[Retro Review] Bahamut Lagoon

Let’s go back in time, to the mid–ninetees, when Nintendo and SEGA were still warring and competing for sales. The SNES had been the designated console for RPGs, but SEGA had the leading Strategy RPG series Shining Force. Squaresoft could not lag behind, and decided to give it a go with strategical rather than conventional Role Playing. Of course there was Ogre Battle, but Ogre Battle was run on a very poor graphic and sound engine, and could not compete with the excellence of the Shining Force games. Bahamut Lagoon turned out to be a pretty good game, however, lack of funding on the North American part kept it from ever being released outside of Japan. A pity, but an all too common setting for those days. Translating games back then was a time consuming and expensive process, and American and European players were left with a limited market for games.

 

Fortunately for a lot of retro gamers, it was translated successfully by the De Jap team. Though the translation has some rough edges, it is near perfect in my opinion. The story is a pretty simple one: the great Kingdom of Kahna is being invaded by the Granbelos Empire. Emperor Sauzer seeks to use and abuse the power of the Holy Dragons that once protected this land. Knowing the legacy of the Dragnar and the Royal Family, Emperor Sauzer kidnaps the teenage Princess of Kahna and kills her father. Byuu, the young captain of the Kahna Dragon Squad gathers the remnants of the Kahna army and sets out to take back the Princess and free the world from the evil grip of the Granbelos Empire.

 

A Party Celebrates a Win Much like Shining Force the player moves his team across a map in order to accomplish their goal. In Bahamut Lagoon, instead of moving all units as individuals, they are made up of teams of four. Their mobility is defined by the combination of classes and levels, and each party has control of one dragon. The Dragons are all AI, but can be given general orders. Unfortunately, the AI for the dragons is rather lacking in several aspects. Although the general commands of Go! Come and Wait are useful, the Dragons often do things you don’t want them to. They will waste their MP on enemies that are near death, or they will attack enemies in other places of the map where they will be completely surrounded. The enemy AI seems to be much smarter, and therefore I find if a fault of the developer that the Dragons can become annoying.

 

A diet fit for a Dragon Feeding and raising your dragons is another big part of the gameplay. You need to feed your dragon with items and weaponry in order to boost their stats. If you have a Japanese manual, it should not be too hard to learn this (if you can read Japanese that is ^_^). However, without any english documentation you might get annoyed with the the lack of explanation. Take my word for it, you can screw up your dragon with just one meal, and if you are unlucky, then you will keep the change for the duration of the game. This is probably one of the worst explained features of the game, and with the lack on in-game information, especially for the english version, you can find yourself cussing at your screen for screwing up.

 

The party gathers on a bland mission map Squaresoft apparently used the same graphic engine that they used for Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy III. It does however, lack in creative use of colours and battle backgrounds. Most of the backgrounds are very dull and will not surprise you. The character animation is alright, but it would have been nice if they had included character portraits. Like with Ogre Battle, the lack of individuality among characters is one of the things that will keep you from having a bond with the characters. The characters themselves are pretty bland and predictable. They seem to have come from the standard Squaresoft tub-o-characters and none of them are very interesting or funny. Definately a point that needed more work.

 

Most Squaresoft fans are used to awesome music to accompany their RPGs, Bahamut Lagoon however seems to trail behind in that category as well. You hear the same tunes over and over again, with little variation and originality. There are no really good scenes with good scores, and because 90% of this game is focused on battle, you will easily get annoyed with the music. The sound effects are alright for their genre, but possess no really good surprises either.

 

Simple menus speed up battles The gameplay is pretty smooth, and battles can go pretty fast this way. There is a minimum amount of windows and menus that you need to use which speeds up the combat and leaves little lag time. The uninteresting story and the aggrivating AI really bring the gameplay down, and I for one got bored of the game pretty quickly. Even if Squaresoft did decided to release it in America, it probably wouldn’t have generated that much sales, since there are far better games out there, a lot of which are made by Squaresoft!

 

In conclusion, Bahamut Lagoon offers the player very little new features in the world of RPGs. It is a good mix between Ogre Battle and Shining Force, but it lacks in a lot of important areas and that keeps it from being a real classic.

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