Final Fantasy Mystic Quest - Television Tropes & Idioms

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest (a.k.a. Final Fantasy USA: Mystic Quest in Japan and Mystic Quest Legend in Europe) is an early spinoff of the wildly popular Final Fantasy franchise, released for the Super NES/Super Famicom in 1992.

The story revolves around Benjamin (you only learn his name from the manual, he has no default name), a boy chosen by fate to save the world. To do so he must recover the four magical crystals to restore the world's climate to its proper order. Along the way he will be joined by several allies who have their own reasons for helping him: Kaeli, a young woman who can talk to trees; Tristam, a ninja treasure hunter with a jazzy musical theme; Phoebe, a mage who joins you in order to save her grandfather; and Reuben, a warrior who is searching for his lost father. Each will join your party at various times and help you deal with the monsters infesting the land, as well as teach you useful things and give you many useful items.

Your goal, of course, is to find the four monsters who have stolen the Crystals and slay them set things right. But are things really as they seem?

Mystic Quest is often considered the red-headed stepchild of the Final Fantasy verse, and is criticized for being "too easy" and "full of cliches" that would appear in many console RPGs after it. Some gamers have decided that these faults can also serve as beneficial for newcomers to the series, but not quite the "gateway drug" that Final Fantasy IV or Final Fantasy VI might have been. One reason the game is hated is because many have mistakenly assumed it was created as a replacement for Final Fantasy V, which was not released in its original Super NES form in America. This is not the case.

That said, the game's music is among the greatest 16-bit soundtracks, with Doom Castle being arguably the greatest piece.

This game contains examples of:

Autobots Rock Out: The boss battle music.
The Barney: The entire point of this game was that it was made for beginners to the RPG genre. Then the people who were hardened to the genre got a hold of it and made it their kickball. They even claimed it wasn't good as a primer for the genre, based on their experience with the game, not what actual RPG newbies experienced.
Canon Name: Though the game allows you to rename your hero, the U.S. manual refers to him as "Benjamin".
Cliche Storm: The plot. Find the Crystals. Defeat the evil dude. That's pretty much it, though it somehow manages to be Better Than It Sounds despite its simple premise.
The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard: It's a turn-based game, so your actions are determined at the beginning of each round. Get hit for over half your life? Tough, deal with it next round. The monsters? No such restriction — unless the computer is that stupid, an enemy that was at full health at the beginning of the round, after you bring it down to its wounded form, will just cast Cure on itself, regardless of whatever else it might have been doing. Fighting mage-type enemies in this game is REALLY annoying.
Convection Schmonvection: One of the dungeons is a giant volcano. The Lava Dome, where the boss guarding the Crystal of Fire hides out, has its entrance at the mouth of the volcano.
- And let's not ignore the fact that when you beat said boss, the volcano erupts, too, leaving you...completely unscathed? Huh?
Crowning Music Of Awesome: Say what you will about the game itself, but Ryuji Sasai's synthesized guitar work is pretty kick-ass (especially "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.
Degraded Boss: Every single boss except for the four crystal guardians and their boss, the Dark King.
Dem Bones: Skeleton warriors are a tough early-game enemy. The two T. rex-type bosses, Flamerus Rex and Skullrus Rex are also made only of bones.
Doomed Hometown, but you never actually get to see the dooming of said hometown. It's All There In The Manual.
Drop The Hammer: Reuben's morningstar, which, strangely functions as an axe-type weapon.
Experience Points: An interesting case, because only the main character can gain levels. Partner characters' levels are all fixed, depending on when in the game they are recruited.
Fisher King: The monsters that stole the four crystals allow the surrounding land to rot by draining their power. Once defeated, the crystals restore that section of the world to its natural state.
Four Is Death: Four crystals, four continents, four big bosses, four allied party members, four One Winged Angel forms for the final boss...yeah, you could say this game loves the number four.
Giant Enemy Crab: The Snow Crab.
Giant Spider: Dark King's third and fourth (final) forms.
Golem: The Ice Golem and the Stone Golem.
Good Bad Bugs
Grappling Hook Pistol: The Dragon Claw functions as one.
Guest Star Party Member: Everyone you encounter will join your party exactly twice.
Guilty Pleasures: You would be hard-pressed to find anyone who will claim to have truly enjoyed this game, due to it being the redheaded stepchild of the series for the reasons stated above, but a few tropers have enjoyed the game without irony. One even did use it as a gateway drug to get his friends interested in Final Fantasy games and RPGs in general.
- I'll save you all the trouble...I am such a person. I'm a die-hard RPG gamer who loves all the Final Fantasies (OK, maybe not so much XI and XII), and the Dragon Quest series too. But I find this game a delightful romp when I'm in the mood for something light. Yeah, it's simple. But simple pleasures can be nice too. Sometimes I want Merchant-Ivory, and other times I want a popcorn movie, ya know?
- This isn't even very rare anymore; the game is getting quite a bit more love in retrospect, and mentioning it on various parts of the Internet will usually bring up discussion of the awesome music and fun-if-simple puzzle-like gameplay in the dungeons well before any complaints about how easy it was.
Headless Horseman: Dullahan
Honest John: Tristam. He'll usually have the right tool you need to pass to the next area...if you pony up some gold pieces beforehand, that is.
Benjamin: But my allowance is only 2GP a month!
(Troper's Note: A cup of coffee costs 10 GP. Ben's parents were cheap.)
Its All Upstairs From Here: The final jaunt up the Focus Tower to face the Dark King in Doom Castle.
It's Short and Easy, So It Sucks: Mystic Quest can be beaten in about six hours, ten if you actively search for every weapon, armor, and spell.
Law Of Cartographical Elegance: Uses the flat, Insurmountable Waist Height Fence version. The entire world appears to be bordered by clouds. Also, you move from point to point on rails.
Magic Knight: The main character, who eventually gets every spell in the game in addition to his arsenal of weapons. Kaeli may also qualify (as a subversion of the typical Staff Chick), since she uses an axe as her Weapon Of Choice.
Multi Armed And Dangerous: Dark King's second form.
Musical Spoiler: Lampshade hung with Tristam the ninja. Every single appearance predicating his arrival is met with an upbeat jazzy tune and the hero looking confused, wondering where the music is coming from.
- Leitmotif: Notably, Tristam is the only character in the game with a personal piece of theme music.
Oddball In The Series: Interestingly, this game was developed by the same team as Sa Ga 3 (and even shares some enemy sprite graphics with it), which was also the oddball in its series.
Patchwork Map: All four regions are neatly divided by the Focus Tower into their own climates.
Pre Existing Encounters: Enemy mobs are always visible in a set position on the map and don't move, except in two dungeons where they are hidden (by thick fog, magic, etc.) There is always a treasure in each of those dungeons to counteract their invisibility and make them visible. The "battlefields" on the World Map are also non-random, but finite.
Prophecies Are Always Right: Double Subversion...The prophecy that "a chosen boy will save the world" was made up as a prank by the Dark King himself, but the old man that sends Ben on his quest is revealed to be the Crystal of Light, and they fulfill the Dark King's fake prophecy anyway.
Recurring Traveller: The old man that the hero meets at the starts, justified as he is the Light Crystal.
Revive Kills Zombie: Naturally, since this is a Final Fantasy game. Using the Heal spell also inflicts random status effects on some monsters, including petrification, which leads to instant death. Thanks to a programming bug in the game, the Dark King can handily be defeated with Cure magic, compared to standard spells doing a few thousand damage at best. Epic.
- Slightly subverted in this game, as the Life spell will instantly kill anything that isn't one of your party members. Even some boss monsters aren't immune to this.
  - That is actually a bug in the game, as can be shown by both the fact that it fails to work on undead enemies and the fact that this situation is reversed in the Japanese and PAL versions of the game.
Ribcage Ridge: The Bone Dungeon.
Set Piece Puzzle: Many of the dungeons require you to press switches, move around blocks, or blow up holes in walls. This was actually innovative for the series at the time, since most Final Fantasy dungeons fit the No Sidepaths No Exploration No Freedom classification.
Shows Damage: Every single enemy.
Straight Arrow: Phoebe, after she gives you her Cat Claw early on in the game. She is also the game's second-most powerful mage, aside from you. Most powerful, if you're lazy about finding the Wizard Magic spells.
Those Two Bosses: Medusa and Pazuzu.
Underground Monkey: Many, including several Degraded Bosses.
When Trees Attack: The Minotaur, one of the first bosses, disguises itself as a tree and attacks Kaeli, poisoning her.

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