Final Fantasy Mystic Quest

It's no secret that I absolutely love the Final Fantasy series. I've been playing these RPGs as long as I've been playing video games at all (close to twenty years now) and I can safely say that there are four or five different Final Fantasy titles that I've considered at one point or another to be my favorite game of all time. This is the fifteenth installment in the franchise that I've beaten, and the sixteenth if you count Final Fantasy IV and its DS remake as two separate games. Unfortunately, there wasn't always a wealth of these games at my disposal. In fact, prior to the release of Final Fantasy VII, the game that would push RPGs to mainstream status in America and entrench the franchise's place in gaming history, there were only four console Final Fantasy games in the Western Hemisphere. There were the first, fourth, and sixth numbered games from the franchise, and there was also this little peculiarity, a game most fans of the series have tried to ignore or forget about over the years: Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.

Mystic Quest was designed to be a "beginner RPG," a game that could attract American gamers who enjoyed stuff like Zelda and Castlevania by combining action-adventure elements with standard RPG aspects like turn-based battles, leveling up, and saving the world by means of reclaiming four stolen crystals. The idea was to get American gamers ore interested in RPGs so that they'd turn out to buy other RPGs from Japan. Unfortunately, it didn't work out so well, largely because Mystic Quest is a pretty terrible game. There's nothing inherently wrong or broken about it, but it's just the most generic and vanilla RPG I've played all the way through. The story is horribly basic, the characters completely forgettable, and any sense of customization or exploration that you normally get from an RPG was kept out here in favor of a much more straightforward path. And damn, this game was simple. Your party size is limited to two people maximum and your second party member can be set to auto-pilot. You can't equip weapons or armor. There are no random encounters. There are no intriguing plot twists. You just kind of get pushed back and forth by the flow of a straightforward story without any chance for optional side quests or additional exploration. I was fortunate enough to play this on an emulator on my Mac, with the gameplay set to five-times normal speed. I managed to bang it out in five hours or so real time; I don't know how patient I would have been if it had taken me twenty-five. As a kid, when renting the game from Blockbuster, I never noticed its flaws. I mean, I never loved it like I did the other games in the series, but it's not like I actively noticed everything wrong with it. With a more seasoned eye, that's no longer the case. It now makes sense to me that this game was a flop. It may be simplistic, and it may work well as a "beginner RPG," but that isn't really a selling point. In fact, given the complete lack of memorable characters or interesting plotting - two things that, when included and done right, are the RPG genre's biggest strengths - I wouldn't be shocked if someone tried this game out and then saw no reason to play other real RPGs as a result. When Final Fantasy did finally catch on in America, it was because of the sixth and seventh games being released in the states with minimal gameplay alterations from their Japanese forms; lo and behold, it turned out that if you release a great game in America, people were going to play that great game, regardless of whether or not they played that shitty "training wheels" game you released in 1992. I'm glad I went back and played this old game from my childhood, but it's nothing you're missing out on by avoiding altogether.