r/lufia

I'm playing original hardware, and I've got about 30 hours into collecting blue chest items in the cave. Im playing with Arty, not Dekar.

Im an average player, at least for Lufia 2, and Ive never attempted to get past the last 30 or so floors. So far ive just been playing through to bulk up on blue chest items. Besides what I have equipped for each character in the pictures, I also have the Gades Blade, and extra sizzle/snow/sky swords, dragon spears, and lots of jewels.

Is what I have enough to feel pretty confident about getting through the last 1/3 of the cave? My strategy is always to fight everything, get an insta-kill weapon for Selan, and find absord, a healing spell, a life spell, a light spell, and a curse-lifter

This is a follow up to a post I made after my Mother passed earlier this year. https://www.reddit.com/r/lufia/comments/1s3ytig/my_mother_passed_away_this_week_which_is_years/

Hey everyone, bit of shameless self-promotion here. My game is coming out on 8/11 and I wanted to share it with this community. It's a JRPG with 100 procedurally generated floors where you start at floor 1 level 1 with no items or skills and have to fight your way down to the bottom. There are red chests which contain items, gear, and skills that you can only use on that run and then there are blue chests which contain powerful gear you can bring out of the cave and back in with you on subsequent runs (probably sounds very familiar to those familiar with Lufia 2's Ancient Cave).

There's basically this tension between "should I push deeper for more loot or should I bank what I have and get out?" The main game is basically balanced such that it should be nearly impossible to beat on the first run, so there's a meta-progression in terms of blue chest items.

There's also a seeded daily run with a leaderboard that's re-tuned to be possible to beat in a single run with incredibly skilled play and a little bit of luck. There's server side replay validation so players can be assured no one is cheating, and the difficulty is such that if you can manage a deep run it'll definitely be something to be proud of. Basically every person in the world will face an identical cave on any given day and the goal is to push as deep as possible.

Full disclosure, I'm not really a video game dev. I do write software for a living but I made this game not because I'm hoping to get early retirement money, but mostly because it's a game I wish existed but didn't. I really enjoy classic JRPG's, but outside of speed running them (something I never got into), my biggest complaint is that they just aren't that challenging. Some of them may start difficult, but eventually you reach a point where you just stat check everything and it's a total snooze.

Depths of Providence is designed to be an incredibly challenging JRPG with a competitive twist. A daily run is genuinely challenging and I expect most players to die around floor 25-30. Again, outside of speed running there's really never been (as far as I'm aware) a JRPG that has a way to compete with other people, so that's something I set out to create.

It's of course natively supported on Linux (I've been running Linux since 2004, Knoppix if anyone remembers that. Basically Knoppix -> Fedora -> Ubuntu -> Mint -> Manjaro -> CachyOS has been my journey) and it plays amazingly on the Steam Deck as well (it's still my go to before bed game on my Deck). It also runs on Windows and Mac which is probably slightly less relevant to this community.

Anyway, again, I'm not really trying to get rich off this game. Mostly I'm just hoping people will enjoy it as much as I do and maybe offer feedback on how they think the game could be made even better.

It releases on August 11, and you can find the Steam store page here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4996340/Depths_of_Providence/

Let me know what you think! I genuinely hope you enjoy it as much as I do, but totally get that this is a somewhat niche sort of game. Anyway, thanks for checking it out!

Today I picked up Lufia 1 and 2 or Estpolis Denki I and II for the Super Famicom!

They were definitely not cheap. Lufia 1 was ¥12,100 and Lufia 2 was ¥7,700. I was actually surprised that the first game cost more, considering Lufia 2 is generally considered the better game. Maybe the first one is a little harder to find complete? I’m not really sure.

Thankfully, both copies are in really nice condition. The boxes, manuals, cartridges, and other paperwork all look extremely well kept.

One thing I’ve noticed when buying old Japanese games is that the stores can be really strict when describing the condition. The label might mention a scratch, some wear on the box, damage to the manual, etc., and it always makes me expect something much worse. Then I actually open the box and think, Wait…this looks fantastic.

There might be a tiny scratch or a little bit of wear somewhere, but honestly, that doesn’t bother me. I’m not trying to collect absolutely pristine museum-quality copies. I just want copies that look nice, aren’t badly worn, and especially don’t have a bunch of discoloration. Both of these are more than good enough for me.

As for my history with the games:

Growing up, I remember being really intrigued by the North American cover art whenever I saw it, but I never got very far into the game itself. Even back then, it felt pretty old-fashioned compared to something like Final Fantasy VI.

And…honestly, I find Lufia 1 kind of boring. The random encounter rate certainly doesn’t help.

I vaguely remember possibly finishing it using somebody else’s save file on a rental copy, but I don’t think I ever actually played through the whole game myself.

Lufia 2 is a completely different story.

I beat that one all the way through as a kid, and I loved it. It felt like such a huge improvement over the first game. Great characters, fantastic music, a much more enjoyable battle system, equipment that gives you different abilities, and of course…

THE PUZZLES.

You really can’t talk about Lufia 2 without talking about the puzzles.

I have really fond memories of getting completely stuck on some of them as a kid and asking my dad to help me figure them out. That’s probably one of the things I remember most clearly about playing the game.

Whenever I eventually get around to playing this copy, I want to try doing the entire game without a guide and solve all the puzzles myself.

I’m sure that’ll be easy now that I’m an adult, right?

…right?

I’m actually pretty terrible at puzzle games, so we’ll see how that goes.

Anyway, I’m really happy I found these today. I don’t actually know how rare the Japanese versions are, but I have this terrible collector scarcity mindset where I see an old RPG in really nice condition and immediately think, “If I don’t buy this right now, I’ll never see it again.”

So naturally…I bought both.

I’m really pleased to have them in the collection.

What do you guys think about Lufia 1 and 2?

Do you love both of them? Do you tolerate the first game but love the second? Is there anyone here who actually prefers Lufia 1? I’d especially be interested in hearing from people who grew up with these games and what memories you have of them.