Final Fantasy Mystic Quest

About Final Fantasy Mystic Quest

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest (1992) is Square's simplified SNES role-playing game made for American beginners, with no random battles and action-adventure exploration, remembered as the "beginner's Final Fantasy" and for its rock-tinged music.

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest in Depth

Players cannot roam the world map freely; instead they travel along set paths between icons for towns, dungeons and battlefields, with blocked routes opening as tasks are completed. It adds action-adventure elements: Benjamin can jump and use weapons outside battle, chopping trees with an axe, blowing open doors with bombs and crossing gaps with a grappling hook, and there are more puzzles than in earlier Final Fantasy games, such as moving ice pillars in the Falls Basin to use as platforms. There are no save points, since players can save at any time. Enemies stand visibly in dungeons instead of appearing at random, and turn-based battles offer attack, magic, items or defend, with an ally who can be controlled manually or by the computer. Armour cannot be equipped manually; new gear replaces or upgrades the old. Benjamin cycles through swords, axes, bombs and claws, each with its own use in the field, and finds spells in chests or as rewards for clearing battlefields of ten fights.

The world's four regions, Foresta, Aquaria, Fireburg and Windia, depend on four crystals of earth, water, fire and wind, which monsters stole from the Focus Tower. When his village is destroyed by an earthquake, the young Benjamin is charged by a mysterious old man with fulfilling a prophecy of a knight who will vanquish the darkness, and with allies Kaeli, Tristam, Phoebe and Reuben he defeats the four Vile Evils and the Dark King.

Making Final Fantasy Mystic Quest

Designed by a Square team in Japan, it was aimed specifically at the US market, where console RPGs were not yet a major genre and Square's executives believed their difficulty put Americans off. Built in a graphic and gameplay style close to Final Fantasy Legend III, reusing much of its interface and sprites, it was marketed as a "simplified role-playing game... designed for the entry-level player" and sold for $39.99. Translator Ted Woolsey said action players tended to be younger and wanted to jump "straight into the action with a sword in their hands". Ryuji Sasai and Yasuhiro Kawakami composed the music, Sasai playing the guitar parts on the album's remixes. Square said it sold 800,000 copies, about half in Japan, but it failed to make console RPGs popular in North America and disappointed fans expecting a successor to Final Fantasy IV; Electronic Games called it "Final Fantasy with an identity crisis". Later reviews were largely negative, Kotaku dubbing it "The Worst Final Fantasy", though its music was widely praised, 1UP citing its "sweet sampled metal guitar licks".