Chapter 9

The initial part of this map was difficult. You immediately get rushed by two different sets of units. The first one wasn’t so bad but Hannibal’s armor group was tricky — I had a hard time surviving the enemy phases. Eventually I had everyone arranged right. What makes it difficult is that if you want to recruit Hannibal, you can’t defeat him, and you have to get Seris down to the second castle. Hannibal will begin to retreat back to the castle when most of his troops are beaten, and you can just block the castle entrance and he’ll sit there waiting.

I also sent Fee out to the left to deal with the bandits; it wasn’t working at first but she eventually got a critical hit that helped out a lot. Sety continues to be a monster.

In the next part I got trolled by this lady thief that steals your gold — I lost 65,000 gold and couldn’t even save the town in the end. Other than that this stage isn’t too bad. There’s a triple group of dragon riders that come out at the end. I put Lester on the home castle to guard it but didn’t bother with the others; I wasn’t really concerned about my rank so I let castles get destroyed if it was too annoying to save them.

Chapter 10

The last two stages have a lot of units with sleep staffs. This is annoying because I put the Rest staff on Julia, not knowing that she would leave until the end of the game — there’s only one Rest staff in the entire game. I really do not like the item management system in this game. So what this meant is that often I had to rely on Selis, Fee, and Aress who were reasonably good at dodging the sleep attacks or resisting them. If I did take in my whole force I just had to accept that 5-7 of them would get put to sleep and hope I could finish the enemies before that.

First there’s a huge group of mages. I tried a couple of strategies to deal with them but the right one ended up being just charging them and taking out as many as I could in one round.

Next up a group of horsemen arrive. Fee is taking her usual role of speeding ahead to stop the bandits from destroying towns.

The next difficult part in the stage is when Ishtar and Julius are both near the castle.

Julius is very difficult to defeat and both Julius and Ishtar can kill almost anyone. They will both leave when they either kill one of your units, or you kill either of them. So one easy way to pass this section would just be to sacrifice a minor unit that’s not very useful (I don’t have the Valkyrie staff since I didn’t pair Claude with anyone in gen 1).

I was not successful at all in luring them in; what I eventually did was have Altena kill Ishtar; she started out of the range but then I used Leen dancer ability to give her another move. One they were gone the castle fell easily.

The final part of the stage is not hard. This section has an easy choke point.

Move Selis out here to get the Tyrfing.

Then beat Emperor Alvis, and the stage is done. I beat him with Altena — I was mainly using her because the discord people were badmouthing her so much that I wanted to prove her usefulness.

Chapter 11

The beginning section has annoying mages with sleep staffs so you have to send out some units to beat them. Then there’s a wall of annoyance:

Lots of sleep staff mages, and too many enemies to just charge in with Selis. Basically what I did was take as many units as I could at the bottom of the enemy formation, accept that I would get a lot of sleeping units, and move Selis up to take the castle as quickly as possible.

The next part of the game is not difficult; they create a “pincer attack” to supposedly trap you but the units move so slowly that it doesn’t matter — you can just take the top castle and ignore the “pincer”.

The next part is one of the hardest in the game and probably the true “final boss”.

Those five mages have sleep staffs. The pegasus knights are very hard to hit, and hit very hard in return with Earth Swords that steal your HP. Ishtar is there, as are a bunch of strong units. I lost many times — one time I managed to do it but the castle got destroyed. Eventually I went back to a save before I conquered the castle. First I took out all the sleep staff mages with Fee. I then moved everyone up and was still having problems. But eventually I got the right formation. For some reason the pegasus sisters decided to all attack Shanan, who was easily able to dodge their attacks and take them out with Balmung. From there the rest of the enemies were manageable, just being careful of Ishtar’s range.

At this point the game is more or less over. The last two castles are an interesting setup but I guess they match the way the other games’ final bosses have worked. Julius sits in the castle surrounded by 12 powerful units representing every type of weapon. It is apparently possible to take them all on with your main force but it’s very difficult and the dialogue clearly indicates that’s not what you’re supposed to do.

Instead, you need to free Julia from her mind control by going up to the NE castle. I took only Selis, Aless, and Fee. Julia will helpfully follow them, and if you take the roundabout path to the north you can avoid the 12 units from moving. The mages can be taken out pretty easily, then Selis talks to Julia and Julia visits the castle to receive the Naga magic.

With Naga, Julia can take out the 12 powerful units plus Julius on her own. I sent Selis with her for the leadership bonus and to help pick off some of the units. As I said, this “special weapon to kill the final boss” has been in all four games to now.

After the credits you get a ranking — mine was pretty low because I let a lot of castles get destroyed, and lost a fair number of units (it saves the stats even if you reset).

Overall I had fun with FE4 — I’m not sure that the larger maps had the same quality of design as the previous games, and the numerous palette-swapped characters felt more generic than some of the previous titles. But the story was entertaining, and the gameplay in general was fun. As I said before, I really did not like the way gold and items were handled in the game despite fans of the series praising it.

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This is the last we’ll see of Fire Emblem for a while. The next game was released in September 1999, one of the last games for the Super Famicom. I always find this amazing because at this point the PS2 was six months away and the Nintendo 64 had passed its peak release schedule. But the last game for the SFC came out after the PS2’s release!

Next up is Energy Breaker, the last of the SFC SRPGs (aside from Fire Emblem 5).

Stage 6

You start out with a whole new set of people here, and slowly build up your party again. Given the length of this game, it’s almost like two games in one. Lakche and Skasaha are twins, children of Arya and Aeden. I found that Lakche was a great character but Skasaha not so good, even though they should be similar. I think it may simply be the equipment; Lakche starts with the Hero Sword, which is a big help. You can put siblings together and they may get a critical hit bonus.

The first task is to choose between Johan and Johalva, or kill them both. It seems like the best one to take is Johalva; if you conquer the south castle, Julia gets a better attack magic than if you conquer the left one. But neither character is all that good (because early FE hates axes). This was a little tough to do with both armies rushing me, but eventually I was able to get Lakche in there to talk to Johalva. I did have to restart though — the first time I went too slow. Johalva chased Arthur into the mountains and got killed by counterattacks.

The rest of the stage is not too bad.

Stage 7

This stage is quite complex. You start with three separate groups of characters — Leif, Finn, and Nanna at the bottom, Patty and Shannan at the left, and the main group in the NE.

The first group is separated from the rest of the party until near the end of the stage. They start out having to deal with some troops attacking their castle, and another force will come out later. You can abandon the castle (without it being destroyed) and head away. Despite my unpromoted Finn I kept everyone at the castle except Nanna, who went out to deal with the town bandits. This took some coaxing (Finn kept dying) but it worked in the end.

Patty can talk to Shannan and give him a legendary weapon, which makes it fairly easy to keep that team alive provided Patty doesn’t make a wrong move. I moved the main army towards this area, took out all the enemies, and conquered the castle.

Now we have to head south, and recruit Aless. He has a legendary weapon so you have to be careful, but once he’s recruited he’s a great unit. Tinny can also be recruited fairly easily. Now we have to head back up to take over the castle we skipped and rescue Leen (our gen 2 dancer)

The final area’s not too bad except for the boss — the bosses on the whole get much more difficult from this point out. It was helpful to use all of the evade up effects stacking on each other. Next stage we get Folsety again, which is a good boss killer.

Stage 8 

The beginning of this stage has a few units go up to the castle at the top. I found it impossible to actually defend that castle with the annoying spear knights, and so I just abandoned it and took everyone south. It wasn’t that hard to deal with them all near the starting castle before I moved forward.

Recruiting Faval with Patty isn’t too difficult (I may have danced to get her into range).

Sety has Folsety so there’s not too much difficulty with him and these dragons, although a lot of them went around the castle to attack me instead. Bows > Dragons

I got trolled by a thief here that stole 65,000 of my gold and then I wasn’t even able to save the town. Oh well.

One side note — this game reuses enemy faces quite a bit.

He starts out on the first stage as Zane but he appears at least 5 more times. They even did this with some more significant figures, which is kind of strange.

Three stages left!

Stage 4

This is a long stage with a lot of annoying backtracking. A lot of the enemies are mages with long range Blizzard attacks, and there are a fair amount of bowmen and pegasus knights as well. First we head up NE all the way to the castle at the top. 

 After that one is conquered, the bottom part opens up, but a troop of pegasus knights also heads towards the castle at the top. So I kept about half my force there (including the bowmen) and sent everyone else down. Unfortunately I didn’t realize that a fair number of units cannot cross the mountains and so can’t make it to the next castle without first conquering it and then using the Warp Staff. Also, you really want Levin down there so he can visit the castle for the Folsety magic. I also had to deal with Pamela heading back for a second round of pegasi.

In the end it took a lot of resets but I managed to conquer and hold the bottom castle against the reinforcements, losing only Arden in the process. I revived him with the one use of the Valkyrie staff (30k repair!). At this point the rest of the stage is not difficult. 

At this point I had my love matchups: Arden/Aida, Levin/Fury, Azel/Tilty, Jamka/Aeden, Dew/Lachesis, and Alec/Sylvia.

Stage 5

This is the last stage of the first generation. As far as I can see the instruction manual says nothing about the generations, but it is on the back of the box, so I don’t think it would have been a surprise. But it is a sudden development that this stage ends when you still have 2 castles left, so I think that would have been a shock to people playing for the first time.

The first challenge is reaching Sigurd’s father so that Sigurd can get Tyrfing. You need to move up their fast so the enemies will not go for his dad, but you have to sent some units W as well. I had to restart at least once but finally I was able to open a path up.

Next it’s through the desert, which is annoying because everyone moves so slowly. I don’t know why SRPGs always think they have to have slow movement areas in every game. There are mages hiding out on bluffs, but the pegasus knight can take them on effectively. There’s also a large force of dragon knights; I hung back until they killed Cuan and Ethlyn and then came up to where I was, using my bows to take them down. Then it was a laborious walk through the desert to the next area, with the final boss of the generation.

Folsety took him down in one turn, and the rest of his troops evaporate.

Then boom, generation one is done. Overall this stage is fairly short because of the reduced length, and not too difficult since a lot of people have legendary weapons at this point. I managed to fix Tyrfing up to 25 uses or so and repair the other legendary weapons to full before the end of the stage.

Now we have 6 more chapters — I’m already on chapter 7 but I will save that for two more posts covering three stages each. This is a long game!

And we’re back to the major franchise of SRPGs, the one that started the whole genre and is still going strong today. The game is different in many ways from FE3, although some of the new concepts in introduced were used in later games.

The biggest change is that there are only 12 maps, but the maps are very large. Each map contains a series of smaller stages within it. By conquering one castle it typically opens up the way to the next one or causes new enemies to appear (from what I have seen so far, there are never any real choices about what to do next). 

Probably because of this, they didn’t feel that they could only allow players to save between maps. I would have expected them to allow a save after conquering a castle; instead they allow you to save at the beginning of each turn. This of course makes the game considerably easier than the previous ones. You don’t have to play as carefully because the risk of a bad move is much lower. They provide 4 save slots so you don’t need to worry about saving yourself in an unwinnable situation. I had a system where I kept the first save slot for the beginning of a chapter, and the second save slot for a safe turn after conquering a castle, just in case I screwed something up and needed to go back.

Here is a list of many of the other changes from FE3:

• The weapon triangle finally appears. In this game it only affects hit rates but the effect is rather large.
• Skills have been introduced. Each character has skills like Pursuit (allows a second attack) or Steal (take the enemy’s money). 
• Promotions now occur at level 20, and can be done in any castle without an item. The level stays the same so there is no longer any purpose to delaying promotion.
• Money is kept on a per character basis, and you can no longer trade items except with a character’s lover (otherwise they have to sell the item to a shop and then have someone else buy it). This is my biggest annoyance in the game — it’s not fun from a gameplay standpoint and it makes no sense whatsoever within the game world. Sigurd visits a town and receives a magic staff he can’t use as a reward. He refuses to give it to any of the clerics under his control and sells it to the castle instead.
• Weapons can be repaired freely at a castle (for a cost). The shop inventories are extremely limited.
• Attack and magic attack have been split. Rather than the “weapon skill” stat, there are now individual weapon skill stats for each type (they only change with promotion)
• Mounted units, after using their attack, can move away if they have remaining move points. The dismount option is gone (there are no indoor maps).
• There are some interface improvements, like being able to see the attack range of units, a nicer sortable unit screen, and other things like that.

Another big system in this game is the Love system. Halfway through the game the story switches to the descendants of the initial group (thus the game’s title). The children you get will depend on who you paired up in the first part of the game.

First off, let me say that I’m using my own romanizations for the names — it’s too much effort for me to check the romanizations of all the names against either the NA official ones or any fan translations.

Prologue Chapter

 As an introduction chapter, this is a small sized map (although still larger than previous FEs).

This is basically two parts. The first part is a race to save the towns, although you have plenty of turns since it takes 10 turns for a barbarian to destroy a town in this game. I kept the armor knight in the castle to defend it and sent everyone else out, making heavy use of the “attack and retreat” ability of the mounted knights. This also helps a lot with the bosses since you can rush the castle and then retreat, letting someone else go in.

The second part is a horde of barbarians that all come at you; it can be a bit hairy but in the end I got a few lucky dodges and succeeded. I made sure to to get the silver sword for Sigurd from the NPC unit that comes in. 

Chapter 1

The first full sized map. We start at the castle at the top right and there are three castles to capture — each castle is almost like a full stage of another FE.

I started out sending everyone down. The initial town is not hard to save. The difficulty at the bottom near the castle is Aira. You have to conquer the castle before she will join (at Sigurd’s request), but before that she’s a nasty fighter that can easily take down party members. I lost several times due to this and it took some effort to maneuver everyone around to not die. Meanwhile, I moved Dew and Aeden towards the party and sent one or two units over to help out with all the guys attacking them.

The second castle is not hard to take, but there is a town all the way to the left that is tough to save. I managed to do it on the last possible turn but you don’t get an item, just money (500 gold since everything else was destroyed). 

At this point I was worried because I had not left a defender in the initial castle, but the troops that come out at the top are dealt with by NPCs so it’s OK. This part you have to move very slowly through a forest — I never like these parts in SRPGs because you spend so much time just moving each person individually and then ending the turn. Sigurd picks up Dierdre in the forest and Alec gets a hero axe from a helpful fairy. 

The boss would be difficult except that Dierdre comes with a silence staff that completely neutralizes him. I made sure to have Azel kill him so that he could get the magic ring.

Chapter 2

Each chapter begins with fixing everyone’s weapons, and then seeing how far they get in the arena. I just have everyone fight until they die and then reload. 

I didn’t leave anyone back in the castle because now that I have a warp/return staff it’s easy to send someone back. The first big problem in this stage is the barbarians heading for the towns. They’re in an inaccessible place on the map — eventually some new units will come out to help, but you have to go incredibly quickly to save the first village. The prize is a discount ring; I saved all the villages except that one. 

Once the left castle was taken care of I headed north and met up with the two new units. The top castle wasn’t much of a problem. At this point the castle on the upper right activates and some pegasus knights begin to head for the base. I warped Midayle back there so he could shoot them, and also Levin (to recruit Fury). It takes them a while to get there but once they do it’s no problem. I eventually realized I had forgotten to actually visit the villages I saved, so I sent Fury to do that.

Meanwhile the next castle has a bunch of shooter units and horsemen that can come in and wreck the troops. I had trouble with Sigurd killing them too efficiently which caused him to get attacked so many times he died. I also had to be careful with some of the weaker characters like Diadre because the shooters could gang up on them. They can’t actually be attacked without Fery (except for one who is in range for a bow/magic shot).

Once the intermediate castle is conquered the shooters disappear, and it’s time for the final castle. A troop of horsemen led by Zane. I took out his entire troop and he began to run away. I’m glad I jokingly posted a screenshot to discord calling him a coward, because they informed me he was heading back to the castle to get reinforcements — indeed, if you let him get back to the castle he will appear the next turn with a full new set of units.

I could not stop him from reaching the castle, but I was able to get there quickly enough to sit on the castle entrance so he couldn’t come out, kill the rest of the guys, and finish the stage.

Chapter 3

My love pairings were starting to come together here. Basically each character gain some love points when they start next to each other. There are also some events that raise love points, and some people start with stronger love towards certain others. When both people’s love points reach a certain point, they are lovers and their child will appear in the next part of the game.

Sigurd and Diadre automatically become lovers, and Cuan and Ethlyn are lovers at the start of the game. Other people can be paired up freely. At the beginning of chapter 3 I had Jamka and Aeden in love with each other, Aira and Arden interested in each other, and Levin and Sylvia interested in each other. There were a large number of other one-sided feelings.

This stage has a lot of wandering around. First we go up the center lane to take over the castle there; meanwhile I sent some horsemen fanning out to stop the pirates from ravaging the towns.

After the initial enemies, the Cross Knights and Eltshan show up. They are quite difficult; their sheer numbers means they can usually kill someone, and Eltshan gives them a large leadership bonus. Lachesis can remove Eltshan from the battlefield but she has to reach him first. This part took the most resets of any part so far. Sigurd’s leadership bonus helps, as does Lachesis’ cheer.

Then we continue to take over west castle, which is nothing compared to the Cross Knights. Once this is done, new enemies appear from the north, and there are several allies that appear way up at the top of the screen. They can get overwhelmed easily, and I think you need to use the chokepoint on the isthmus like this:

Here, Bridgid and Tilty can attack, Claude can use his area heal, and Fury can dart in and out and contribute. With this setup I was able to take out almost everyone (I sent in Cuan and Ethlyn to help but I think the initial 4 could have beaten everyone without help). The rest of the map is easy; one of the axe guys did go back for reinforcements but that was just extra XP. I got some initial promotions after this stage (just Ethlyn and Aira).

So that’s 4 chapters out of 12 — I’m pretty sure this will be the longest game I’ve played so far.

When I get to the Super Robot Wars games I usually post old message board posts; in this case I really don’t have much — I was doing a story summary instead, which is obsolete now that there is a full translation patch. I’ll add a bit more to what I wrote. In the main SRW games up to this point, in addition to the licensed franchises like Gundam and Getter Robo, they had original characters who came from another world La Gias. The third game, EX, takes place in La Gias, mixing up the licensed characters and the originals.

This game divides into two parts — one that takes place before SRW 2, showing the origin of Masaki and the other Masou Kishin characters. The second part takes place after SRW 4 and continues the stories begun in EX and the first part of Masou Kishin. The series then lay dormant for a long time, before a sequel finally came out in 2012, followed by two more games to finish the series.

Now on to the old posts.

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Despite 4S, the Super Famicom was not yet dead!  Almost two years after the release of 4, SRW Gaiden came out.  This was a huge advance on 4 in many ways — graphically, musically, gameplay, everything.  Although it is labeled Gaiden, it introduced a number of significant improvements that carried over to future SRWs.

Some of the changes that did carry over:
– For the first time, the map has a 3/4 view and full robots instead of just faces.  This would not be introduced into main SRWs until Alpha.
– Units now gain EXP for repairing and refueling.
– The Masou Kishin characters now get their own themes — this is the first appearance of Flapper Girl, Dark Prison, etc.
– Character faces now have multiple versions that show different emotions.
– The character designs for the Masou Kishin characters were all redone into the form that they have had ever since (even down to OGs).  As a comparison, here are Masaki, Shu, and Ryune in their EX and MK incarnations:

System things that did not carry over:
– The robots are full sized instead of SD (this is used in the next game, but then never again)
– Height and facing matters
– There is a “zone of control” system (Banpresto used this later in the Summon Night and Black Matrix series)
– Units have Prana in addition to EN

This is also the first game that Kono Sachiko, the character designer for many of the original characters, worked on.  She still does original character designs now.

My final verdict on SRW:LoE is “so-so”.  In general I don’t like the all-originals games as much as the regular ones.  LoE’s high point is the characterization and the dialogue between them.  The story is kind of weak; like I said, a lot of the plot points are retreads of EX and the plot sort of jerks around from one story to another.  There are a lot of places where the story writers don’t really seem to know what they’re doing (i.e. when Jogg and Rasetsu show up to take the Duraxylls and Tudy just lets them do it).  The battle system is OK.  You get attacked from behind a lot because everyone has such a high move rate and there’s hardly any terrain to block them.  The double-attack ability is the worst ability ever in a SRW game [2020 note: This is a system where people can sometimes get two attacks in a round, and this game still has the double move from the old SRW games. So you get situations where someone can take 4 attacks in a round, which can be an auto kill even for overlevelled units.]

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Now that this game has a translation patch it’s easy to play it, so give it a try if you like SRW — although there’s a later DS remake that might be more fun.

I didn’t say much about the story last time. This game has a much more RPG-like storyline (and overall feel) than some of the other SRPGs that lean more towards the strategy side of things. The basic story is that Emperor Sauther of the Granvelos Empire takes over the Kingdom of Kahna, where Bahamut dwells. Sauther’s goal is to talk to the Divine Dragons in order to open the path to a new world. Princess Yoyo, the daughter of the King of Kahna, can also speak to the Divine Dragons. After being driven out of Kahna, the main character gathers a band of fighters around him to try to defeat Granvelos. 

 There are more twists and turns to the story, but since there’s an excellent translation patch out I won’t give away the whole thing (there are walkthroughs on gamefaqs that have the whole story anyway). Overall I enjoyed the story with two caveats. The first was that I felt too many of the characters were joke characters, even some of the characters that were important to the main storyline (Matelite, for instance). The second is that the conclusion was kind of abrupt and vague, but that’s typical of RPGs.

Between missions you can walk around your ship and talk to people. This game does a better job than most of the other games in giving each of the characters a personality and making them memorable (even though as I said, a lot of them are just played for laughs).

It is annoying that you can only save at the beginning of each chapter. Typically the start of the chapter is a story sequence, then you can explore the ship and talk, buy equipment, feed dragons, and then finally change your formations and assign dragons to each party. This can easily take 15-30 minutes just for the pre-battle stuff, and to not be able to save before the fight actually starts is an odd design decision. Of course on an emulator, save states easily deal with the problem.

I don’t have much to say about the stages until Chapter 22 when they begin to get more difficult. By this time I had Salamander in Master Dragon form, which is a bit broken because he can’t take damage from anything. In theory you could win every stage just by ending the turn and letting Salamander do everything, but this would be incredibly tedious and take hours for each fight even with speedup keys. However, my Salamander was also very timid and would often heal instead of fighting — I actually preferred when he ran out of MP because then he had no choice but to fight.

My groups tended to keep similar units together, although I put Light Armors in some squads for greater mobility. By far the most powerful group was the Yoyo-Sendak summoner squad, who could often clean up whole areas of the battlefield just by themselves. I notice the Gamefaqs walkthrough writer is one of those people who overlevels and he claims he hardly used the spellcasters. But he also recommends all Master Dragons by stage 8 or something, which is completely absurd. This is a pet peeve of mine in walkthroughs; it’s annoying to struggle with a boss or stage, look up a walkthrough, and find no real advice because the walkthrough writer has overlevelled to the point where they don’t need any strategy.

Anyway, Chapter 22 is a large chapter that is difficult primarily because of all the cannons. They have high HP and can attack from pretty far away, damaging entire parties. Some of them are on HP regen terrain, and there are also healing units that can support them.

The Siegfried is the chief difficulty among them. What I eventually did was hug the left side of the screen and advance slowly, being careful to watch for the Siegfried’s range. Lightning can destroy both the walls and the regeneration spots, and you can ice freeze the moat to cross on the left. Sending out the dragons to “go” helped soften up the cannons.

For the Siegfried itself, by having the Dragons “go” to it and then moving Yoyo/Sendak up towards the middle, I was able to target Leviathan summon on the spots and take out the healing units, and then the dragons were able to destroy the Siegfried. From there the rest of the mission was not so bad — the remaining units (a dragon and two bosses) aren’t pushovers but they’re nowhere near as hard as the cannons. With Magic Gins to keep up the MP of the Sendak/Yoyo party it wasn’t too bad from there.

Chapter 23 is just finishing off the Granvelos soldiers but since there are no cannons it’s not especially hard.

Now we head into the other world. I actually got a game over on the chapter 24 battle (above) because I got hit with too many area attacks in a row. Advancing slowly from the bottom left was a better strategy and I won the second time. Game overs aren’t that bad since you can keep all your XP, money, and items.

Stage 25 is interesting because there are only a few enemies, and only two boss units you have to beat. But they constantly summon more monsters, who have over 9999 HP each. What I did was just rush the main character’s unit and the summoners up to the boss and use area spells over and over again until they died, and I defended whenever my guys were attacked by the summoned monsters. Not too bad.

Stage 26 has a bunch of enemies but the boss Alexander. Although these bosses look impressive, it’s annoying to keep track of where the single block is that you actually attack. But I did this by basically another rush/defend strategy.

The final boss is Alexander again. He’s huge and has 4 different parts. You have to beat the healing and spellcasting parts to hurt the main head, but you do not have to beat the status effects head. My basic strategy for this was to keep most of my units away from the action so they couldn’t get hit with the devastating area effect spells. I used a lot of summoning with a lot of Magic Gins, and also main character sword techniques when I could. Fortunately the attacks frequently were directed at the dragons, especially Salamander, so there wasn’t too much trouble surviving them.

Once you beat the game, you can start a New Game+ where you keep all your levels and can even summon Alexander:

But I don’t know if there’s much purpose to this mode; there aren’t any alternate paths or endings. I guess there are one or two places in the game where enemies appear but then leave before you can beat them, and you could do it here. Or if you just want to experience the story again.

A good game overall — impressive graphics, nice music, an enjoyable story and characters, and pretty fun gameplay.

  

The basic idea behind this game is that you have several parties, and each party has an associated dragon. The dragons affect what spells and moves the party members can use. The party can issue a general command to the dragon (Come! Go! or Wait!) but the dragons act on their own, and have stats like Timidity and Affection that affect how well they follow your orders.

The dragons’ stats are affected by feeding them items — they will eat everything from potions to plate mail to fire rods. The dragons have various elemental stats, which enable them to use different kinds of breath (and affect the elemental skills their associated party can use). They also have strength and defense for basic attacks. Dragons will evolve form when they gain levels in various stats, and there are unusual dragons and secret transformations as well.

I like the late-SNES era graphics.

Battles are done on a player/enemy phase system. You move a party, then the associated dragon will take its action. Units can either use a “field attack” which has a direct effect, or attack an enemy party. If that happens you go into a separate battle screen and enter commands for each party member individually. This slows the game down a bit but on the whole I don’t find the tempo to be all that bad.

Player characters have a class that determines their skills and what equipment they can use. There aren’t any class promotions although I think one character changes class from the story.

Using spells and techniques of certain elementals causes changes on the board — you can destroy things with thunder, set trees on fire with fire, freeze water with ice to cross, and remove poison fields with heal spells.

The first few stages are basically just to get you used to the system and aren’t very hard. After the first one you get a “ship” (which is an island, that’s what the “lagoons” of the title are).

Chapter 3 introduces catapult enemies, which are nasty, as they can attack from a pretty far away range and have an AoE attack. I did manage to beat all the enemies but it was rough and I lost a few dragons. Death is not permanent and you can revive the human characters on your team (if you can revive dragons I don’t know how to do it).

Chapter 4 has a ton of enemies, and healing enemies that are annoying but you can take care of by attacking with the human parties and just focusing on them. 

Chapter 5 has monster enemies, but they’re not hard.

After this chapter I found a “Princess ???” item in Yoyo’s bed; apparently if you collect 5 of these and feed them to a dragon it evolves into Bahamut. Getting them all without a walkthrough is hard.

Also after this chapter you can start doing “side quests” which are really just repeatable battles to build levels and get money. There are only 2 to choose from now. I didn’t bother.

Chapter 6 has some surprise reinforcements but nothing I couldn’t handle.

Chapter 7 introduces artillery things on the board that shoot at you if you stop in front of them. But they can be destroyed with thunder magic.

Chapter 8 is against dragons fought from outside the ship.

Chapter 9 has a floodgate you can release to hurt the enemies, although they immediately start healing themselves so it’s only useful if you can rush them.

Chapter 10 introduces treasure chests, which have either treasures or traps.

Chapter 11 has us going to a lake to find the next Divine Dragon (which all become summons for two of the characters).

Chapter 12 has some passages that close on you if you are in them, but that just stops your move for a turn.

Chapter 13 was the hardest one yet for me — there are “generators” that open up to make enemies, or you can lightning them to have them appear. I lost several characters but in the end I still won.

I will try to take more detailed notes for the rest of the battles (although I often say this and then don’t!)

As for my dragon feeding, I’ve been doing it rather randomly. I suppose it’s probably better to have one really powerful dragon but I’ve been spreading around the food. One thing I noticed is that the item drops you get from enemies depend on the elements you use to defeat them. So that can create a feedback loop where you’re getting nothing but fire equipment unless you make an effort to spread around what you’re using. There’s an ultimate form of the dragon you can get if you max all of a dragon’s stats but that seems hard to do. I especially have a hard time increasing life and poison.