Bahamut Lagoon

"Fun plot, fun gameplay, way too easy."

I'm a strategy game freak and Bahamut Lagoon really enticed me when I first played it in Japanese. Enter translation- and here comes 30 hours worth of fun.

Graphics:
It's a late-SNES era Square game, so of course it's going to look good. Beautiful sprites, all wonderfully animated, nice backgrounds, pretty environments...graphics-wise, there is much to like about this game. Of course, since it's a late SNES-era Square game, saying these things about the graphics is a pretty redundant activity, so i'll leave it at this.

Sound:
This suffers from Front Mission syndrome. Wonderful, beautiful music...but there isn't enough of it >_<. You hear the same two map themes for 55% of the game's fights, then you get one other map theme for the other 35%. To put it bluntly, you get really tired of these three songs. The other music doesn't get as repetitive, though, since it's not played nearly as often. Thankfully, all the music is of good quality, even if it gets repetitive.

Gameplay:
My excitement for this game was for good reason. This is a very, very fun game. Think Shining Force mixed in with Final Fantasy 6's mass battles and you've got something close to this game. Essentially, each unit in battle represents a group of four ala Final Fantasy- and when you make an attack on an enemy unit, you go into a turn based battle mode where you select commands and such like any other RPG. You can also choose to pool the party's skills and spells into an 'area' attack used from the map, which are usually very powerful and even affect the environment they target. Then we get into the dragons. You see, each unit of yours is assigned one dragon, of which you command to 'Come', 'Go' or 'Wait' and it acts accordingly when that unit finishes it's turn. Between fights you get to attempt to raise these dragons through feeding them anything, from weapons to armor to items. The dragon raising system, asides from a very neat features here and there (?? and ??? stats, for example)- isn't terribly deep or interesting. It's enough to make you interested in how the dragons are growing, but that's...really about it. There's nothing about it to keep you drawn in after that initial stage of interest- which may be a good or bad thing when you realize how ludicrously powerful the dragons end up making your party. You see- the enemies stand next to no chance of actually harming your dragons if you half-heartedly feed them (in fact, the main character's ultimate dragon has infinite HP. Whoo, fun)...and if anything, nothing really sucks the fun out of a fight for me than the dismal realization that I can't die. Otherwise, though, the game is great fun.

Story:
Bahamut's Lagoon has a very nice plot, for sure. It's very light-hearted and semi-wacky, yet takes itself seriously at the same time...and it does this correctly without things getting incredibly cheesy. I found the story and characters wonderfully amusing and liked every one of them for their quirks and values. The characterization is really superb for a game with more characters than can be developed at once. Despite the number of characters, the plot does make an honest attempt to develop as many as it can- whether through the main story or through the side-dialogue you get when you talk to the characters freely. Through all this, the writing still manages to be really nice. It's thanks to Tomato's quality efforts in translating this that I can enjoy such a nice plot.

So, what do we have here? A fun strategy game with it's difficulty permanently set on Very Easy with a fun plot and nice graphics. My anticipation for getting this game in English was well met- this game is truly worth your time despite it's lack of challenge ^_^.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 08/09/02, Updated 08/09/02