I bought a Super Famicom a few weeks back, largely to facilitate playing GameBoy games via the Super GameBoy (which has been very fun, yes x3), but also to try out and own some SFC RPGs that are super cheap and plentiful around here. Mystic Quest is a game a friend of mine really loves, and given that I was able to find it for just 500 yen around here, it seemed like the perfect thing to finally try out. It took me around 13 or so hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
MQ was made with consultation from SquareSoft’s American branch to make a beginner RPG for both kids and newbies to the genre in the hopes that it would help bring more Americans into the RPG genre. This gives it the weird place of, even though it was written in Japanese and then translated to English, it didn’t actually come out in Japan for another year or so after the American release. The story is, nonetheless, about as light as you’d expect an RPG made explicitly for beginners to be. There are no grand themes or messages to be found here. It’s just a straightforward adventure to save the world as the hero the god fella seems to have found as a legit-seeming world saver. You meet a cast of colorful characters through your adventure, but it’s mostly just silly fun and light fluff as you go from Plot Event to Plot Event. That’s not a bad thing, especially for a game this easy and short, but it’s certainly something difficult to ignore. It’s a perfectly fine story, but it’s nothing that’ll be terribly exciting to more discerning players either now or back when it came out.
The gameplay is a very straightforward turn-based RPG, but it does have some action-based elements as well. There are no random encounters, with monsters instead chilling out on the map, waiting for you to attack them (usually blocking your path as to require you to fight them in some way). The action elements are some light Zelda-style world exploration via the weapons you have. You can cut bushes with axes, bomb walls, push buttons with your sword, and even jump over pits with your jump button (which can also be used to vault over annoying NPCs, thankfully). It’s not much of an action game so much as it still is very much an RPG with action elements, but it gave me some strong Lufia II vibes that I enjoyed nonetheless.
You only have a party of two, which is your main character plus whatever party member the story had placed with you for that duration of the story. You have money, but shortly after the start of the game, it doesn’t really have much of a problem, as most things until the very late game are trivially cheap with how much money you get from things. There isn’t really equipment, per se, either, at least not like a normal game. You don’t even have an equipping mechanic, as when you acquire new armor or versions of weapons, they’ll equip automatically, as they’re always just outright better than what you had before. Your party members, on the other hand, are completely static. Not only can they not get new equipment, but they can’t level up either, so they’re always exactly as good as they’ll ever be (unless the plot increases their strength for you). This isn’t so bad aside from the glitch that will make your party member’s stats not actually change when you get a new one, which can be pretty bad depending on when it happens, but they’re generally good enough with the new spells they get anyhow that it’s not a severe problem.
Enemy encounters are also balanced quite viciously at times, with many fights often being a fight you literally couldn’t win with how fast many enemies with instant-death spells are. However, given that you can just retry the battle from its start when you die, dying has very little consequence despite how mean it sometimes is. The generous retry mechanics turn a battle system whose meanness would make SMT blush to one that’s more so style rather than substance in terms of how difficult they actually are. The mechanics are quite simple overall, sure, but it’s still not much trouble given how short the game is. They will likely outstay their welcome for some, but with only a little over a 10-hour playtime, they won’t be too bad for most, I think.
The presentation is a mixed bag. The previous game this team did was SaGa 3 (aka Final Fantasy Legends 3), and a lot of the UI, battle system, and graphics are reused from that. As a result, it has an even more “8-bit RPG on a 16-bit console) than even a game like FFIV (released the previous year) does. The music, however, is absolutely excellent, with tons of tracks being super stand-out in just how hard they rock. The music quality alone has made me want to try more games by this team/composer in the future, so SaGa 3 and Treasure of the Rudras will absolutely be games I’m playing in the future. I’ll let that speak for the quality of the music itself, I suppose x3
Verdict: Recommended. This is a weird one to recommend, as while it’s a very competently put together and quite short game, it’s also one that I think anyone but retro enthusiasts will have a difficult time justifying giving their energy to these days. It you’re looking for more meaningful narratives or mechanical depth, then you’re better off looking elsewhere. It’s also difficult and not self-explanatory enough (while also being bog-simple enough) that I wouldn’t call it a terribly good beginner’s RPG either (compared to other SNES games like Earthbound or Super Mario RPG, to name a few), so that’s another difficult point in recommending it. But if you’re into retro RPGs and looking for something a bit different to spend a weekend or two playing, I think this will likely fit the bill quite well~.
MQ was made with consultation from SquareSoft’s American branch to make a beginner RPG for both kids and newbies to the genre in the hopes that it would help bring more Americans into the RPG genre. This gives it the weird place of, even though it was written in Japanese and then translated to English, it didn’t actually come out in Japan for another year or so after the American release. The story is, nonetheless, about as light as you’d expect an RPG made explicitly for beginners to be. There are no grand themes or messages to be found here. It’s just a straightforward adventure to save the world as the hero the god fella seems to have found as a legit-seeming world saver. You meet a cast of colorful characters through your adventure, but it’s mostly just silly fun and light fluff as you go from Plot Event to Plot Event. That’s not a bad thing, especially for a game this easy and short, but it’s certainly something difficult to ignore. It’s a perfectly fine story, but it’s nothing that’ll be terribly exciting to more discerning players either now or back when it came out.
The gameplay is a very straightforward turn-based RPG, but it does have some action-based elements as well. There are no random encounters, with monsters instead chilling out on the map, waiting for you to attack them (usually blocking your path as to require you to fight them in some way). The action elements are some light Zelda-style world exploration via the weapons you have. You can cut bushes with axes, bomb walls, push buttons with your sword, and even jump over pits with your jump button (which can also be used to vault over annoying NPCs, thankfully). It’s not much of an action game so much as it still is very much an RPG with action elements, but it gave me some strong Lufia II vibes that I enjoyed nonetheless.
You only have a party of two, which is your main character plus whatever party member the story had placed with you for that duration of the story. You have money, but shortly after the start of the game, it doesn’t really have much of a problem, as most things until the very late game are trivially cheap with how much money you get from things. There isn’t really equipment, per se, either, at least not like a normal game. You don’t even have an equipping mechanic, as when you acquire new armor or versions of weapons, they’ll equip automatically, as they’re always just outright better than what you had before. Your party members, on the other hand, are completely static. Not only can they not get new equipment, but they can’t level up either, so they’re always exactly as good as they’ll ever be (unless the plot increases their strength for you). This isn’t so bad aside from the glitch that will make your party member’s stats not actually change when you get a new one, which can be pretty bad depending on when it happens, but they’re generally good enough with the new spells they get anyhow that it’s not a severe problem.
Enemy encounters are also balanced quite viciously at times, with many fights often being a fight you literally couldn’t win with how fast many enemies with instant-death spells are. However, given that you can just retry the battle from its start when you die, dying has very little consequence despite how mean it sometimes is. The generous retry mechanics turn a battle system whose meanness would make SMT blush to one that’s more so style rather than substance in terms of how difficult they actually are. The mechanics are quite simple overall, sure, but it’s still not much trouble given how short the game is. They will likely outstay their welcome for some, but with only a little over a 10-hour playtime, they won’t be too bad for most, I think.
The presentation is a mixed bag. The previous game this team did was SaGa 3 (aka Final Fantasy Legends 3), and a lot of the UI, battle system, and graphics are reused from that. As a result, it has an even more “8-bit RPG on a 16-bit console) than even a game like FFIV (released the previous year) does. The music, however, is absolutely excellent, with tons of tracks being super stand-out in just how hard they rock. The music quality alone has made me want to try more games by this team/composer in the future, so SaGa 3 and Treasure of the Rudras will absolutely be games I’m playing in the future. I’ll let that speak for the quality of the music itself, I suppose x3
Verdict: Recommended. This is a weird one to recommend, as while it’s a very competently put together and quite short game, it’s also one that I think anyone but retro enthusiasts will have a difficult time justifying giving their energy to these days. It you’re looking for more meaningful narratives or mechanical depth, then you’re better off looking elsewhere. It’s also difficult and not self-explanatory enough (while also being bog-simple enough) that I wouldn’t call it a terribly good beginner’s RPG either (compared to other SNES games like Earthbound or Super Mario RPG, to name a few), so that’s another difficult point in recommending it. But if you’re into retro RPGs and looking for something a bit different to spend a weekend or two playing, I think this will likely fit the bill quite well~.