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Lagoon
The pure waters of Lakeland have become muddy! (Also, lots of demons have appeared everywhere.) Nasir is the Champion Of The Light, so it's up to him to find the source of evil and cleanse the waters! (Also, kill demons.)
Spoilers for the entire plot: There's a Princess named Felicia in magical floating Lagoon Castle that needs rescuing, and rumors of an evil spirit that is very likely to get revived and try to destroy the world before this is all over. Nasir helps out some random generic fantasy folks and meets a mysterious man named Thor who seems like doofus. Three-quarters of the way through the game, he meets the evil wizard Zerah, the dude responsible for all of this mess. He and your mentor Mathias (that old guy in the opening cutscene) have a not-even-slightly-epic wizard battle that forces Zerah to retreat, and Mathias to finally info-dump the plot. Nasir and Thor are both sons of the gods, sent to protect the world, but Nasir is light and Thor is darkness, and Zerah stole baby Thor and raised him evil. So you rescue the Princess, but it's too late, Zerah and Thor have gone to the "secret place" and awakened the evil spirit. Fortunately, after you kill everyone and everything involved, Thor's good spirit ends up in a locket and Nasir is able to protect the world forever (and catch the eye of the Princess) with his help. And the waters are clean again, not that the cutscenes ever showed them anything but blue.
I hadn't noticed this back in the day, but this bears a decent resemblamce to an Ys game, given the top-down view, rpg elements, and close-quarters combat style. (You have a tiny sword relative to your sprite and need to get very close to enemies to hit them.) Health regenerates when you stand still, and you can "bump" enemies with your shield if you ram them perfectly head-on. The magic rings drain your MP while equipped, like the rings in Ys 3. And you desperately need to grind on the (mostly harmless) normal enemies to stand a chance at beating the bosses.
You get magic by combining the four staves and four crystals you collect, which in theory seems neat and in practice means you spend most of the game with very little variety in your magic, only to get half the spells in a lump near the end. And when you finally get those top-level spells, they take a ton of MP to use but don't deal enough damage to be worth using on any of the endgame enemies.
You can also jump, but that only seems useful for travelling and occasionally dodging; there's no useful jump-strike or anything like in Terranigma. Also, if you walk off a ledge that you're supposed to jump over (as opposed to any other ledge in the game, which has edge gravity to stop you) you die instantly; back to your last save.
I am terribly spoiled by games with a wider hit range (the tiny dagger you get at the beginning has virtually no range outside your character's hitbox) and faster movement (there isn't even a dash button). Oh, and auto-mapping, or at least a minimap. And the game doesn't scroll until you're close to an edge, rather than centering the screen on Nasir, so it's easy to walk into enemies or holes. (Seriously, even for the era, the play control is pretty awful.)
The difficulty takes a serious jump when fighting bosses, mostly due to the problematic hitbox/tiny attack range issue. Especially since you can't use magic in boss battles; but also because you can get pretty far in this game by standing still to heal after every hit you take, which isn't an option in boss fights.
It's amusing to me that they took the time to change your character's appearance with each new suit of armor equipped, but never give you a longer sword. There are also relatively few palette-swapped enemies
NPCs accompany you from time to time; they move at half the speed your character does, don't fight (but can't be hurt by monsters) and occasionally prevent you changing screens until they catch up. Plus, they use typical SNES bad pathfinding. Fortunately, there are only two of them.
I'm going to disclose also that the only reason I got through this was cheat codes and Gamefaqs maps, and the only reason I played it at all was curiousity driven by the Nintendo Power article back when this came out. (They made it look like there was actually a plot, and that the magic was awesome, and that it was, y'know, fun to play.) If you have that same curiousity, I suggest using the cheat codes I created:
7E052AFF - Fast XP Gain
7E0520FF - Infinite HP (turn off when you beat bosses or the game will freeze)
Overall: I blew through this out of curiousity. It's not a lost gem; it's just a forgettable and poorly-done Ys clone that was part of the first wave of SNES games. After all, it came out in 1991--the same year as Final Fantasy 4--and which one of them has had four remakes since?
Spoilers for the entire plot: There's a Princess named Felicia in magical floating Lagoon Castle that needs rescuing, and rumors of an evil spirit that is very likely to get revived and try to destroy the world before this is all over. Nasir helps out some random generic fantasy folks and meets a mysterious man named Thor who seems like doofus. Three-quarters of the way through the game, he meets the evil wizard Zerah, the dude responsible for all of this mess. He and your mentor Mathias (that old guy in the opening cutscene) have a not-even-slightly-epic wizard battle that forces Zerah to retreat, and Mathias to finally info-dump the plot. Nasir and Thor are both sons of the gods, sent to protect the world, but Nasir is light and Thor is darkness, and Zerah stole baby Thor and raised him evil. So you rescue the Princess, but it's too late, Zerah and Thor have gone to the "secret place" and awakened the evil spirit. Fortunately, after you kill everyone and everything involved, Thor's good spirit ends up in a locket and Nasir is able to protect the world forever (and catch the eye of the Princess) with his help. And the waters are clean again, not that the cutscenes ever showed them anything but blue.
I hadn't noticed this back in the day, but this bears a decent resemblamce to an Ys game, given the top-down view, rpg elements, and close-quarters combat style. (You have a tiny sword relative to your sprite and need to get very close to enemies to hit them.) Health regenerates when you stand still, and you can "bump" enemies with your shield if you ram them perfectly head-on. The magic rings drain your MP while equipped, like the rings in Ys 3. And you desperately need to grind on the (mostly harmless) normal enemies to stand a chance at beating the bosses.
You get magic by combining the four staves and four crystals you collect, which in theory seems neat and in practice means you spend most of the game with very little variety in your magic, only to get half the spells in a lump near the end. And when you finally get those top-level spells, they take a ton of MP to use but don't deal enough damage to be worth using on any of the endgame enemies.
You can also jump, but that only seems useful for travelling and occasionally dodging; there's no useful jump-strike or anything like in Terranigma. Also, if you walk off a ledge that you're supposed to jump over (as opposed to any other ledge in the game, which has edge gravity to stop you) you die instantly; back to your last save.
I am terribly spoiled by games with a wider hit range (the tiny dagger you get at the beginning has virtually no range outside your character's hitbox) and faster movement (there isn't even a dash button). Oh, and auto-mapping, or at least a minimap. And the game doesn't scroll until you're close to an edge, rather than centering the screen on Nasir, so it's easy to walk into enemies or holes. (Seriously, even for the era, the play control is pretty awful.)
The difficulty takes a serious jump when fighting bosses, mostly due to the problematic hitbox/tiny attack range issue. Especially since you can't use magic in boss battles; but also because you can get pretty far in this game by standing still to heal after every hit you take, which isn't an option in boss fights.
It's amusing to me that they took the time to change your character's appearance with each new suit of armor equipped, but never give you a longer sword. There are also relatively few palette-swapped enemies
NPCs accompany you from time to time; they move at half the speed your character does, don't fight (but can't be hurt by monsters) and occasionally prevent you changing screens until they catch up. Plus, they use typical SNES bad pathfinding. Fortunately, there are only two of them.
I'm going to disclose also that the only reason I got through this was cheat codes and Gamefaqs maps, and the only reason I played it at all was curiousity driven by the Nintendo Power article back when this came out. (They made it look like there was actually a plot, and that the magic was awesome, and that it was, y'know, fun to play.) If you have that same curiousity, I suggest using the cheat codes I created:
7E052AFF - Fast XP Gain
7E0520FF - Infinite HP (turn off when you beat bosses or the game will freeze)
Overall: I blew through this out of curiousity. It's not a lost gem; it's just a forgettable and poorly-done Ys clone that was part of the first wave of SNES games. After all, it came out in 1991--the same year as Final Fantasy 4--and which one of them has had four remakes since?