Lagoon (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
190A 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 had always caught my eye. The SNES had plenty of fantasy adventure/RPGs right from the beginning, and though Lagoon always seemed to get lost in the shuffle, I always 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, and yet still never forgot about the ever elusive Lagoon. I finally ended up renting it a couple of years later and I thoroughly enjoyed it, even if it wasn't as awesome as the years of anticipation had built it up to be.
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 was one of the system's earliest games, released at the end of 1990.
The SNES game has nothing over the x68000 version in its graphics and music (the x68k's soundtrack seriously sounded awesome), but it is still a really nicely presented game. The cinema cutscenes are all appealing and colorful (especially the eye catching opening, at least by 1990 standards), the soundtrack is thoroughly excellent throughout (even if it lacks the power of the original game's heavy FM/PCM music), 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, except that they changed nothing else about the mechanics. Your sword is all of 3 or 4 pixels long, you have to be right on top of an enemy to hit them, and everything requires nearly perfect timing in order to avoid taking massive amounts of damage. No accommodations were really made to balance the game play for 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 certainly frustrating at times. There are too many occasions where you find yourself inching closer and closer to and enemy, taking tentative swings because of the shoddy hit detection, when the enemy suddenly decides to run straight into you. When you're really lucky, you'll get pinned against a wall, which is a good way to end up with a drained life meter and a game over message. And this is even more fun when it happens during that hideously bad escort mission near the beginning of the game.
BUT!
I can't. With such flawed game play, it'd be really easy to hate on Lagoon. But I can't. Like I said before, I liked it the first time I played it, and it's grown on me quite a bit 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 at times hyper-stilted translation), and the battle system works...ish. At least, it does if you have a lot of patience and a willingness to abuse the save almost-anywhere option.
There are those games that have a real wildcard factor that make the "experience" so much better than what logic would lead you to believe. We've all had that bad game that we've loved, and 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're paying close attention as you watch, you might see a couple of spots in the recording where my stats seem to suddenly jump. That happens where I cut out grinding for experience points. Grinding is tedious to do and even more so to watch, so I axed it to keep the video moving at a good pace.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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