45. Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest
Square, 1992: SNES Points: 338 Votes: 11 Previous Rank: 47
What the heck is this doing here? The bad game? The worst bad game??
Everyone knows the story: in the ‘90s Square liked to make good games but hated the idea of Americans enjoying them. So in revenge they dumbed down Final Fantasy II, financed a whole new studio to make Secret of Evermore instead of localizing Secret of Mana 2, and, as the ultimate insult, produced Mystic Quest, the rudimentary baby game for unsophisticated toddlers.
Such was the sentiment at the time, and for a long time after.
But is Mystic Quest so bad? It is a simple game by design. The true history is that Square wanted to succeed in the West. Japanese audiences ate up JRPGs and if they could spark the same fire in America and Europe then the returns would be massive. Yet sales failed to materialize for games that did gangbusters back home and it wasn’t clear why. Though probably due to lack of cultural onboarding the genre received in Japan with Shonen Jump’s promotion of Dragon Quest, the powers-that-be at Square landed on the excuse that their games were too complicated and slow for the action-hungry audiences of America. Thus their stratagem of molding games to chase this perceived market.
With Mystic Quest Square went all-out, designing a game specifically for the West that would serve as a genre introduction for younger players. Stats would be simplified, exploration limited, story streamlined, and action elements incorporated. The result is a rather interesting game, one that doesn’t really play like anything else, even its closest sibling SaGa 3. For all its pared-down mechanics and long-standing reputation, it's not so much simplistic as streamlined. The game isn’t lacking, is what I mean. It still has that certain je ne sais quoi that defined Square’s golden era; and a craftsmanship that makes it an interesting and pleasant revisit—even when divorced from nostalgia—in this day and age.
There are a number of reasons why, a quantity of quality aspects which keep it fresh. One is the interesting choices that Square made to simplify JRPG conventions such as the concision of stats, magic, items, and gear; or transforming dungeons into clever mazes via the design conceit of enemy encounter roadblocks. Another is the irreverent tone the game has. Because of the truncated story sections and a rush to get the player into the action as soon as possible, Mystic Quest plays out almost like a loving parody of the more self-serious mainline Final Fantasies. The setup is FF cut to the core: evil monsters have stolen the four elemental crystals and now the earth is withering away unless the prophesied hero shows up to stop them. You play as Benjamin, who shows up to stop them, and then you stop them. The game isn’t knowingly satirizing the genre, but the lighthearted way that it riffs on the basic premise gives it a fun, irrelevant attitude as characterized by Benjamin’s perpetual “it’s a living” shrug.
But paramount to these is its quality as a charmer. This is a game—once taken on its own terms and removed from any perceived slights from Japanese CEOs—that’s hard to hate. Aesthetically, it lands in that early SNES style that’s so pleasing to the eye. Like Paladin’s Quest, Dragon Quest V, or Final Fantasy IV, it sports a bold style half informed by the power of 16-bits and half informed by lingering assumptions developed under the previous generation’s technical restrictions. Additionally, the game’s a sounder as well as a looker, with an infamous heavy-metal soundtrack rightly celebrated still. And then there’s all the ineffable charming details like the elementally divided world map, Benjamin’s jumping shenanigans, the notable way enemy sprites degrade as they take damage, or the wonderful overflow bug that sees the final boss fall to a single healing spell.
There’s an irony inherent in Mystic Quest. It’s just a great, streamlined, amuse-bouche of a JRPG hailing from the golden era, made by the genre’s greatest developer, yet it came saddled with a reputation as the worst, most-insulting, laughing stock of a bad idea. However, the very forces that engendered that reputation were the same ones that make the game what it is, and give it the unique charming character that it has. I don’t know if its seen a full reassessment, now that we’re so far from the circumstances that both formed and burdened it, but certainly its placement on this list suggests the game is remembered more for its successes than for invented flaws.
