Oh I am not happy.
Nice on the surface when you look at this SNES game and play the intro to it, but that falls apart later on. Lufia 1 may just be the first JRPG that I played and hated, to be honest. It's got all the traditional turn-based cliches in it, which isn't the problem, the problem is that it really doesn't do anything exciting with them. You've got the four characters you play with permanently affixed for your party, even though only one of them (the titular character) is the only important one, and that is because of her connection with the four characters on the villain side. Every other hero isn't really noticable. Main character who is a "choose your own name" person has archetypal hero and also archetypal "I love Lufia" persona. Aguro honestly is nothing but a guard. Jerin's best purpose for the plot is to help you get through a forest and that's about it as far as she goes. Guy and Artea don't serve too much, but then again, they are super old. Artea manages to fair better being an elf and all. But it all boils down to Lufia and it's honestly a bit lame.
And yes, I'm not a fan of the gameplay. While I try to stay indifferent on turn-based games as far as what they offer, Lufia 1 actually made me quite mad. Looking at how the battle system presents itself isn't the problem. Looking at how grinding is a necessity isn't a problem*. The problem is how the combat works. The Final Fantasy 1 rule applies, in that once you kill a group and someone was targeting that group, it's an auto miss. It's a little better than it was in that game in that it only happens if you already take out a monster group, but still. Oh and speaking of targeting, for a group, you target a random enemy for single-target attacks, which really sucks. To put more insult into this game's combat system, the monster stats are actually randomized around a median value, making it hard to effectively kill certain enemies. Put this together with how much grinding I had to do and it seems that 3 out of 5 battles just frustrated the hell out of me.
There really aren't a whole lot of positives I can say for this game. Well, the music is rad, especially the boss battle music. Having a ton of towns in game is questionable, but I wouldn't go too far and say it's bad, because it really isn't. A few extra premises are interesting provided you trounce all the broken bridges. Finally, the intro. God that intro is great. It's one of the best ways to lean a player into a JRPG, give them a really good high-level fully-equipped party and watch them go through an endgame dungeon, fighting off those same four bad guys easily. Then you get to the main course, which is the entire main game and, well, it's quite the grinder, lame unfortunately. So yes, I still don't like Lufia 1 all that much. While presentable, it's far from being anywhere better than its successor game or most other SNES RPGs.
*I'd like to point out I grind liberally for this game, even when my guide doesn't tell me to do so. So grinding isn't really an issue and the level up curve here is fine as well.
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