YMMV / Bahamut Lagoon

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • If you take all the dialogue trees as being in-character for Byuu, it becomes apparent that he's a two-faced manipulative Jerkass who toys with the emotions of those around him for fun, including Yoyo, who's supposed to be his beloved (to the point where, regardless of how the player feels, isn't all that concerned that his lover loves another man). He has no objection to torturing suspects, and happily hires assassins to take out his "friends" just to amuse himself. He's a sociopathic recluse who cares for nothing except his dragons, and maybe Frederika. He also steals mushrooms!
  • Princess Yoyo. Is she simply a naive, inexperienced, yet nice woman who just happened to get tangled in an unfortunate Love Dodecahedron or is it something else? The narrative seems to lean toward the latter. However, portions of the fanbase often picture her a selfish, two-timing slut, and a ''tyrant'' among other things. Not helping was the fact that it was (and still is) rather uncommon for a young male protagonist to NOT end up with the main female lead, particularly of the childhood friend variety. The epilogue has her only admit she only feels a slight chill when she senses Palpaleos' presumed Suicide by Cop. Could she have used the man she chose as consort to find any threats?
• Awesome Music: The game has a somewhat unique soundtrack among SNES RPG's, being kind of jazzy as per the stylings of Noriko Matsueda. The battle theme will stay with you for a while.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Frederika, if her ending second in the Video Game Saimoe is any indication. It helps that a good half the time, Frederika's hypochondria and drug habit are played seriously without being annoying or overtaking the narrative, lending her sympathy. Her life goal of opening a pharmacy sets her as a Humble Hero as well, contrasting with most of the other men and women who only seem to have love on the brain or who tend to be largely unsympathetic due to their antics. The fact she's part of the Fan-Preferred Couple certainly helps matters. She also is implied to get one of the happier endings in the cast due to the fact she promises to focus on 'getting healthy' during her final conversation before endgame, meaning there's a chance she'll end up kicking the habit.
  • If the fanart is anything to go by, Anastasia is popular as well, standing out as a Nice Girl who isn't overly obsessed with finding love, where most of the cast can't shut up about their potential love lives. The fact she's ironically one of the few to find it nonetheless with Barclay lends to warm, fuzzy feelings regarding her future. She's also one of the party's Wizards, which are some of the few units that are consistently amazing from the start of the game to the end of the game.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: The Japanese fans ship Byuu and Frederika, largely because Byuu and Yoyo break up mid-game, and because Frederika is consistently the only person who Byuu can only be nice to - there isn't a single dialog option involving her that's rude, and indeed most of them revolve around Byuu taking care of her or commenting on how reliable he believes her to be as a friend and fighting partner.
• Game-Breaker: Bahamut Lagoon isn't a particularly challenging game, mainly because there are several, several factors in your favor that help you.
  • You can feed the dragons items to power them up and give them new forms. One of Salamander's forms is called Phoenix, and it is literally invulnerable. Just give it the command Go, and it will destroy every enemy on the map for you while you sit on the sidelines. (Technically, since dragons in Bahamut Lagoon are linked to a unit of soldiers, it's still possible for Salamander's final form to be beaten indirectly if his soldiers are all killed... but as a practical matter, you can just hide them in the corner of the map while your invincible dragon kills everything for you. And the AI isn't smart enough to take advantage of this.)
  • On the more mundane end of things, the way field actions work. If you are playing optimally you should rarely, except in the instances where you want Matelite and the heavy armors or the knights to chunk enemies, ever need to personally engage with enemy units. Anastasia and the mages, Byuu and his Hits, the assassins and their Ninjutsu, the lancers, and especially Yoyo and Sendak all have incredibly damaging field attacks that actually deal more damage if used on the field because their power isn't diminished even if they hit multiple targets. The lancers are built by design to exploit this, as their damage in the midst of an engagement is pathetic while their damage with field actions tears holes through enemy parties at a cheap cost. This works double for healing actions - healing on the field means you'll never enter engagements with less than full health because healers can heal multiple people to full from six squares away, frequently healing multiple parties with one spell. This even works for revival magic and status clearing, in the rare instances where the enemy actually manages to whittle you down or inflict a debilitating status ailment on you.
  • Unless you are deliberately gimping your dragons, you won't even need Phoenix, Salamander's final form, to break the game with dragons alone. You don't even need to engage personally unless, by some black curse against the player, the dragons manage to run out of MP before the end of a map - something that will only realistically happen with the first ten chapters at most. The dragons don't have the single-target damage potential Matelite, the heavy armors, or the knights do, but they functionally exist to be mobile spellcasting platforms that hit somewhat less hard than Anastasia and the other mages do. You can field six per map. Frequently, unless you set the Dragons to 'Wait,' they will absolutely do all the work for you just as you're approaching enemies to fight. Even if you set the dragons to wait, they won't be content to do nothing, choosing instead to focus all their magic on healing magic that will ensure your parties never die. Their mere existence cuts the difficulty down because they'll show up a good seventy-five percent of the time to soften up enemies for you with their magic whenever you move in to attack an enemy party directly - and when they use magic this way, they don't lose MP. This happens even if the enemy goes to attack your party, as the dragons will intercede to deal damage for you before the enemies even get to attack.
• Goddamned Boss: The final boss is more of an annoyance than a proper challenge. You fight against a four-headed dragon wallpaper, and every head has very high HP (and infinite MP). In order to damage the main part, you have to destroy the other three first. One of which has no offensive attacks and will heal itself every turn, dragging on the fight. The other two will use status-inflicting spells (that your dragons are immune to) and elemental spells, respectively. Alexander's main head will use summon magic, which are have a long attack animation.
• Memetic Mutation: "It's way faster than Salamander!" The Wham Line of the game's main relationship problems, due to have set many a player's heart bursting with rage.
• Ron the Death Eater: Yoyo is despised by a good portion of people who have played the game (which, in North America, translates to not many) for choosing another man (that presumably gets lynched in the ending) over the main character Byuu. While she certainly could have handled the Love Triangle better, its not rare to find her being portrayed as a selfish slut or a tyrant where in game, she's more of a naive Dude Magnet.
• The Scrappy:
  • Princess Yoyo, with many of the feelings of dislike stemming from what some have perceived as one of the earliest cases of NTR in video games (i.e. the resolution of her romantic subplot, especially when the player has responded positively in the flashback sequence with Byuu and Yoyo).
  • Palpaleos is fairly disliked by the fandom as well, mostly due to association with Yoyo. Many also agree with Truce when the latter goes off on him during Palpaleos' philosophical rant about how wars are always started for trivial, petty reasons - Palpaleos is one to talk when it was a war he and his Emperor started. While Sauthar and Palpaleos may have some degree of justification given their war did end warfare across Orelus, that Palpaleos would downplay all the lives lost and destroyed property as 'trivial' didn't win him any fans.
    • Both Yoyo and Palpaleos also face considerable controversy for spending time with each other to the near-total exclusion of others once they reunite. Yoyo's Character Development, the strongest aspect of her character in her favor as The Protagonist, hits a brick wall once Palpaleos shows up. She stops spending time with her friends; she hyper-focuses on her relationship with Palpaleos to the unhealthy point that she can't be bothered to give the party mission-critical information just because Palpaleos stormed out of the room in a huff despite being the Queen; and she even seeks counsel from him as the Queen of Kahna despite the fact he'd have no means of knowing how to effectively run the country as the man who originally waged war against it - this latter point makes her a scrappy in-universe for a good half of the rest of the party, who, even if they feel they can trust Palpaleos, admit they can never forgive him. For his part, Palpaleos' own growth as a character starts and stops at 'Yoyo softened his heart and he joined Kahna to be with Yoyo,' leaving him as something of a Flat Character for the final third of the story once he does manage to reunite with her. Not helping is that Sauthar, the only other person he consistently spent time with, kicks the bucket not long after.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The dragons themselves can be considered problematic for any player seeking a challenge. Simply put, they do their job too well - they fight better than any party not built to deal damage to a single target, they have vast magic reserves to ensure they can deal with all the enemies for you, their health means that they can tank like gods even if their vitality is neglected, and even when they do run out of MP, they still hit like trucks with their bodies. This wouldn't be so bad if they were optional, but you have to bring them to every map. Because they aren't strictly player controlled either, you can't send them to guard some lonely corner of a battlefield. What truly makes this an aggravating mechanic is how their AI works - you can stop them from engaging in battle by setting their AI to 'Wait,' but then you have the issue of them sticking close to you, hogging up map space other units in your army may want to occupy, and worse, they'll still help you by casting healing spells. There is no way to turn them off short of sending them to their deaths, but good luck with doing that - they'll take out most of the map for you before ever going down by themselves, if they don't solo the map entirely through clever use of healing magic. Even if you neglect them to the point they do die and allow you to do all the work yourself, they take the player's magical capacity with them, gimping the player party to the point of being ineffectual against any enemy combatant, meaning it's a lose-lose situation no matter what.
• Self-Fanservice: The battle sprites of the Light Armors and Wizards are rather modest (Lukia shows some leg and that's it), but some fanartists take it to...revealing levels.
• That One Level: The Final Battle, chapter 23. It's not actually the final battle, but it is far, far worse than that. It is either the single hardest map in the game or the single most annoying map in the game depending on how you tackle it. The enemy is dug in with cannons with insane range. One such cannon, the central cannon, can fire over 12 squares away and will absolutely catch a first time player off guard, and when the player bumbles into its range, the range band of its shot is massive, catching allies out to three squares out. If your healers, mages, light armors, lancers, or ninja - pretty much anyone who isn't a knight or a heavy armor, really - are caught in the blast, they are instantly downed without insane, otherwise overkill-amounts of grinding. The two types of units who have the resilience to approach the cannon also cannot do so because it is embedded behind a river and a wall - in the time it takes to freeze the river over and get through the wall, the enemy's dragon will have flown in to ensure anyone weakened by the cannon blast is taken out. Even if by some miracle the dragon doesn't overcome the party, there are two other cannons nearby, each with a damage output almost on par with the central cannon. Without insane amounts of luck and copious amounts of healing items - because the only characters with any chances of survival who can heal if shot by the cannons are Yoyo and Sendak, meaning their resources will quickly be stretched to nothing - the humans cannot approach and overcome the cannons, the dragon, the healer near the central cannon and the dragon, and the two bosses with ranged field abilities who are also nearby. This means that realistically, the only way to beat this level is to rely on your dragons. This is an agonizingly slow process. Your dragons, by this point, will be near or at their master, holy, or dark incarnations, meaning their MP should be through the roof, and their AI loves abusing spells...which will only wittle off 1,000 HP at a time from a cannon that has over 10,000, and this is assuming their AI plays nice when you set it to 'go.' Be ready for the dragons to hit everything but the central cannon, doing the latter half of the level for you over the course of twenty to thirty minutes at least, especially when they start taking damage and decide to focus their resources on healing each other rather than taking out the cannons.
• Ugly Cute: They were aiming for a Moogle-like Ridiculously Cute Critter (might have even been moogles at one stage in development), but the Minidevils were more this, judging by their artwork.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: A good half of the party. Despite being in the middle of a war to reclaim the world's independence from Granvelos, a quarter of the cast just cannot keep it in their pants and another quarter of the cast is made up of truly terrible people.
  • Rush and Truce are childishly petulant and waste time screwing with Matelite even when the man, otherwise a Jerkass, actually attempts to get work done and strategize. This directly puts Byuu and Rush in danger when the latter refuses to unlock the door to the entry of the ship for Matelite and the sky opens up, nearly sucking Byuu and Rush in. Rush is especially contentious because he, unlike Truce, doesn't have a chip on his shoulder regarding Palpaleos due to the war; no, his issue with Palpaleos is Yoyo chose Palpaleos over him. They're supposed to be war orphans who garner sympathy as a result of having to grow up in a cold, uncaring world that thrust them into combat, but this facet of their character is rarely focused on. It's saying something when the mushroom addict Bikkebakke is easily the most sympathetic knight, largely because his plotline revolves around the humble goal of saving up money to buy a house for himself, Rush, and Truce.
  • Matelite is supposed to be sympathetic because he sees himself as a foster father who is forced to watch as Yoyo grows up and falls in love with a man Matelite despises - justifiably so, as that man, Palpaleos, was the lead general and best friend of Sauthar. Any and all sympathy for him is killed by the fact Matelite is routinely an asshole who rushes ahead without thinking and who happily and often intentionally ignores the bigger picture of a given situation in favor of simply pushing whatever narrative he feels most supports Kahna's war effort. Furthermore, when an entire room of Kahna's strategists and leaders criticizes him for this last point during a meeting, Matelite responds by physically ousting everyone but Yoyo from the room and even punching his friend, Taicho.
  • Don Juan is a horrible human being who is constantly trying to get with women - especially emotionally vulnerable women who are by themselves. The only reason he participates in the liberation war is explicitly to travel the world in search of women to woo - and he frequently invades their houses once he's in town. At one point he tries to enter a palace so he can have sex with harem girls who literally cannot say no. At the time of the game's release, his antics were supposed to be seen as funny, but as a result of changing times, he's since been correctly identified as an unsuccessful serial rapist.
  • Yoyo is genuinely apologetic about leading Byuu (and potentially, if he is to be believed, Rush) on, and she has a lot on her plate as the Queen of Kahna and the Dragnar, but this doesn't justify her near-total exclusion of all contact with anyone else once Palpaleos joins the party, to the point she withholds mission-critical information to spend time with a brooding Palpaleos. Her edicts and policies are also dangerously influenced by Palpaleos' own decisions, leading to some concerns she could be a puppet Queen all in an effort to appease Palpaleos or, worse, is unable to trust herself with any independent thought once Palpaleos enters her life, which makes their romance come off as incredibly self-destructive and toxic to modern players.
  • Palpaleos falls under much the same issues as Yoyo. His relationship with Yoyo is his sole focus beyond some time with Sauthar as the man lays dying, and virtually every bit of dialogue from him revolves entirely on his relationship with Yoyo. If Yoyo's relationship with Palpaleos is destructive because it robs her of her agency as a person, Palpaleos' relationship with Yoyo is destructive because it robs him of his independence and individuality. His love, even if it was supposed to be a sympathetic quality, does nothing to change the fact he only turned coat because of Yoyo - he was almost as responsible for the unification war as Sauthar himself was, and at no point does he admit that the war was wrong. He only ever opposes Granvelos because Sauthar literally orders him to do so and it's in Yoyo's best interest for Granvelos to fall - when questioned by Truce, he even implies he still felt the war and the lives lost were entirely justified, only relenting with Gudolf usurping control of Granvelos and making the place worse than it already was.
  • Flunze the lancer, though this may be intentional. He does increasingly terrible things to his friend, Reve, because he feels Reve snubbed him in favor of befriending Orelus (Zora's son, not the world) when Orelus joined the crew. At first it's just ignoring Reve, but eventually Flunze starts messing with Reve's training regime, refuses to make up with Reve when the latter earnestly tries to set things right, and he eventually admits he feels a strange sort of pleasure stealing Melodia's panties and tying them to Reve's spear, which turns the entire female half of the crew against the poor man as a result of them believing he's a pedophile. By the time they do make up in Altair, the player would be forgiven for believing Reve should blow Flunze off entirely.