Finally!

Now comes the time to complete my quest, according to this statue that randomly talks to you.


Why is it that like, every final dungeon ever has a part where you're walking on little shiny glass blocks in space? Is this just really easy to do with pixels, or something?




Whee, final boss time! I don't know much more about him besides that he's the Dark King, he's somehow evil and threatening the crystals, and he's, I guess, a dude with green skin.



Oooh, but now I see his true form. He's a guy with green skin and shit tons of arms.



OMG, I was tricked again! His TRUE true form is a giant spider!




ERGH, no! It's a giant wormy-armed spidery creature from Hell!


Thankfully he doesn't morph any more.




At last! But look, here comes the mysterious old man who's been giving me cryptic advice since the beginning of the game! Maybe now I'll learn his true identity!






....what the fuck?! he was a CRYSTAL? Okay, this is retarded. I am leaving this world and sailling away on my sweetass ship, to search for new, and better adventures.



Hip hip, hooray!


Ah, peace at last... but oh wait, what's this?


If this game were a sitcom, everyone would laugh and then there'd be a freezeframe while the credits ran.

So that just about does it for Mystic Quest. Okay, I still like this game for what it is. It's lame, it's easy, it's cutesy, but my nostalgia is too powerful to overcome. I think, believe it or not, we should actually have MORE RPGs intended for younger kids with short attention spans. Most RPGs are for the tween-teen crowd, and nowadays they're geared towards even older consumers. This was the perfect game for me when I was six, and had no idea what levelling up was, and didn't want to have a Cliff's Notes handy in order to understand what the plot was and where I needed to go next. And it did get me into other, more legitimate RPGs. Let's start putting the next generation in front of television screens right now, Squeenix! You heard it here. I give Mystic Quest a 4/10.

Coming up next: Matty is back from vacation, and we get back on track with Final Fantasy III, the last FF game for the NES!

Because we all love teh hoyay...

The only way it seems that I can complete my quest is by performing ambiguous sexual favors for trees.






Ewwwww.

what the?

Is that like, a live chocobo impaled on top of someone's house? Or are chocobo hunted to extinction in this world, and only live on in peoples' memories so that they make weathervanes out of them? It is a mystery.

Fun things to do to old ladies in Mystic Quest

Jump over their heads!





Chop them with your axe!

Throw grenades at them!

Stab them! Engarde, Mabel!

Attack their faces with your hook-clawy thing!

Then let them thank you.

Now, who says this game isn't awesome?

Jilted!

Poor Fucker.

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!