Review #1: Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest(SNES)Introduction: Mystic Quest is quite possibly the most obscure Final Fantasy game in the franchise. To this day I've never met anyone who even knew this game existed before I told them about it. Heck, I didn't know it existed until I saw ProJared's review of the game,
which you can watch here!The game was introduced on the SNES as an "entry level RPG", supposedly extremely easy to learn and easy to beat. Final Fantasy hadn't taken off in America like it had in Japan, and Square concluded that maybe we just thought they were too dang hard to comprehend. So they set off to make an easily understandable JRPG. And this was the result.
You play as Benjamin, a hero with unclear motives who escapes his town as it collapses into rubble behind him. He travels to a nearby mountain, where he meets a strange old man on a cloud. The old man tells him that he is the Knight, and he must travel across the land, rescuing the four crystals from four Fiends who are draining their power.
Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Will you restore the four crystals and bring the world into balance, AGAIN?
Pros:1. Weapons: There are four different weapon types for you to choose from in Mystic Quest, and each one has an field use. Swords can be used to press switches, axes chop down trees and break rocks, bombs blow up walls, and claws can be used to scale walls. I like this idea! It brings a little life to the regular old dungeon crawling by using the various weapons to clear new paths and reach new heights, rather than being set on a fairly linear path with a few deviations. In addition, enemies in this game have weaknesses and resistances not only to various types of magic and status effects, but to various weapons as well. Axes do extra damage to plant-like enemies, flying enemies are weak to bows, etc. Again, nice to see something new, plus it encourages players to experiment with the different weapons.
2. Music: The music is....not ear-bleeding! In fact, it's pretty darn catchy and memorable. Towns have calm, serene tones, the overworld music is adventurous, and the dungeon tracks are ominous, yet heroic. It's very reminiscent of other Final Fantasy titles' music, but still sounds unique to Mystic Quest. Even some characters have unique themes!
3. Treasure Chests: I know what you're thinking.
Marcato, what could possibly be so cool about the treasure chests? Well, I'll tell you. Scattered all over the place are these little brown chests that infuriate me for reasons I'll get to in a minute. They contain regular items, healing potions, restorative stuff, extra ammunition for weapons that need it, etc. Then there's the other chests. They look like legit treasure chests, because they ARE legit treasure chests! These contain new weapons, armor, magic, or plot-relevant items. The differentiation between these chests and the boring old brown ones is awesome, because it gets you excited to open it. You see that big shiny chest, and because you know it has to be good, you instantly want to figure out how to get it. Kind of reminiscent to the giant chests in Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, evoking similar feelings. I've got to say, it's been quite a while since I played a game, saw a chest like that, and thought, "*GASP* WHAT IS THAT. WHAT. IS. THAT. I WANT THAT. I WANT THAT RIGHT NOW."
4. Battle Animation: In a stroke of genius, the developers decided to give each enemy battle animations that change as they take more damage. This is really encouraging, and gives the player a rough estimate of how much longer they need to survive the barrage of attacks being thrown at them before they can claim victory. Plus some of the animations that pop up when your foes are weakened are just hilarious!
Cons:1. Equipment: Throughout the entire game, you only get three upgrades for each weapon and piece of armor you get, with four types each. That's a whopping twelve weapons and twelve pieces of armor. Total. Remember in previous Final Fantasy games when you'd get tons and tons of different armors and weapons that made you stronger a little bit at a time? Yeah, you can forget about that. In addition, whenever you get a new piece of armor, you are automatically equipped with it. You also can't change it at any time. It's not a huge issue, as none of the upgrades are detrimental in any way, but it's still an annoyance. Also slightly annoying is that you can't sell old equipment you can't use anymore, only restorative and healing items, A.K.A. the stuff you shouldn't sell.
2. Default Configuration: Seriously, I have to complain about THIS? Geez. Anyway, some of the default options for the game are just plain awful. For starters, your health is automatically set to be displayed as a health meter with little bars that vanish as you get hurt, as opposed to numbers. You can change to a number display, which I did, but I actually found it HARDER to understand how hurt I was with this default setting. Also, your party members start off set to Auto Fight, which is a little jarring when you get into your first fight and don't understand why you can't control your party members. Again, this can be changed. So why bother complaining about them if they can be changed? Because these default settings just serve to remind me how stupid Square thought American players were.
3. Item Chests: On the opposite end of the game design spectrum regarding chests is the item boxes. Like I said earlier, they're found in little brown chests all over in dungeons, towns, and such, and they contain standard items like potions and other restorative items. The problem with these item chests is that they don't disappear upon opening. When you leave an area and come back, they are REFILLED AS IF YOU NEVER OPENED THEM. That means that in a half hour's time, you can have enough potions to last you half the game. So in essence, all the cheddar you earn from battles is virtually useless, as you'll never need to buy items from shops. There are a couple weapons and pieces of armor you can buy, but after that, you'll have thousands of GP(not Gil? Aww....), and nowhere to spend it except inns, I guess. Those also become obsolete quickly, as I'm about to explain. All of this boils down to the fact that now your only incentive for fighting enemies is the experience. And as I'm also about to explain, even THAT'S hardly worth it.
4. Length: This game is short for an RPG, especially a Final Fantasy game. It's a short stride through most dungeons, despite how nonlinear they are, and all in all it only lasts about 12-13 hours. I 100% completed it in 14:21, and I'm usually a bit slower at finishing games than most. And for such a short game, the lastability is almost nil. There's nothing drawing you back in to play it again, and there's no optional dungeons or bosses or anything.
5. Party Members: Or should I say, party MEMBER. You can only have one extra person in your party at a time, and your party member changes constantly throughout the course of the game. So if, say, your party member is petrified and you're hit with a doom spell on the same turn(which can and did happen to me near the end of the game), well, sucks to be you! Also, your ever-changing party member has one weapon, and one piece of armor of each type. And, you guessed it, you can't change them! So if, say, your party member only has a weapon that induces a status effect that a lot of monsters resist, and also has no good spells, well, sucks to be you! ALSO, two of them only have the Life spell, making them useless for anything other than reviving you and physically hitting things.
ALSO, your party members don't gain any experience from battles, meaning that if they die, your only incentive for reviving them is to speed the battle along and make sure they can heal you if necessary.
ALSO, almost every time you get a new party member, they're at a higher level than you, and ALWAYS have at least one stat that's higher than yours.
6. Plot: ................................................Oh, were you expecting me to say something here? Well, for 14+ hours, I was expecting the game to say something to ME about.......itself! You want the plot? Go back and read the introduction again. Done. The little nuggets of story the game shoves in are meaningless and add nothing at all to the experience. The only semi-relevant things that happen, aside from restoring the crystals, are jumbled plot points about a guy named Captain Mac, something about a Prophecy he was studying, and a Dark King. I stopped paying attention to anything anyone said unless they told me where to go or gave me something. None of the townspeople say anything even remotely relevant, the "surprise twists" at the end are bland and uninteresting/shocking, and there is ZERO CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT FOR ANY OF THE MAIN CHARACTERS. I bodaciously don't care about anyone in this game.
7. Overworld: Remember what the best part about playing an RPG is? It's the spirit of adventure! You can go almost anywhere, explore, take in the scenery, become immersed in the backstory behind the game! You know, what a "quest" SHOULD be like! Mystic Quest completely sucks the spirit of adventure out of its RPG gameplay. Whereas in most RPGs, you're allowed open-world exploration of your overworld, Mystic Quest forces you to go from place to place in stages, "like picking levels in Super Mario World or something", to quote ProJared. You can't even go to certain places until you finish doing what you need to do in the "stage" before it. Which means there are no regular battles, no exploration, and therefore no fun. I don't feel like I'm on an adventure, I feel like I'm out on a grocery run. Stop here, then here, then here, lastly here, then you're done. You can go home now. The only "freedom" you have is visiting Battlefields, which consist of ten random fights against set types of monsters. Completing the ten fights nets you mostly minor rewards, like more experience. And after that, you can't revisit them. All in all, they're not really that worthwhile.
8. Level Design and "Broken" Mechanics: First, let's talk planes. There are various areas in the game where you have to complete platforming puzzles by jumping across gaps, a new mechanic. Sounds easy, right? The problem is that the heights of various planes are so poorly conveyed, I can't tell whether something is above me or across. In one particular area, you have to move a block into a certain position in order to walk around and jump across it. The problem is, the level was so poorly rendered, I couldn't tell how far away the block actually was from me. I ended up having to leave the area and RESET THE ENTIRE PUZZLE because I put the block in a position I couldn't move it from and I couldn't jump across it. Next, status effects. Let me start off by saying I don't know if they're actually broken, but they sure as heck feel like it. You know how a lot of people jokingly(sometimes not) complain that the status effects in Pokemon never work for them, but almost always work for their opponent? That is bodaciously TRUE in this game. Enemies will ALMOST ALWAYS hit with their status inducing moves, but your attempts to induce status NEVER do, at least not that I'm aware of. To my knowledge, the game doesn't tell you when status affects an enemy, which I find odd considering it tells you when an enemy is weak or resistant to an attack. This inevitably leads to some extremely irritating fights. And the worst part is that your enemies will mercilessly spam status effects. Armor that protects against status is your saving grace.
9. Lack of Difficulty: Like I said before, this game was designed to be easy, and it definitely delivers in that aspect. In fact, Mystic Quest is insultingly easy. There are exactly zero challenging enemies or bosses, just annoying ones. The only times you'll die is when you get bullcrap luck with status effects or just plain old don't heal. No of the monsters do anything interesting, just gradually hit harder and use more annoying status effects. The same is true with the bosses. Their little gimmicks that make them only slightly tougher than regular enemies are easily overcome with little effort. The puzzles are a joke and really just pad out the game's length, and you'll never find yourself at a loss as to where to go next, since your supporting characters will kindly tell you, their only real purpose for being there at all. The spells are borderline pointless, save for bosses, and you can seriously win most fights by spamming the attack button until everyone on the other side dies, usually in two or three hits per enemy. Even the final boss is laughably easy, even without utilizing his weakness, which hits him for around 15,000 POINTS OF DAMAGE BY THE WAY. HE DIES IN THREE HITS THAT WAY. None of the items require any sort of challenge to obtain, just solving a small puzzle and fighting off waves of enemies to get to them. They're almost given to you. You can save anywhere you want, at any time outside of battle(actually, that's kind of nice), and best of all, when you die, you're allowed to restart at the beginning of the same fight with NO PENALTY. It's almost like the game was designed to be able to be won with no effort. No, I take it back, I'm pretty sure this game WAS designed to be able to be won with no effort.
In-Betweens:1. No Random Encounters: I hate this. I hate this so much, you don't even know. But some of you are probably crying tears of joy reading those words, so it goes in the In-Betweens. So yeah, no random encounters in this game. Enemies appear in dungeons as stationary field sprites. This allows you to skip innumerable boring battles and heal before reaching another enemy. The reason I hate this idea so much is because I actually LIKE random battles. Not knowing when the next monster shows up helps me keep myself prepared, and if I'm not ready, oh well! Being able to see where every enemy is caused me to get cocky, which equaled more than a couple deaths. Additionally, once you beat a group of enemies, they're gone until you leave the area.
2. Little Irritations: I put this here because as a hardcore Final Fantasy fan, there are a lot of things Mystic Quest did that gave me little twinges of irritation, which may not be the case for you. The game left me with questions like "Why is the first enemy you fight a Behemoth, typically an enemy reserved for near the end of the game?", "Why is there a single discolored Chocobo in this whole game?", "Why is the first spell I get Quake, typically a high-level spell, and not, I don't know, Fire or something?", and "Why the heck is there not a single Cid to be found in this game, despite there being a perfectly good character you meet who could have had that name?". These are the questions that keep me up at night.
Final Notes: Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest has a few good ideas sprinkled in with terrible design choices, stupidly easy gameplay, hand-holding out the wazoo, and lackluster storytelling. It serves its original purpose well, but it's a hassle to finish, and not something I would recommend except to the most naive of RPG newbies. Maybe. If I didn't particularly like the person. At the end of the day, Mystic Quest just doesn't feel like a Final Fantasy game, and certainly doesn't deliver on the spirit of adventure the series has become known for. Plus it's just not that fun.
So, that being said, Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest walks away with a score of....
5/10
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