This is a game I think I’ve seen in person a time or two, but the cover and title were just so unimpressive that I never really paid it any mind. I didn’t realize it was a 2D-Zelda type game until a friend of mine mentioned it offhand to me when I was talking about how I was playing through Brain Lord a few days ago x3. Very much not wanting to let a game in one of my favorite genres pass me by so easily, I got right to playing it once I was done with Brain Lord. It took me about 8~10 hours (I didn’t keep super good track) to play through the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware only abusing save states very rarely (which I will specify more on later).
Lagoon is the story of a teenage boy named Nasir (or “Nassel”, if his transliterated name in Japanese is anything to go by). Sat down and instructed by his father figure at the start of the game, he’s told of the kingdom of Lakelyland and how a curse at Lagoon Castle is causing all of the water in the land to turn foul. If that weren’t bad enough, it’s also causing monsters to spawn all over the kingdom! So begins the story of Nasir, Lakelyland’s Hero of Light. It’s all around an okay story. The pacing is honestly pretty decent, and there aren’t too many characters to get lost in either, so I had a good amount of fun with it. It’s nothing amazing or anything, as it’s a pretty stereotypical fantasy adventure story for the time, but for 1991 on the SFC, it’s nonetheless a pretty good showing for an action/adventure game.
While the story was more or less what I expected (if not a little above my very meager expectations), the gameplay was immediately surprising. It’s a top-down 2D action/adventure game, sure, but this is no Zelda-clone. It’s a heckin’ Ys-clone! xD. The original Sharp X68000 version of this game had bump combat, but they’ve switched to giving you a physical sword in this one, and it’s VERY short. You go around towns and a handful of dungeons along your quite linear quest to save Lakelyland, but the combat is never particularly great. That said, enemies tend to be pretty simple to deal with between your sword and your magic, and just learning their movement patterns makes things not too difficult to deal with eventually.
This is down to three factors. Factor 1 is that you actually regenerate health and mana by just standing still (as long as you’re not in a boss arena). This means that, as long as you can beat an enemy, you don’t really need to worry about running short on resources, since just standing still for a little while will get you right back up to perfect readiness. Sure, it’s annoying in the late-game to stand still for like a minute to just fight one or two more enemies, but at least you won’t die. Factor 2 is that this game actually has save-anywhere functionality. As long as you’re not in a boss arena, you can save anywhere, and you’ll appear right back there upon death, so even getting sniped by an unexpectedly strong enemy or boss doesn’t need to be much of a set back as long as you’re saving frequently.
Factor 3 is that, much like Ys, you have levels that you gain from fighting stuff, and there’s little that just grinding a bit won’t eventually solve. However, unlike Ys, the maximum level is something way higher than you’ll need to fight almost anything in the game quite comfortably. Sure, your sword is so uselessly short that you’ll take hits a lot, but between hunting down better swords/armor and grinding up a few more levels, there’s usually just a bit of grinding between you and being able to tank that boss well enough to finally beat it.
The only real exception to this is the final boss, who is a pretty unforgiving gauntlet of hard-ish fights with the penultimate one being NUTS hard, and you basically just gotta get lucky to kill that guy. You actually can’t use magic in boss fights, and instead you have magic rings you can equip that buff your stats in exchange for draining MP constantly, but even then, that final boss really is a step too far. Sure, the boss fights are already not very good, as there’s not a ton of strategy beyond having the stats to tank and spank your way to victory with your puny sword (that’s far too difficult to hit things with when facing up or down), but I was having a good amount of generally frustration-free fun with the game until the final boss came and ruined things. He was what I finally had to start using save states for outside of a faster alternative to the save-anywhere system, and godspeed to anyone brave enough to take that jerk on using original hardware. Overall, the mechanics of the game will probably wow few and frustrate far more, but as a big fan of the genre, I thought it made for a good enough time that I was excited to go back to playing more Lagoon after getting home from work the past few days, and I think that speaks for itself in regards to how engaging the game manages to be despite its relatively poor mechanical polishing.
Aesthetically, the game is pretty good for the time even if it’s still very heavily drawing from Ys for its mechanical inspirations. The graphics are simple and very Ys, but they have a simple charm to them that I found quite fun. While the monsters (and especially bosses) are big, fairly detailed sprites, the adorable simplicity of the human sprites made me smile and giggle a lot, and that goes double for Nasir’s friend Soa and his 80’s hair metal haircut XD. The music is all around pretty damn good though! There were quite a lot of times where a field theme or boss theme had me bopping my head along to how good it was, and the music is honestly the highlight of the game in terms of how little there is to criticize.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While this is apparently a bit of a meme-bad game in some circles (given that several of my partners began to laugh when they heard I was going to be playing it x3), I think it’s nowhere near that bad. It’s something that only big fans of 2D Zelda-style or Ys-type games should really consider looking at, but I had more than enough fun with it that I can recommend it at least a little even if I understand that it’s actually a relatively weak game at the end of the day.
Lagoon is the story of a teenage boy named Nasir (or “Nassel”, if his transliterated name in Japanese is anything to go by). Sat down and instructed by his father figure at the start of the game, he’s told of the kingdom of Lakelyland and how a curse at Lagoon Castle is causing all of the water in the land to turn foul. If that weren’t bad enough, it’s also causing monsters to spawn all over the kingdom! So begins the story of Nasir, Lakelyland’s Hero of Light. It’s all around an okay story. The pacing is honestly pretty decent, and there aren’t too many characters to get lost in either, so I had a good amount of fun with it. It’s nothing amazing or anything, as it’s a pretty stereotypical fantasy adventure story for the time, but for 1991 on the SFC, it’s nonetheless a pretty good showing for an action/adventure game.
While the story was more or less what I expected (if not a little above my very meager expectations), the gameplay was immediately surprising. It’s a top-down 2D action/adventure game, sure, but this is no Zelda-clone. It’s a heckin’ Ys-clone! xD. The original Sharp X68000 version of this game had bump combat, but they’ve switched to giving you a physical sword in this one, and it’s VERY short. You go around towns and a handful of dungeons along your quite linear quest to save Lakelyland, but the combat is never particularly great. That said, enemies tend to be pretty simple to deal with between your sword and your magic, and just learning their movement patterns makes things not too difficult to deal with eventually.
This is down to three factors. Factor 1 is that you actually regenerate health and mana by just standing still (as long as you’re not in a boss arena). This means that, as long as you can beat an enemy, you don’t really need to worry about running short on resources, since just standing still for a little while will get you right back up to perfect readiness. Sure, it’s annoying in the late-game to stand still for like a minute to just fight one or two more enemies, but at least you won’t die. Factor 2 is that this game actually has save-anywhere functionality. As long as you’re not in a boss arena, you can save anywhere, and you’ll appear right back there upon death, so even getting sniped by an unexpectedly strong enemy or boss doesn’t need to be much of a set back as long as you’re saving frequently.
Factor 3 is that, much like Ys, you have levels that you gain from fighting stuff, and there’s little that just grinding a bit won’t eventually solve. However, unlike Ys, the maximum level is something way higher than you’ll need to fight almost anything in the game quite comfortably. Sure, your sword is so uselessly short that you’ll take hits a lot, but between hunting down better swords/armor and grinding up a few more levels, there’s usually just a bit of grinding between you and being able to tank that boss well enough to finally beat it.
The only real exception to this is the final boss, who is a pretty unforgiving gauntlet of hard-ish fights with the penultimate one being NUTS hard, and you basically just gotta get lucky to kill that guy. You actually can’t use magic in boss fights, and instead you have magic rings you can equip that buff your stats in exchange for draining MP constantly, but even then, that final boss really is a step too far. Sure, the boss fights are already not very good, as there’s not a ton of strategy beyond having the stats to tank and spank your way to victory with your puny sword (that’s far too difficult to hit things with when facing up or down), but I was having a good amount of generally frustration-free fun with the game until the final boss came and ruined things. He was what I finally had to start using save states for outside of a faster alternative to the save-anywhere system, and godspeed to anyone brave enough to take that jerk on using original hardware. Overall, the mechanics of the game will probably wow few and frustrate far more, but as a big fan of the genre, I thought it made for a good enough time that I was excited to go back to playing more Lagoon after getting home from work the past few days, and I think that speaks for itself in regards to how engaging the game manages to be despite its relatively poor mechanical polishing.
Aesthetically, the game is pretty good for the time even if it’s still very heavily drawing from Ys for its mechanical inspirations. The graphics are simple and very Ys, but they have a simple charm to them that I found quite fun. While the monsters (and especially bosses) are big, fairly detailed sprites, the adorable simplicity of the human sprites made me smile and giggle a lot, and that goes double for Nasir’s friend Soa and his 80’s hair metal haircut XD. The music is all around pretty damn good though! There were quite a lot of times where a field theme or boss theme had me bopping my head along to how good it was, and the music is honestly the highlight of the game in terms of how little there is to criticize.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While this is apparently a bit of a meme-bad game in some circles (given that several of my partners began to laugh when they heard I was going to be playing it x3), I think it’s nowhere near that bad. It’s something that only big fans of 2D Zelda-style or Ys-type games should really consider looking at, but I had more than enough fun with it that I can recommend it at least a little even if I understand that it’s actually a relatively weak game at the end of the day.