Bahamut Lagoon - Part 01

Channel:

KenseiKitsune

Subscribers:

89

Published on February 14, 2025 9:00:28 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTKvDsfCvLM

Game:

Bahamut Lagoon (1996)

Duration: 0:00

12 views

1

Originally Played on February 12th, 2025

Today we begin with an old favorite of mine from the SNES library, or Super Famicom, I suppose. Tactical RPG battles, floating sky islands, dragons, feeding unmentionables to said dragons, whats not to love?

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Bahamut Lagoon was released in Japan in 1996, and was never ported to the States. is not natively available in the US without importing it (or other methods).

I am playing this using the translation patch made by a group headed by Near. I cannot tell you where to get the patch, but it is not overly difficult to find if you search for it.

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Description from Nintendo Fandom Wiki:

Bahamut Lagoon バハムートラグーン is a video game for Super Famicom was created by Square Co., Ltd.. It was never officially released outside Japan, but was fan-translated by a group known as DeJap, and later again by a group led by Near. It is often called Bahalag バハラグ by Japanese fans.
While the game has no relation to the Final Fantasy series, it incorporates several staples from the series, most prominently the use of summons.

The game's development staff included many key members from the Final Fantasy series, including Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, as a supervisor, Kazushige Nojima as director, and Motomu Toriyama as a story planner.

Features of the Translation Patch:

• A brand new script translation from a native English speaker with Japanese fluency far beyond the JLPT N1.
• Exhaustively researched translations for all names.
• Ubiquitous use of proportional fonts and tabular numbers throughout the entire game.
• Normal-weighted sans-serif fonts with strong shadowing and anti-aliasing for readability.
• An italic font for sound effects and letters, a smallcaps font for menu headings, and a bold font for the credits.
• Support for extended characters such as umlauts to allow for more faithful translations.
• True font kerning with overlap support for every font in the game.
• Player and dragon names were expanded to 11 characters, allowing even the longest names to fit.
• Every list (of names, items, enemies, etc) has been statically rendered for performance.
• Player and dragon names are cached in memory, so they do not have to be rendered dynamically within menus.
• When necessary, pre-shifted proportional fonts provide the fastest dynamic text rendering possible.
• Field status display messages converted to use the larger proportional font for consistency and increased readability.
• All proportional text strings are double-buffered to prevent flickering when moving between screens and lists.
• Extensive knowledge of the SNES hardware was utilized to safely maximize data transfers to video RAM each frame.
• Expanded save RAM and a method to avoid requiring memory initialization to greatly reduce required game code hooks.
• Not that they are necessary, but safeguards were put into place to prevent text overflow for every string in the game.
• Multiple text colors were added to help distinguish between text, names, headers, quantities, etc.
• The title screen menu and ending screen graphic were redesigned for better legibility.
• The opening and ending credits were redesigned with a new bold font for better legibility.
• All Japanese graphical text strings were translated, and English text strings were localized better.
• Every menu dynamically resizes to take up the least amount of screen space possible.
• Every menu cursor has been repositioned for consistency.
• Every menu screen has had its layout optimized for readability.
• Several bugs present in the original game were fixed.
• All dragon stats (including previously hidden stats) have been made available on all screens.
• The internal debugger has been fully translated into English, with some of its original bugs fixed.
• Item icons added to the player field screens.
• Status icon ordering has been made consistent between all of the various screens in the game.
• Class names have been re-added to screens they were missing from when no status modifier icons apply.
• Pixel-perfect alignment of every string with left/center/right-justification support.
• Customized and additional HDMA scrolling tables to present additional strings within menus.
• All menus optimized to avoid the overscan areas of CRT monitors.
• Extensive beta testing including dozens of completed play-throughs.
• Over 370KB of new SNES assembly code and 180KB of tooling code.
• Source code written using extensive macros and pseudo-instructions to enhance readability.
• The entire project is fully open-source and ISC-licensed. Translations to other languages are welcome and encouraged!
• Absolutely no self-promotion or hidden easter eggs replacing dialogue from the original game.
• ... and so very, very much more!

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00:00 - Pre-Stream
31:35 - Bahamut Lagoon