Final Fantasy Mystic Quest was made with love. Not the “I want you to be happy” kind but the “Aw shit, I’m not sure if the kids still believes in Santa Clause, so on Christmas Eve let’s play recordings of some fat man saying ‘Ho, ho, ho’ so they will believe” kind. The end result isn’t as shitty as people may have led you to believe.
Mystic Quest’s biggest alleged “flaw” is that it is too easy. Surprisingly, I’ve died. Several times, too! My first few deaths were from me underestimating the power of the enemies. Later, it was just cruel fate. The enemies in this game love to throw out status effects. In fact, many of the undead enemies will counterattack with a move that confuses you. Since after dying you are allowed to restart from the beginning of the battle, it seems the developers allowed the enemies go all out in trying to screw you over.
That’s not to say the game isn’t heavily sided towards the player. Baring boss fights, I’ve always been able to run. Having your partner on auto allows them to be fairly smart about which moves to use. Hell, half the time you’ll figure out enemy weaknesses due to your partners’ attacks. But remember when I said “fairly smart”? Well, since they have a rough idea of what the best attack is, if that attack is magic, they’ll burn through their MP faster than crack at a crack party where there’s not much. Crack, that is. Er…anyway, this again becomes moot about halfway through the game where you can buy items that fully replenish a character’s MP for very little cash money.
Overall, it’s not really that bad of a game. Pretty damn easy, but you can’t go without paying attention either. My main reason for playing was the rumor that you could whack the final boss with one casting of the Life spell. I couldn’t get that to work. Tried several times but the damn spell just kept doing nothing. Pissed me off!
At least the game was more enjoyable than FF12.
Want more challenge, try beating that ice palace without getting the shades or mirror or whatever. It helps you to remember just how annoying random encounters are.
Another thing that makes the game harder is to buy items one at a time. You know, like if the only RPG you ever really played before was FF1 and you didn’t realize that you can use the shoulder buttons to increase the item quantities before buying. Not that I know that from experience or anything…
Also, what I remember most from that game is the weird arenas or whatever where you go to grind (that’s how the cool kids say “level” these days, right?). It was laid out like a map from Mario 3, but all the levels were just boring not-so-random encounters.
You know, scratch that. The thing I remember most about that game is being able to jump over NPCs in towns. That was awesome!
Life and Cure does work on the final boss. However, Life may fail sometimes and if I remember correctly, Cure can sometimes even give health back to the final boss thus rendering the damage you did to it prior null. This is the case for zombies, skeletons and other undead as well, which is why it works on the last boss since he’s an undead enemy.
And of course obviously use the strongest Cure spell you have (Cure3 if I remember correctly). Those little angel things are so adorable.
Random question: I know you are using wordpress for this blog, but have you tried any other platforms. I am trying to decide for my blog? and I ask because I like yours.