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FINAL FANTASY MYSTIC QUEST Company: SquareSoft Released: October 1992 Genre: Turn-based RPG Graphics: 6.0 Control: 7.0 Sound/Music: 6.5 Storyline: 7.0 Review by: Corbie Dillard ©2008 SUPER-NES.COM

With the success of Final Fantasy II, Square took it upon themselves to create an rpg for the younger gaming audience and the less experienced rpg players. They took the basic concepts that had made their Final Fantasy series one of the best selling rpg series in the world, and built a game with a much shorter quest and added an easier gameplay system to it all. The result is Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. An rpg that anyone can play and finish, but also a game that any serious rpg player worth anything will blow through with little difficulty. It's a game that's really gotten an unfair bashing over the years, mainly because it carries the name of such a well-loved and much-played rpg series yet doesn't' have even close to the style and  playability of the regular Final Fantasy series of games. What this game does have is a very user-friendly interface and a fun and engaging quest that's easily accessible by just about any gamer of any level of gaming experience. Let's face it, Final Fantasy II didn't exactly set the world on fire with it's visuals. In fact, for a 16-bit game, it had a fairly plain look to it. Final Fantasy Mystic Quest not only carries on that tradition, but in places it actually one-ups it. My main complaint with the graphics is that at times this game feels very monochromatic. A good example is the forest level at the beginning. The tree stumps are brown, the leaves are brown, and even the ground is brown. And this happens a lot in the game. It has very little variety in its' use of colors and coupled with the lack of detail in most areas, what you have is a very flat and uninspiring game visually. This game is even graphically worse than Final Fantasy II which was released a full year before this game. In fact, about the only thing in the game that doesn't look 8-bit in nature is the enemies. I can understand making the game easier and less complicated as far as gameplay goes, but I'm not sure why Square allowed such mediocrity in this game's visuals. Despite the game's mediocre looks, it has a surprisingly good soundtrack. Anyone that played Final Fantasy II will know what to expect from this game as it has a very familiar sound to it. Most areas in the game have their own music tracks and they all show a surprising amount of variety in both tempo and style. Square may have scrimped on the visuals a bit but they did a nice job with the soundtrack in this game. A very nice orchestrated effort. Here is where most experienced rpg players will find the most difference between this game and other Final Fantasy games. Final Fantasy Mystic Quest features a very simplified turn-based combat system that gives players the opportunity to select the very basic of menu selections. You can also allow the other members of your party to be controlled by the game itself by selecting the "auto" function. This will allow less experienced players to concentrate on selecting commands for their player only and allow the other members to select their own commands automatically. It's little things like this that make the game much more accessible to even complete rpg novices. Fans of Final Fantasy games will also notice that the quest itself is quite a bit shorter and much less complicated. Monsters are all in plain site and if you want to fight them you need only walk up to them to initiate a battle sequence. Most of the puzzle elements to the game are all but handed to you on a silver platter so don't expect much of a challenge with these if you've had an experience at all playing role-playing games. You'll also not have to deal with the minor tasks found in most rpgs, like keeping track of equipping different weapons and navigating the world map as even these tasks are taken care of for you. All in all the gameplay has just enough of the classic Final Fantasy qualities to be called such, but dumbed down quite a bit for better ease of use. It's an rpg for beginners and it plays like it. I know that most rpg fans don't care for this game much, but I have to admit that I really enjoyed it from beginning to end. Now it didn't offer the kind of satisfaction or challenge of say a Final Fantasy III or Lufia 2, but for what this game is, it was a nice change of pace and a short, but enjoyable story. Any rpg fan should at least give this game a try but you need to go into this game with the mindset that it is, after all, a simplified rpg for beginners. It's still a fun rpg, despite what a lot of rpg fans will try to tell you.