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

"Ogopogo lives! Will you?" isn't nearly as eye-catching as Mog blasting a horde of fiends into dust in print magazines, or auditioning them in TV commercials.

Mystic Quest was developed by the SaGa team.

...So, yeah, basically second-stringers.

I hate Mystic Quest because I bought it instead of FF II, since I had rented the latter, loved it and thought MQ would be of similar quality. Instead, I got a game that was dull and predictable from start to finish. It's not a terrible game, but it's far from the quality of its 16-bit FF cousins.

So as a complete side note, After Years (and maybe some of the later releases of FFIV) names Yang's wife Sheila IIRC.

Aside from that, I had no idea there even was a Black shield.

This explains a lot. The SaGa guys were in a way better position to whine that Americans don't understand their games, because their games are confusing as hell.

A quick comparison shows no staff in common between SaGa II and SaGa III! Including Kawazu. SaGa III is its own weird standalone thing that has nothing to do with the rest of the series, but is basically the same team as FFMQ. Interestingly, it seems like the team had a diaspora after FFMQ, with some staying at Square and others going on to Sacnoth, Alpha Dream, etc.... but never working together again.

Also, to address an earlier claim: not everyone dislikes FFMQ because of some imagined slight against FFV! I had no idea what FFV was back in 1992, but I did recognize FFMQ as a massive simplification compared to FFII. FFII was incredible and I loved it; FFMQ, on the other hand, didn't do much to distinguish itself in my mind from other mid-tier SNES RPGs like Lagoon, Drakkhen, and Ys III.

Edit: The odd-man-out status of FFMQ is why I think SaGa III: Shadow Or Light is so interesting. It's basically Kawazu and his team reclaiming someone else's take on his series and reintegrating it into the standards and mechanics that are standard in the rest of the series.

Yeah, I'm right here. I think the FFV/SD3 thing is Internet-created revisionist history except for the subset of people who didn't know about MQ until after they started to learn that we didn't get some FF games, which certainly wasn't the case for me until much later when I started to wonder where the hell FF4-6 went when FF7 came out.

To be fair, the idea of that SD3/Evermore conviction is less revisionist history than the FFV/FFMQ one. The Internet was catching on by the time Evermore came out, and the existence of SD3 was pretty well known by Americans, so the idea that Evermore killed SD3 was a popular message board theory even back in 1996.

Suddenly, I understand why SaGa III is the only game in the series that I genuinely enjoyed from start to end!

It got a radio commercial referring to the baddies as "Suprecious Slimebags", whatever that means. IIRC, Breath of Fire was the first Square game to get a real ad campaign. Which is funny, for reasons I assume everyone here knows.

SaGa III is a disgrace! SaGa II is way better in every way!

*shakes fist*

Actually, the SaGa III team being largely the MQ team would explain a great deal why I took so violently ill at that third entry. Even though I never played MQ and have no idea what's going on with it! I loved II to pieces for its funkadelic systems and the NES flavor of FF-story that I never got to experience on the NES proper.

I believe the reason SaGa 3 wasn't Kawazu-developed was because his team was making Romancing SaGa, weren't they?

It really sold that well? I remember reading somewhere that it only sold 300K in North America and that Chrono Trigger only sold 200K. If 850K was real, I'm happy!

At what point after Mystic Quest did Square decide to start selling Americans bigger, darker, harder games? Was that just what they were making in Japan? Did MQ sell badly? What customer feedback did Squaresoft USA get pre-FF3?

That's what I've heard, anyway. Both FF3US and CT were big hits in the US compared to what came before.

I think it was just that they threw up their hands and said "screw it, we're putting in all this extra effort and the Americans don't appreciate it, so let's just translate the games and release them there modification-free". I don't know what feedback they got, or what sales numbers Mystic Quest did, but I'd guess both were not very good. Certainly someone on staff pointed out that all that extra effort wasn't paying off.

I wonder; if I recall correctly, it was around the time of Secret of Mana where Nintendo Power started really pushing RPGs. They used to have a section for them that was maybe 2 pages? It ended up becoming several, if I recall, with lots of information about games like SoM, FF3, and Chrono Trigger.

I mean, it's got a readership of about half a million or so. I'm not sure if there is a connection, but my former love for Nintendo Power as a kid makes me wish it were true.

- Eddie

Secret of Mana had a three-issue feature that had a full walk through of the game in Nintendo Power.

Best research suggests Secret of Mana sold 330,000 copies outside of Japan? I don't know how much of that is NA.

Vegas numbers appear more accurate. Square only lists 290,000 copies of CT sold outside of Japan, while FFVI only sold 860,000 units outside of Japan total.

And those are Square Enix numbers; I can't imagine they would underexaggerate.

- Eddie

Epic Centre! I loved that section. It was usually the first thing I flipped to whenever a new issue came in the mail. Unfortunately, they still kept it running long after the flood of RPGs had slowed to a trickle. I remember reading a few articles on import games I'd have never heard of otherwise, before they finally realized they didn't have enough content to justify the section anymore and put it out of its misery.

The thing you have to remember is that NP basically pushed FF1 as hard as they did Ninja Gaiden 2, and nearly to the same level as Mario 3. That was INSANE in the wake of the Dragon Warrior failure, but it kinda-sorta paid off. I do think there's a correlation, but Mana just didn't have the name value FF did so it was something of a flop.

It wouldn't stun me if Mana didn't do well outside of Japan, but anecdotally I recall CT being much harder to find. Mana got deep discounted in a lot of places, which you never saw with CT.

How did Breath of Fire do in North America? That got fairly heavy coverage as well from what I recall, and it certainly had both the pedigree and production values to appeal to North American gamers.

I wasn't hip enough to know about "Seiken Densetsu 3" but I do remember thinking that Evermore* was a joke and, hey, what the hell happened to Secret of Mana 2? So I guess that part was true for me.

But MQ felt like "Baby's First RPG" to me even when it was only the second RPG I had finished!

*Evermore fans please don't hate me I'm talking about mid-90s McClain.

Man, Secret of Evermore is rad. Fuck da hataz. (And da po-lice.)

I get the feeling I just made this argument.

What amused me most about Epic Center, in retrospect, was that when Pokemon came out in Japan in 1996 they predicted it was too Japanese to do well in America.

I'm not hating. I bought Evermore on launch week and even beat it once. Actually, I rented Evermore and bought it two days later. Since I made some progress in the rental copy, I considered returning Blockbuster my purchased cartridge since it was superficially identical. But I didn't.

Despite Evermore being a tad of a letdown, I was impressed that it sold for $55 at an EB that charged $80 for FF3 and $70 for CT.

Speak for yourself, man, cause this is very false. At least in my experiences and memory. I recall, in the weeks (or was it months?) just after the N64's release, barely a year after Chrono Trigger's US release, stores significantly reducing their 16 bit space, to make room for the hot new N64, and to a lesser extent, PSX stuff. I clearly remember picking up CT for $20 at one store, then going to another one and seeing it for $15 and being irked I didn't wait another day. I'd say this counts as a deep discount. This was a great time, at least in my neck of the woods, to pick up 16 bit games, especially late-era SNES games. I recall other price slashings as well, but the most impressive deals were generally on games I had already owned/played.

Too bad I don't have many, or perhaps any other stories about stumbling upon game deals in retail spaces.

Addendum: I even remember one of the trips was to Toys R Us and another was to Blockbuster. I don't remember which was bought where, but from a collector's stand point, which I wasn't in 96 but still, it's likely better to get a new game at TRU than presumably used one at 25% off with their missing posters and maps and stickers and such. Not that this pertains to anything here. I'm just happy I remember it.

Man, no wonder my parents never wanted to get us a SNES. That was such a different time... Back in the early-to-mid-90s, PC games were usually going for $20 to $40, while all of the most popular cartridge-based games were pushing $50 to $80 a pop. PC gamers like me looked on in confusion at all of the console gamers and wondered at why anyone would pay so much for something so clearly inferior to what you could get on PC.

A few of us even wised up years later when we discovered that the SNES was a hell of a lot more than just a 16-bit computer with a controller.

What is it then?

I ended up paying $50 each for used copies of Chrono Trigger and FFIII at my local specialty game shop and I never regretted it.

the used copies of Lufia II and Breath of Fire II were $80! I... I considered it.

It's a 16-bit Nintendo computer with a controller, of course. Nintendo's always been like Apple when it comes to video games: anything they make does way better than anything else like it, no matter how high or low they price it.

Wow! I always bought these games at launch so I had no idea how far they got discounted after a year or two. I only started to browse flea markets and used game shops after these games had been out for several years and started to become collectors items, so I never saw any of Square's major SNES games for less than $40.

Also it had all of that Capcom and Square/Enix (seperate companies at the time) support.

I wouldn't call a SNES a computer, as a guy who grew up with computers. Piracy defined my gaming youth, as did getting the thing to play the game properly. They're completely different, and offered different games.