Friday, December 4, 2015

TEXT PLAY: Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest (Square, SNES, 1992): Issue #022: Well Crap... Again...

At least this isn't the kind of “well crap” I was saying at about this point in the Lufia Text Play.

I should still offer apologies for the way I went about this, though.

See, part of the reason I did the end of this game the way I did it is because I've got this bad habit of waiting to actually play until after the 10 PM news is over, and I've been trying to get to bed at a more regular time again. So, I figured I'd do this in three parts, with the first half of the boss rush one night, the second half another night, and then do the final boss on a third night, tonight. My reasoning was that if I just tried to muscle through and do it all in one sitting, as I could very easily have, if I'd wanted to and had known how the weather was going to be this week, I'd have hit a snag, gotten pissy about it and wound up ruining this for everybody. It turns out that might not have been necessary, even with the way my luck tends to run.

All this takes us to the top floor of Doom Castle, where the Dark King is waiting for us. To get into his chamber, there's a statue of a knight we have to talk to. It says that the Crystals are giving Ben and Phoebe their power because these two are the Knights of Legend. That's not the exact wording, but it gets the point across. They open the way forward, and also grant access to the last four chests in the game. These have Arrows for Phoebe, Cure potions, Heal potions, and Seeds. They all contain either 25 or enough to max out the inventory, whichever is less.

When we go confront the Dark King, he tells us that the world's over and we're going to serve him because the prophecy the game's story is based on was just a bunch of bullshit that he'd come up with. Ben tells him to go fuck himself, which sets off the final battle.

I'd say it was a fairly standard final battle if it wasn't as simplified as it was. It seems fairly obvious to me that we're meant to use the crazy powerful spells we've got on the Dark King, so for most of the battle, I was just spamming Ben's Flare spell and Phoebe's White spell. I did heal when needed, of course, because it's usually necessary in these final battles.

Thing is, though, that depending on how lucky one is when one sits down to play, the final boss can be either easy or hard. It's like this for every game there is, regardless of title or genre. I say that because hard for Mystic Quest is what would have been not so bad for Final Fantasy 4, and a cake walk compared to Kefka at the end of FF6. And I got lucky enough to have this be an easy fight, which means that it was really easy. The Dark King only managed to kill Phoebe once, and getting him to cycle through his four forms was no problem.

When the fight starts, the Dark King looks like a regular guy, but with green skin. His second form is with six arms, all equipped with a different weapon. The third form is a giant spider, a la Giant Spider Invasion. The final form is the spider, but with the skin and exoskeleton melted off the legs.

By the time we got to that last one, I'd used all of Ben's charges for his high level spells and was using him to keep the heroes healed up. Phoebe still had a couple charges left for her White spell, so I kept her on that. Once I got everybody healed up with Ben, I remembered that I'd read somewhere that the Dark King can be hurt with the Cure spell, too, but it only works once. The only reason I can think of that last bit being important is if you have to make him cycle through all four forms to win, because if I read the screen right, using Cure on him did some insane about of damage, like in the area of 30,000 points of damage insane. I would think that would be enough to one-shot him otherwise.

When the Dark King bites it, the Old Guy shows up and turns into another crystal, the Crystal of Light, and says we won because there's always hope as long as we're willing to hold onto it.

From there, Ben and Phoebe go around the world to see how everybody's doing. Everything is Awesome now that the Dark King is gone, and everybody's happy that Ben's decided to get more adventure in his life. Captain Mac is so much so that he lets Ben take his boat to go looking for it. After a few last stops, most of the allies meet Ben and Phoebe at the dock so Ben can set out looking for that adventure he wants. Phoebe leaves the party and joins the others in wishing him luck in his adventures. Just before the end credits roll, Tristam shows up on the boat and says he's coming along regardless of if Ben likes it because he's got a permanent boner for adventure.

I've got enough other thoughts to talk about to fill as much space as this issue already has, but I'm going to save most of them for the epilogue. The one I'm going to bring up here is that as I read the credits this time around, I thought of something I really hadn't until just now. A lot of the people who worked on this game also worked on Final Fantasy IV and VI, because I recognized the names from the credits to those other games. From that, I can assume that they worked on Final Fantasy V as well, as it came out in Japan at the same time this was coming out here. Makes me wonder if this game wasn't as easy to make as it was to play, in general. But I'll get to that a little more in the epilogue.

Until then, stay safe, have fun, keep gaming, and DFTBA!

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