Kammy's Spinoff Extravaganza, Part I: Mystic Quest

Okay, I know I'll get a lot of crap for this, but I kind of have a soft spot for Mystic Quest. People hate this game because the gameplay is boring, there's barely any character development, and the plot is skeletal at best. Plus, we got this game instead of FF5. Ask any fanboy and they'll tell you that it was because everyone thought that American kids were too stupid to figure out how to play FF5, and that they needed a dumbed-down version of the series that they could play with one hand so they could do it while eating their Big Macs and pumping their Air Jordans. Curse you, evil game execs!

My feeling has always been that Square realized that RPGs were still very foreign to American kids, and they wanted a way to weasel into their gaming consciousness when they were still young and impressionable. Mystic Quest is really a game that teaches you what an RPG is. It is very simplistic, but that is kind of the point. Think of it like a minimalist Final Fantasy, designed with six-year-olds in mind. That's how old I was when I played this game, and I thought it was the shit.

Okay, yeah, so it was my first RPG. I get hit in the face with a giant brick of nostalgia when the title screen comes on. Sure, kids four or five years older than me and expecting FF5 would have thought this game sucked ass, but for a kid who'd never even heard the word "RPG" before, there was something new and exciting and cool about this game. (I remember my dad getting into it, too. He would talk to townspeople meticulously and get very annoyed if one of us skipped over talking to them. They might give us vital information! OMG!)

Anyway, now to the task at hand... beginning my quest, and naming my anonymous hero!




Ah, how I've matured since my childhood days playing this game.





Hee hee.



Another cool thing you can do in this game is jump!




My hero has the habit of shrugging his shoulders in a perfect "wtf?" pose. This happens almost every time he meets a character who says something cryptic and lame.




Are you a bad enough dude to save the Crystals?

Anyway, you meet several people on your quest who I suppose qualify as party members. There's Tristam, the "treasure hunter":


Kaeli, the obligatory girl that can communicate with the spirit of nature (although she fights with a battle axe, which is kind of awesome):




And Phoebe, who's an emo blond chick with a cape and a metal leotard of some sort. I mean, nothing says emo quite like this opening line:




So far I've saved two crystals. Fuck yeah!