"One to be born from a dragon..." -- Let's Play Final Fantasy II

Not to be a buzzkill, but are we going to circlejerk about how much we all hate Mystic Quest the same way we did with FF2 in Brick's last thread?

But I love me some Mystic Quest. It surprises me that it gets such a bad rap as it does even still.

- Eddie

yeah you fuckers can shut-up about Mystic Quest.

Probably not, because at least Mystic Quest has a few good things going for it.

Hey guys you want to know something funny about Square's reputed contempt for American gamers back in the day? According to an interview with a Square producer in a 1994 issue of EGM, Final Fantasy (1) sold 600,000 copies on Famicom... and 700,000 on NES. It was more successful in America than Japan! This has been your fun fact for today.

I thought the fact that the series was more popular over here than in Japan was fairly well-known, as Nintendo never had to, say, unload unsold copies of the game with subscriptions to Nintendo Power.

The funny thing is, we talk about how easy FFII was, and how ridiculous the 80 page walkthrough manual was, but for this fifth-grader (who had never played an RPG before) the game was hard. It took a while for me to wrap my head around RPG elements we take for granted, like elemental weaknesses or the fact that you should grind a few levels to beat tough bosses. I had a tendency to run from every fight, then I couldn't understand why I couldn't beat certain bosses. I was stuck on Leviathan for weeks.

This is all rather embarrassing to admit.

Screw the MQ haters. I give it an A for the music alone.

Amen to that.

Having finished the LP of it here on Talking Time, I'd be a horrible hypocrite if I said I didn't like Mystic Quest. Sure, it's simple and the plot is about as deep as (and made about as much sense as) your average 1960s fantasy sitcom, but there's a certain charm to it. It could almost be called a parody RPG, if it were a bit more witty and self-referential. And of course the music rocks the socks.

That's pretty much all on you though. It pretty much holds your hand through boss weaknesses and is the first RPG ever specifically designed so that you never have to stop and grind out levels to get through it.

Mystic Quest is rad. Fuck da hataz. (And da po-lice.)

I know it's all on me - that's why it was embarrassing to admit.

I also liked the simple Zelda esque action segments, made the easy dungeons more engaging.

I thought that the only promotional game given away with Nintendo Power subscriptions was Dragon Warrior (I) - did they do a similar thing with Final Fantasy?

It seems I will be interviewing the designer of this game next week. This news excites me.

So we're talking about Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest now? It was pretty okay to me, though I like it more for the cartoony SaGaesque monsters and the music than the actual gameplay. I certainly don't hate it, though. It's a perfectly decent game as long as you rented it or got it from a video store sale in the 90s instead of paying full price for the cart.

That said, there were way more SNES RPGs I liked better than it.

View MQ as an RPG tutorial and suddenly it gets a whole lot better. I actually believe this is more or less what Square was aiming for after perhaps hearing the already dumbed down Final Fantasy just released for the Super NES was too hard (see: a previous post in this topic, on this page I don't feel like quoting.)

Well... I actually quite like Mystic Quest. And here I thought I was the only one!

I like how the enemy sprites change when they're injured.

Yay. Now I can be the contrarian when I say FUCK MYSTIC QUEST.

Changing the topic YET AGAIN, I've got a backlog of DS RPGs. Should I finish up The 4 Heroes of Light or finally motivate myself to play Chrono Trigger?

Finish the one you've started first.

BUT I'M SO ADD ABOUT IIIIIIIIIIIIT

I only just beat FF3DS, and I've had it for like 2 years! (I blame Ahriman)

That's. The. Point.

DW bombed over here (or, at least, didn't sell to Nintendo's expectations that it would be equivalent to Japan in popularity), while FF sold reasonably well for a heavily-promoted NES game of the era.

On the other hand, it sold kinda-sorta-okay in Japan, while DQ did much better. Hence the series always being a bit more popular on this side of the Pacific, and the questionable necessity of Square creating an Americanized game for a series that appealed more to American gamers anyway.

Your odd syntax frightens and confuses me.

Lawyer. Get used to it.

(And how the heck is that syntax confusing? It's fairly straightforward.)

"Americans will buy anything with the FF logo on it! Quick, call the intern devs to stamp out something cheap 'n' dirty!"

Ah. Sorry, I had a brain fart there and thought that you were referring to Final Fantasy when you said 'the series' that Nintendo had to package with NP issues.

People hate MQ because they believe it prevented the localization of FF5, just as they believe Evermore prevented the localization of Seiken 3.

I remember reading this back in the day and wondering why the SNES FFs didn't sell nearly as well.

FF2US didn't sell as well because it practically got no promotion whatsoever. FF3US, however, did a very respectable number in the US (somewhere around 850,000 units, as I understand it).