Secret Place: a Lagoon fansite

FAQS

Why are names in Lagoon in all CAPS?
This was an arbitrary decision on the part of the translators, for the English version. The German version actually has all text in all caps. I suspect it's because the German requires combining diacritics, and storing the glyphs for them takes up additional space.

Who owns the rights to Lagoon?
Kemco holds the rights. They were also the publisher for Dragon View and Genocide 2. There are no plans of releasing a sequel to Lagoon, DS release, or VC title right now.

What games are similar to Lagoon?
The Ys series is often compared to Lagoon, most notably Ys Book 1 and 2. It's entirely possible that Lagoon was riding a bit on Ys's coattails. The first few Ys games were released on NEC-PC8801, a few years before Lagoon on the Sharp X68000. The two games are very similar in their gameplay mechanics and visual style.

Ys and Lagoon are your classic case of "one made it, and the other didn't". The Ys series went on to become a big successful franchise with many new installments and sequels, while Lagoon was never touched again.

If you want to entertain a sense of "what Lagoon could have been", playing Ys games is a great way to do that! The Ys games are pretty good in their own right independently of whether you attach nostalgic associations to them. Many of them have been released in English and have a sizeable fan following in the West.

What are the last three items?
The last three spaces in your inventory are blank! Not used for anything. A full inventory looks like:


What is with the Gold Cave Outside map?
The mountain top appears chopped-off in the game. Not a glitch in your ROM. They were banking on you not being able to see it.

Where does the bridge outside Voloh lead to?
The bridge is just decoration, it doesn't go anywhere. Even if it sure looks like it does...

Why do chests sometimes hold money?
If you already own the item that the chests contains, you'll get money instead. You aren't allowed to have more than one of an item. Same reason you can't buy an item you already have ('2pc are too much').

Why is NASIR's sword so short?
Actually Nasir's sword isn't short, if you look carefully it's about 1.5 times wider than his shoulders, which in realistic proportions translates to almost 1 meter.
If you have problems hitting things you're just bad at video games

Are there any differences between the English and Japanese versions?

Aside from the obvious (language) differences, there is a graphical difference with the minister at the worship site. In the Japanese version he is wearing a vestment, in the USA version it is a shirt with buttons.

There's a difference in the environment graphics for the church as well. In the SHARP Japanese version only, there is a crucifix on the altar.

The crucifix was removed for both the Japanese and English SNES versions. (More minor- in the SHARP version, some panels of the stain glass window are white and the priest is physically moved on the map a tad lower.

Lagoon was created before the advent of ESRB and conforming to SNES censors and some guidelines that aren't in enforcement for games today. This meant removal of religious references from the game for release to the West. It affects dialogue too: 'Church' is changed to 'Worship site', and the priest says something about God/prayer which was changed to "Well Nasir, you have become so strong in such a short time".

How is the main character's name spelled?
It depends on the version. In the English version it's transliterated from Japanese as NASIR, in the Japanese versions it's Nassel (from ナセル).

Do you host the SNES ROM on this site?
No, but if you need to find it you can use a search engine, snes roms are old enough to be widely available.