from Data East after working as writer for the Glory of Heracles series. The producer was Tadashi Nomura. The scenario was written by Motomu Toriyama, who also joined in 1994 and took up the role as no-one had. The game's setting was inspired by Sasaki's memory of flying over the Izu Peninsula, wanting to evoke a similar feeling of a "floating lagoon". The scenario, which featured complex relationships and betrayals, was directly influenced by events in Toriyama's life. Toriyama attributed his leading role in the scenario to the team's nature as a group of newcomers. The battle system was designed by Takatsuga Nakazawa, who wanted to make the game challenging yet balanced for players, with Sasaki calling Nakazawa "brutal" with some of his trap placements. Dragon breeding was implemented during the later half of development, which influenced its design transition into a tactical RPG. Ono wanted the dragons to exist as their own creatures outside player control, hence being driven by the game's AI. An abandoned idea was dragons fighting and eating each other during battles. Sasaki also wanted the dragons not to act like party members, comparing them to pets that acted on their own. Space limitations forced a reduction in the planned character behaviour pattern. Music The music was composed and arranged by Noriko Matsueda. Teruaki Sugawara acted as sound engineer, and the sound programmer was Hidenori Suzuki. Bahamut Lagoon was Matsueda's second major video game, having first co-composed the score of Front Mission with Yoko Shimomura. Matsueda wanted to create a score close to orchestral music, working within the platform's limited sound environment to create that impression through "reverb, spatiality, and balance". She also wanted music that would get players emotionally invested in the narrative, thinking of that before matching songs to in-game areas. An official soundtrack album was published by NTT Publishing on February 25, 1996. Release Bahamut Lagoon was released for the Super Famicom on February 9, 1996. It was one of Square's last Super Famicom releases before they broke with Nintendo to develop for Sony's PlayStation. As with other of Square's Super Famicom titles of the time, copies were priced high due to the growing expense of cartridge production. It was re-released in the Japanese Virtual Console for Wii on September 29, 2009, and for Wii U on February 5, 2014. The Wii version was taken down with the console's Virtual Console store in