Mystic Ark review
Mar. 2nd, 2010 02:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroI played the Aeon Genesis fan-translation of Mystic Ark, and it's interesting. It opens with a classic ontological mystery: Your character is roaming a cave when a spinning square comes out of nowhere, turns you into a Figurine, and carries you off into a shrine. You hear a voice, and are able to regain your original form. What the hell is going on?
For those of us who discovered the rom years ago, long before there was a translation or any walkthroughs to get your further into the game, that’s all we knew. What a mystery it was! As you’d expect, the actual game didn’t quite live up to expectations (particularly in terms of mood), but you did eventually find out what the hell was going on.
It's definitely a sequel to 7th Saga in the same sense that the Final Fantasy games are sequels--the plots appear to be unrelated, but the themes and style are the same. (The "monster radar" is the same, the combat setup is similar if a bit more cartoony, and a number of the monsters use the same graphics and, I suspect, have the same names in Japanese.) The pacing of the game also appear similar to the 7th Saga, as it gives very few hints as to where to go, and seems to expect you to grind a level or two between each task. (Honestly, fairly in-line for Enix games of the era.) Unless you really like the wandering, a FAQ/Walkthrough is basically necessary. (I was relying mostly on this one by Ritchie.) It follows the annoying old convention where you must talk to specific characters in a specific order to trigger plot events, but who those characters are, or the fact that you’ve hit the right one, is often not particularly obvious. It’s interesting, actually, in that 7th Saga really wasn’t that bad in that regard; there just weren’t really many event flags in that game.
Fortunately, it also follows the stats system of most Enix games, where the only benefit of leveling up is the bonus to your stats, and there are also items that raise a stats a few points. (As opposed to Square games, where damage taken and received is usually a more arcane formula involving your level; and it's more important to be level 99 than have 255 Strength.) These are the easiest systems to invent cheats for, because you can just reset your stats to a higher number, then continue the game normally and let the additional bonuses accrue as you continue to level. Using most emulators, you can find where the variables for your stats are stored in memory by using the one-shot items that increase them.
I went ahead with the plan to adjust stats late in world 1, as I got to the obvious next dungeon, and the required grinding of 3-4 levels was too much for me. The amount of XP enemies give doesn't scale sufficiently to their difficulty, and the fact that a couple of levels (especially early on) means the difference between "they kill you in two hits" and "they do 1 point of damage per hit" is huge.
You need to get through the first world solo, then when you find the Strength Ark, you can use it to "infuse" one of six partners to join you. At the end of the third world, when you get the Wisdom Ark, you are able to have a second partner join you. In a surprising grind-related mercy, all of your partners, not just the one you're using, get XP after battle. They'll still all lag your main character, but they all lag by the same amount and you don't need to level them separately!
You carry around the Figurines of all of the characters, whether they’re infused and active or not, which means that you can access their inventories at any time, too. They only get one page each, but it still helps with item-glut. If a companion dies, their Figurine is transported back to the shrine and you have to hike back and retrieve it again. There are no revive spells, and if your main character dies, it’s game over. Which, let me say, makes the abundance of random monsters that use instant-kill spells particularly annoying. Then miss a lot, and you learn a spell that protects against them (which is necessary for a few bosses, who have the versions that don’t miss a lot), but even so, RPGs shouldn’t have a “one unlucky turn from a weak enemy in a random encounter could send you back to your last save.” Especially in a game where grinding is necessary.
Somewhere around the end of the fourth world, my cheat code buffs on the main character stopped being enough to make the game easy, as I was some 7 levels behind what the FAQ recommended for all of my characters. I decided to put in a “max experience” code to cut down on grinding. Turns out that the max experience the game can give you in one battle is about 65,000, only enough to go up 2-3 levels when your characters are in the 20s (when you reach the 30s, it starts need two or three battles to go up a level, getting max XP each time). Interesting contrast to many games where you could, in theory, get to level 99 in a single fight. I opted to just catch up with where I was “supposed” to be and keep going. (“Just pretend I fought 90 battles instead of 4, and let’s move on.”)
For all of the issues with XP, they’re actually very liberal with money—I wonder if they expected you to be blowing all of your cash on healing or attack items between every task. Even without grinding, and I pretty much always had enough money to re-equip my entire party (all 7 characters) whenever I got the chance.
The designers definitely were trying to switch things up and make each world different--it actually reminds me a little of a platformer, in the "we changed one rule of the game for this stage to make it interesting" sort of way. One of the worlds has no combat for fully half of it, another focuses entirely on the scenery-manipulation system. Several have no world map.
Mystic Ark has a monster arena, where you can take the monsters you've turned into figurines, put them in a pot, and watch them fight. Or you can have those figurines transformed into useful weapons and armor. Given that your ostensible goal is to restore the souls of all the figurines in the mansion and return them to their rightful worlds, this seems wrong somehow. If you capture certain monsters in the second, third and fourth worlds, you can trade their Figurines, along with some special monster arena currency, for better weapons and armor. Not amazing, game-breaking ones, mind you, just a step up from what you have at that stage of the game. Which means you’re obviously supposed to be doing this as you progress, not all at the end. It’s odd, though, that the monsters in later world stop turning into Figurines you can trade for equip-able items; just “special figurines” you can sell for money.
There’s also a synthesis system that you seem to be able to access in Green World in the machine section. It’s well-hidden, easily-missable, and non-intuitive, and doesn’t actually provide that much useful stuff as far as I can tell. The presence of items obviously intended as synthesis ingredients makes me wonder if they had bigger plans for it, but didn’t have time to implement them.
Your main character has no personality; the most you can gather about him (or her, you have that option) is that he’s either really nice or just a total chump, because he easily gets roped into all sorts of convenient questing. Your companions have even less personality, as they can be swapped into the party at any time, don’t get any lines and don’t feature in cutscenes, and might as well be Ark-animated zombies.
Overall, the game feels like it was developed mostly separately—one person came up with the combat engine (mostly cribbing off 7th Saga), one came up with the scenery-manipulation scheme, different people came up with each of the worlds (the fact that the “dark and mysterious” tone is only kept for the Dark World and the shrine versus everything else is a clue here), and then they pieced everything together. It’s an interesting case of apparently trying to make a game to be “everything to everyone” and failing—the fact that this was produced near the end of the SNES era and when Enix was having money problems probably didn’t help.
Do I recommend playing it? Maybe. If you like SNES rpgs, it’s still a more interesting and varied game (and far better translation) than Paladin’s Quest, and it’s still easier than 7th Saga, but there are far better games out there.
For those of us who discovered the rom years ago, long before there was a translation or any walkthroughs to get your further into the game, that’s all we knew. What a mystery it was! As you’d expect, the actual game didn’t quite live up to expectations (particularly in terms of mood), but you did eventually find out what the hell was going on.
It's definitely a sequel to 7th Saga in the same sense that the Final Fantasy games are sequels--the plots appear to be unrelated, but the themes and style are the same. (The "monster radar" is the same, the combat setup is similar if a bit more cartoony, and a number of the monsters use the same graphics and, I suspect, have the same names in Japanese.) The pacing of the game also appear similar to the 7th Saga, as it gives very few hints as to where to go, and seems to expect you to grind a level or two between each task. (Honestly, fairly in-line for Enix games of the era.) Unless you really like the wandering, a FAQ/Walkthrough is basically necessary. (I was relying mostly on this one by Ritchie.) It follows the annoying old convention where you must talk to specific characters in a specific order to trigger plot events, but who those characters are, or the fact that you’ve hit the right one, is often not particularly obvious. It’s interesting, actually, in that 7th Saga really wasn’t that bad in that regard; there just weren’t really many event flags in that game.
Fortunately, it also follows the stats system of most Enix games, where the only benefit of leveling up is the bonus to your stats, and there are also items that raise a stats a few points. (As opposed to Square games, where damage taken and received is usually a more arcane formula involving your level; and it's more important to be level 99 than have 255 Strength.) These are the easiest systems to invent cheats for, because you can just reset your stats to a higher number, then continue the game normally and let the additional bonuses accrue as you continue to level. Using most emulators, you can find where the variables for your stats are stored in memory by using the one-shot items that increase them.
I went ahead with the plan to adjust stats late in world 1, as I got to the obvious next dungeon, and the required grinding of 3-4 levels was too much for me. The amount of XP enemies give doesn't scale sufficiently to their difficulty, and the fact that a couple of levels (especially early on) means the difference between "they kill you in two hits" and "they do 1 point of damage per hit" is huge.
You need to get through the first world solo, then when you find the Strength Ark, you can use it to "infuse" one of six partners to join you. At the end of the third world, when you get the Wisdom Ark, you are able to have a second partner join you. In a surprising grind-related mercy, all of your partners, not just the one you're using, get XP after battle. They'll still all lag your main character, but they all lag by the same amount and you don't need to level them separately!
You carry around the Figurines of all of the characters, whether they’re infused and active or not, which means that you can access their inventories at any time, too. They only get one page each, but it still helps with item-glut. If a companion dies, their Figurine is transported back to the shrine and you have to hike back and retrieve it again. There are no revive spells, and if your main character dies, it’s game over. Which, let me say, makes the abundance of random monsters that use instant-kill spells particularly annoying. Then miss a lot, and you learn a spell that protects against them (which is necessary for a few bosses, who have the versions that don’t miss a lot), but even so, RPGs shouldn’t have a “one unlucky turn from a weak enemy in a random encounter could send you back to your last save.” Especially in a game where grinding is necessary.
Somewhere around the end of the fourth world, my cheat code buffs on the main character stopped being enough to make the game easy, as I was some 7 levels behind what the FAQ recommended for all of my characters. I decided to put in a “max experience” code to cut down on grinding. Turns out that the max experience the game can give you in one battle is about 65,000, only enough to go up 2-3 levels when your characters are in the 20s (when you reach the 30s, it starts need two or three battles to go up a level, getting max XP each time). Interesting contrast to many games where you could, in theory, get to level 99 in a single fight. I opted to just catch up with where I was “supposed” to be and keep going. (“Just pretend I fought 90 battles instead of 4, and let’s move on.”)
For all of the issues with XP, they’re actually very liberal with money—I wonder if they expected you to be blowing all of your cash on healing or attack items between every task. Even without grinding, and I pretty much always had enough money to re-equip my entire party (all 7 characters) whenever I got the chance.
The designers definitely were trying to switch things up and make each world different--it actually reminds me a little of a platformer, in the "we changed one rule of the game for this stage to make it interesting" sort of way. One of the worlds has no combat for fully half of it, another focuses entirely on the scenery-manipulation system. Several have no world map.
Mystic Ark has a monster arena, where you can take the monsters you've turned into figurines, put them in a pot, and watch them fight. Or you can have those figurines transformed into useful weapons and armor. Given that your ostensible goal is to restore the souls of all the figurines in the mansion and return them to their rightful worlds, this seems wrong somehow. If you capture certain monsters in the second, third and fourth worlds, you can trade their Figurines, along with some special monster arena currency, for better weapons and armor. Not amazing, game-breaking ones, mind you, just a step up from what you have at that stage of the game. Which means you’re obviously supposed to be doing this as you progress, not all at the end. It’s odd, though, that the monsters in later world stop turning into Figurines you can trade for equip-able items; just “special figurines” you can sell for money.
There’s also a synthesis system that you seem to be able to access in Green World in the machine section. It’s well-hidden, easily-missable, and non-intuitive, and doesn’t actually provide that much useful stuff as far as I can tell. The presence of items obviously intended as synthesis ingredients makes me wonder if they had bigger plans for it, but didn’t have time to implement them.
Your main character has no personality; the most you can gather about him (or her, you have that option) is that he’s either really nice or just a total chump, because he easily gets roped into all sorts of convenient questing. Your companions have even less personality, as they can be swapped into the party at any time, don’t get any lines and don’t feature in cutscenes, and might as well be Ark-animated zombies.
Overall, the game feels like it was developed mostly separately—one person came up with the combat engine (mostly cribbing off 7th Saga), one came up with the scenery-manipulation scheme, different people came up with each of the worlds (the fact that the “dark and mysterious” tone is only kept for the Dark World and the shrine versus everything else is a clue here), and then they pieced everything together. It’s an interesting case of apparently trying to make a game to be “everything to everyone” and failing—the fact that this was produced near the end of the SNES era and when Enix was having money problems probably didn’t help.
Do I recommend playing it? Maybe. If you like SNES rpgs, it’s still a more interesting and varied game (and far better translation) than Paladin’s Quest, and it’s still easier than 7th Saga, but there are far better games out there.
