Final Fantasy Mystic Quest was an experiment. While North American PC gaming had a rich RPG tradition by the 90s, console RPGs were having a tougher time. SquareSoft had a bold idea: What if the problem was that American gamers were fucking idiots?
Thus began the journey towards Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. Intended to be a radically simplified version of the genre meant to create new fans for the core series. Instead, it alienated fans who had loved Final Fantasy IV and bored many who didn’t particularly care for RPGs to begin with. The only thing everyone agrees worked was the game’s soundtrack, which unexpectedly whips.
Where did it go wrong? Did it go wrong? Or is Final Fantasy Mystic Quest a misunderstood delight?
Welcome back to Fantasies Revisited.
“Look over there.”
You are an adventurous young boy. After an old man tells you to go on an adventure, you do so. Your town, Foresta, is in trouble. The Earth Crystal has been corrupted, and it is killing the earth around the town. After saving the Earth Crystal, you travel to Focus Tower, a massive tower at the center of the world that links its four elemental kingdoms together.
Someone, or something, is corrupting each of the other crystals. Aquaria, the water-kingdom, froze over. Fireburg is in danger, as the corrupted Fire Crystal is setting off a nearby volcano. Windia is, uh, too windy. I’m going to be honest, I’m not as worried about Windia.
As each Crystal is rescued and each land set to right, you get one step closer to finding the mastermind behind it all.
“That’s the Focus Tower, once the heart of the World.”
The story here is admittedly simple — though not so much simpler than Final Fantasy I or even III. Still, gaming was growing up, slowly. Stories were becoming more intricate. Characters were becoming deeper, if only a bit. The simple, pared-down adventure narrative might be fine for a GameBoy title, but for a console release it was seen as shallow. Final Fantasy IV had just offered a players a story about empire and redemption, one filled with character. Now we’re back to “old man told me to adventure, so here I am,” storytelling?
These complaints aren’t without justification. I finished Final Fantasy Mystic Quest less than a month ago, and its narrative has completely left my head. I can totally understand how fans at the time would have seen this, justifiably, as a step backwards for the genre and the series. But with the passage of time, seeing that the series would recover and soon release a series of truly excellent games, it’s easy to be more forgiving. Final Fantasy Mystic Quest is charming. Slight, but definitely charming.
At its heart, Mystic Quest was meant to simplify JRPGs for American audiences. What I find interesting is how they went about doing this. Essentially, Mystic Quest breaks down RPGs into what it views as key elements: Travel, combat, dungeon-crawling, equipment/party management.
Travel is nixed entirely. The player’s path forward is mostly linear, presented like a series of Super Mario levels. This is the game’s biggest change, and is at once its most frustrating and its most understandable. Early JRPGs were incredibly difficult without a guide. As I’ve mentioned before in this column, the art of gatekeeping progress and guiding players from destination to destination was still quite messy at this point. There was no quest log or marker pointing you where to go. It’s easy to lose yourself on the maps.
So why not get rid of them entirely? I’m going to say something controversial here: This isn’t an inherently bad idea. Final Fantasy VI director Hiroyuki Ito would do something very similar in last year’s surprisingly fun minimalist RPG Dungeon Encounters. Here, as there, you can backtrack, but you always know broadly what you’re aiming for. You can’t really ‘get lost’. The game limits players to a few set paths, and while there may be branches, there’s no real wandering.
But Dungeon Encounters can get away with that. The challenge it presents players is in its robust combat system and resource management. Mystic Quest lacks that element. In one of the most baffling choices I can imagine, instead, Mystic Quest presents its players with dots on the map, some of which are just… ten fights against basic enemies in a row. You can skip them, but you need levels and money, so you probably shouldn’t. Instead, you just do ten arbitrary fights. Sometimes there’s a special reward for finishing. Sometimes there isn’t. The reward is rarely worth it.
Mystic Quest rightfully recognized some of the problems RPGs had. Random encounters frustrate players. In Mystic Quest, you can see every encounter coming. In dungeons, enemies are stationary sprites you walk into to fight — or special places on the map made for grinding. But why are you grinding? The game is extremely generous with saves. It gives you powerful partners for every leg of the journey.
I love turn-based combat. I miss it. RPGs have moved away from it in recent years, as all blockbuster games slowly converge on a single gargantuan Action RPG megagenre. But there’s something satisfying about good turn-based fights. It can be simultaneously tense and thought-provoking when handled well. But ‘handling it well’ means presenting the players with challenges, interesting encounters, forcing them to approach things in a different way. Hell, even interesting enemy design helps — I smile every time I fight a Hell House in Final Fantasy VII.
Mystic Quest doesn’t do that. It has a smaller list of enemies, and there appear to only be two to four ‘sets’ of foes in each of those ten-fight spaces. And you can back out at any time without penalty. Return to town, rest at an inn, and then get back to fighting. It’s basically impossible to lose. Beyond that, combat has been simplified — characters don’t have unique abilities or classes, so you aren’t really learning anything new as you play. It’s just… content. Even equipment doesn’t matter, as the game automatically upgrades you with the best new finds.
That, however, is one of the game’s best changes. If you have a Battle Axe and you find a Giant’s Axe, you automatically equip the Giant’s Axe. You don’t have to sell the other one, and it isn’t sitting around in your inventory. Don’t worry about it. The best version of each weapon will be equipped automatically. This system is great, and predicts some changes that would eventually come to modern RPGs around equipment optimization. Hell, Bethesda’s wildly popular Fallout and Elder Scrolls series could certainly take note and just give you less useless garbage.
Beyond that, the game uses the equipment for more than just combat. Perhaps the American success of Zelda and similar titles convinced Mystic Quest designers that players were open to exploring dungeons just not a larger world. Whatever the reason, Mystic Quest has genuinely solid dungeon design. Swords hit switches, claws let you climb walls, axes chop things down. Swapping between weapons is easy and intuitive — an improvement over a similar system from Final Fantasy Adventure, which asked you to switch weapons regularly but made you navigate multiple menus to do so.
Because of this, Mystic Quest actually ends up being a pretty good game. It looks good. It sounds great. The dungeon-crawling is well-handled, with multiple means of traversal and more interactive elements than previous games in the series. Final Fantasy Adventure was largely excellent, but it relied too heavily on hidden walls and scarce resources. Mystic Quest has no such issue.
Party management should work, but here’s where the game’s overly simplified writing comes back again to hurt it. As with Final Fantasy IV, you don’t have any control over your party. As you go, you meet other adventurers. If your goals align, they’ll join you temporarily. They’ll leave when you finish that leg of the story, and someone else will join up a little later.
But in FFIV, these changes were dramatic, the stakes were high. Palom and Porom, a pair of powerful mages, leave your party when they petrify themselves to death in order to save the rest of the party’s lives. Yeah, you get more party members soon after, but it’s still a dramatic, emotional scene. It sells the importance of the adventure to have the characters grow, change, and sacrifice themselves.
In Mystic Quest, no one really seems to want much. The world is ostensibly in bad shape, but emotions are dulled, motives are simple. Even the main character is a complete blank slate. At the start of the game, his entire village is swallowed in an earthquake, and it just… never really comes up again. Party members who join you each use different weapons, but there isn’t a particularly meaningful difference between them.
More than anything else, this is where Mystic Quest falls short. Even simplified, most of the core gameplay works. It’s just not really in service of anything particularly interesting.
“An old prophecy says, ‘The vile four will steal the Power, and divide the World behind four doors. At that time, the Knight will appear.'”
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest got a lot of hate. And while I don’t think a full-on critical reappraisal is necessary, I do want to acknowledge that it was better than its reputation suggested.
That said, I’m fascinated by the belief that Final Fantasy games were ‘too complicated’ for American gamers. I’ve mentioned it before, but Final Fantasy owes an enormous creative debt to Western tabletop RPGs, particularly Dungeons & Dragons. And it’s not like America wasn’t producing its own brand of video game RPGs. The Ultima and Wizardry franchises were both a half-dozen games deep by this point! Hell, Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi was a fan of games like Ultima; they helped inspire him to make RPGs!
I do think it’s genuinely interesting to see what Square believed the ‘pain points’ were in the genre. Turn-based battles are fine; random encounters are not. I actually think they’re right on that. Exploration needs to be better sign-posted. Right again, honestly. Don’t fill inventories with so much garbage. I agree completely.
In a weird way, Final Fantasy Mystic Quest correctly diagnosed a lot of problems with this era of RPG game design. They just didn’t know how to put it back together in a satisfying and fulfilling way. They thought it needed to be ‘simplified’ — that the ‘flaws’ listed above were good, but players needed to be eased into them. The push to simplify everything went down to the story, the characters, every aspect. Crucially, however, you still played the story and the quests. They just didn’t make them, you know… interesting.
When you think your audience is stupid, you inevitably end up talking down to them. Ultimately, this was Mystic Quest‘s core problem. The developers had a clear understanding of what worked and what didn’t for American audiences in JRPGs. But they attributed taste to intellect, and damned the project from the start.
“The Prophecy has now come true.”
Thanks for reading! We’ll be back in a couple weeks with Final Fantasy V, as we make our way towards the end of the Super Nintendo era.
See you soon!