YMMV / Lufia & The Fortress of Doom

• Anti-Climax Boss: All the final bosses except Gades turn into this if you use Mirror because Amon and Daos (including Guard Daos besides when he uses Gades' physical attacks) only use magic meaning Mirror will reflect everything they use.
• Awesome Boss: Unlike the Foregone Conclusion of its prequel shown in the prologue where you only fight each of the Sinistrals once and call it a day, here they fuse into Guard Daos after they're defeated, an epic boss which uses all different attacks of the previous final bosses alongside some new magical attacks, alongside an equally epic final battle theme.
• Awesome Music: The normal battle theme. Most SNES JRPG normal battle themes tend to be slower, more uneventful, but this game's normal battle theme is a lot more upbeat which makes normal battles a lot less boring when the theme playing in the background is so nice.
• Cheese Strategy: You can largely trivialise some of the end-game boss fights, specifically Amon, Daos and Guard Daos by the simple tactic of having Jerim do nothing but spam the Mirror spell on the members of the party, since all three of them use only magic attacks. It's not 100% infalliable, though, since the spell wears off so quickly that she has to constantly replace it, occasionally letting a spell through when it falls off someone during the gap between her actions, which can be potentially dangerous with spells that apply status conditions like Confuse. Also, while it may feel cheap, if you don't use this strategy, you're probably in for a savage beating from the unending magical bombardment.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: You will never, ever equip Jerin with any weapon other than Artea's Bow once you acquire it. Even if other weapons do more damage, the ability for it to hit every enemy in a group with every attack goes a long way towards countering your inability to target specific enemies within a group, even with Jerin's sub-par attack power. The only time you'll replace it is when you acquire the game's only other bow weapon, the Might Bow, from the Egg Dragon.
• Complete Monster: Daos; see the series page for details.
• Cult Classic: The game is not a popular JRPG, even among fans of the genre or the series. It's very niche and its sequel/prequel is considered to be vastly superior. It also has a significantly flawed battle system and extremely high encounter rate. However, if you get past all that it is a rather fun, challenging, and interesting JRPG with nice graphics, soundtrack, and plot.
• Demonic Spiders: Pretty much any enemy that can use magic; it almost always hits the entire party and is almost universally devastating to the low-MGR hero and Aguro. Get ambushed by a trio of Werefrogs (which have literally no other attacks than the powerful spell Flood) and you're pretty much toast.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Mirror spell, learned by Jerin at level 32, will reflect any magic thrown at you by the enemy, but will let healing and buffs through. Using Mirror on everyone makes the final boss battles jokes. On the other hand it's not quite as cut-and-dried as all that- the spell's duration is so pathetic that Jerin will be reduced to doing nothing but constantly spamming the Mirror spell on the party members one after the other, with it expiring on one member just as soon as she's finished protecting the last one (or sometimes before she can manage to get it onto everyone) and frequently letting enemy spells slip through as it expires before her next action comes around to let her replace it. It's easier to use against Amon and Daos, since for plot reasons she only has to maintain it on 3 characters rather than 4, making it easier to keep it up without gaps.
  • Using the Old Cave to level up to 35 and then arriving at the bottom floor to get the penultimate equipment found there before moving forward in the story. The next several bosses will be an utter joke when one of your melee fighters is using a Brave Blade, a weapon you're not meant to have until the final few dungeons.
• Good Bad Bugs: If the Hero is dead going into the fight with Artea's apprentice, you will start the fight with no HP, but still able to fight. However if you take a hit, you die because the game has to register that you're at 0 HP.
• Narm: Guy proclaiming that he's "Over 100 years old and still kicking!" only to walk ten feet and keel over is perhaps a little funnier than it should've been.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The rudimentary Battle System:
    • Instead of being able to target individual enemies, players have to target groups of enemies instead, and the party will just attack enemies within that group at random. This makes Wolf Pack Bosses far harder than they need to be. Sometimes it legitimately feels like your party are conspiring against you with the monsters by doing their best to spread out their attacks enough to ensure the monsters live as long as possible before the first one goes down.^note It's particularly notable in the late game when the hero and Aguro could kill almost any enemy if they combined their attacks against it, but will almost always split their attacks between both enemies in a group of two.
    • If a party member is set to attack a group and that group is wiped out before their turn comes, they'll just swing at the empty air and waste their turn.
  • The rate of Random Encounters is utterly insane, even for an old-school JRPG. You literally have to maintain Sweet Water 100% of the time^note thankfully quite easy with its trivial cost of 10g per bottle, available from most item shops just to bring it down to the level of "infuriating".
  • Similar to other old-school JRPGs, you have a strict inventory limit of 5 pages of items, including all unequipped pieces of equipment. Fill that up and you get that ever-dreaded message "You have no more room".
  • Having to use a Float item or cast the Float spell to cross poison without taking damage. As with all buff spells the duration is pathetic, often expiring after only about 10 steps or less, meaning you'll frequently have to do it again just to get back after opening a chest that was the only thing on the other side.
  • Equipment weight. It's anyone's guess exactly how it interacts with Agility to affect a character's speed (it's not even Guide Dang It! because even the guides have no clue), but it's generally understood that heavier gear makes you slower. The problem is that, when you try to equip a piece of gear on a character, it shows you all the changes it will make to your stats except for its weight! Literally the only way you can see the weight of a piece of equipment is to use the 'Look' command in an equipment shop to compare a piece of equipment with your currently equipped one- so the only way to see the weight of found equipment at all is to equip it first and then go into the store to use Look to compare it with another piece of gear. God knows why it couldn't just show you the weight from the equip menu...
• So Okay, It's Average: Lufia & The Fortress of Doom is regarded as an okay, if not especially memorable not doing much to stand out, SNES JRPG with a significantly flawed battle system and extremely high encounter rate.
• Tear Jerker: If one plays this after the second game anyway...
• That One Boss:
  • The quartet of Demon Lords and the trio of Goblins that are fought early in the game. If the player were able to target individual enemies (see Scrappy Mechanic) then they'd both be relative pushovers, but because you can't they're two of the hardest boss fights in the game.
    • Grabbing some Mid Arrows from the kobolds in the cave before the goblins helps wonders.
  • The Phantasm in the Ghost Cave can prove quite a difficult stumbling block. He's almost immune to magic damage after casting Shield on himself, regularly casts confusion and sleep spells on your entire party, and spams Spark, which hits your entire party (particularly the low-MGR Aguro) for a considerable chunk of damage.
  • The Guardian, who except for very, very rarely casting Absorb to try and drain your MP or Dread to sap your party's DEF, literally does nothing except spam Flame and Blizzard spells, which hit your entire party for WAY more damage than they can tank for long unless you engage in some serious grinding first^note on the bright side, this makes his Dread spells irrelevant since he never uses physical attacks and his spells hit MGR not DEF. He's simply too fast, too tough, and too damaging. Without Lufia's or Jerin's Boost spell to heal your entire party at once, you really don't have a chance.

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