Final Fantasy Mystic Quest/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Angst? What Angst?: Benjamin seems more disgruntled than anguished about his village's destruction at the start of the game.
  • Breather Level: Hell, this is a breather game.
  • Crazy Awesome: Say whatever else you will about the game, but the trees can put you into Full Nelsons. This is in the game's first dungeon. Things just get crazier from there.
  • Cliché Storm: The plot. Find the Crystals. Defeat the evil dude. That's pretty much it, though it somehow manages to be good despite its simple premise.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: Just in case the various other links to this trope haven't clued the reader in yet, this game has what is generally considered to be one of the finest soundtracks of its generation, even with a relatively limited track list. Most praise focuses on Ryuji Sasai's use of electric guitar, and several of the tracks that resulted (which is the three battle themes, "Lava Dome" and "Doom Castle"). The soundtrack even came with three remixes that combine battle music in one track, and "Doom Castle" and "Lava Dome" in the other, to a crescendo of awesome.
  • Epileptic Trees: Surprisingly, a few exist. One's around Tristam and whether or not he was supposed to be in the "party" longer - since his robe nulls Doom attacks but you don't meet a monster which uses that until he leaves. Bigger questions come from the back of the US box, however, which among other things showed Phoebe in the party... in the Great Tree, with the name "Tea" and wielding a morning star. Was that just a debug character, or?...
  • Game Breaker: It's easier to break this game with in-game items than to rip it out of the SNES and smash it with a hammer.
    • Seeds are a cheap purchasable item that completely restores the heroes' magic points. Once you gets spells like White and Flare, spamming magic is made easy.
    • Not to mention the Life spell that almost always defeats any non-zombie monster instantly, akin to a highly accurate One-Hit Kill spell. Revive Kills Zombie inverted. Did the developers invoke this on purpose?
      • Actually, yes. Aside from Cure (which does damage to undead enemies), White Magic actually turns offensive when used on enemies. Heal, for example, will give every status it normally heals (and to show this isn't a glitch, the little angle that pops up in the spell animation becomes a demon), and Exit boots the enemy right out of the battle and, presumably, reality...meaning that White Magic possesses two One-Hit Kill spells.
    • Once you get the Dragon Claw... well, it has a 50% chance of inflicting Petrify with every hit, which is an instant kill on any enemy not immune to it. (Those who don't get Petrified, on the other hand, get hit with every other status effect in the game, more than making up for its (comparatively) low attack power!)
  • Gateway Series: The game was designed to make RPG novices interested in the genre.
  • Good Bad Bugs: Good grief, there's a few classic ones in here. Using Benjamin's Cure on the final boss for massive damage, for example. The revive spell is also rather broken in some ways, especially in the US release. Whether or not it was meant to completely supplant Cure as a party heal spell is debatable.
    • At high levels, Cure is enough to completely heal a single character or do 50% healing to both characters with a single cast. All Life really has on this (other than being able to target the fallen) is that it also heals status effects (which also go away when you die), but it also loses the ability to be cast on both characters simultaneously. Life's major brokenness comes from its effect on enemies in the US release of the game.
    • In a really strange glitch, party members will retain the element and status resistances of the one who last joined so long as you refrain from saving and restoring from said save, whereupon they're reset to their correct values. That said, you can use this to your benefit if you want to give Reuben resistance to things besides fire, for example.
    • Out of bombs? No problem, apparently Benjamin can blow up rocks with his fists. Out of Mega Grenades? Still no problem, apparently Ben can do this at range. Basically, the only thing you need the explosives themselves for is their use in battle. (Try to use them there when your out, and Ben'll just slug the enemy with his bare fists. This, surprisingly, has little effect.)
  • It's Easy, So It Sucks
    • Not so in the Japanese version, where even the introductory enemies have beefed up stats and resistances, your spells are nerfed quite a bit, and generally the game fights back. Granted, it is still short and straight-forward.
  • It's Short and Easy, So It Sucks: Mystic Quest can be beaten in about six hours, ten if you actively search for every monster lair, weapon, armor, and spell.
  • Those Two Bosses: Medusa and Pazuzu. Granted, the game is never hard, but these two can in fact kill you. Medusa uses a lot of status attacks like Paralyze and Stone, while Pazuzu can reflect your Aero spells, which he so happens to be weak to, doing more than a 1000 damage to the caster. If you order both characters to use Aero and Pazuzu goes first and uses Psych Shield, you just lost.
  • Woolseyism: Every playable character, as well as Spencer, went through a Dub Name Change. "Zash" to "Benjamin", "Karen" to "Kaeli", "Rock/Lock" to "Tristam", "Faye" to "Phoebe", "Red" to "Reuben", and "Jack" to "Spencer". And yes, Ted Woolsey translated FFMQ.
    • Although the US version was released first; and the Japanese version also had no built-in default name for the Hero (Benjamin).
    • Furthermore, the Japanese version of the game appears to mention the final boss in the first conversation in the game whereas this knowledge is held back to be a twist in the English versions of the game.
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