Let's Play MYSTIC QUEST - now with a complete second chapter

HELLO! Welcome to the Let's Play of Mystiq Quest, the grandest of SNES RPGs. Mystic Quest was released in 1992, in north america only. I think it was because Squaresoft considered westerners too stupid for their complex japanese Final Fantasy games and decided to go light on us, by pretty much making a Final Fantasy game but with fewer characters and a Zelda-like gameplay. It was marketed as an RPG for beginners and came with a strategy guide. No doubt, many who played Mystic Quest later moved on to such games as Planescape: Torment and Fallout!

Oh, and this game is bad. Really bad. But kind of fun! According to Wikipedia,

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest is widely regarded as the black sheep of the franchise.

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, and considering its competition for that title (http://www.publiblanes.net/Fondos/Juego ... asy_x2.jpg) that really is a pretty impressive accomplishment.


So anyway, we start out by seeing the TITLE SCREEN:

Oh, and those crystals are all happily bouncing around, BTW. Adding to the epic feel of the game, no doubt!

Then we go on with naming our protagonist:



CHAPTER ONE: THE MOUNTAIN ENCOUNTER!!!!!!!



So, uh, Cloud starts out on top of some kind of... mountain? The ground is shaking, and everything is terribly confusing. A weird old man is floating on what might be a small cloud or a very large fuzzy ball of his pubic hair not far from us. Let's see if he knows what's going on.



OLD MAN: This place is going to sink any second! Let's climb up quick!

The old guy floats away on his cloud/pubic hair collection and we swiftly follow!

OH NO! How could Cloud possibly pass beyond this deep chasm?









INTENSE!

Cloud follows the old man further up the mountain.



OLD GUY: Look over there. That's the focus tower, once the heart of the world. An old prophecy says, "The vile 4 will steal the power, and divide the world between 4 doors. At that time the knight will appear!" The prophecy has now come true. 4 (since this is a beginner's RPG, they wanted to decrease the amount of difficult letters by writing numbers instead whenever they could) monsters have locked the doors of the focus tower and escaped with the keys. They're draining the light from the 4 crystals of the Earth, and the world is in chaos. The people are in desperate need of help. Cloud. only you can save the crystals and the world.

CLOUD: Me?

Cloud is overwhelmed by something... a sense of purpose.
I guess.

But SUDDENLY, out of NOWHERE


A MONSTER APPEARS



Will Cloud's heroic destiny be smothered in its cradle by the terrible BEHEMOTH? How will he go about to unlock the doors of the FOCUS TOWER? Who are the 4 EVILS? How did the old guy know what the B-BUTTON was? Stay tuned, for more... MYSTIC QUEST

Re: Let's Play MYSTIC QUEST - now with working images!

Radisshu said:

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I remember that very screen in a promotional article for RPG's in an old gaming magazine.

I was thrilled.

CHAPTER 1 B: Uhh


So yeah, uh, the battle system in Mystic Quest is pretty much like the other Final Fantasies. The difference is that instead of random encounters you first see the enemies on screen, walk into them, and start the battle.

At first, you can choose between BATTLE, RUN, and CONTROL. Run makes you try to escape, and CONTROL is some shit I never bothered to try out. BATTLE opens these commands:



ATTACK makes you ATTACK, SPELL opens the spell menu, and ITEM opens the ITEM menu. DEFENSE makes you slightly more defensive for a round, but you can't take any action either. Like I said, it's like most of the final fantasies, but stripped down.


Since our hero hasn't got any spells or items, I choose to ATTACK


BUT OH NO, the BEHEMOTH strikes first! How will our hero survive the attack of this BEAST?!



Okay, so this Behemoth is pretty pathetic. He dishes out about 6 points of damage with each attack, while the (level 1) hero does about 20. The battles goes on:





Victory, yay.





This is why I called the character Cloud. At every attempt at humour this game does, he'll do that goddamn shrug. Or whatever it's supposed to look like. Oh HAH-HAH this game is even funnier than that Dominic Deegan comic I've heard so much about!

CLOUD: Forget it, just tell me where I can find the crystals.
OLD GUY: It's up to you to find them!
(rumbling)
OLD GUY: This place is becoming dangerous! Follow me to the Level Forest!

THE LEVEL FOREST,
it's got a pretty crappy name

The old man vanishes, and the rumbling continues.

CLOUD: Got to get out of here.


To do that, Cloud shapeshifts into giant form and carelessly strolls away as the mountain collapses.

The level forest: a forest level. IN THE NEXT UPDATE. Oh my god.

I imagine your commentary is very amusing and witty, but... but I cannot bear looking at these screenshots. They give me a strange, mild nausea--as if catching the fragment of a glimpse of a Lovecraftian horror--and a nascent headache (even though I'm used to anime). The writing--well, I thought FF7's localization was pretty bad.

Why is it that all JRPGs got that really horrible combat?

Lesifoere said:

I imagine your commentary is very amusing and witty, but... but I cannot bear looking at these screenshots. They give me a strange, mild nausea--as if catching the fragment of a glimpse of a Lovecraftian horror--and a nascent headache (even though I'm used to anime). The writing--well, I thought FF7's localization was pretty bad.

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What's worse is that I think this game was written by native english speakers. It was made for the US, anyway, and was only released in japan a while later as a Squaresoft USA product.

No offense to japs, but sometimes I wish there were many, many more a-bombs in 1945. Enough to ensure no computer game would ever come out of that country. Yes, I am willing to sacrifice my beloved Celtic Tales and the rest of KOEI cult games as collaterial damage. A small price to pay for the chance the JPGs would never, ever exist.

I finished this game a few years ago. While it is certainly one of the worst games in the series, I found it much more bearable to play through than FF8 or FFX.

JarlFrank said:

Why is it that all JRPGs got that really horrible combat?

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Funny considering there are more jRPGs with better battle systems than western RPGs. Nitpick the cliches, translation issues, characters, etc. all day, but generalizing the combat for all games in the genre is silly. Mystic Quest is hardly a prime example of a jRPG, let alone a game period.

there are also like 20 million jrpg's coming out every week compared to the... zero crpg's coming out. ever. obiously thru sheer advantage in numbers you will find more jrpg's with better battle systems.

aweigh said:

there are also like 20 million jrpg's coming out every week compared to the... zero crpg's coming out. ever. obiously thru sheer advantage in numbers you will find more jrpg's with better battle systems.

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Yet my point still stands. We get a million Diablo clones with click and watch combat, so there's no excuse in numbers. Hell, it seems like the only combat system ever pimped around here is from ToEE or Fallout 1/2 anyway.

Sorry -- I'll take Tales of..., Star Ocean, Valkyrie Profile, Suikoden or countless other jRPG battle systems over the boring and repetitive shit we're tossed.

now you're talking about something else entirely.

OOh nice, I remember this game! I got it for Christmas when it came out. Some of those old SNES JRPGs weren't so bad, although I prefer FF2 and FF3 (american ones) to this one, it was still decent.

Keep it up.

aweigh said:

now you're talking about something else entirely.

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?

What's up with all the colours? Why do all of them look like puke? Eww! :shock:

YOu didn't mention the rocking battle tune!

* Cue cheesy electro-synth distorted guitar with no place in a fantasy RPG! *

jun jun jun jun

Strangelove said:

What's up with all the colours? Why do all of them look like puke? Eww! :shock:

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Welcome to the era of 16bit color. Fucking crazy eh? Yes, it is quite fucking crazy. You spoiled bratz these days. All you know is your 32bit+ color schemes, as if bigger was better. Or are you gay?

I bought Mystic Quest because I was a huge Final Fantasy fan and the advertizement on the back of a Venom comic book said it cost $29.99. Well shit! Even as a 2nd grader I had 30 bucks, and so it was mine. And even though it was really easy, I still enjoyed it. I used to have an active imagination and the tedious battles became interesting as I acted out the attacks, locked alone in my bedroom.

That's a pretty intense looking first monster. Haven't they heard of rats?

Xi said:

Strangelove said:

What's up with all the colours? Why do all of them look like puke? Eww! :shock:

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Welcome to the era of 16bit color. Fucking crazy eh? Yes, it is quite fucking crazy. You spoiled bratz these days. All you know is your 32bit+ color schemes, as if bigger was better. Or are you gay?

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But even for a SNES game, those colours are horrible

Don't know what Xi is going on about or if he was remotely serious, but Mystic Quest looked like a Gameboy color game ported to SNES. The color palette was terrible, everything was very drab and ugly in it. One of the most ugly jRPGs on SNES, just look at Star Ocean or Chrono Trigger to see what the SNES was capable of in that area.

I've been trying to play FF12 and it's staggeringly bad. And it's not at all from dumbing things down, so I'm actually having a little metafun noticing everything that's wrong.

FFXII is one of the few mainstream jRPGs to actually be generally loathed on even Gamefaqs.

Bad reviews

Strangelove said:

But even for a SNES game, those colours are horrible

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Seems like the devs decided on bland 8 bit coloring for the game eh? Yeah, for an SNES game, they do look shite. Point taken!

What the fuck, I liked FFXII. More than X, anyway.

But who cares, it's time for

CHAPTER 2 A: EXPLORING THE FOREST




So we return to our hero, who finds himself in the spooky and weirdly named LEVEL FOREST. The old man seems to be there as well.



OLD GUY: Before we continue... Radisshu, is it?

Uh, what?

OLD GUY: I'd be delighted if you'd refer to me as OLD MAN rather than OLD GUY.

Really? Okay, if it's that important.

OLD MAN: Oh it is. Anyway...



OLD MAN: Save the crystal of the earth. See you! (dissappears)



Our heroic hero decides to talk to the second old guy standing around, hoping he's not some kind of evil forest gnome!



Sure!



He also tells us to give Kaeli an old twig he's carrying around for her to help us, but I forgot to take a screenshot. And by the way, Foresta? What the fuck, Square? When I was about thirteen I started making an RPG Maker 2000 game where a port town was called Watera, but I was a stupid thirteen year old making AN RPG MAKER 2000 GAME that only I was meant to play, and I'm sure that game was on the same level or BETTER THAN Mystic Quest.

Anyway, Foresta...

Yeah, on the Wikipedia Mystic Quest site, someone claims that "Mystic Quest features a unique world map!" It doesn't; it features the Super Mario 3 world map!



It's all about unlocking areas by performing certain tasks. The only direction I can move in right now is to the east, as marked by the yellow arrow. The grey arrow indicates that there is an area to the north, but I can't go there yet! It's locked! If I detonate the unexploded nuke Foresta was built around, however, it might become unlocked. Who knows. ANYWAY, ON TO FORESTA!




Well this place looks like crap. I really think Level Forest should just be called Brown-Beige Forest and Foresta could be called Brown-Beige Forest City, since they use the same fucking tileset for both areas. I wonder how big a budget this game had, and I wonder how much it brought in? There really are freeware jRPGs made by lonely internet people that beats this game in terms of both length and quality. And they're not usually that good, or long.

The hero starts exploring the town and socialising with the locals.



But he quickly decides to go straight to Kaeli, for some reason.



KAELI: There's a tree blocking the north exit of the Level Forest. I can chop down the tree, but monsters have taken over the forest, and I can't get to it.

CLOUD: I can help you with that! Come on, let's go!

KAELI'S MOM(?): Don't you dare take Aeri.. Kaeli anywhere dangerous!

KAELI: Listen, mom... (quickly changing the subject!) HEY! That tree wither looks awful! (that's the twig the forest gnome wanted us to bring her) How much the trees must be suffering! Okay, you win.

I thought we were trying to persuade her mother and she wanted to go with us all along? Oh well.



AND THE HEROES ARE OFF TO FACE TEH FOREST ONCE AGAIN! Hopefully they don't go brown-beige blind on their way. I will post the next part of this shit shortly.

CHAPTER 2 B: MARK OF THE BULL, SECRET OF THE EVIL TREE! INTO COMBAT POSITIONS, HERO! CLOUD KICKS ASS!

Before we leave for the level forest, let's do some more exploring!




Our first spell! Yeah, Mystic Quest is EXTREMELY simplified, even compared to early FF games. Inns cost nothing, so you're just free to walk into a bed, get fully restored, and watch the hero leap out of the bed and pose for a bit. There are no stores, weapons are awarded through plot developments only (though they do have effects out side of combat) and everything is really simple.

Oh, I also collected some healing potions from various chests in town, but who cares. THE BRAVE HEROES JOURNEY OUT OF FORESTA!


... where Kaeli chops down a few trees standing in our way with our axe, so that we now can go to the EVIL tree by the north exit. I guess that is what makes Kaeli special enough to be a party member, she happens to be the only villager of the forest city made entirely of trees that owns an axe.

Anyway, we walk around a bit, kill some monsters, find some chests, level up.




Until finally we stand before the EVIL TREE! Which turns into a MINOTAUR as soon as Kaeli tries to chop it down.



KAELI: He poisoned.. Me... Just as he did.. To the trees...

Flashback:


One of those precious "I told you so" moments.

Anyway, we fight the minotaur (the poison has no effect on Kaeli during the battle, strangely) and ultimately kill it.



For some reason, Kaeli's mom shows up.



KAELI: I'll be okay as soon as I take Elixir...
KAELI'S MOM: That's in the Sand Temple.
CLOUD: Don't worry, I'll get it.
KAELI: Then take this Axe with you...



CLOUD: I'll be back.

These writers are so great. Oh, hey, that's the end of this chapter. UNTIL NEXT TIME...