Bahamut Lagoon Review

What if Final Fantasy Tactics wasn’t, but instead was all about dragons and weird interpersonal relationships and an airship made out of rocks?

Well it would be this. Because this was, originally, going to be Final Fantasy Tactics for us godless heathens in the west. But for reasons only known to those who know them, that didn’t happen. Instead Bahamut Lagoon sat on a “To Do” shelf of the translation team and never was looked at again. That is, of course, till a plucky band of linguistic enthusiasts with a love of gaming snagged a copy off the internet somewhere and translated it for us.

Nice of them, right?

This Emperor guy, Sauzer, is all about taking over the world and he wants to use the power of the holy dragons to do it. So our little resistance fighter glee club has to assemble a rag tag band of misfits and go and deal with this jerk with the slick backed hair. As we go from stage to stage, saving a princess and liberating towns, recruiting new units, dragons, etc (like Ogre Battle), we learn more of the story. And that story takes us to new places and has us engage in new encounters with every more dangerous enemies with their own goals in mind.

Byuu, our avatar in this game, is leader of the dragon corps and decided to tag along and help out. There’s a princess that needs saved and she can talk to dragons. Kind of.

The biggest flaw I found when playing with this game is the translation seems a little, I dunno, sloppy, so it’s hard to really get a good grasp on the motivations of every character. There’s also some weird kind of dating sim built into the game too based on your choices and interactions. Think Final Fantasy 7.

Bahamut Lagoon, as I said before, was going to be Final Fantasy Tactics. So it’s a tactical RPG. I, personally, am a little at a loss of how to best describe it. It doesn’t play like Ogre Battle, but it kind of does. It doesn’t play like a Fire Emblem game, but it kind of does. And it doesn’t play like a Final Fantasy game, but it kind of does. Allow me to try to explain.

Battles take places on battlefields. They can be large sprawling fields, inside buildings, on the airship itself. There are hazards to avoid and terrain to take into consideration. You take some time before each battle to organize your troops and assign them a helpful dragon companion. Troops fight in parties, like Ogre Battle, but the parties are built like Final Fantasy parties but have units like Ogre Battle. Knights, priests, wizards, summoners, valkyries, ninja, weird little dancing things… these aren’t all their official names but those are the rolls these people play. People, in this game, aren’t just throw away pawns like in Ogre Battle, each one has a unique look, name, and personality – like Final Fantasy (but not Tactics).

You build your units however you prefer, one of all Knights or all Wizards, or you break them up and make more traditional parties with a little of everything. You assign a dragon to each party and the dragon imparts some of it’s power to the unit it’s assigned to. A fire dragon ups the fire powers of said unit, same with ice or healing or physical or whatever. Dragons have affinity with characters and keeping them together makes them work together better. This is important because you control your units but you don’t control the dragons. You give the dragons commands but they’re vague. Things like hang back with us, or go out and kick butt, or, do whatever. That kind of thing.

And speaking of battles. Battles take place like this. Big map, you deploy your units, they go out and do what you direct them to do. This does NOT work like Ogre Battle, it’s more Fire Emblem. Along the way you’ll encounter enemy units and a battle starts (this time like Ogre Battle), but unlike Ogre Battle where both sides are totally computer controlled, you can control your individual characters in the unit. So you Ogre Battle your way into a Fire Emblem situation to get into a Final Fantasy battle. Make sense? No? Good.

You have to feed these dragons or they start to get uppity. And by uppity I mean they don’t grow in power and that makes the game difficult later on. So in between each battle when you have your plot development and party building you also get to play everyone’s favorite game “Dragon Keeper Simulator 3”. Dragons will eat anything. Potions, swords, armor, rocks, trees, small furry animals, books, whatever you throw at them they’ll eat. And knowing what and when and how to feed these dragons is pretty key to their development. If you have a fire dragon and feed him ice related stuff, he’s not going to fire very good anymore. But if you only stick to fire with the wyrm in question, he might start to lag behind in other areas.

There’s also the added bonus of your dragons changing form as you feed them. This will come back up in the graphics section. Which just so happens to be now…

Graphically the game also exists in a weird spot on the Venn Diagram. It is clearly square soft. It is clearly Final Fantasy influenced. But it’s very much more in that Amano style – the guy that did all the artwork for the games forever and ever ago. Human characters have strange proportions. Bestial enemies seem more human than humans in some situations. Dragon forms can, at times, be downright grotesque. There’s another SquareSoft game we never got officially over here called Treasure Of The Rudras, it looks more “normal” than this game.

The graphics are great, but confusing. Backgrounds are almost a pixely mess, sprites are excessively detailed and animated in some situations, but most of the biggest and baddest of the baddies are just backgrounds with hot spots to target. Final Fantasy 6 did this with the final boss fight, but this does it with more of a “Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark” vibe.

The music, honestly, I don’t remember any of. I had to go back and listen to some of it and it’s good. Noriko Matsueda is our composer and she worked on Front Mission and Final Fantasy X-2. She also helped out with Chrono Trigger. So she’s got chops. The music is big and bold when it needs to be, small and quiet when it needs to be. It’s a perfect fit for the game. But I don’t know if any of the music from the game will be in my greatest hits playlist. Know what I mean?

It’s a good game all in all. Tons of stuff to do, an interesting combat system mixed with the dragon raising thing. Strange at time graphics and solid music. The plot, and this is not the writers fault, just gets lost in translation for me a little bit. I’d like to revisit this game someday. Maybe I will.