Lufia: The Ruins of Lore

10/18/2021: Booted up the game for the first time in well over a decade and I see my save file has a whopping 38 hours put in with characters that are at like level 20. Damn nicely done for a game where I had no idea what was going on. I now have a hankering to go back and play this lol.

2022-07-30: Tried to replay this. Started from scratch wiping out my save and it's just too dated AND not good enough to justify playing with the outdated mechanics. It's brutally hard even in the first dungeon where you have to keep backtracking out to the entrance to save lest you die. And that's the thing is you HAVE to backtrack pretty far because the save points are only in towns. Combat is quite slow and pretty boring. They have a monster capture mechanic but it doesn't feel great because they kind of just add in a second attack sometimes while also leeching a ton of EXP from the party. They end up being far weaker than your normal characters that can change jobs (later in the game) so it ends up just being a waste. Though I thought they were really cool as a kid and invested in them a bunch (I had "Snuffles" a Dark Dragon, "Vantra" a Basilisk, and "Norbert" a Lava Dragon) but I think they actually kind of gimped my party.

At the end of the day while I kind of want to finish this game I just can't justify the required 40 hours when there are a bunch of much better JRPGs to play. Especially even on the GBA you have Golden Sun which is supposed to be one of the all-time greats.

Well, I'll always remember this very odd JRPG, hard, second-rate JRPG I grew up with as a kid.