It's generally accepted, and generally true, that
american gamers are not nearly as interested in
RPGs as their
japanese counterparts. What's more, translating an RPG is
hard. Porting some cruddy
action game is easy, since there aren't many
words to move over; RPGs, on the other hand, are almost all words. As a result, moving a
japanese RPG to america is not always a great idea from a purely
business point of view. It isn't
cheap, it can't be done on a
whim, and once you're finished, since american consumers are not attracted by the same things as japanese consumers, they won't
buy as many copies, and they'll usually buy them for
different reasons. As an effect of this, most RPGs, especially earlier ones, are in some way
limited in the american release in order to "
tone down" the gameplay for the reportedly worse american gamers.
Difficulty levels are slashed,
bosses are made weaker, entire aspects of the game are simply removed. The problem with all this is that the american gamers who
do like RPGs are rather heavily
shortchanged-- some of the best stuff never gets into our hands, unless we want to
learn japanese and then somehow
mail-order stuff, and what we do get is often
watered down somehow.
So the question becomes, what happens if you just take some american programmers, put them in a room and say "OK, make an RPG", with the intent of getting as many american values and assumptions in as possible? Do you get something which is inherently american enough that american gamers can connect to it and appreciate it?
Well, kind of, i guess, if "american gamers can connect to it" means "it isn't very hard at all". What you definitely do get is something kind of sorry-ass. You get something wussy. You get something fiercely mediocre. You get Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest.
Overall the game was very simplistic, and mostly felt kind of just like Square had just given some random untrained people some basic books on SNES programming but they hadn't really mastered it yet. The game was a huge step back in terms of graphics; all the characters and other objects were very clearly icons, and unlike the ones in FF2 they felt like icons. The plot.. well, the plot was there, but it wasn't spectacular. There were a limit of two characters in your party. The most notable differences from the rest of the final fantasy series was that the enemies didn't attack you at random (plus they weren't invisible-- they were all just icons of monsters, sitting out there in the terrain, and you would fight them by going and talking to them) and that there was no freely-movable overworld map-- it was more like super mario world, where you had a couple specific checkpoints you could go to and you would move between the predefined areas (in implementation, this isn't quite as bad as it sounds). There were a bunch of little things that just kind of took a lot of the life out of the game.. like, there were inns, but that didn't matter because you could go to literally any bed in any house in the game and it would let you sleep in it.
Mystic Quest was not nearly as bad as most websites make it out to be. It wasn't painful, nor do i regret the time or money i put in the game. But i sure as hell wish i had bought one of the Breath of Fire games instead. Because the thing is, the game was worth it, but not when you compare it to all the RPGs out there which are so much better..
Note: People in other nodes have reflected that Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest has no relation whatsoever to the Final Fantasy series itself, and is merely a lame attempt to cash in on a franchise by tacking the words "Final Fantasy" to an unrelated game, thus bringing attention to it. They are completely right.