Lagoon (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
192A playthrough of Kemco's 1991 action-RPG for the Super Nintendo, Lagoon.
Though it was released to middling reviews in magazines during the holiday season of 1991, Lagoon caught my eye. The SNES had plenty of fantasy adventure/RPGs right from the beginning, and Lagoon always seemed to get lost in the shuffle, but I loved the screenshots and the descriptions of the game. I played the stuffing out of ActRaiser and Final Fantasy II in the console's early days, yet I never forgot about the ever elusive Lagoon. I finally ended up renting it a couple of years later and thoroughly enjoyed it, even if it wasn't as awesome as years of anticipation had built it up to be.
If it feels a bit different in its execution from what you are used to, that's largely the result of it being a port of a 1990 Japanese x68000 PC title by Zoom (also the developer of Phalanx and the Zero Divide series) to the SNES. The Japanese version of the SNES cart, released at the end of 1990, was one of the system's earliest games.
The SNES game has nothing over the x68000 version in its graphics and music, but the presentation is still quite nice. The cinema cutscenes are all appealing and colorful (especially in the eye catching opening), the soundtrack is thoroughly excellent throughout though it lacks the power of the original version's heavy mix of FM synth and PCM drums, and the in-game graphics are attractive in a simple, folksy kind of way.
The game play unfortunately hit a couple of snags in the transition from the PC. The game was originally designed to play like Ys or Hydlide: you would merely run into your enemy to fight rather than endlessly smashing a single button, and the outcome would depend on your strength and the angle from which you attacked.
This being a console game, the development team felt the need to have you press a button to swing your sword, but they changed nothing else about the mechanics: your sword is about the length of a pocket knife, you have to be right on top of an enemy to hit it, and your timing has to be virtually perfect in order to avoid taking massive amounts of damage. No accommodations were made to balance the game in light of this fundamental change to its mechanics, and as a result, it's a far more demanding game that it was ever intended to be. It's not *difficult*, per se, but it's can be frustrating at times. There are too many occasions where you find yourself inching closer and closer to an enemy taking tentative swings, only to have the enemy suddenly run straight into you.
There isn't any temporary period of invulnerability when you take a hit, so if you're really lucky, you'll get pinned against a wall, have your life gauge drained, and be shown the Game Over screen, all within a three second span. It's even more fun to have things like that happen during that awful escort mission near the beginning of the game.
With such flawed game play, it'd be really easy to hate on Lagoon. But I can't. Like I said, I liked it the first time I played it, and it has grown on me more over time. The quaint graphics still hold a lot of charm, the soundtrack kicks ass, the story is surprisingly engaging (and amusingly awkward thanks to its sometimes hyper-stilted translation), and the battle system works...ish. At least, it does if you have a lot of patience and you are willing to abuse the save almost-anywhere option.
Some games have a wildcard factor that make the "experience" far more enjoyable than you'd expect given the uneven quality of their component parts. We've all had that bad game that we've loved for no other reason than it resonated in a way that allowed us to, to some extent, overlook its shortcomings. For me, Lagoon is one of those games. It's not a great game, but it's a game that I love playing.
If you were a fan of Kemco's Dragon View (https://youtu.be/xrPLqw2ted4), you might also get a kick out of Lagoon since DV recycled many of this game's ideas and plot points.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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