Well, since I kind of need to get away
from my main Text Play for awhile and need to do something, why not
do this game?
I do have a fair number of games I
could have done for this one that don't have “Final Fantasy” in
the title, but I'd have to take them a little more seriously than I
really want to right now to properly do them justice. So instead,
I'm going to do what seems to me like a rare thing in the video game
world: the equivalent of the introductory starter kit.
Before I really get into explaining
things here, I should note that I'll probably keep this short, as
I've already covered this game two
times
(those are separate links, BTW) in Community Blog posts on Channel
Awesome. That was entirely accidental, of course. I'd only meant to
do it once, but still managed twice somehow. This playthrough will
be more about actual gameplay and personal thoughts and details that
I may have left out of the previous articles.
You'll notice that I also used the word
“underrated” in the issue title for this. It's for good reason,
as is the “starter kit” thing. See, when this game first came
out in 1992, the reasoning behind those of us getting this game
instead of Final Fantasy V like they did in Japan, as I understand,
is that the North American audience was deemed just a little too slow
on the uptake for this sort of game and Squaresoft thought we needed
something a little easier to catch our interest and get us into these
role playing game thing-a-ma-jiggers they were making.
The most embarrassing thing about this
for me is not so much that I was eager enough for another Final
Fantasy game after FF4 that I fell for it when they sold me this, or
that I can honestly say that I actually kind of like this game, but
that they pretty much snookered me out of an extra five bucks on this
game by selling me a strategy guide for this game. And that would be
bad enough if I'd managed to keep ahold of the damned thing all these
years, but the only thing I can say for sure about it right now is
that sometime between when I originally bought this game in early
1993 and when I went to college in the fall of 1996, I lost the guide
somehow.
But that's OK. Part of the reason it
wound up getting lost is that it's really useless. The game pretty
much holds your hand the whole way through, if only because it makes
it so your only option is to go exactly where the story needs you to
go when you need to go there.
There are things I'll get around to
explaining when I get to them, but to sum up, Final Fantasy: Mystic
Quest is pretty much the Dragon Strike of the video RPG world, and
the Final Fantasy world specifically. I'll post a link to Spoony's
Dragon Strike review in hopes that the video will become
available again, because he does a pretty good job of explaining the
concept of this game, too.
Otherwise, this is a fairly
straightforward “meta-title” for the series, meant to do what the
aforementioned Dragon Strike was for tabletop RPGs, and I'm assuming
there were other such things for the likes of collectible card games
such as Magic the Gathering and the like as well.
So, in the very near future, we'll get
underway for what I'd call one of the most underrated entries in the
Final Fantasy family.
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