Lagoon

"Average among the average, but could have been worst."

Kemco is not a very well known company for its rpgs, in fact, Kemco is not a well known company at all, but they made the loyal effort of producing one of the first (if not the first) action rpgs for the Snes, and here is the result.

Story 4/10:
As expected, a very typical plot with basically every single cliche imaginable, but the big problem here is that there is hardly any plot, I didn’t knew what was the main goal of the game until the last part of it, during the intro no one says a thing, we only see a castle, a boy and a girl, and then an evil looking guy, and the only thing we can do with this is suppose that the evil guy is evil, the boy and the girl are the good ones, and that the castle is important but we don’t know why, and what is more, Nasir, the main character, is silent. Bad.

Graphics 8/10:
Considering that this game was one of the very first games for the Snes (so it is old even for a Snes game), the graphics are extremely good. One of the things that make them better is the fact that there is quite a lot of variety when it comes to show different backgrounds (for a game that is not exactly “long”), and everything is big but quite detailed. When we equip armor and shields we can see them on our character, that is a nice touch. The enemies are the worst part about the graphics, because they are pretty so-so, without animations, boring designs, and not enough variety. But the graphics are very good anyway.

Music 6/10:
Pretty good to be honest, I was surprised because sometimes it even gets extremely good, but only sometimes. Overall the music is fine, but it gets a bit annoying because the soundtrack is like very fast paced, and some places have very weird music that ends up being irritating, for example that one that sounds in the Dwarf Desert.

Gameplay 5/10:
Like everyone that plays this game says, the ridiculously short attack range Nasir has is one of the worst problem, the average enemies are pretty easy to kill, the problems come with some of the bosses, because they are extremely hard to kill with that ridiculous knife we have.

The difficulty is not high really, but the above mentioned bosses sometimes are EVIL, the first one for example, and why in the world we can’t use magic during the battles with them?, like if they weren’t hard enough!, I defeated the first boss only because I was lucky (it was some kind of bug, he suddenly got stuck in one position and I was able to kill him basically without doing anything), then when I got a magic spell I thought: “well, at least I have some magic to fry those filthy bosses”, but when I reached the second one, well, I couldn’t use it, how come?!. Bad bad.

Although we can’t use it against the bosses, the magic system works fine, we have to find the typical crystal with the different elements (fire, wind, etc), then we have to get rods, depending on the rod we have different attacks will be available.

Sometimes you will have to travel with people or just taking them to some places, what is the problem with that are you wondering?, the thing is that these “companions” are tremendously slow, you are going to have to wait them while they try to follow you like if they were turtles.

One of the worst flaws in my opinion are the dungeons (they are not exactly dungeons, I mean the caves, castles, and this like that), because they are very long and with lots of paths, it is very easy to get lost, which is annoying.

Taken as a whole, Lagoon reminds me a lot to the Ys series, everything in this game has an Ys feel because of the gameplay (we will recover our life if and magic points if we stand still in any moment), sometimes the music, the graphics, the fact that we have to level up to easily kill some bosses... too bad it lacks one of the Ys’ most important things, the amazing plot.

Overall:
Lagoon is a fairly mediocre action rpg, so-so and without very much content, but considering how old it is, and compared with a lot of rpgs released after it for the Snes, it is true that it is not THAT bad, it is mediocre yes, but at least it is perfectly playable most of the time (my only complaint about this are some bosses), something that certainly cannot be say about a lot games that were released after this one.

”My lack of vocabulary and grammatical errors (if there’s any) are because I’m not from an English speaking country, sorry about that.”

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 02/27/04