Mention this game to any Final Fantasy fan and you will have two possible reactions out of them. The first they will convulse, foam at the mouth and possibly have a seizure and then you run away from them cause nobody wants to see that. The other is that they will go to a violent rage and start attacking you and then you run away cause you like your face just the way it is. But after they do whatever it is they were doing they will spout out various reasons for why this game sucks: "It's short!", "It's easy!", "We didn't get Final Fantasy V because of this!" and/or "It's so cliched!"
And yes, each of those criticisms are true...well not the Final Fantasy V one, why we didn't get FFV has nothing to do with Mystic Quest. I don't know the specifics but I know it's not Mystic Quest's fault. But it is short, it is easy and it is cliched but it is a little fun. Also, this was made for kids and RPG newbies who never played RPG's or were previous scared of them so it was intentionally made easy.
So the story is simple, really simple. You're this guy in this world that's falling apart from people suddenly becoming old people, everything being frozen, multiple earthquakes and being extremely windy because monsters took the crystals that support the world. So you have to find them, kill them and take back the crystals with the help of some guys that help you when they're not busy being injured or just plain not busy & this flying old person.
So basically this does sound boring cause you're friends are injury-prone flakes and it's a standard save the world story but there are some clever moments. The cleverest moments comes from the very beginning when you first meet the flying old guy who says you're the guy from this prophecy(yeah there's a prophecy but you should know that, it's that kind of game). Almost immediately you fight some monster and you kill it, then the old guy says he's now sure your the guy from prophecy because he was just guessing before. Then he flies away as you shrug cause your inferior mind doesn't comprehend it and anything else he says in the rest of the game, besides his last line but you've beaten the game by then so who cares.
The other really clever moment is in the music. One of your flakes, I mean party members, has his own theme music and it plays when he's about to come in, so you're looking for where the hell the music's coming from. And then the guy comes in. Speaking of the music, people kind of forget that the music's pretty good in this. Of course it's short before it loops and there's no real logical themes in the game but they are catchy. And there's also really complex....I mean it's not prog-rock but there are many synth-instruments in there like guitars, horns drums and real keyboard synths.
The gameplay may not be as deep as a real Final Fantasy game but it's not meant to be, it also improves some of it. For one thing, there are no random encounters in here at all, every enemy is on the map or part of a battlefield. Now some people hate this, some people, ie me, love this kind of system but this is one of the first to do so, so you have to give it credit. Another thing is that during the battles you fight them and you literally see them decay as you weaken them. Why doesn't any other RPG games use this? We finally have the secret to determine an enemy's strength by looks alone and very few games capitalize on it....sigh, I bet this game's negative reputation had a factor on this...sigh.
So if you think of the Final Fantasy(including the spin-offs and what not) games as Arnold Schwarzenegger movies this is more like Commando. It may be stupid and you could do better but a lot of things do die and every so often there's something clever in it. This is something you know is bad for you but you can't stop playing until you beat the game and the music is awesome in this, like in Commando. Just know what you're getting into when you plug it in, that's all.
6/10
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