lufia and the fortress of doom has no random miss chance for weapon attacks and damage spells. aside from the odd cursed sword, offensive moves land with 100% accuracy. it's an enormous mercy for a game with long meandering dungeons, full of dead ends, worthless treasures, and encounter rates that are simply insensitive.
this is not to say that attacks always land. one of the most common complaints about the game is its handling of targeting. fortress of doom joins enemies of the same species into "groups"; you can choose which group to throw a single-target attack at, but who it hits within that group is up to chance. a little strange, but you can still plan around it, especially with smaller enemy groups. the real point of frustration is the possibility of wasting turns by overcommitting to attacking one group. if two or more characters target the same group, and all the monsters in that group have died by the time the last character executes their attack, the attacker will swing at the empty space where an enemy used to stand. reviewers didn't understand why characters wouldn't redirect their attack to a living target, like most turn-based games allow - or at least default then to defending, like golden sun. instead, carelessly assigning all characters to attack the same target often means watching a parade of futile slashes play out one at a time.
i can't blame anyone for having a bad time with lufia. there are lots of valid issues to take with it, like its truly miserable dungeon design, its multiplying fetch quests, and its low opinion of women. but its targeting system, and specifically its "committed" targeting, is actually one of its smartest features. far from a sentence to unavoidably burn turns whiffing, my experience of lufia's battle system was of encounters that began and ended quickly, in which my mindfulness was rewarded with the satisfaction of watching my plans play out just as i intended and without waste, despite the uncertainty faced. i would estimate the rate at i lost attacks to overcommitment to be less than 1 in 50 - fewer than i'd lose to random chance in most games - and this low rate was easily attainable without memorizing enemy health values, tracking damage inflicted, or going out of my way to learn how enemies work. even if my experience isn't representative, it's still possible, without exerting undue effort or relying on luck.
FoD's solution to overcommitment is in establishing implicit rules for ascertaining enemy durability. these rules are broad and have exceptions, but are generally maintained. they are especially pronounced in the game's second act; they stabilize after elfrea, once you have a full party and jerin has artea's bow; and they destabilize in the third act for reasons we'll explore later. the rules allowed me to parse battle scenarios quickly and determine the quickest and least wasteful way of distributing my attacks. because the rules were consistent, i could make these judgments even when fighting unfamiliar monsters. instead of having to figure out how each new enemy worked from scratch, i only had to learn the exceptions to the rules. this approach didn't just let me leverage my knowledge of the rules to assess enemy health and allocate attacks efficiently, it created an environment of exploitable normalcy where experience and intuition translated into mastery. as long as the rules applied, i was in control.
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FoD's enemy evaluation rules are the player-facing effects of choices in the game's numerical balance. a precise and consistent relationship exists between the damage you deal as a player and the amount of health an enemy has. the nature of this relationship is to make it easy to gauge which, and how many, attacks should be committed to each enemy. it supports an understanding of enemy health in qualitative terms rather than quantitative ones. that is, decision-making happens less often on the level of "how many points of damage?" than the level of "what combination of specific actions?". although this is not a unique space for an rpg battle system to exist in, the move away from mental math and value tracking is essential for making overcommitment avoidable.
i identify 4 design choices that empowered me to make quick, clean judgments about targeting commitments, either by generating rules, broadening the applicability of rules, or limiting the amount of content to be learned and understood:
1. low upper health bound. mundane enemies (i.e. non-bosses) have low HP relative to the player's damage. any given monster will die to some combination of, at most, 2 character's standard attacks. most will even die in one, if it's the right one. fortress of doom's tight adherence to this upper bound teaches you over time that it's wasteful to commit any combination of 3 attacks, and certain combinations of 2 attacks, to one enemy up front. the rare exception exists - the trap harps near bakku come to mind, but because they're also huge, weird, and unfamiliar, it reads as a measured irregularity to factor into your strategy of rather than a contradiction of the whole paradigm. in general, two hits were the most it took to kill anything. (footnote one)
2. close lower health bound. as low as enemy health is, it's still high enough that weaker moves, such as jerin and lufia's weapon attacks, will almost never one-shot. this is a subtler decision, but it limits the number of situations in which a weak attack can substitute for a strong one, emphasizing the difference between them in strength and purpose. in fortress of doom, two characters' attacks are never interchangeable - it always matters who is attacking whom. (footnote 2)
3: consistent attack outcomes. a given attack tends to have the same qualitative outcome against all current targets, regardless of damage and health values. the proximity of the upper and lower health bounds means that this consistency will hold within an area, and continue to hold upon progressing to a new area, as enemy stats are balanced around maintaining these bounds. consistency means that a given attack will map reliably onto a qualitative outcome: aguro's basic attack is a one-hit kill, it will one-hit kill most enemies in an area, and although it may drift into two-hit kill territory for some enemies, you can rely on it dealing damage in one-shot range throughout the current area and into the next one. the same consistency can be expected of the hero's attack, which falls in the upper end of the 2-hit kill range for all current targets. the major exceptions lie in elemental damage spells, where weakness and resistance can be tricky to learn and exploit (the main caster's elements are lightning, water, and explosions, so...), and in weapon attacks against enemies like will-o-wisps with physical resistance.
4: low number of relevant attacks. "hero" and aguro only have physical attacks. jerin has two sets of multi-target attack spells, but they're overshadowed by her faster, cheaper, and often stronger bow. it's lufia who has the widest range of spells to worry about, although her single-target lightning spells provide the clearest benchmark for comparison. the other three party members are strongly identified with their weapon attacks. the low number of attacks on hand means fewer outcome mappings to learn and remember.
the cumulative result of these features was that i came to understood attacks in relation to each other. if every enemy can die in some combination of two attacks, then what should i pair each attack with in order to kill? thus did FoD let me avoid numerical logic in strategic play by learning what attacks pair with each other. the function, the identity of lufia's "bolt" spell is not in the value of the damage it does but the fact that, whatever the damage, it will finish off an enemy weakened by jerin's bow or the hero's sword. the function and identity of aguro's attack is that it needs no complement; that of lufia's weapon attack is that the only complement so strong that it could kill on its own. consistency of outcome means that established pairings remain lethal as you deploy them in new contexts; you could call each pairing a rule in itself.
these rules form the body of exploitable knowledge that transfers between areas; they simplify the process of getting acquainted with new enemies and limit learning to the exceptions. whatever comes next, experience shows, won't be so strong that it can survive jerin and the hero working together. when i go to a new area, the numbers go up a little bit, the rules remain true. i can still count on it to provide an upper limit for how much it'll take for me to kill an enemy. where rules fail to apply, it's never for long, and it errs on the side of enemies being stronger than expected (i have the "old cave" in mind here). never does lufia surprise you with an enemy that dies too quickly. these strong bounds on enemy health and consistent outcomes from attacks, in terms of qualitative actions, are what kept overcommitment from ever becoming an issue.
the carefully established and maintained rules formed the basis for engaging turn-based combat. at its best, fortress of doom uses limited exceptions to the rules, in combination with elemental weakness/resistance and random enemy group composition, to keep encounters varied. for my tastes, it strikes a good balance between keeping encounters varied enough to avoid feeling repetitive, but straightforward enough to resist fatigue of constant strategizing. it asks just enough to keep me mindful through the high volume of battles and rewards that mindfulness by ending battles faster. unfortunately, FoD is not always at its best, and neglects to push back hard or regularly enough, falling into tedium and repetition only exacerbated by its ever creeping encounter rate and compounding fetch quests. but its high points are high and many enough to illuminate the role of player knowledge in rpg combat experiences, and to demonstrate the value of centering knowledge in enemy and encounter design through rules and exceptions. i hope that by describing the logic of FoD's combat design in detail i can show how many ideas it boasted worthy of new adoption and further exploration.
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as long as the rules applied, i was in control. what happened when they didn't apply anymore?
toward the end of the game, the rules cease to apply. during the introduction to the game, you play as maxim and the heroes of the first doom island war, navigating a dungeon full of encounters against hydras and towering efreeti that look dangerous, but are trivial for your party of level 75+ veterans. at the start of the third act, when the new generation of heroes arrives on the epro continent after uncovering dual blade, many of the enemies seen in the introduction begin to appear again. symbolically this represents the return of doom island in full force: you're fighting the sinistrals for real now, just like maxim did.
the increase in stakes is accompanied by a difficulty spike. not only do you face largely unfamiliar enemies, none of whom carry over from previous areas or even, really, resemble monsters you've seen before, but also the the low hp rule suddenly falters: enemy health jumps up and previously trusted lethal pairings are no longer sufficient to kill. the relationships between party members are further upset by the arrival of "high defense" enemies like mega turtles that take drastically less damage from jerin, preventing her from "complementing" the hero or even aguro's attacks. this gets worse and never gets better. enemies hit harder and harder and by the final dungeon represent a random encounter can represent an existential threat even at full health. and right before the final dungeon, lufia departs from your party, leaving you to face these hardest fights without her, plus three of the sinistrals, returning only for the final final battle against guard daos. (hope you remembered to equip the thunder ring before nazeby!) (footnote 3)
the cumulative effect here is that the vanishing rules (footnote 4) erase the ability you spent act 2 mastering to judge enemies, allocate attacks efficiently, and control the flow of battle. instead you spend the endgame grappling with vulnerability in increasingly hostile circumstances. fortress of doom isn't interested in the experience of powerlessness per se (like, say, live-a-live), but it does use these feelings to underscore the emotions of the whole ending. lufia sees there's something powerful in pitting the player against the final boss when they're at their most desperate, rather than when they're feeling their strongest (like they might after a series of ultimate weapon sidequests). the conflict of lufia 1's ending extends past the the final battle as (spoilers again) lufia demands the hero kill her to stop the sinistrals' cycle of resurrection. dual blade rids her of erim's spirit, but as she lays wounded from the schism, the floor crumbles beneath her and she disappears into the abyss. the game lets us wallow in the hero's shock at his best friend and beloved's abrupt disappearance, and when the party finally escapes, he leaves alone without celebrating or saying goodbye. it's genuinely a very affecting sequence. it denies you an opportunity to celebrate a hard-earned victory after a harrowing final dungeon (with no save points, incidentally). the precarity of the final dungeon is instrumental in setting the tone that drives home the tragedy of the ensuing events. i worked so hard to get here, and now, for what? i was already at my limit.
hence the careful balancing and disruption of enemy health and player damage doesn't just create appropriate difficulty in line with the escalation of challenge as the game progresses, but informs the emotional arc of the whole third act as well. fortress of doom reminds us that simple systems are perfectly capable of supporting mindful and rewarding rpg combat, that they're perfectly capable of coloring and augmenting a story, and that rpg developers have been thinking about the connection between gameplay and narrative for a very long time. as certain experiences and aesthetics have been codified as "good game design" in the years since lufia, it's easy to misunderstand the values that consciously informed fortress of doom's conscious design (footnote 5). but all the signs point to its core design being thoughtful, deliberate, and effective in delivering a specific emotional experience.
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footnote 1: this upper bound assumes you're current on levels and equipment and fighting current enemies, although when the encounter rate is so high and sweet waters cost 8 gold apiece, i wonder which level is ever "current". for my part, i never intentionally grinded, but i also i rarely ran from battles or used sweet waters to lower the encounter rate, because i liked fighting them. anyway, the same assumptions are in place for all my generalizations
footnote 2: when we're dealing with enemies at full health, anyway. naturally, if an enemy is on its last hit point, it doesn't matter who swings their sword.
footnote 3: writing about rpg mechanics is hard because it's hard to tell whether your experience was the norm, or relegated to your particular way of playing the game. it was during the third act that i stopped fighting every battle and started chugging sweet waters and lobbing smoke balls. did the difficulty surge because i fell behind in levels? or was this my return to baseline after 30 hours spent overleveled?
footnote 4: i suppose another rule in the norm could put an upper limit on how much damage enemies do to you. for instance, i never saw an enemy who could deal as much as half my health in a single attack. the biggest dangers were groups of red magi and other enemies who could hit my whole party for a quarter to a third of their health, multiple times in a row - and even those felt like outliers. i think they all vanished by elfrea
footnote 5: even lufia 2, published less than 2 years later, discarded much of fortress of doom's innovation in favor of ideas that were visibly more "final fantasy" or "zelda". incidentally, of the two titles, it's the one more widely celebrated by retro rpg fans
