Tuesday, September 15, 2015

TEXT PLAY: Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest (Square, SNES, 1992): Issue #003 The Boner Dungeon

Because Tristam's kind of a dick...

And yeah, misspelled it last time. Only one “R” at the beginning.

But like most games of this nature, this dungeon is only slightly harder than the first. I know it's supposed to be incremental, and the first few are usually small, but it's kind of ridiculous here how small it really is.

At least this one's bigger and has a couple new monsters. In addition to the toads and Basilisks from last time, there were also sand worms and Rocs. The worms are weak against axe attacks, which Ben has, and the Rocs are weak against projectile attacks, which would be Tristam's throwing stars.

On the first basement, there's a path north blocked by a pile of bones that we'll have to come back to. As it happens, there's a door in a room to the west that's been blocked. Tristam will offer to sell Ben some bombs. His initial offer is 50 bombs for 30 gold. If you've fought all the monsters in the game thus far and not spent any of the gold, it should be no problem. Not having enough money should only be a problem if you've not gone after all the monsters because there's no place to spend the money yet.

And this kind of brings up a problem in this game. See, fought twenty battles in battlefields and, by this point in the game, almost as many more between Level Forrest and the Bone Dungeon thus far, and I don't think any of the battles have given us ten gold at a time thus far. It's kind of like Monopoly Junior, where everything's reduced by 90%. The thing is, that means that going past go only nets the player $2 instead of the $200 that it is in the regular version, when ten percent of the price of some of the other properties is still a quite a lot, relatively speaking. It does kind of solve the problem of the heroes being insanely wealthy by the end of the game that tends to happen in a lot of the main series games.

That's kind of like the item drop thing I've been meaning to write about for years now, and can never remember if I have or not. But that's for another time.

The door that Tristam blows open for us leads further into the dungeon, but we need to go back and take care of that pile of bones now that we have bombs. That path leads to an item chest that has our first shield in it: the Steel Shield. This adds six defense to Ben's total

As we go on, we'll also run into two more new enemies: Gorgons and Skeletons. The Gorgons are kind of like weakened versions of the Behemoth Ben fought at the very beginning of the game.

There are also a lot of treasure chests in this dungeon that contain expendable weapons for Tristam, who can possibly run out of his throwing stars, or bombs to replace the ones that get used over time. It's extremely unlikely that such a thing will ever happen, because these chests t replenish them are extremely common in areas where they need to be.

On the bottom floor, we'll find a box with something called seeds in it. These seeds refill a characters magic points. Or in this case, spell charges, since that's what we've got in this game. We also get a Quake spell to use on the upcoming boss. In this case, it's a living skeleton called Flamerous Rex. He's kind of tough, all things considered, but the Quake spell is a big help.

When the boss goes down, the Crystal of Earth relights, and the trees come back to being green again. Most of the people in Forresta are young again, too. Kailie and her mom are the same ages as before, as is the guy who gave us the cure spell. Before we go, we need to get something called the Sand Coin from the Bone Dungeon, too. Well be needing that on our way to the next part of the game.

In Forresta, Kailie tells us she wants to go to a place called Aquaria to visit somebody. She's not well, so Ben offers to go in her place. That means going through the Focus Tower, but that'll be for next time, when we'll get on with the Dawning of the Age of Aquaria! Until then, stay safe, have fun, keep gaming, and DFTBA!

No comments:

Post a Comment