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Lagrange Point
Developer: Konami
Release Date: 1991 (JP)
Platform: Famicom
Genre: Turn-based RPG
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Lagrange Point is a Konami science fiction RPG and was one of a few games released for the Famicom/NES by Konami that incorporated some of that company's experimentation with cartridge hardware. Castlevania 3 and Mouryo Senki Madara both used Konami's VRC6 chip, which added new dimensions to the existing sound hardware, but Lagrange Point, released in 1991, was the only game to make use of the powerful VRC7 chip. Incorporating new memory management and an additional sound chip (the YM2413), the VRC7 was able to increase the NES's sound capabilities to the point where they were at least equal to some of the early efforts of the Sega Genesis. However, Konami's experimental hardware never got a Western showing, because the architecture of the NES did not support the enhanced capabilities provided by Konami's sound hardware, which is why the soundtrack of Castlevania 3 had to be reworked for Western release. Lagrange point was also not released in the West because, as it was released in 1991, it was near the end of the NES's cycle as the SNES had already taken off pretty much everywhere. Thanks to the efforts of fan translators, the game is now playable in English, so it's time to see how it actually stacks up.
So, here's the story. In the 22nd century, mankind has begun to move into space, and has constructed the Isis colony cluster at a Lagrange Point, consisting of two colonies, Land 1 and Land 2, the Vesta asteroid base, and a Satellite monitoring station. However, Land 2 is struck by a sudden outbreak as hordes of monstrous, mutated creatures poured out of the colony's biotechnology laboratory, killing many of the inhabitants and altering the environment to better suit them. To add to the Isis cluster's woes, three of the five members of the colonial board of governance, Oregi, Ledesma, and Weber, launched a coup on Land-1 after somehow discovering the means to transform themselves into powerful Bionoid creatures. Calling themselves the Bionoid Generals, and taking command of the army of mutants and artificial creatures which have infested the colonies, they capture one of the remaining two members of the board, while the fifth escaped to the Satellite to organize a resistance. In the chaos, communication with Earth was cut off, so Earth sent three recon teams to find out what was going on. The first two were completely wiped out, and the third was attacked on landing, and the only survivors were the team captain who is too wounded to go on, and Gene, their shuttle pilot. The captain asks Gene to continue the mission, and find one Doctor Stolte, as he is the key to unraveling this whole mess.
Lagrange Point is a conventional turn-based RPG in its basic mechanics. Travel is mainly done on an overworld, and there is space travel between the various installations in the Isis Cluster through the use of spaceports, as in Phantasy Star. Characters gain experience and levels through combat, which is handled in a first-person Dragon Quest/Earthbound manner. The game does have a large number of its own quirks. Every action in combat, from basic attacks to special skills, use up a character's Battery Points (BP), which is required for almost any action a character might take, with the exception of using items. Characters do not increase their max BP through gaining levels, but through buying higher-capacity battery tanks as one goes through the various towns of the game. Many characters also have Super skills, which, while potentially very powerful, also cost a non-trivial amount of HP to use. Because everything a character does costs something, consumable items have a great deal of importance, and managing one's limited item capacity is key to navigating the game. Almost all overland travel is handled with vehicles, and the player gains more vehicles able to handle more and different types of terrain as the game goes forward. While there are only four members in one's active party, there are ten possible characters, divided into three types- Humans, cyborgs, and robots. While Humans and cyborgs are generally interchangeable (Humans get higher HP growth by level, cyborgs generally get higher stat growth), robots operate a number of special rules. They can't be healed through normal healing skills or items, requiring their own items for repairs, they use different armor, and they don't equip weapons normally, gaining attack power and capabilities through the use of consumable upgrade parts. However, robots just don't get the protection, firepower, or skills to be viable towards the end of the game even at their maximum upgrade levels. All types of characters gain skills not through leveling, but through the acquisition of kits and tools scattered throughout the game that enable the character that can use them to perform those skills. As there are numerous kits, and each character has four skills max, each character has a largely unique skill list.
While armor is bought normally, the same is only true for a relatively small number of weapons. Most of the weapons in the game, especially the most powerful, are acquired through Weapon Fusion, where characters can combine weapons for a cost based on the power of the new weapon being made. Weapons are ranked from level 1 to 6, and combining two weapons of the same rank gives one of a higher rank, and here are a total of 72 weapons to be found or made in the game. It's a much simpler and more friendly crafting system than one finds in other games with such systems, as there is no chance of failure and you get a preview of not only what weapon you're getting, but who can immediately use it. Weapons do have stat requirements, and if a character lacks the necessary strength and intelligence, they simply cannot equip the weapon without gaining some more levels. While this is an interesting and important component of the game, it only becomes available after the first boss is defeated, which is more of an undertaking than it may sound.
There are some enemies which are nasty in the dungeon environment, but overall, grinding for cash and levels isn't as obnoxious as it was in pre-1990 RPGs, though that is an admittedly low bar to clear. The bosses themselves can be a pain and a half, as they really test whether or not the player has been paying attention to the necessities, such as item management and weapon fusion- being unprepared in either area will in all certainty lead to death for the whole party. There are almost no bosses that one can sleepwalk through. One's expectations for this game should be set with the idea that there will be rather significant challenges in combat and party management.
Despite being released around the same time where character-driven RPG plots had started to come into vogue in JRPGs, Lagrange Point's storytelling is very much in the mode of '80s RPGs. Party members only ever speak when they join you and each has a small handful of lines in the ending, and NPCs usually exist to dispense exposition, information, or helpful skills and items, with only a few gaining more characterization. The villains do have more motivation beyond the usual "Conquer the Everything" story one usually finds, but it's still rather basic, and begs for more narrative space than it is given. The story itself is rather unsparing- Konami was not about to be outdone by Phantasy Star 2 in terms of child-murder, and there at least a couple of times when you will return to older areas after some plot point and find that an NPC that used to be there is now gone, having been killed in an assault by the Bio Corps. The setting, while not greatly explored, is still interesting- Erath is only barely mentioned by the colonists, and they talk about it as if its something of a dump, and there's also the fact that this game is one of the few RPGs that has a "pure" sci-fi setting, without even psionics or some other stand-in for magic one usually finds.
The visual design of the game can be hit or miss. The environment design is really good, and because the Land-1 and Land-2 space colonies are based on the ever-popular
O'Neill cylinder, the overworld maps actually loop vertically but not horizontally. There's even a segment where your party needs to exist through one of the airlocks of Land-1 and maneuver in zero-gravity across the surface to another airlock, in order to get to a town that the party can't reach with their vehicles. The fact that they chose to make this a gameplay sequence with its own different but still playable movement physics further sells the idea that the development team decided to use the game's space setting as more than a mere background prop. The hit or miss part comes in the monster designs. There are a number of monster design choices, especially in the early areas, which just seem rather uninspired and unthreatening, especially for the story of crisis the game is trying to tell. While there are many monsters which are well-designed, those that aren't can be rather jarring. The sprites for regular monsters are static, but bosses are animated when they attack. The soundtrack is already very well-composed across a wide range of moods, from friendly to tense to action to haunting, but that is lent a great deal of oomph by the use of the powerful VRC7 chip, which elevates the sound quality to something approaching that of the Sega Genesis, or at least well above what one normally associates with the NES.
While Lagrange point does have some questionable decisions in both its gameplay and graphic design, there is far more good than bad to be found in the game, and it should be checked out if one can find some means of getting a hold of it. This goes double if one is a fan of NES-style RPGs, but wants one with a bit less grinding and a bit more depth in how one is expected to handle one's characters.
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Predictably, I have made boss videos. annotations are somewhat mandatory.
Boss #1: Oregi (both encounters)Boss #2: Ledesma (first encounter)Boss #3: AshBoss #4: Ledesma (Second encounter)Boss #5: MetalRobosBoss #6: WeberBoss #7: Bio KaiserBoss #8: True Bio Kaiser