Lufia: Ancient Cave

I've recently restarted playing Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals for the DS. I picked this up shortly after its release last year but quickly ended up getting stuck. It's an action-RPG game with a heavy emphasis on puzzle dungeons. (I believe it's essentially a remake of Lufia II for the SNES which was a standard RPG with a heavy emphasis on puzzle dungeons.) You may think I got stuck because I couldn't figure out a puzzle or wasn't nimble enough to pull off an action combo or such. No, I was actually stuck because you needed to use a charge attack to destroy a big rock. In order to charge up an attack you had to hold down the R button and my DS had a broken R button.

I bought a 3DS earlier this year (yay functioning R button!) but never got around to getting back into Lufia. I had other games to play and I've actually done a lot of reading on the bus this year. I was randomly looking through a pile of game cases and saw Lufia and figured I'd give it another shot. It's got some interesting concepts to it but the best by far is taken pretty much directly from Lufia II: the Ancient Cave!

The Ancient Cave is a side dungeon with 100 levels. I've never actually completed Lufia II since every time I'd play I'd get to the Ancient Cave and just spend all my time in it. It's such a unique concept and I wish more games would put something like it in since it's fun and highly replayable. Each level of the dungeon has a few randomly generated rooms with monsters and treasure chests in them. One of the rooms has stairs down to the next level. There is no way to go back up to a previous level. The game doesn't have random encounters so there's a finite amount of xp you can earn as you go down the dungeon. Every now and then (once every 10 levels or so) you get the option of leaving the dungeon. Doing so will force you to restart it from the top if you come back in.

All of that seems pretty standard so far. The twist is that when you enter the dungeon your characters are reset to level 1. You lose all of your equipment and items. The levels and items are restored when you leave the dungeon but you lose everything you found inside. Doesn't seem like there's much point to doing it, eh? Well, you lose almost everything you find inside. There are some rare treasure chests which are coloured blue. Inside these chests are items with blue names and those items persist between the Ancient Cave and the real world. So you can find a few good items and leave. Save the game. Go back in from the start but with the blue items to help you out... Probably you can make it a little deeper this time since you've started with some good stuff. On this trip in you probably found some more stuff... Repeat!

I just found the Ancient Cave in my game. The first blue chest I found had an awesome sword in it. How awesome? Well, it was three times as powerful as my real world sword and five times as powerful as my Ancient Cave sword. Maxim is now a brutal killing machine! I could take that sword and go smash through the plot for a while... Or I could try to get deeper into the Ancient Cave! Yeah, I think I'll do that...