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.