island in full color after the intro showed it in more drab tones.

    Amon, Daos, and Guard Daos almost never attack. They usually use group based magic. Because of this, the best strategy for these fights is to have Jerin cast Mirror on everyone. They fade after a few rounds and you can only Mirror one person at a time, but with three characters it's easy to to keep them up. This stops all of the status magic and sends the attack magic back at them. Doesn't do much damage but you're not being hit. Once you have Lufia for the final fight it's a little tougher to keep four Mirrors up, but you can either go for it anyway or let her take the fall and continue with the three fully reflected characters.

    Guard Daos IS an odd name. Of course Lufia 2 doesn't have it though because we've already seen those final battles.

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  2. I gotta say this game brings the excitement of finding new equipment. You can tell from how often you talk about it.

    LMAO@the Nazeby GIF. This is premium content.

    So, Daos wants to maintain a functional working relationship with Erim. It sounds lame but as an adult, I can say it makes a ton of sense. When you're planning to work with someone for the rest of eternity you don't want to risk Fing up your relationship even longer.

    Gonna guess they made Zircon unequippable for Lufia so players who budgeted and got Zircon equipment for her and not someone else would be like "AW MAN". It's a gift to the player. Good move.

    This Doom Island hunt is realistic, if frustrating for you. I'm impressed they made, and found a use for, grim icecaps. Makes it feel more like a world than most video game planets.

    Doom Island is -awesome-. They get you so pumped for it by scrolling across it in the intro. Coming back here feels so thrilling.

    Having the tutorials come back doesn't make sense from a gameplay standpoint, but it does from a nostalgia standpoint.

    They took the Dual Blade too? And broke it?! Damn!!
    And then it heals. I see, so Dual Blade is Aslan.

    I forgot about the freaky-looking Guard Daos.

    Good series. I'm really happy to see you cover such a deserving game.

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