A look back at: Lagoon

 

Lagoon for the SNES, mind you. Not related to Bahamut Lagoon, considering it's made by Kemco, who I'm really not familiar with much of their work at all. But it is a port for the original game that was on a long-forgotten console of sorts, excuse me, computer.

And if you like Ys. If you like Soul Blazer, well, this one could be up your alley, but it just does not seem to hit the right stride. No contact damage from your end, you do swing a sword, but damn if that isn't the smallest sword range ever. It's extremely small, you'll only know if you hit if you hear a *DING* and even then you might also get the white flash indicating damage alongside the enemy. Sometimes the enemy just gets pushed back instead. If it weren't for regenerating health and magic when standing still, no matter how slow it would be, then I wouldn't be liking this game at all. The music is a true standout, the plot is cookie-cutter in a number of ways, but gameplay matters more than most.

Speaking of magic, once I got a hole of it, it ends up becoming more of a primary means of attack. It's great until you run into the enemies who are immune to magic, where you then are forced to use the super-short-ranged sword again. You at least get several staves and crystals to experiment with magic, and I found myself using the basic staff for single-target magic the most. The higher level magic uses up a lot for screen-clearing magic but it is totally useless for me. I did level grind a lot, and this factors into strength and defense and made my sword overpowered, so the game ended up being easy, at least until the boss rush at the very end of the game. Yeah, there's one of those, you have four bosses at the end, two of which have alternate forms so essentially that means six. And oddly enough bum-rushing some of the bosses at a high level actually does work, though not with all of them.

Well, at least I finished it in a week, or actually about four days to be honest. I took two days off because I was sick. Anyways, summer break is on me so the next game will hopefully get through soon enough.

A look back at: Moon: Remix RPG Adventure

Thank you Toby Fox.

Okay, he's not the guy who made this, but whatever, a lot of his inspirations for Undertale basically came from this Japan-only release. He saw the stuff about this, an unnamed boy falling into a strange new world (though this one is the video game he was playing), the coming into contact with the strange and idiosyncratic  characters, and saving the monsters, the strange and cliche damage numbers during the beginning and ending. It seems like Undertale took it all and then some. Of course, other games Toby has experienced also helped in his craftsmanship, namely one song from Live-A-Live is the inspiration behind Megalovania.

So this is ultimately a pacifist RPG. You don't kill anything as the invisible boy at all. The hero does, and you get to experience the hero at first, but then you as the bystander boy end up catching their souls, sending them to the Moon for safety, and all sorts of things. The game essentially parodies all the conventions that fantasy RPGs have. Hero on a quest by a king and minister? Yeah, that's here, and the minister deemed him a "chosen one" and looks eerie enough to have sinister intentions. A "rabid dog" that attacks the hero? Turns out it's your Gramby's dog. And thankfully doesn't die from this. Legendary armor? It's hilariously some girl's bikini that the hero steals for some reason. The Perogon monster? An actual American family's pet which you don a suit and SET YOURSELF ON FIRE to trick the hero and save. The airship? A rocket you actually craft with the weird doctor Stein Hager. There's a weird oracle, a weird fisherman, weird Kukunte tribes, everything is weird but still manages to be interesting. Oh and the Penultimizer opponent that the hero fights near the end is really just all the monsters who die to protect the queen Aphrodite, who's you're guide fused with a dragon.

Weird, but can be frustrating early on. It's really bad that I've been working my ass off so much that I have only time on weekends and late nights to pick up this game again, luckily with summer on the horizon I'm looking at a decent enough break period to play more RPGs. But the frustration comes with not being able to do much action early on due to your action limit being small. The game actually gets easier the more you play it, you get more maximum action limits to avoid dying of fatigue or so, and doing things right also increases the love level. That's right, a game about making lots of love so you don't die. That's what this game is!