Bahamut Lagoon

"A good strategy RPG for someone new to the genre"

Game Difficulty: Easy
Game Length: 30 hours

Strategic Combat

Bahamut Lagoon is part strategy RPG and part traditional turn-based RPG. The game is comprised of 27 required battles and 4 optional ones, and each will require roughly one hour to complete. Each battle presents you with a two dimensional bird's eyes view of a large battlefield in which you move your six units around on the grid. Each unit is made up of four characters, so in total you can control 24 individuals per battle. Attacking is done in one of two ways. The first takes place directly on the battlefield view. So long as your unit has a long-range skill it can launch an attack over several grid squares to hit the enemy without fear of retaliation. The second approach involves moving next to an enemy unit and engaging them head-on. If this happens the screen will switch to a side-view, in which your four party members square off with their foes in a Final Fantasy 6-esque battle. This presents a degree of risk since the opponents will each get to execute an attack of their own. More harm than good can come from this approach if the wrong unit tries to pick a fight. Some enemies will be able to heal themselves for more than your team has been able to damage them, resulting in the foes being in better standing than they were before you encountered them. Battles are turn-based, meaning you decide the actions of all your units, then when finished, all the enemy units will make their move, and you will trade off in this fashion until the battle is complete. This is the gist of battle, oh yeah, that and...

...dragons! Well it wouldn't be called Bahamut anything if it didn't have dragons! Each of your six units is assigned their own dragon. Though it is not explicitly explained in the game, your dragon is essentially your only means for improving your team. Dragons have their own stats you must control by feeding them and this will affect the proficiency of your party members. For instance, a team of wizards who works with a dragon specializing in fire magic will be able to cast more powerful fire spells, but nothing else. Likewise, if you raise this same dragon's ice and poison stats your wizards will gain new blizzard and poison spells. This is a creative way to strengthen your allies and causes one to pause for a moment to decide which humans should ally with which serpent. There is more to say on the matter of the dragons, but I will postpone that discussion for a few moments.

An interesting feature that I should not neglect to mention is the inclusion of traps and hazards present in the battlefield view. For instance, lava or poisonous swamps will sometimes be apart of the terrain, and moving a unit onto these panels will result in extra damage between rounds. The good news is that you can often use the landscape to your strategic advantage. If an enemy unit is positioned on a bridge, a well placed lightning spell will destroy the structure, leaving your foes to fall into water, resulting in drowning and eventually death. Characters taking refuge in a forest must be cautious not to expose themselves to fire skills, as this will result in the forest catching fire and dealing extra injury. Additionally, buildings can provide small amounts of healing between rounds and ice magic can be used over water to create impromptu bridges. This creative use of the terrain is something I wish more games employed, and is especially vital to Bahamut Lagoon since this is where the game derives most of its strategy.

Ease of Play

As my title implies, this game is a good introduction for someone who has some knowledge of traditional RPGs but wants to test the waters of the tactical arena. Aside from being no more statistics reliant than a typical Final Fantasy title, there are several features employed in Bahamut Lagoon that make it much more relaxed than others in its genre:

No permanent character deaths. Unlike in Final Fantasy Tactics, where a character's death has the potential to be irreversible if not treated in time, no such feature exists in Bahamut Lagoon. Your entire regimen can be annihilated, but as long as one character survives the victory your team mates will be revived to full health, ready for the next outing.

No game over. Now if all your characters do perish, don't panic. While I can't attest to this personally (since I never lost a battle *gloat*), judging by what characters say in the game, if you lose a battle you will get the opportunity to re-try it again with all the experience and items you had acquired during the battle which lead to your defeat. So what this amounts to is that if you just stick with it eventually you will grow powerful enough to ensure victory.

Unlimited item usage. At the start of each turn in battle you can open the status menu for each of your units and pump them full of as many restorative drugs as you want. This essentially results in unlimited MP and HP since you are only limited by the amount of items you can keep in stock (99 of each), which is more than enough to carry you through any one conflict. Plus, money is in no short supply so it is very easy to remain well outfitted. This, paired with your dragons' healing properties, essentially makes priests (your healing characters) somewhat obsolete fairy early on in the game. This has the consequence that you'll just have that many more slots open for melee characters, so battles will often go in your favor.

Invincible character. You read that right. Assuming you know a thing or two about raising dragons, it is possible to make one of your pets so obscenely powerful he will perpetually have maximum health and literally cannot die from enemy inflicted pain. This is a fair and square, no cheats required, legitimate use of your dragon. I have read the only way for him to actually lose is if you somehow get the unit to which he is assigned defeated. If all else fails, huddle your teams in a safe corner, command your dragon to pounce, and let him wreak havoc. Naturally this can be seen as unbalanced, and should only be used as a tactic of last resort.

The Sprinter Paradox

Each of your 32 characters is represented by a certain class, such as summoner, knight, or wizard, but there is one class in particular that deserves special attention and that is the light armor. If you play your cards right you will acquire three light armor characters over the course of the game. While they at first seem weak, they are paradoxically both the best and worst characters of the game. By placing one in your unit you will note that team will be able to move slightly farther on the battlefield per turn. This ability is termed "sprint" and directly correlates with your dragon's dexterity statistic. As the dragon grows throughout the game the range of your light armor's unit will also significantly increase, often exponentially. Soon any unit with a light armor in it will be able to traverse half the map in a single turn. This is great for any unit, especially ones made up of melee characters, who can rush into battle and survive the onslaught, but what this also means is that three of your units will be miles ahead of your remaining three squads. So effectively, by around halfway through the game it is not uncommon for half of your team to be rendered obsolete simply because they lag behind and cannot get close enough to enemies to be of any more use. Units with high sprinter ranges will gain more experience, gain levels faster, and be more powerful than your remaining teammates.

The solution for this is either of two self-imposed punishments. The first is to not raise your dragon, thus keeping your ranges low. Since this will also keep your dragon's other stats down, your dragons may start to suffer, and likewise, so too will the squads who depend upon them. Secondly, you could opt for not using light armors at all. All this really serves is to prolong battles since you will end up spending more turns to move units the same distance that they otherwise could traverse in one swift stride. The last thing most of us want is to draw out what is already an hour long fight. While the light armors and their sprinter ability is ultimately helpful, it is also horribly unbalanced later in the game. Nevertheless it still works due to the game's light difficulty, so three powerful units are just as effective at winning as are six.

Dragon Intelligence

The game's AI deserves special attention, and nothing brings to light its incompetence more than the idiotic schemes cooked up by your dragon guardians.

I won't beat around the bush: the dragons are dumb as bricks. Well, actually they occasionally do something right, so I'll upgrade their status and say they're dumb as sponges. The problem is you have no direct control over your dragon in battle. You can issue it any of three vague commands. “Go” orders it to fly wherever it wants on the battlefield and pick its own fights. “Come” is essentially the same, only it starts skirmishes nearer to your unit. “Wait” tells it to cool its jets and sit the current round out. While this introduces a random element to the battles, it sometimes interferes with any tactics you may be trying to devise.

The primary problem with your dragons is they are animals, and as such, are not tactical wizards. While your dragon can (and by all accounts, should) attack an enemy unit from several tiles away (where it is completely safe) with its fire breath, often it will sidle up next to the foe, engaging a side-view battle, just to do the same fire move, which opens it up to retaliation by the enemy and ultimately HP loss. Even worse, it may purposely move onto a hazard panel, such as spikes or burning forest, to attack, resulting in even more damage.

In more crowded scenarios enemies may be bunched together, leaving few tiles for your soldier-based units to move to in order to attack. Your dragons will often perch in these empty spaces next to an enemy, preventing the unit you had hoped to move there from doing so. Especially frustrating if it moves there only to perform the previously mentioned grievance.

Next, your dragons will preferentially attack units which you may deem a low-threat, while ignoring the one foe who is slaughtering your team. Case in point: All my units were on the opposite side of the battlefield from, and well out of the range of, a cannon's fire. Nearly all my dragons seemingly sprouted an insuppressible hard-on for this one cannon and incessantly harassed it while my human units took a whomping from the boss du jour. They got the cannon though. Good for them. I guess.

Lastly, while you might think teaching your dragons healing magic would be beneficial, it oftentimes results in wasted turns. By mid-game it is not uncommon for your dragons to reach max (9999) HP. During the course of battle one may fall to about 8500 HP or so, prompting its pal to cast a healing spell on it rather than using its turn to deal the death blow to a powerful enemy. When the dragons are taking a mere 600 damage per round, you can see how this move could easily have been postponed.

Alright, so they're not geniuses. But you know what, dammit, they are dragons and they look cool and they are fun, so I can't fault them for that. The game wouldn't be the same without the dragons and, if anything, their rampant stupidity provides for some much needed challenge in this game. Plus, some of their antics are amusing, so I love them anyway. Plus you know what, you can feed them porn, and where I come from that's a pretty unique feature in any game.

Characters and Setting

While the battles may have been outright easy, I found myself looking forward to each one, which is more than I can say for the cutscenes which punctuated the missions. In total there are 32 characters plus your seven dragons. Let's get it out of the way, the dragons have no personality whatsoever (other than being perpetually hungry) and all behave the same. So ignoring those behemoths, the rest of the cast is sadly not much more improved. Aside from a couple of exceptions, each member of your crew can be summarized in a single sentence by their one defining peculiarity. The few characters who do develop do so only very shallowly. The bottom line is that, while I wanted to, I could not really connect very well with any of the characters and was not motivated to partake in their struggle. I understand that with such a large cast it is hard to bring them to life, but in all honesty I think Square could have done a bit more with them than to have each cling to a single mannerism throughout the entire story.

Above all this is most disheartening because the world of Bahamut Lagoon is quite unique. Civilizations are built upon floating islands in the sky (think of an expanded Kingdom of Zeal, all you Chrono Trigger fans), called lagoons which act as oases amidst the endless sky. The story is rather loosely held together, partly because of the poor acting of the characters, but some concepts were interesting and held potential if only they had been given more focus. Understandably I must remain vague on this subject to prevent spoiling what little story there is, but suffice it to say the plot does not stand upon the same pedestal as those from other Squaresoft RPGs of the decade. Had Bahamut Lagoon perchance become an anime where the characters were given sufficient time to develop their own personas and purpose the world might have the chance to flourish and come alive. However, as it is restricted to a console game limitations must be placed on the storytelling so what we are left with is a fairly watered down tale of an empire at war.

Summary

So while it may seem I have more complaints than praise for this game (and I do), it was still fun, I'm still glad I played it, and I would recommend it for beginners or Squaresoft fans looking to beat it for completion sake. The game had a lot of good ideas concerning gameplay but I don't think all were as polished as they could have been. Battles and character growth (gameplay wise) could have used some more depth, such as a wider variety of spells, status effects, and skills unique to each class. Some classes became obsolete too soon and those that did not relied upon the same skill sets for the entirety of the game. While the motive to play this game should be on the battles over the story, the plot definitely needed more focus and explanation for exactly what was supposed to be transpiring. Give it a go, there is certainly nothing in the game that makes it cripplingly bad or unplayable.

Pros: (b^_^)b
* interactive environment
* still fairly fun, albeit easy

Cons: (pv_v)p
* dumb dragons
* unbalanced character classes
* poor character development and story

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 08/14/08, Updated 08/15/08

Game Release: Bahamut Lagoon (JP, 02/09/96)