Lagoon has potential, but it's far from perfect
Gameplay is unfortunately the area that can make Lagoon more frustrating than fun. One of the first things a person will probably notice about the main character, NASIR (yes, every name in this game is in caps), is he is right handed. In fact, he is right handed to a painful extent. When you attack, your sword does not simply go in front of you, such as in Zelda, but it goes on your right side. This can make it annoying to hit enemies, but if it was the only problem it would be fine. A rather annoying aspect of combat is many bosses seem to have a spot that you must hit. By this I am not talking about the typical "giant flashing area" or "obvious weak spot" but rather an exact location. For example, one of the bosses has what can best be described as six frozen squids that you must kill first before you can damage him. Each squid dies in one hit, but you must hit it exactly in the eye, which is about a third the size of Nasir. To do this, you must perfectly line up your right arm with the eye while it randomly shoots chunks of ice at you and hope that you are close enough to actually hit it with an extremely small sword (the camera angle can also make it hard to judge distance).
Boss fights in Lagoon are unique. You can usually kill a boss in 10-20 hits. However, the speed at which you attack in this game is fast, so you really only need to find an opening 2 or 3 times (or sometimes only once) for most bosses. Bosses can hit hard, but you can usually hit them harder. For two of the bosses I literally just let them charge at me and I simply slashed away as fast as I could and won with over 1/2 my life. Three of the bosses in the game also teleport around the room. Amazingly, teleportation can work out in your favor if they teleport directly in front of you since for at least two of the three bosses you can just slash away and kill them before they can teleport away or even do anything else. While this makes the bosses sound easy, many of them are not because of one factor: randomness. Almost every boss in the game that has a projectile attack does not follow any attack pattern. This means you can get lucky and get a boss down to under 1/2 health as soon as the battle starts. However, what will usually happen is you will be directly next to the boss trying to attack it when it suddenly launches three rows of projectiles at point blank range without any warning and you go down to almost 0 health. Some of the more close-range bosses can hit you multiple times with a single attack and I have personally gotten hit 2x, gotten flung back into the boss, and took massive damage from touching the boss about 3x all from a single attack. Of course, sometimes the boss will just stand there for about 2 seconds while you quickly attack it, which is all the time you need to kill even most of the final bosses. Overall, only the first and third boss fights in the entire game really felt like true fights instead of just a quick kill or a matter of luck.
The dungeon design can be very boring and confusing. Most dungeons consist of two or three floors. In most dungeons there tends to be about five items, one that you will need to give to a person in whatever the closest town is, one or two pieces of equipment, and the rest are either money or some sort of healing item (you can only ever carry one of each type of item though). While this is pretty standard, the problem is the floors are just too big. Everything tends to look the same in each dungeon and it is easy to get lost without drawing a map or looking one up online. About 90% of each floor is just there to annoy you. There really are areas where you can jump over a pit, spend about three or four minutes following the path and killing any enemies that are in your way, and finally only reach the end...which is a dead end. So then you need to backtrack all the way back, kill the respawns, and try any one of the two or three other paths and pray that there is actually something useful at the end. The fact that every dungeon only has three or four different types of enemies does not help. A person can probably spend over a half hour just running into dead ends in a dungeon before he finds the stairs to the next floor.
Two of the more minor problems of the game are money and escorts. Money in Lagoon honestly doesn't serve much of a purpose. There is both an item shop and a weapon/armor shop in the first town, the second town only has an item shop (it technically has an equipment shop, but it was robbed so you can never buy anything), the third town only has a shop that sells a nice piece of armor and a shield, and after that you never use money again since everything else is found in dungeons. The NPC problem involves the matter of escorts. In the first dungeon you must escort a guy from the end of it out to the beginning. This would be fine if he just followed behind your character. Unfortunately, he moves at about 1/2 your speed and it took me about a minute to finally get him to stop bumping into a wall and go down a flight of stairs. He never gets attacked by monsters, but you can't go to another screen unless he is near you so even though you may want to simply run through the place back down to the town, you must stay with him to help him learn how not to walk into a wall. There is a similar problem slightly farther ahead in the game, but it isn't quite as bad.
There are, however, some good points to the game. First, there is a magic system where you can use different staves with different gems for spells. Magic can't be used in boss fights for some reason, and it tends to be much weaker than your sword attack, but it does give you a ranged attack and there are 16 spells. The game also has equipment. There are five pieces of armor, five swords, five shields, and five rings in the game. The sword unfortunately stays the same length and looks the same no matter how big it's picture appears in your inventory. The armor and shields do change depending on which ones you have equipped, which is nice, although the shield doesn't seem to actually be able to block anything (although some enemies seemed to jump back when they got near me occasionally, if they were actually moving back or somehow being repelled by my shield I can't tell). Rings also lend some strategy. There is a ring that freezes enemies when worn, a ring that makes you invincible, a ring that increases your strength, a ring that increases your strength and a ring that makes you very rapidly regain health. All of the rings rapidly drain mana and the invincibility ring and the time-freezing ring do not work on bosses, but they are still very useful.
Some other aspects of Lagoon can also be viewed as average or above average. The graphics themselves aren't anything special and some of the special effects are laughable, but you do get to see the armor you are wearing and there are actually a few 'cinemas' in the game, which is actually impressive considering Lagoon's age. The music is about average; none of it is really memorable, but it is varied and doesn't get boring fast. Lagoon's story is both good and bad. The story itself is decent and it has a few twists. However, you won't get attached to any of the characters and almost all of the major villains only appear for literally a minute, talk to you or do something, and then fight you about an hour later into the game and explode when they die. Another odd feature is for all except the final few bosses you can run out of the boss room. This feature is good for if you fight a boss and realize you are too weak and should gain a level or two, but other than that it isn't very useful since bosses go back to full health A final feature of Lagoon is you can save anywhere. This is very useful for if you want to simply take a break or know you are about to fight a boss and don't want to walk all the way through the dungeon again. Unfortunately, I suspect a main reason for this feature is the fact that several dungeons have a large supply of instant-death pits and even some normal enemies can get four or five hits on you and kill you before you can become unstunned if they hit you on certain angle.
Ultimately, Lagoon has several major differences from similar action RPG's, but fails to correctly implement all of them. I personally did not have fun playing the game, but anyone looking for a dungeon-crawler with a few twists or just a way to waste an afternoon may want to give this game a try if they can find it.