![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckro100 years after the last coming of the Sinestrals (and 200 years after Maxim famously defeated them), a mysterious girl comes searching for a powerful warrior to join her on an adventure. She finds Wain…who honestly isn’t very bright, but he’ll do.
I used the Text Cleanup patch for this, which is less an overall retranslation and more fixing errors in dialogue. As it’s been 14 years since I last played this, I can’t actually tell what’s changed.
This game has a lot of the hallmarks of a game made “on the cheap”. It abandoned the original dungeon design of the previous games in favor of procedurally-generated floors that have a limited number of options and skins. (Seriously, there are only nine rooms at most on any floor, only a few places secret passages ever generate, and only one non-monster obstacle you need to watch for.) This makes the gameplay loop very repetitive. It’s heavily influenced by the previous game’s Ancient Cave and the roguelike genre in general; but they don’t put equipment in dungeon chests, just the Ancient Scrolls (that teach you IP skills, which are half of the magic system) and consumables. Which means you have to do a full upgrade of all your characters’ equipment in each town (less whatever you steal from bosses or find in hidden chests in said towns), but you’ll be drowning in Boomerangs and Bombs. There are a lot of special items hidden in nooks and crannies about towns, but that’s one “floor” worth of town for every 5-10 floor dungeon.
They set up the battle and skill system to be based on a 3x3 grid, but you have four dungeons to get through before you even get a third character, and a good chunk of the game before you can actually fill out your team. But then, only three of your characters can act in any combat round, so the rest are just alternate skill loadouts and MP reserves anyway. Who you have to keep equipped at every town.
They did make an effort with the snarky dialogue. The characters banter a lot and the mood is very lighthearted. Given that the plot is really a retread of things the series did better in the first two games, tongue-in-cheek was the right way to go. And the text cleanup patch was unobtrusive and generally matches up to the tone I remember, so good for that.
Overall: I got bored of the repetitive gameplay after three hours, and there isn’t enough new material later in the game to justify powering through. Upon reflection, I played all the way through this during a six-month period I was depressed and taking Paxil, and I think that’s the reason I made it through then. This was definitely the weakest point in the Lufia series.
I used the Text Cleanup patch for this, which is less an overall retranslation and more fixing errors in dialogue. As it’s been 14 years since I last played this, I can’t actually tell what’s changed.
This game has a lot of the hallmarks of a game made “on the cheap”. It abandoned the original dungeon design of the previous games in favor of procedurally-generated floors that have a limited number of options and skins. (Seriously, there are only nine rooms at most on any floor, only a few places secret passages ever generate, and only one non-monster obstacle you need to watch for.) This makes the gameplay loop very repetitive. It’s heavily influenced by the previous game’s Ancient Cave and the roguelike genre in general; but they don’t put equipment in dungeon chests, just the Ancient Scrolls (that teach you IP skills, which are half of the magic system) and consumables. Which means you have to do a full upgrade of all your characters’ equipment in each town (less whatever you steal from bosses or find in hidden chests in said towns), but you’ll be drowning in Boomerangs and Bombs. There are a lot of special items hidden in nooks and crannies about towns, but that’s one “floor” worth of town for every 5-10 floor dungeon.
They set up the battle and skill system to be based on a 3x3 grid, but you have four dungeons to get through before you even get a third character, and a good chunk of the game before you can actually fill out your team. But then, only three of your characters can act in any combat round, so the rest are just alternate skill loadouts and MP reserves anyway. Who you have to keep equipped at every town.
They did make an effort with the snarky dialogue. The characters banter a lot and the mood is very lighthearted. Given that the plot is really a retread of things the series did better in the first two games, tongue-in-cheek was the right way to go. And the text cleanup patch was unobtrusive and generally matches up to the tone I remember, so good for that.
Overall: I got bored of the repetitive gameplay after three hours, and there isn’t enough new material later in the game to justify powering through. Upon reflection, I played all the way through this during a six-month period I was depressed and taking Paxil, and I think that’s the reason I made it through then. This was definitely the weakest point in the Lufia series.
