Mystic Quest isn't just plain boring. From a design viewpoint, it's downright amateurish. A game made for RPG beginners wasn't the problem in itself, I mean, Paper Mario pulled it off and I love those games. Where Mystic Quest really falters is the belief that gameplay depth was what made their mainline Final Fantasies unapproachable. I hold the more likely belief that the original FF1 came out as a bug-ridden, sluggish, unbalanced, grind-heavy mess with a severe lack of QoL, and that's what turned some people off from it. FF4 comes out and people like it, because in spite of that game streamlining many elements of the series and making things more linear for it, that kind of thing can only "get you" into a game. Whether it'll retain your attention for the rest of it is another matter, FF4 made up for that through its more involved storyline, and a combat system that remained complex and varied enough to encourage experimentation, and pressuring you to think on your feet.
In contrast, Mystic Quest's simplicity is capable of getting you into it, but that's it. As the dungeons start ramping up the amount of enemies, the game wears down your patience through the same repetitious button-mashing tactics against the exact same formation of enemies, tossed at you some 70-90 times. Most RPG's are like this to be fair, but if you like the genre, you don't have this visceral realization that the game is wasting your time with battles, the point for them is to be relaxing and always leading you towards a dropped item, or a new level up. But in Mystic Quest, the balance is all sorts of unsatisfying. Level ups take agonizingly long to obtain after a while, enemies don't drop shit, and even as you level up or obtain stronger armor and weapons, the difference is negligible in practice, with often a scant few points of additional damage to an enemy, but always, and I mean ALWAYS, the same amount of turns required to defeat them.
Your main character is always weak, your partner is always stronger. Your partner will always take everything down in one hit, you will always take them out in two. Even as you get the Excalibur, which is often the ultimate weapon in a Final Fantasy game, taking it out for a test reveals that it still takes the exact same amount of turns to defeat an enemy. Not even the Excalibur is capable of making a dent in this game's infuriatingly perfect balance, where you're only as powerful as the game wants you to be at that moment, and it always wants you to be at the exact amount of power that you've started the adventure on. In a way, everything is intended in most video games. But Mystic Quest does the poorest job at hiding it, making it clear to you that the fun of this game is dictated, and never in your control.
Considering that there are no random encounters, the game gives you a choice of which enemies you want to engage with. That's assuming they're not blocking your way, of course. But, since I fought every single one and thus fought way more enemies than I'd like to have, there was a question roaming through my mind. "Am I playing this wrong? Should I be trying to avoid as many enemies as I can?" I could never figure out the answer to these questions. You have more than enough resources to take all of them on without getting anywhere close to running dry, so the game wasn't incentivizing me to be careful with what I fight. On the other hand, even as I fought and amassed as much EXP as I could throughout the game, enemies and bosses are still capable of hitting you real hard. Which makes me wonder what it would be like if I did dodge a handful of level ups. How much harder would the game be then?
One way or the other, it has to be stressed that even at a high level, the difficulty of this game is some bullshit. Enemies just love to spam status effects, stuff like Stone, Paralysis, Sleep, Confusion... Combine the sheer frequency of these things with there only being two characters you can bring into battle, and enemies are extremely likely to instantly evaporate you. There are no buffs to protect yourself or anything, all it takes is one unlucky turn where at least two enemies choose to inflict a status effect on you, and you're done. And this will happen FAR more often than you'd think.
Dying's not such a big deal though, since the game allows you to restart from the last fight you died in without any hassle, plus, you can save anywhere, even in dungeons. That's nice, at least. But y'know, think about that for a sec. Think about how without these two features, the experience at hand would be very, very different. Imagine only being able to save in certain spots, and then you get 30 minutes into a dungeon and suddenly, an enemy inflicts Stone on you. You're dead, start over. This is the kind of balance we're talking about here. Built-in save states are the only thing that turn Mystic Quest from an unplayable garbage pile to a mindless bore with zero stakes. Strategy is irrelevant, your only option is to keep trying until you stop dying. Like a paradox, it is simultaneously way too easy, and yet one step away from being impossible.
Coming from the team that made Final Fantasy Legend III, while that game was far from a worthwhile playthrough, I'm stupified by this being what they followed things up with. No depth in the gameplay, no ambition in the story, a game whose entire purpose is to dumb itself down to an audience that wasn't going to play it. Truly, the more I think about the decisions made around this game, the worse it gets in my eyes. It does get at least one bonus star for the soundtrack, though, if there's anything you'll hear about this game, it's that. Take a listen to it. Enjoy it. Then move on to your next RPG.
In contrast, Mystic Quest's simplicity is capable of getting you into it, but that's it. As the dungeons start ramping up the amount of enemies, the game wears down your patience through the same repetitious button-mashing tactics against the exact same formation of enemies, tossed at you some 70-90 times. Most RPG's are like this to be fair, but if you like the genre, you don't have this visceral realization that the game is wasting your time with battles, the point for them is to be relaxing and always leading you towards a dropped item, or a new level up. But in Mystic Quest, the balance is all sorts of unsatisfying. Level ups take agonizingly long to obtain after a while, enemies don't drop shit, and even as you level up or obtain stronger armor and weapons, the difference is negligible in practice, with often a scant few points of additional damage to an enemy, but always, and I mean ALWAYS, the same amount of turns required to defeat them.
Your main character is always weak, your partner is always stronger. Your partner will always take everything down in one hit, you will always take them out in two. Even as you get the Excalibur, which is often the ultimate weapon in a Final Fantasy game, taking it out for a test reveals that it still takes the exact same amount of turns to defeat an enemy. Not even the Excalibur is capable of making a dent in this game's infuriatingly perfect balance, where you're only as powerful as the game wants you to be at that moment, and it always wants you to be at the exact amount of power that you've started the adventure on. In a way, everything is intended in most video games. But Mystic Quest does the poorest job at hiding it, making it clear to you that the fun of this game is dictated, and never in your control.
Considering that there are no random encounters, the game gives you a choice of which enemies you want to engage with. That's assuming they're not blocking your way, of course. But, since I fought every single one and thus fought way more enemies than I'd like to have, there was a question roaming through my mind. "Am I playing this wrong? Should I be trying to avoid as many enemies as I can?" I could never figure out the answer to these questions. You have more than enough resources to take all of them on without getting anywhere close to running dry, so the game wasn't incentivizing me to be careful with what I fight. On the other hand, even as I fought and amassed as much EXP as I could throughout the game, enemies and bosses are still capable of hitting you real hard. Which makes me wonder what it would be like if I did dodge a handful of level ups. How much harder would the game be then?
One way or the other, it has to be stressed that even at a high level, the difficulty of this game is some bullshit. Enemies just love to spam status effects, stuff like Stone, Paralysis, Sleep, Confusion... Combine the sheer frequency of these things with there only being two characters you can bring into battle, and enemies are extremely likely to instantly evaporate you. There are no buffs to protect yourself or anything, all it takes is one unlucky turn where at least two enemies choose to inflict a status effect on you, and you're done. And this will happen FAR more often than you'd think.
Dying's not such a big deal though, since the game allows you to restart from the last fight you died in without any hassle, plus, you can save anywhere, even in dungeons. That's nice, at least. But y'know, think about that for a sec. Think about how without these two features, the experience at hand would be very, very different. Imagine only being able to save in certain spots, and then you get 30 minutes into a dungeon and suddenly, an enemy inflicts Stone on you. You're dead, start over. This is the kind of balance we're talking about here. Built-in save states are the only thing that turn Mystic Quest from an unplayable garbage pile to a mindless bore with zero stakes. Strategy is irrelevant, your only option is to keep trying until you stop dying. Like a paradox, it is simultaneously way too easy, and yet one step away from being impossible.
Coming from the team that made Final Fantasy Legend III, while that game was far from a worthwhile playthrough, I'm stupified by this being what they followed things up with. No depth in the gameplay, no ambition in the story, a game whose entire purpose is to dumb itself down to an audience that wasn't going to play it. Truly, the more I think about the decisions made around this game, the worse it gets in my eyes. It does get at least one bonus star for the soundtrack, though, if there's anything you'll hear about this game, it's that. Take a listen to it. Enjoy it. Then move on to your next RPG.
2 Comments
Thank you for reading the review!! I do agree that the dungeon design wasn't too bad, the lack of random encounters meant that they could make things more puzzly without enemies getting in your way to make it annoying. Comparing it to Zelda though (which is where I think it got its influence from), I do still think there's not a lot of depth in this aspect of the game, as most of the time, I didn't need to think a whole lot about how to progress. The design mostly came down to it incorporating fancier ways to walk across tiles, so instead of walking, you're climbing a wall now, or hookshotting across a gap. It's nice as a bit of visual variety, but in a way, you're still walking through a mostly linear cave at the end of the day, engaging in more enemies than the maximum lifespan of a human.
iyellatcloud
6 months ago