Sunday, June 15, 2008

Replaying Mystic Quest, Part 3

Welcome to the third part of my log about replaying Mystic Quest. Although this can't be called "replaying" anymore, because I already got a lot further than in my original attempt ten years ago. First of all I want to tell you a little something about the Mana or Seiken Densetsu series, where Mystic Quest or better known as Final Fantasy Adventure is the first part of. The successor of Mystic Quest is actually the well known Super Nintendo game Secret of Mana. And the series got a third part on the SNES, though never released at the outside of Japan. The series later got different installments on the GameBoy Advance, Playstation, Playstation 2, Nintendo DS and even mobile phone. Most of them are an Action RPG, like Mystic Quest is. So you get real time action and a leveling system. One noticeable title is Sword of Mana for the GameBoy Advance, because it's supposed to be a remake of Mystic Quest. I tried this game, but it didn't catch me at all. On the one hand Square Enix tried to remove all elements from Final Fantasy, like the Chocobo, but on the other hand made it look more like their Final Fantasy games by adding those neverending cutscenes. It took you ages, so you could finally start playing for real. I normally don't play games for the story and I think, the best feature of Twilight Princess was, that you could skip cutscenes by pressing the start or minus button. So, I get pretty much pissed by long boring sequences with a lot of blah, blah, blah.

So, let's get back to the original game. Like I said in the last part, I finally returned to the Dark Castle thing, where I fought a Chimera, met my so called girlfriend again and faced the Dark Lord personally. I also found the Blood Sword there, which has the ability to steal health from your opponents. However, after defeating that Dark Lord guy Julius and the girl went the waterfall up and I ended up being thrown the falls down. Again. I landed in a desert, where I met my Chocobo again and where it got some robot legs. Talking about the Chocobo, that's a bird from the Final Fantasy series and quite handy. You can ride on it with top speed and you can't get damaged from enemies. The robot version can also ride on water, which makes things tricky. On the one hand you can finally cross water and so the boundaries of the seperated regions of the game. On the other hand, you will get confused very soon, because if you cross one border of the map, you will end up at the other side. For example crossing one of the southmost screens will take you to the opposite northmost one. So, basically you can walk infinitely in one direction. Which is just weird and can easily make you lose orientation.

Next to the Chocobo, who constantly follows you on the overworld after completing the Airship, you have other companions, who mostly assist you in dungeons. They follow you like the companions in Link's Awakening and can't be hurt by monsters. Though most of them have the abilitiy to attack enemies, as well serving you in a special way, when you "ask" them in the menu. For example the girl can heal you, which is a real bless at the beginning of the game. The dwarf Watts let you buy items, Amanda will neutralize the petrified condition and Lester can change the background music.

So, after I got the "Chocobot" and new equipment, like the Flame Chain, the Ice Armor and the Ice Shield, I went back to Wendel and after that to Lorim, where everyone was frozen. So, I had to go to an Ice Cave, fighting Kary, a female gigant with serpent legs, leaving the Ice Sword after defeat. For doing so, a guy in Lorim gave me the Bone Key and said, I have to go for the Legendary Sword. Then two minidungeons were on the list. The first ended with a fight against a Grim Reaper missing a scythe and throwing skulls, which gave me the Nuke spell. I didn't have the chance to try this one out, but it sounds like fun. Then I went to the cave the Bone Key was for, buying the Thunder Spear on the way. The dungeon was quite short, too, and came up with a Kraken at the end. Now the Undersea Volcano dungeon is next, where I'm supposed to find the Legendary Sword. But I doubt so.

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