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Retro Video Game Review: Final Fantasy Mystic Quest

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Sometimes you have to face the music. For example, at some point over the last ten years I lost just about all of my video game skills. Gone. Sure, I can play a game here and there, but I can’t dominate them like I did when I was a little kid. I’m just not very good at the high end video games that are produced and released these days. The truth is that I suck at these Call of Duty games, I’m horrible at that Resident Evil stuff, and when it comes to Madden and other sports games – I just can’t keep up!

I suspect that there are many people out there just like me – people who used to be good at playing videos games, but try to play today’s video games and generally find themselves on the short end of the stick. If you’re one of those folks who has been passed by in the current generation of video games, then I’m here to tell you that there is hope thanks to the Nintendo Wii! More specifically, there is hope thanks to Nintendo’s Virtual Console – where you can download hundreds of old games from previous gaming systems.

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest - A Quick, Fun Way to Spend 10 Hours

Last weekend, I was flipping around the Virtual Console looking for a nostalgic way to spend a few bucks and there it was – Final Fantasy’s Mystic Quest. Frankly, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw it on the screen because I didn’t think that Mystic Quest was the type of big-time game that you’d find on the Virtual Console. But there it was and a few bucks and a few minutes later it was downloaded to my Wii and I was ready to play.

Mystic Quest was originally released in 1992 and you’ll be able to figure as much as soon as you turn the game on. The graphics, gameplay, character movement, audio, and sound effects are all straight out of time warp when George H. W. Bush was still President and I was kicking butt playing on the recreation soccer team in Mount Arlington. Good times, but I digress.

It took me about 10 hours of playing the game in order to beat it. Now, I don’t specifically remember how much time I spent playing this particular video game back in 1992, but I have to imagine that it was a number greater than 10! So, while I tend to fail miserably at today’s video games, I think I’ve actually gotten better at yesterday’s video games. Ha! That’s improvement right there, people! And, honestly, I could have beaten the game a little bit quicker, but it took my some time to get my bearings about me (hey, it’s been almost 20 years since I last played the game – give me a break!).

Mystic Quest follows a tried and true formula for Final Fantasy games: something bad is happening in the world, a fabled hero appears, the hero defeats a series of lesser “bad guys” which lead up to fighting the major bad guy, and the world is saved. Hey, if the formula ain’t broke – don’t fix it, right? After you save a bunch of crystals, you’re faced with going through a tower and refighting a different form of each of the lesser bad guys before you come before the Dark King (creative name, right?). After you defeat a few incarnations of the Dark King, Square-Enix (actually, Squaresoft made the game, but since they’re now Square-Enix, I’m using that name) puts together a montage with the hero visiting all of the major locations in this very small land that the game takes place in. The hero gets an update from everyone, borrows a ship from his girlfriend’s father, and goes off sailing around the world with a treasure hunter named Tristam.

And that’s it – the game is over. There’s nothing else going on after you beat the game unlike some of the newer Square-Enix games where you can go through the game from the beginning with a powered up version of the hero. But hey – this game was made in 1992 and the idea of going back through the game at top performance was probably crazy talk back then!

However, better than actually beating a game again, I was able to take 10 hours of my time (broken into an hour here, two hours there) and feel like I was good at a real video game again. So if you’re on Nintendo’s Virtual Console, like role playing games, and are a fan of Final Fantasy and Square-Enix – go ahead and download Mystic Quest. You’ll love it!

Up next from the Virtual Console… Secret of Mana released by Square-Enix in 1993. Awesome!

Bring Crystalis to the Nintendo Wii Virtual Console!

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As you know by now, I support and engage in little campaigns to try to get some things accomplished in this world. Some are more important than others, but all of them mean something to me, your humble blogger. The little campaign referenced in the title of this entry is about bringing a video game to the Nintendo Wii virtual console.

Box art for Crystalis

If you haven’t heard of Crystalis, then you are either not a fan of the role playing game (RPG) genre of video gaming or you’re a fan of the genre, but haven’t studied some of the classic games from the old 8-bit systems. Crystalis was released in America in 1990. It features a post-apocalyptic setting where modern cities have fallen and people are surviving as members of clans and villages. Today, this might be rendered in beautiful three dimensional graphics by a company like Square-Enix, but back in 1990 the good folks at SNK did a spectacular job creating this world on an 8-bit system as you can see in the video at the bottom of this entry.

If you have the Nintendo Wii and you’ve played around with their Wii Shop channel, then you know they have something called the Virtual Console (and chances are that if you don’t have a Wii, you’ve at least heard of this feature). The Virtual Console brings games from yesterday to the Wii and makes them available for purchase by gamers. As a guy who really enjoyed Crystalis, I thought that I’d send a message to the people over at Nintendo asking them if they could get this game listed on the Virtual Console. Here is the response that they sent me:

To tell you the truth, I don’t know if Crystalis will ever become a Virtual Console game. However, it is great to hear from the many fans excited about the Virtual Console! So many of you have contacted Nintendo regarding the games you would love to see added. While we appreciate your excitement and support, decisions regarding which games will be made available come from several different companies and are influenced by a variety of factors apart from consumer suggestions.

For more details about the Virtual Console, including an updated list of available software titles, check out the following web page:

http://www.nintendo.com/wii/virtualconsole

New Virtual Console titles should continue to be released weekly across all systems, so there’s hope that the title you’re looking for will eventually appear. Keep checking our website (www.nintendo.com) for updates!

As you can tell, most of the response seems to be cut and paste from a generic “answer” database, but at least the person who responded had the good will to write an original sentence or two in the beginning of the e-mail. As a consumer, I appreciate that extra effort when it is so easy to just send a form response these days. I did some digging online and I read somewhere that Nintendo actually owns the rights to this old SNK title; I guess somewhere along the line they purchased the game (I may have that portion incorrect, I’m not sure). If that is true then it might be very easy for Nintendo to make this game available on the Virtual Console.

For those of you interested in watching a few minutes of this game, including the opening sequence which explains what is happening, feel free to watch the video below. You’ll be able to see the first few minutes of the game in all of its 8-bit glory!