A Great Entry For New Players

Happy whatever day you’re watching this everybody, you’re watching a From the Vault review from The Broken Controller Club, my name’s Ed and I’m your host. Just about every month I pick out a game from my personal collection of older titles to review and look back on. These titles are all notable to me for some reason or another and I like to put on my old man pants and talk about what those reasons are.

Today’s title is the first RPG that I ever played all the way through, and that is Square’s Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest, a spinoff to the mainline Final Fantasy games that came out on the SNES in 1992. Some of the top songs in 1992 were Creep from Radiohead, Rooster from Alice in Chains, and…Everybody Hurts by REM…(that’s only good in comedies), and Jimmy James from the Beastie Boys! That’s a hell of a lot better than Everybody Hurts.

A few big movies were Wayne’s World, Army of Darkness with the always amazing Bruce Campbell, and Encino Man with Brendan Frasier before he saved the world from mummies or made us cry on Scrubs, a Sean Astin that hadn’t saved middle-earth from Sauron yet, and a Pauly Shore that was just about to explode in popularity and then go the way of Dane Cook and be hated by the planet soon after.

So what’s the big deal with Mystic Quest? Well other than being a Final Fantasy title, throughout the years this game had been pooped on a bit by reviewers and fans because it was the easiest of all the final fantasy titles at that point. Where the other games had told these stories of epic quests with worlds ending, villains becoming gods and good guys travelling to the far reaches of the planet or even the moon to save the day, this game was a more focused adventure that was really just about a chosen one getting the world’s crystals back and defeating the big bad to put the world right again.

This was advertised and developed as an entry-level rpg and to this day, if you want something easy to jump into or maybe you have a younger kid that wants to get into RPGs but you don’t want to discourage them with something huge and complicated and intimidating, then this is a great game to start them on. Most of the changes in the game were really just for ease of life. For starters, there were no save points and you could just save wherever you wanted. If your party wiped in battle, it asks you if you’re giving up. Say “no” and the fight starts over. This is especially useful because ironically, while the game is pretty easy, I did die fighting the very first enemy in it because they got a lucky hit in before I could kill them. That was in the opening 5 minutes and I personally thought that was hilarious.

On top of all that, you’ve got the added convenience of chests carrying consumables that reset whenever you leave a town or dungeon. This is meant to be cheesed because you don’t get a lot of gold from killing enemies and there’s no shops in the game. Coincidentally every town looks like it has maybe a half dozen people living in it. So basically you find a spot where you can quickly get to a chest of potions or bombs or whatever, get them, then leave and come back. You’ll be at 99 in 5-10 minutes.

There’s also no random battles in the game and you can see every enemy before fighting them, letting you prepare beforehand or even plot out a different path if you’re trying to avoid enemies. They also won’t return until you leave the area you’re in, so if you’re in a dungeon and don’t have the Exit spell yet, it’s not so bad to have to walk back to the entrance since you probably won’t have to fight anything unless you really want to. The battles themselves are lightning fast and unless you end up missing attacks or get hit with status ailments, they won’t last longer than a minute at most.

The cool thing about combat in this is that the more you damage enemies, they’ll eventually start showing damage or they’ll change how they look completely before dying.

Where other Final Fantasy titles took an open world approach to their adventures, this one takes a linear approach and you’re only allowed to go to points of interest like towns or dungeons. There’s also these battlefields that let you fight 10 sets of enemies at your own pace, and they dole out rewards in the form of xp, gold, or a special item. The world is split into 4 major zones, each representing a different crystals. Each one has some problem when you first enter them and freeing the crystal from the boss changes everything back to normal and opens up the next area. You’ve got your basic forest zone, ice zone, fire, and wind, and they’re all attached by a tower in the middle called the Focus Tower, that acts as a hub between them all.

Being that this is a smaller adventure, your party is also smaller in size and has dropped down to just 2 characters. Your partners will change frequently throughout the game but are a nice boost as they can usually one-shot any non-boss enemies they attack. You can also set them to auto and they’ll just do their own thing. Other than occasionally wasting potions they’re mostly competent and you’ll team up with a ninja, an archer/mage combo, and more. There’s very little fanfare in when they join or leave and it usually amounts to someone saying they need help, then they just decide to join. When they’re done they say something like “whelp, I’m out!” and then you’re back to being by yourself until the next person joins, which is always soon after.

The weapons are also a departure as there just aren’t many that you’ll find. You’ll usually either pick them up in chests, they’ll be given to you as a story event, or you’ll buy them off townspeople in their homes who will just offer them to you. Hypothetically speaking of course, if I had several weapons in my home, you can bet I wouldn’t just randomly sell one to anybody who’d walk through the front door of my house.

Anyway, all the new gear you get replaces what you were just using, so while it’s a little bit lame that you’re not actively choosing to equip anything and really feel like you own it, it all fits into this streamlined path Square took with the game. Also you can use the weapons in real time in order to complete puzzles, like for example the axe chops down trees in the forest and the claws let you climb special walls, and eventually you get a sweet dragon claw that works like the hookshot in Zelda.

The enemy variety is pretty fun, even if they do the usual and eventually just add in palette swapped enemies that are more difficult. But you’ll fight everything from mermen to ninjas, birds, medusas, and more. The cool thing about combat in this is that the more you damage enemies, they’ll eventually start showing damage or they’ll change how they look completely before dying. So like with some of the birds, you’ll damage them enough that they’ll lose all their feathers, or there’s an ice boss that’ll start melting, things like that.

The enemies themselves are easy, though later in the game most of them inflict some sort of status ailment like blindness or confusion, and that really seems to be the only way your party can wipe because you’ll never come across enemies with a high enough attack stat to cause you any real harm. It’s more likely they’ll turn your party to stone or inflict confusion and you’ll end up wiping yourself out instead. Bosses are usually challenging and have a few tricks up their sleeves, and as I said a second ago all the different physical changes they take make the fights more interesting. One last change I wanted point out is that by default your health is represented by a life bar, but you can change that to the classic numerical value. That way it’s a little less shocking when you take a hit and it looks like you just lost all your health.

So back when it was released and even today, I think the game is underrated and the bad reputation isn’t deserved. Not because people didn’t understand it, but because they chose to ignore the purpose of the game and instead whine that it wasn’t for them. Kotaku said it was the “worst Final Fantasy”, which is ironic considering on any given day they’re the worst gaming website and circus monkeys with half their brains removed could do their jobs. Also apparently they never played Final Fantasy XIII.

IGN said the game was repetitive, which, yes, but also, doing the same thing repeatedly is a trait of RPGs, and they also said that veterans will be bored with it and that there’s no exploration. So again, they’re ignoring the fact that this is not a game for veterans but for new players and while yes, the exploration is basically limited to a few different paths in each of the dungeons, it all fits within this streamlined approach of the game. Like it or not, the whole experience is consistent.

So I admit, there’s not a ton of meat to the game and you can clear it in under 20 hours. I still think the good outweighs the bad, though. It’s easily accessible for newcomers, the graphics and music are good and while it’s definitely not as ambitious or deep as other Final Fantasy titles at the time or even before that, it was great for someone like me who as a kid didn’t have a lot of money to buy games with or a lot of friends who played RPGs enough to show me the ropes on other titles, and it was a fun entry into RPGs and prepared me for harder titles, like the first Final Fantasy on NES that I picked up used soon after that. I also know of other parents who played this with their younger kids and they had good time, and I think that has to count for something.