Bahamut Lagoon was released towards the end of the Super Nintendo's active lifespan in 1996. A few months later, the world would usher in the next generation of consoles. The Playstation would emerge as Square's preferred new toy to expand their games, leaving the Nintendo 64 behind. I wondered if this could have been a bit of a swan song for the system, but there were five other games Square released for the SNES, so probably not. Regardless, it was never released on American soil, and the English translation was done by a team of fan creators. I'm not one of those people who claim to know everything about localization, so I'll leave out any tiny qualms I have about the script. Both teams did something that I found to be amazing. I didn't want to stop playing when I ran of time I set aside to play games ended. It's one of the reasons why I wrote two posts on Christmas. There are so many things that I wanted to do, so let's talk about them! After I give my criticism, of course.
What sucks about Bahamut Lagoon?
Why is Byuu the main character? I'm not against silent protagonists, but Byuu doesn't seem to be a Link or a Dragon Quest MC in terms of relevance. It just feels like he's just there. He has connections to other people, being a loyal knight to Kahne and early love interest of Yoyo, but what would happen if he weren't there? Matelite would be leading the forces of Kahne. I'm unsure who the dragon would be following, but Rush feeds them in one chapter, so I assume he'd be the new Dragon Squad Captain? They seemed to follow him well enough. Or maybe Byuu would still be there, just not in the spotlight? And worse still, he gets more irrelevant as the game progresses. Yoyo dumps him for Palpaleos, and Byuu drops off the face of the world. Sure, he's given acting captain duties by a guy who's just fine, but I think it's shoehorned in. Unlike Chrono, he doesn't even get the girl at the end. And his competition died after the final boss, too, so no one gets a happy ending! Poor Byuu. And what happened to Salamundo at the end? Hell, what happened to any of our dragons?
I'm not fond of the music. The OST was composed by Noriko Matsueda. She wrote for the Front Mission games and bits and bobs for other Square titles before retiring in 2004. It's far from bad, but I don't think it's very memorable. The problem could be that there are so few tracks, and we get five or six of them drilled into us through the game. Most of those are the battle songs, which sound too imperial to my ears. I want my chill and mellow tracks, which are rare in BL. Every city has its own piece on the OST, but we never revisit them like we could in conventional RPGs. They're listened to once and then lost to time. I put on a Youtube video of the entire one hour OST, and I liked the location songs. They deserved more attention. This is a major personal qualm, and I hope it doesn't dissuade you from playing the game. An in game jukebox to hear old songs on the ship would have been great.
So there is a large cast of characters in the game. That's really cool, but what's really lame is how bland most of them are. We've got thirty two characters on the ship, but only five of them get any plot relevance: Byuu, Matelite, Sendak, Palpaleos, and Yoyo. This is worse than Chrono Cross. There are a few that have screen time: Taicho, Zora, Truce, Rush, and Bikkebakke, but they're not major parts. A smaller few get one scene: Danfan, Lukia, Jeanne, Melodia, and Mist (an optional character). Meanwhile, the remaining seventeen are just kinda there to be bodies. Some of them are for humor between missions onboard the airship, but a few do even less. The lance-lance-lacers show up, grow apart, and then come together for reasons never stated. Barclay and Anastacia seem to be having a fun love affair despite never talking on screen. Why did my assassins never try to kill Matelite? I get it, it's a SNES game, and games like this need wide casts, but why not try to give them depth? But, I will say, when the devs gave people a reason to be here, they hit it out of the park with them. Matelite is great!
I didn't understand Sauzer. Who he was, his motives, his goal? Was he evil? He killed the King of Kahne, but the game and our characters seemed pretty quick to forgive that. Palpaleos joined the team with no real bite back despite, at the start of the game, clearly being evil. But we, the player, get an idea that he's kinda not. Our characters in the Resistance, though, don't see these scenes. Not that I think they should matter because this guy plunged the planet into war. How many people died, and lives did he upend? He's not a good guy, so why did the plot try to make him out to be? Especially since they didn't give any hard evidence contrary. Why did he want to bring about the new era? Was it for personal gain? And Palpal killed your dad, Yoyo. Stop banging him...
Many of the bosses, or at least those working for the Empire, had to be killed multiple times. We beat them on the battlefield, but they somehow always got away. How many times did we kill Lestat, Irvine, or Goldulf? I don't know anything about the woman general, but at least she knew to die after our first battle in Kahne. It's unrewarding, lazy storytelling, and annoying. Giving us a wall of nameless generals would have been better; that's how low the bar could have been.
Dragon AI can be sketchy at best. I found myself yelling at them, asking why they attacked that guy nowhere near where the actual fighting is happening far too often. And then the opposite happened, where, even on "Go," they'd just nest next to their master. I get not wanting them to be playable, and this is the SNES, which doesn't really have modern computing power to run reliable AI, but it was frustrating. Take you're free EXP, guys. Maybe I should have experimented with the controls more?
Byuu dying shouldn't be an instant game over. This mechanic is widely agreed to be garbage in the modern era, and I'm not letting old timers get away with it. Everyone will be revived after the battle, and there is no permadeath in Bahamut Lagoon, so why do we get a game over when our MC dies? No. Just, no.
So, before I get on with what I think Bahamut Lagoon did great, I'd like to posit a small theory. The story of BL was always secondary. There are so many mechanics in this game that are well throughout, in depth, and fun, that I think it's fine that the story is merely yeoman.
With that in mind, here's why I still found the game to be an absolute must play:
The dragons are addicting. I love feeding them and seeing them, literally, grow. I wanted to keep feeding them any new equipment I found to see how it changed their stats. Maybe it would alter their appearance, as well. Some of the forms are a bit naff, but the cool ones are hella rad. Seeing them learn new attacks and blasting away entire armies was exciting. I left off in the middle of so many chapters because I wanted to feed my friends all the new spoils from the last battle. It can get a lot tedious for some of the less noticeable and hard to raise stats, but I spent millions of gold on mushrooms for a reason, and I have no regrets. It's weird to say this, but once I got Salamondo to the rank of immortal, I kinda lost interest in the game. Not enough to quit, obviously, but I just wanted to feed them more. I hope this didn't awaken anything in me? This is definitely the main point of Bahamut's Lagoon. Not the story. It is this strange mechanic from which the rest of the game is built around.
Along the lines, the way dragons' strength is how our humans learn new moves ties it all together. It's not just the dragons that learn and grow when we feed them, but we do, too. When they gain new magic or techniques, we do too. It's a two-for-one power move, and you hold all the power. Admittedly, when you rush to max stats, you kinda reach the ceiling pretty fast. Gear only helps to make these spells stronger so much, so there's a pretty heavy wall when you near the end.
Which might not actually be that bad. Despite being godlike early on, there's the occasional mini boss around to test you. Alchemic, the dragon, shows up twice. Both times, he's terrifying. Sure, you can let Salamundo do all the work, but that's slow and boring. You want to get in there, but that might be the end of you. You really have to pick and choose when/if you go in. It feels like a war.
The formations screen leaves for a lot of experimentation. Is it possible for six mixed groups to wander the battlefield? It gives you four parties that can heal, rather than one and a mediocre second. Four groups with a mage can take down a wall or freeze a lake faster than one. Should I have split up my cross knights? Yoyo never fought beside her love interests once... Two summoners? C'mon! Maybe it was something I should have done earlier in the game against various monsters. If you're against something weak to fire, I could have put three wizards with Salamundo to make their flame gaze spell stronger. Ditto with Fafnir and ice magic. Not that there's a lot of reason to do this since elemental weaknesses are few and far between. Something to think about, at least. I wonder if assassin techniques are good? Man, can you imagine the mini devil squad fully healing a boss late in the game? Wouldn't that be a thing worth gambling for...
And all of this combines into the battle system. The entire game is a combination of Pokemon, Fire Emblem, and Final Fantasy that works so well and smoothly that you can't help but love it. The new spells that I talked about already, the dragon stats, the up close and personal turn base like portions, the strategy sized battle maps with terrain and obstacles all make the game vibrant and interesting. For reasons I hope to never understand, I loved walking into a side quest and blowing up the entire map. And you can do that for nearly every mission. Sap a wall, freeze a lake, burn a forest: the world is my plaything! We're not on empty fields on grass, but we're in cities with weather. The maps are varied and attractive, and I wonder if there's a secret on a random square somewhere. Usually. Caves are, well, caves, and Rainbow Road is a questionable place for a final boss, though. I wish these could have been utilized more. For example, what could have happened if we destroyed the Temple of Memories in Kahne with thunder gale? I had plans to play a Fire Emblem game early next year, and I will be harshly judging it against this random Square RPG no one's ever heard of.
Bahamut Lagoon is a combination of several RPG genres melded into one. Some parts don't fit right, but they could be salvageable. But what hits slaps hard, and they hold up twenty five years later. I held off on replaying this game because I didn't want to deal with the tedium of dragon feeding. Instead, it became my entire reason to keep playing. The combat kept me going even when I had maxed out my team, and the story works well enough to give it teeth. There are a lot of options in the dialogue that might make the game feel fresh on a second playthrough. Byuu's the loudest silent protag ever. A part of me wants to see if the Hard Dungeon is as hard as RPGClassics said it is, but do I want to play on New Game +? I mean, yeah... Fun is fun, and I might figure out who Sauzer really is. There are also these weird dragon forms I never bothered with...
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