Quest 64 is a bit of an odd case for me. When I was a kid, my dad would often take my brother and I to the local flea market. When we were there, we'd pore over the various selections of used video games on display. We never had much money, so we had to be pretty selective about what we would buy - either save our allowances to get something a little better or try our luck with a cheaper game. One day, we ended up picking up Quest 64. I seem to recall being somewhat drawn in by the artwork on the front - and it was assuredly cheap, which I'm sure was a contributing factor. As far as my memories of playing it go, however, I don't have many. From my recollection, I played the first section of the game at least a dozen times, but I don't seem to remember much of anything past the first boss. All in all, it was nothing but another foggy memory of one of many N64 games that never quite managed to hold my attention.
But I did remember it. And it was something of a pleasantly nostalgic feeling when it would pop back up into my mind from time to time. I did some reading up on it not too long ago, about how the game was rather highly anticipated for being one of the first RPGs on the infamously RPG-starved N64. I remember reading that it wasn't received very well, although it did score some modest sale numbers. And I do remember reading that there was a lot of content left on the cutting room floor - party members, story elements, more RPG-ish systems like currency, and so on. I even read that the game was eventually released in Japan with some minor improvements, and that there was some planning done for a sequel before it became apparent nobody was really frothing at the mouth for one. I brought it all up to my brother, who shared my feelings about it: Even if we didn't seem to remember the game being especially good, we did have some fond memories of it. I had to go back and play it again and see if maybe I was missing something. And now that I've seen the credits roll, I can finally say with a mind unclouded by time... Yeah, the harsher criticisms back in the day were not entirely unwarranted. But it isn't all doom and gloom. I'll talk about it for a little bit.
This is a game from 1998 with a fairly straightforward story, so I haven't bothered tagging this review, but I will be spoiling details going forward. Keep that in mind if you want to go into it blind.
I'll give a quick summary of the game's story before I really dive into this. Our protagonist is a young monk named Brian, who lives in a monastery in a quiet village called Melrode. His father, Bartholomy, has not been heard from in a month. Bartholomy left the monastery in search of the Eletale Book, a tome of magical power beyond human understanding that was stolen away. In the wrong hands, the Eletale Book could bring ruin upon the world of Celtland. Brian sets off in search of his father, and the book as well. This is about as complicated as the plot gets. You will come across a fair number of characters on your quest, some of which are recurring, but most are not. It's obvious from the intricacy of their designs that a good handful were intended to have more relevance to the plot, but they by and large serve as signposts to give you story tidbits and point you in the right direction. The game throws a couple of curveballs towards the end, but they don't have much of an impact because of the lack of context surrounding them. I'll touch more on all of that later in the review, but overall, the story is pretty standard RPG fare: young hero sets off on a quest to save his homeland. To its credit, the game does keep this basic plot quite unobtrusive, which is actually one of its better points. Many games in the genre will inundate you with lore and dialogue in service of similarly under-nuanced narratives. Quest 64 doesn't waste a bunch of your time with cutscenes and melodrama. Not to say it's especially respectful of your time otherwise, but we'll get to that as well.
I'm going to take this moment to talk about the things that I enjoy about Quest 64. First and foremost, its vibes are immaculate. It's got that distinct "mid-to-late 90s 3D game" aesthetic, with lots of chunky polygons and bright colors. Celtland wasn't drop-dead gorgeous for its time, to be sure, and it isn't going to blow anybody away now. But it is charming and expansive, with lots of little nooks and crannies to explore. Towns and cities are quaint and cozy, and just about every building in the game can be entered, containing surprisingly detailed interiors. The NPCs populating these burghs have a notable amount of diversity - even though many of them share the same basic models, I almost never saw the same face twice. The more "important" characters are quite well-designed and have a lot of charm. A couple of standouts are Princess Flora and Leo D'nardo, who were apparently intended to be able to accompany Brian on his quest at some point in development. Brian himself is adorable and I never get tired of seeing that stupid ahoge bounce around. The enemies you'll encounter are likewise a strong point for the game, featuring a lot of interesting designs and rarely relying on simple recolors to give the illusion of variety. The game's core systems are fairly novel for its time, even if not entirely original. The main focuses are the elemental magic system and the way the game stages battles. Brian can cast spells from the four classical elements (fire, water, earth and wind). He can unlock new spells by putting points into these elements, either via leveling up or finding one of the many "spirits" hidden throughout Celtland. What results is a branching spellcasting system, which you navigate using the C-buttons. Once in combat, you are placed into a "battle area" of sorts, represented by a large white octagon. Meanwhile, you and your enemies on your turns are surrounded by a smaller octagon. These octagons represent the full range of the battlefield and the area in which you can move on your turn, respectively. You take turns with the enemy group casting spells and attempting to evade attacks, and you can either move closer to your enemies to engage them more directly or leave the battle area altogether to escape from the fight. Encounters in the overworld are still random, but at least this way, you are guaranteed to escape from any non-boss fights as long as you can reach the edge of the arena. It's a much more interactive way of performing standard turn-based RPG combat and honestly feels surprisingly fresh even in 2023. I wish more RPGs would adopt a similar approach. Stats are not gained in the traditional manner, either - rather than having your numbers increase with each level you gain, stats are improved by performing the associated task, much like in Final Fantasy II. The more you run around, the higher your agility becomes. Casting spells frequently increases your mana pool. Taking a lot of hits in combat leads to you becoming more durable. On paper, it's a way of allowing you to develop a favored playstyle naturally. And of course, the music is quite nice. It's not my favorite OST ever by any stretch of the imagination, but there are a few ear-worms that I've caught myself humming even years after the fact.
And with that, I think I've run out of nice things to say about the game. Let me tackle the combat first, because it's obviously the meat of the game besides running from place to place. Everything that I described before is great in theory, but in practice is a bit of a mess. The spell system is a neat idea, but never reaches its full potential. Balance is a big issue and is assuredly the most frequent complaint you'll hear about when people discuss the game. While the manual does explain what kinds of spells you can expect from each element, it doesn't explain what level of utility you can expect to see from them in the long run. And I can summarize it fairly succinctly as such: Water has the healing spell, and Earth has a barrier spell that makes you temporarily impervious to magic attacks (read: 99% of attacks in the game). By comparison, Wind and Fire offer some decent attack spells and some fairly situational or underwhelming buffs and status spells. I'm sure you could beat the game with Wind and Fire given enough forethought and patience. But the handful of benefits in those two elements ultimately pales in comparison to the aforementioned boons that Water and Earth offer. If you were to play the game start to finish, making a respectable effort to find the hidden spirits and doing a bit of level grinding, you could have two of those elements maxed out by the end of the game. If you, being uncertain of where the best spells lie, were to evenly distribute your points between each element, you could severely hinder yourself simply by virtue of not having access to the best spells of each element. To me, that's more than a little counterintuitive, and it is definitely a deterrent from experimentation knowing you could make life a lot harder for yourself by not pooling your resources into two specific elements. What's more, the elemental spell system doesn't go quite as deep as it could to begin with. The spell variety isn't great, with some of the core offensive spells simply being bog-standard attacks of increasing size and power. There isn't a whole lot of creativity on display amongst the available abilities, which again takes away from the joy of experimentation. There is no overlap between the elements with regards to the spells you can cast, and while your standard rock-paper-scissors elemental system is ostensibly in place, it doesn't really matter too much when you're picking your favored elements based on their best spells as opposed to any bonuses one might give you in a specific fight. The combat system has its own share of problems, too. In theory, being able to move around during combat would allow you to evade attacks in much the same way as one would in a more action-centric game. However, in reality, most of the enemies you encounter will have attacks that either home in on you or come out too quickly for you to react. You don't have the ability to move until the attack is already on its way, which takes away a lot of the strategic potential that should be afforded by this free movement, even when using one of the spells or items that lets you move more quickly. There's no dodge or block button, or parry mechanic - all things that might have added a decent level of strategy, but ultimately your options in evasion amount to moving left or right as soon as you're able to and praying you don't get hit. Even things such as terrain are ultimately meaningless - rarely will you ever enter combat in places that aren't simply flat ground, and since most enemies use difficult-to-avoid ranged attacks you are more likely to be hindered by any kind of cliff or barrier than you are to be helped by it. To top it all off, passive evasion is a thing in this game. You're expected to position yourself properly to make sure your spells land, but that still isn't a guarantee that you'll actually hit your target - you can still see a big MISS jump out at you even when you watched that two-ton boulder fall directly on their head. This can be incredibly frustrating at times, as it adds randomness to what is superficially a skill-based combat system. The other systems surrounding all of this don't do the core gameplay any favors, either. Much like in Final Fantasy II, grinding stats through doing sounds way cooler than it actually is, especially given how painfully slow the growth rates are. Even then, the benefits are difficult to gauge, as their overall effect on gameplay is minimal. Being able to tank one more hit or being able to run to the escape zone a little bit faster isn't nearly as important as having the spells that will let you win your fights in the first place. What's more, the game lacks a traditional buy-sell RPG economy, with all of the items you find in the game either coming from chests, NPCs who freely hand them over, or enemy drops. Chests don't replenish, NPCs will only give you an item if you don't already have an identical one in your inventory, and enemy drops are so infrequent you could go the entire game without getting one. The end result is that if you're having difficulty with the game, you could use up a great deal of your resources without any feasible way of recovering them, which is not going to make your life any easier. On that note, the relatively short list of items in this game is mostly useless, as aside from the HP/MP restoratives which can be a lifeline at later stages, all of the benefits items can provide are either too niche or unreliable to be of any use or can be replaced by an equivalent spell. And yes, even in spell form they are seldom any more useful. Rare items like a golden amulet that temporarily doubles your defense are pointless when there is a spell in the game that can make you effectively invincible. In spite of all that, you'll probably still more likely be loath to use them because of the aforementioned issues; you won't want to expend your items when it's uncertain if you can get extras later on.
And to wrap up the gameplay: It's just a slog, man. The first half or thereabouts of the game is paced relatively well, with areas that are a bit too big but are forgivably so, and the enemies and bosses being mostly manageable. However, as you move into the latter half it becomes painfully apparent that the devs were intent on stretching the game as thin as they possibly could. The dungeons at this point become lengthy and linear caverns which lack any meaningful features to help you keep your bearings. One area in particular pretty much was just a long cavern that I think went on for a solid 20 minutes. In a game where enemy encounters can come from any direction and will require you to adjust your position, this can sometimes result in you unintentionally heading back the way you came and having no way of knowing until you unmistakably end up at the last room you can recognize. Being able to get the player lost when they can only go in a straight line is quite the accomplishment. Enemy encounters are unbearably frequent and any concept of a difficulty curve flies out the window - late game foes deal unreasonable amounts of damage and your best healing spell is not up to the task of keeping you topped off mid-fight. You'll likely spend most of your time fleeing from these encounters, as there is no meaningful benefit to winning them. Grinding stats is better done against weaker enemies that pose you no threat, and grinding levels is largely unnecessary because exploration will provide you with all of the element points you could possibly need. And again, you will seldom receive items as a result of winning battles. Bosses are largely just damage checks and do not require any meaningful degree of strategy to overcome. Shield yourself, heal yourself and throw your biggest spell until they die. And the worst part is that the game isn't particularly difficult if not for Brian's squishiness. Dying is a slap on the wrist - you get sent back to the last place you saved, with nothing lost, except for whatever items you used up along the way. The tragedy, then, is that you have to go all the way back to wherever you were before. That walk back to the boss room is going to sting with the constant random encounters. All in all, complaints that can easily be made of many older RPGs, but ones that are all the more irritating given how little Quest offers you to keep you going.
Yes, the story doesn't ever develop in any meaningful way. Brian moves from town to town, knocking down bosses who have stolen four powerful elemental gems. Turns out those gems are the key to unlocking the potential of the Eletale Book, and the significance of all of this is not revealed to you until the last minute. Up until then, you're led to believe that King Beigis, the monarch of Brannoch Castle, was vying to collect the elemental gems and use the power of the Eletale Book to become undisputed ruler of Celtland. To this end, you've been "manipulated" by Shannon - an easily-missable NPC who frequently appears along your path to give you cryptic guidance - into gathering those gems and bringing them to Beigis. But in actuality, Shannon is the puppet of Mammon, an otherworldly being who seeks to escape from the realm he is trapped in and wreak havoc upon Celtland. His ultimate goal is to claim Brian's power for himself to facilitate his ascent. Ultimately, you beat him and you are given a few brief words from Shannon before getting a simple text scroll and then the credits. It's not much of an ending, but then it wasn't much of a story, either. You encounter Brian's father just before the final bosses, and get a single set of dialogue from him before moving on. This in spite of the fact that the whole quest was as much about finding him as it was about saving the world. Really, that's the problem with everything in this game - it begs to be deeper, to be explored further, but you aren't given anything. So many concepts and characters are introduced to never be brought up again. Everything is explained and wrapped up in the last hour or so of gameplay, and then it's over. The Japanese version of the game apparently does add some new text and cutscenes, and on top of the other additions does sound like it would be a little more enjoyable. But the game itself is just so fundamentally flawed as to be incredibly difficult to enjoy in the first place. When I watched Mammon explode into the same red flash every enemy you defeat does, I was relieved - not because I was now able to savor my victory, but because I could say I had beaten Quest 64 and thus never had to touch it again.
In spite of everything, though, I can't bring myself to hate Quest 64. There is a definite appeal to it, and seeing that a lot of people still harbor some affection for the game even after it has been objectively obliterated by the passage of time is kind of... Heartwarming. I think most of us can agree that Brian deserved a better Quest, and knowing all the things that could have been makes what we did get all the more bittersweet. Imagine a Quest 64 if Imagineer had another year or two to work on things. Maybe Flora and Leo could have been party members after all. Perhaps the combat system could have been further refined and expanded upon, making it much more enjoyable. A lot of fine-tuning on the top end, maybe a little more story content, more content in general - I doubt it would have been a runaway success, but perhaps it would have been a bit more warmly received. Even still, 1998 was a massive year for gaming. We had absolute titans like Ocarina of Time and Metal Gear Solid coming out, as well as other RPGs like Suikoden II and Panzer Dragoon Saga. Quest 64 never stood a chance, and I honestly think a lot of the positive reception it did get was largely because it was an alright RPG for the N64 - a platform with barely anything else to compare it to. Set side by side with its contemporaries on the Playstation, I think it would have been eaten alive. But that was then, and this is now. Quest 64 hasn't necessarily aged much better than a lot of the games from that era, and we have the benefit of hindsight to view it more fondly now that none of us has to be the poor sap who spent full retail picking up what they thought was going to be the next big thing for the Big N. I have a special place in my heart for Brian and his big stupid ahoge, and even though I highly doubt we'll ever see him again, he'll still live on in our memories.
But I did remember it. And it was something of a pleasantly nostalgic feeling when it would pop back up into my mind from time to time. I did some reading up on it not too long ago, about how the game was rather highly anticipated for being one of the first RPGs on the infamously RPG-starved N64. I remember reading that it wasn't received very well, although it did score some modest sale numbers. And I do remember reading that there was a lot of content left on the cutting room floor - party members, story elements, more RPG-ish systems like currency, and so on. I even read that the game was eventually released in Japan with some minor improvements, and that there was some planning done for a sequel before it became apparent nobody was really frothing at the mouth for one. I brought it all up to my brother, who shared my feelings about it: Even if we didn't seem to remember the game being especially good, we did have some fond memories of it. I had to go back and play it again and see if maybe I was missing something. And now that I've seen the credits roll, I can finally say with a mind unclouded by time... Yeah, the harsher criticisms back in the day were not entirely unwarranted. But it isn't all doom and gloom. I'll talk about it for a little bit.
This is a game from 1998 with a fairly straightforward story, so I haven't bothered tagging this review, but I will be spoiling details going forward. Keep that in mind if you want to go into it blind.
I'll give a quick summary of the game's story before I really dive into this. Our protagonist is a young monk named Brian, who lives in a monastery in a quiet village called Melrode. His father, Bartholomy, has not been heard from in a month. Bartholomy left the monastery in search of the Eletale Book, a tome of magical power beyond human understanding that was stolen away. In the wrong hands, the Eletale Book could bring ruin upon the world of Celtland. Brian sets off in search of his father, and the book as well. This is about as complicated as the plot gets. You will come across a fair number of characters on your quest, some of which are recurring, but most are not. It's obvious from the intricacy of their designs that a good handful were intended to have more relevance to the plot, but they by and large serve as signposts to give you story tidbits and point you in the right direction. The game throws a couple of curveballs towards the end, but they don't have much of an impact because of the lack of context surrounding them. I'll touch more on all of that later in the review, but overall, the story is pretty standard RPG fare: young hero sets off on a quest to save his homeland. To its credit, the game does keep this basic plot quite unobtrusive, which is actually one of its better points. Many games in the genre will inundate you with lore and dialogue in service of similarly under-nuanced narratives. Quest 64 doesn't waste a bunch of your time with cutscenes and melodrama. Not to say it's especially respectful of your time otherwise, but we'll get to that as well.
I'm going to take this moment to talk about the things that I enjoy about Quest 64. First and foremost, its vibes are immaculate. It's got that distinct "mid-to-late 90s 3D game" aesthetic, with lots of chunky polygons and bright colors. Celtland wasn't drop-dead gorgeous for its time, to be sure, and it isn't going to blow anybody away now. But it is charming and expansive, with lots of little nooks and crannies to explore. Towns and cities are quaint and cozy, and just about every building in the game can be entered, containing surprisingly detailed interiors. The NPCs populating these burghs have a notable amount of diversity - even though many of them share the same basic models, I almost never saw the same face twice. The more "important" characters are quite well-designed and have a lot of charm. A couple of standouts are Princess Flora and Leo D'nardo, who were apparently intended to be able to accompany Brian on his quest at some point in development. Brian himself is adorable and I never get tired of seeing that stupid ahoge bounce around. The enemies you'll encounter are likewise a strong point for the game, featuring a lot of interesting designs and rarely relying on simple recolors to give the illusion of variety. The game's core systems are fairly novel for its time, even if not entirely original. The main focuses are the elemental magic system and the way the game stages battles. Brian can cast spells from the four classical elements (fire, water, earth and wind). He can unlock new spells by putting points into these elements, either via leveling up or finding one of the many "spirits" hidden throughout Celtland. What results is a branching spellcasting system, which you navigate using the C-buttons. Once in combat, you are placed into a "battle area" of sorts, represented by a large white octagon. Meanwhile, you and your enemies on your turns are surrounded by a smaller octagon. These octagons represent the full range of the battlefield and the area in which you can move on your turn, respectively. You take turns with the enemy group casting spells and attempting to evade attacks, and you can either move closer to your enemies to engage them more directly or leave the battle area altogether to escape from the fight. Encounters in the overworld are still random, but at least this way, you are guaranteed to escape from any non-boss fights as long as you can reach the edge of the arena. It's a much more interactive way of performing standard turn-based RPG combat and honestly feels surprisingly fresh even in 2023. I wish more RPGs would adopt a similar approach. Stats are not gained in the traditional manner, either - rather than having your numbers increase with each level you gain, stats are improved by performing the associated task, much like in Final Fantasy II. The more you run around, the higher your agility becomes. Casting spells frequently increases your mana pool. Taking a lot of hits in combat leads to you becoming more durable. On paper, it's a way of allowing you to develop a favored playstyle naturally. And of course, the music is quite nice. It's not my favorite OST ever by any stretch of the imagination, but there are a few ear-worms that I've caught myself humming even years after the fact.
And with that, I think I've run out of nice things to say about the game. Let me tackle the combat first, because it's obviously the meat of the game besides running from place to place. Everything that I described before is great in theory, but in practice is a bit of a mess. The spell system is a neat idea, but never reaches its full potential. Balance is a big issue and is assuredly the most frequent complaint you'll hear about when people discuss the game. While the manual does explain what kinds of spells you can expect from each element, it doesn't explain what level of utility you can expect to see from them in the long run. And I can summarize it fairly succinctly as such: Water has the healing spell, and Earth has a barrier spell that makes you temporarily impervious to magic attacks (read: 99% of attacks in the game). By comparison, Wind and Fire offer some decent attack spells and some fairly situational or underwhelming buffs and status spells. I'm sure you could beat the game with Wind and Fire given enough forethought and patience. But the handful of benefits in those two elements ultimately pales in comparison to the aforementioned boons that Water and Earth offer. If you were to play the game start to finish, making a respectable effort to find the hidden spirits and doing a bit of level grinding, you could have two of those elements maxed out by the end of the game. If you, being uncertain of where the best spells lie, were to evenly distribute your points between each element, you could severely hinder yourself simply by virtue of not having access to the best spells of each element. To me, that's more than a little counterintuitive, and it is definitely a deterrent from experimentation knowing you could make life a lot harder for yourself by not pooling your resources into two specific elements. What's more, the elemental spell system doesn't go quite as deep as it could to begin with. The spell variety isn't great, with some of the core offensive spells simply being bog-standard attacks of increasing size and power. There isn't a whole lot of creativity on display amongst the available abilities, which again takes away from the joy of experimentation. There is no overlap between the elements with regards to the spells you can cast, and while your standard rock-paper-scissors elemental system is ostensibly in place, it doesn't really matter too much when you're picking your favored elements based on their best spells as opposed to any bonuses one might give you in a specific fight. The combat system has its own share of problems, too. In theory, being able to move around during combat would allow you to evade attacks in much the same way as one would in a more action-centric game. However, in reality, most of the enemies you encounter will have attacks that either home in on you or come out too quickly for you to react. You don't have the ability to move until the attack is already on its way, which takes away a lot of the strategic potential that should be afforded by this free movement, even when using one of the spells or items that lets you move more quickly. There's no dodge or block button, or parry mechanic - all things that might have added a decent level of strategy, but ultimately your options in evasion amount to moving left or right as soon as you're able to and praying you don't get hit. Even things such as terrain are ultimately meaningless - rarely will you ever enter combat in places that aren't simply flat ground, and since most enemies use difficult-to-avoid ranged attacks you are more likely to be hindered by any kind of cliff or barrier than you are to be helped by it. To top it all off, passive evasion is a thing in this game. You're expected to position yourself properly to make sure your spells land, but that still isn't a guarantee that you'll actually hit your target - you can still see a big MISS jump out at you even when you watched that two-ton boulder fall directly on their head. This can be incredibly frustrating at times, as it adds randomness to what is superficially a skill-based combat system. The other systems surrounding all of this don't do the core gameplay any favors, either. Much like in Final Fantasy II, grinding stats through doing sounds way cooler than it actually is, especially given how painfully slow the growth rates are. Even then, the benefits are difficult to gauge, as their overall effect on gameplay is minimal. Being able to tank one more hit or being able to run to the escape zone a little bit faster isn't nearly as important as having the spells that will let you win your fights in the first place. What's more, the game lacks a traditional buy-sell RPG economy, with all of the items you find in the game either coming from chests, NPCs who freely hand them over, or enemy drops. Chests don't replenish, NPCs will only give you an item if you don't already have an identical one in your inventory, and enemy drops are so infrequent you could go the entire game without getting one. The end result is that if you're having difficulty with the game, you could use up a great deal of your resources without any feasible way of recovering them, which is not going to make your life any easier. On that note, the relatively short list of items in this game is mostly useless, as aside from the HP/MP restoratives which can be a lifeline at later stages, all of the benefits items can provide are either too niche or unreliable to be of any use or can be replaced by an equivalent spell. And yes, even in spell form they are seldom any more useful. Rare items like a golden amulet that temporarily doubles your defense are pointless when there is a spell in the game that can make you effectively invincible. In spite of all that, you'll probably still more likely be loath to use them because of the aforementioned issues; you won't want to expend your items when it's uncertain if you can get extras later on.
And to wrap up the gameplay: It's just a slog, man. The first half or thereabouts of the game is paced relatively well, with areas that are a bit too big but are forgivably so, and the enemies and bosses being mostly manageable. However, as you move into the latter half it becomes painfully apparent that the devs were intent on stretching the game as thin as they possibly could. The dungeons at this point become lengthy and linear caverns which lack any meaningful features to help you keep your bearings. One area in particular pretty much was just a long cavern that I think went on for a solid 20 minutes. In a game where enemy encounters can come from any direction and will require you to adjust your position, this can sometimes result in you unintentionally heading back the way you came and having no way of knowing until you unmistakably end up at the last room you can recognize. Being able to get the player lost when they can only go in a straight line is quite the accomplishment. Enemy encounters are unbearably frequent and any concept of a difficulty curve flies out the window - late game foes deal unreasonable amounts of damage and your best healing spell is not up to the task of keeping you topped off mid-fight. You'll likely spend most of your time fleeing from these encounters, as there is no meaningful benefit to winning them. Grinding stats is better done against weaker enemies that pose you no threat, and grinding levels is largely unnecessary because exploration will provide you with all of the element points you could possibly need. And again, you will seldom receive items as a result of winning battles. Bosses are largely just damage checks and do not require any meaningful degree of strategy to overcome. Shield yourself, heal yourself and throw your biggest spell until they die. And the worst part is that the game isn't particularly difficult if not for Brian's squishiness. Dying is a slap on the wrist - you get sent back to the last place you saved, with nothing lost, except for whatever items you used up along the way. The tragedy, then, is that you have to go all the way back to wherever you were before. That walk back to the boss room is going to sting with the constant random encounters. All in all, complaints that can easily be made of many older RPGs, but ones that are all the more irritating given how little Quest offers you to keep you going.
Yes, the story doesn't ever develop in any meaningful way. Brian moves from town to town, knocking down bosses who have stolen four powerful elemental gems. Turns out those gems are the key to unlocking the potential of the Eletale Book, and the significance of all of this is not revealed to you until the last minute. Up until then, you're led to believe that King Beigis, the monarch of Brannoch Castle, was vying to collect the elemental gems and use the power of the Eletale Book to become undisputed ruler of Celtland. To this end, you've been "manipulated" by Shannon - an easily-missable NPC who frequently appears along your path to give you cryptic guidance - into gathering those gems and bringing them to Beigis. But in actuality, Shannon is the puppet of Mammon, an otherworldly being who seeks to escape from the realm he is trapped in and wreak havoc upon Celtland. His ultimate goal is to claim Brian's power for himself to facilitate his ascent. Ultimately, you beat him and you are given a few brief words from Shannon before getting a simple text scroll and then the credits. It's not much of an ending, but then it wasn't much of a story, either. You encounter Brian's father just before the final bosses, and get a single set of dialogue from him before moving on. This in spite of the fact that the whole quest was as much about finding him as it was about saving the world. Really, that's the problem with everything in this game - it begs to be deeper, to be explored further, but you aren't given anything. So many concepts and characters are introduced to never be brought up again. Everything is explained and wrapped up in the last hour or so of gameplay, and then it's over. The Japanese version of the game apparently does add some new text and cutscenes, and on top of the other additions does sound like it would be a little more enjoyable. But the game itself is just so fundamentally flawed as to be incredibly difficult to enjoy in the first place. When I watched Mammon explode into the same red flash every enemy you defeat does, I was relieved - not because I was now able to savor my victory, but because I could say I had beaten Quest 64 and thus never had to touch it again.
In spite of everything, though, I can't bring myself to hate Quest 64. There is a definite appeal to it, and seeing that a lot of people still harbor some affection for the game even after it has been objectively obliterated by the passage of time is kind of... Heartwarming. I think most of us can agree that Brian deserved a better Quest, and knowing all the things that could have been makes what we did get all the more bittersweet. Imagine a Quest 64 if Imagineer had another year or two to work on things. Maybe Flora and Leo could have been party members after all. Perhaps the combat system could have been further refined and expanded upon, making it much more enjoyable. A lot of fine-tuning on the top end, maybe a little more story content, more content in general - I doubt it would have been a runaway success, but perhaps it would have been a bit more warmly received. Even still, 1998 was a massive year for gaming. We had absolute titans like Ocarina of Time and Metal Gear Solid coming out, as well as other RPGs like Suikoden II and Panzer Dragoon Saga. Quest 64 never stood a chance, and I honestly think a lot of the positive reception it did get was largely because it was an alright RPG for the N64 - a platform with barely anything else to compare it to. Set side by side with its contemporaries on the Playstation, I think it would have been eaten alive. But that was then, and this is now. Quest 64 hasn't necessarily aged much better than a lot of the games from that era, and we have the benefit of hindsight to view it more fondly now that none of us has to be the poor sap who spent full retail picking up what they thought was going to be the next big thing for the Big N. I have a special place in my heart for Brian and his big stupid ahoge, and even though I highly doubt we'll ever see him again, he'll still live on in our memories.