Mystic Ark - Plot and Commentary
Mar. 2nd, 2010 02:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroSince I'm pretty sure no one who reads this will play Mystic Ark, I thought I’d detail (and spoil) all of the plot events for anyone who was curious.
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. (Which resembles a mansion on a lake.) You hear a voice, and are able to regain your original form. The shrine is full of other Figurines, as well as odd items that you can carefully examine. The voice of the Goddess tells you to come talk to her statue, and explains that you need to help her (and yourself) by retrieving the Arks which are hidden in different worlds. The talking fireplace gives you hints on how to use items in the shrine to reach those worlds, and when you fiddle with a model pirate ship…
The first world ("Sand World") is populated by cat-pirates who've been at war since forever in their beached ships. You end up joining both armies (or possibly being a double-agent for one, it’s not totally clear, as you never do anything particularly hurtful to either side) and running helpful errands for them, culminating in climbing the heavily-trapped tower of a sadistic cat-witch named Matoya. Who you also run errands for. Eventually, you and all of the major NPCs track a monster to the caves under the boats, and in killing it, you tap an underground water source that floods the world. Which allows you to canoe to a shrine on a precipice and retrieve the Strength Ark from it.
You also pick up on one of your tasks in this game, which is to find people’s “hearts”, and use those to take their Figurines back to their world of origin. You retrieve the vanished cook from one of the ships this way. Your six companions are separate from this, as you can take their Figurines as soon as you get the first Ark, but they can never be permanently reconstituted, only temporarily infused with an Ark’s power.
The second world is "Fruit World", where people live in giant, hollowed-out fruits and vegetables. Your first task involves finding seeds for people so they can grow a new town, with a brief stopover in the fable about the village full of foxes disguised as people. (Turns out that fruit seeds have souls too, as you find their “hearts” and need to retrieve their Figurines.) You defeat some evil Beetles that are threatening the people, run a few errands retrieving a monster crow’s baby and clear monsters out of a fruit town. Then the game goes on to feature an odd plot twist where the village elder who has had you running in circles through that world, and the second-in-command of the evil Beetles, are both actually the leader of the foxes who had taken over a town early on. (I'm having some trouble figuring out how this works, timeline-wise.) Anyways, you beat him and retrieve the Light Ark.
The third world is "Child World". The first half of this world doesn't involve any battles at all, just running around talking to children and a couple of minigames. (The designers snuck some knight moves and sliding-block puzzles into the first few worlds, then math puzzles in world four, then that’s about it. You find them in talking books in this world.) The running back and forth gets tiring after a while, but by that point you get to go to a mountain where there are monsters, and by the end of the story for this world there are monsters overrunning the towns. (They also put in an area where your crystal disappears and you can't see random encounters coming. It's kind of a silly bit, as it just makes the random encounters like any other rpg.) The end of Child World also gives your first glimpse of the actual plot, as the witch Cecille (a child whose powers come from one of the Arks you need, and who created this world) made a deal with something called the Darkness, that it would keep the world monster-free if she would create a mega-monster called Chimera for it. Apparently the Darkness has an interest in turning everything into Figurines. (Including, in this world, a playground.)
World four: "Green World". In a clever bit, this world has an area with no color, an area with no sound (where you need to learn sign language to communicate with people) and an area where time is running extra-fast. With help from characters named Edison and Einstein, you need to repair and activate a machine that takes you under the plant's surface, where a giant computer that runs the world is apparently on the fritz. You also meet a mysterious stranger who taunts you; he's also looking for the Arks and wants to make a world full of soulless figurines. He’s Darkness, but you might not catch that at the time because he escapes while his Death Knights are slaughtering you. Once you survive that, you can fiddle with the machines to fix them (restoring proper color, sound and rate of time flow) and take the Ark from this world.
Mystic Ark’s fifth world, “Wind World,” is a fairly standard fantasy rpg pastiche. It opens with the Ark you’re looking for right in front of you, but you can’t take it because that would upset the locals, who think you’re their prophesized “Wind Hero”. Instead, you need to investigate the strange earthquakes and disturbances in the wind. You discover that the wind is (well, was) caused by a sleeping giant, who wakes and tramples the town. The villagers also notice that the air is getting polluted while they’re standing in the rubble. You hike over a mountain, get attacked by the giant (in a cutscene—this world has more cutscenes than the entire game before it combined) and wake up in a new town. You get sent on fetch quests for a magic book and a magic mirror, then sabotage a bunch of machines and control the giant into knocking down its own control tower, which serves as a bridge to get you to…a cloning lab. The “Ancient One” has apparently awoken and is trying to clone his people back to life, while using polluting machines to block the sun so the ecosystem is more like his time. You kick his ass, and he notes that he wasn’t supposed to wake for another 1,000 years, but the Darkness woke him early. Then the giant walks into the sea and the wind starts up again, and the villagers finally give you the Ark so you can leave.
The sixth world, “Dark World”, is your big chance to use the game’s scenery-manipulation system. You’ve been examining things the whole game, but this world is all one interior set, without the encounter crystal (just spiked squares in some doorways) where you wander around examining items and using commends on them, like a text-adventure game. They definitely try to make it creepy, with diary entries from a madman who was apparently trapped in this world, and comments about hearing footsteps and someone else opening the door behind you. When you get back, the Darkness taunts you, saying that was the world it grew up in, the World of Darkness. It also thanks you for gathering the Arks. A bit worrisome, that.
When you appear in world seven, “Fairytale World”, the Darkness (who apparently is, in fact, the guy who set the Death Knights on you in world four) appears and taunts you, saying that this is the last world you’ll ever visit. Which is a bit at odds with the bright, cheerful setting and the fact that every character seems to be a reference to some western fairy tale—Little Red Hat and her grandmother, three pigs hiding from the Wolf in a house made of bricks, the king with no clothes, etc. You need to defeat the Wolf and save the villagers from a Lion (who’s just looking for some courage), and then you visit the great wizard Woz. Then you get caught up in getting Cindereena an outfit for the ball, which involves the game’s only trip to a different world to find a key item--you take a trip back to a windmill with invisible walls in the Wind World (that there didn’t seem to be a purpose to, before—you need the Water Ark to get the key item from it) and you give the piece of glass from there to a tree to get size 19 shoes for Cindereena. (Don’t think about it too hard.) During the ball, though, Darkness appears and turns several NPCs in Figurines, so you need to gather their hearts and go back to the shrine to get them. Then you go on a wild goose chase to look for Woz, and when you return, ALL of the villagers are gone, so you sneak past an annoying road-blocking man in the forest and head for Darkness’s lair—a lovely set of cave set into scenic waterfalls. There are two mini-bosses, one of whom is the annoying old man, who is once again the annoying fox from Fruit World (I wonder if that was just to try to add in some extra continuity here?), and then there’s Darkness himself. After you beat him, Darkness just hands you the last Ark, tells you where to go with it (implying that what you find there will actually manage to kill you) and his last words are a cryptic, “I am your soul. The evil in your soul is…”
There’s a sidequest you can do here before going on to the final world, in which you reunite Cindereena and the Prince. There’s no reward for it, however.
Finally, you return to the shrine and use the Darkness Ark to go through the mysterious door you appeared in front of in the prologue. It leads to a series of caves with a few unimportant mini-bosses (who you have to talk to for the express purpose of them grunting at you), and then to the lair of the final boss, Malice. Malice thanks you for bringing him the Arks, as he plans to use them to turn your homeworld into his ideal world, a world of no free will. (He’s kind of annoying as a final boss, incidentally, as he has a gazillion hit points and knows every spell, which means the random number generator might make him waste you three times in a row with top-level attack spells, or have him waste turns on stat-down spells that always miss. Also, one of the FAQs translates his name as “Wicked Heart”, which seems fitting given the revelation below.) When he’s defeated, he does that standard “Oh no, my perfect world, oh woe is me” final boss thing, and the Goddess appears.
The Goddess explains that the Arks are the source of her power, and that she created all of the worlds you visited. She had apparently created them to be trials for you to overcome, and Malice was one of those trials, but he grew too powerful, defeated her, and sealed her in the Arks which were hidden in the seven worlds. Malice, she says, was originally the evil from within your own soul. Since you beat him, there’s nothing left that she can teach you about being human, and now you must go to a new world. There’ll be new challenges there, but you’ll be fine, “my child”.
The epilogue montage shows the companions: Miriene appears out of nowhere in a bar and rebuffs a fellow patron. Reeshine appears in a village and is brought to see an old man. Lux appears in a machine area, and falls in behind a parade of other robots. Kamiwoo returns to a flock of…blue lions, maybe? Mesia appears in a city and gathers up a group of children. Tokio appears in a cave and leaps over a chasm. And you walk along a flaming path to a door that magically appears and opens for you, which you enter in a flash of white light.
* * *
If I had to put together a theory of what was going on, I’d guess that the shrine is effectively heaven. The Goddess gave birth to demigod you, but needed to make sure it was okay to let you loose among humans, so she created the seven worlds and their inhabitants and was planning to send you to them over time. But then she made the mistake of turning your “evil half” into a creature and letting it loose in Dark World, where it grew powerful enough to challenge her and seal her away. Malice then split off a piece of itself (“Darkness”) which turned good-half you into a Figurine and went about causing havoc in the seven worlds. You broke free and started retrieving your mom’s powers, which were sealed in the Arks. This would also explain why the main character is the world’s most incredible pushover of a white knight, with all of his evil separated out and turned into a god-beast-thing. Also, why you get the power to create Figurines out of monsters—you, Darkness and Malice are all the same being, and all have that same power.
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. (Which resembles a mansion on a lake.) You hear a voice, and are able to regain your original form. The shrine is full of other Figurines, as well as odd items that you can carefully examine. The voice of the Goddess tells you to come talk to her statue, and explains that you need to help her (and yourself) by retrieving the Arks which are hidden in different worlds. The talking fireplace gives you hints on how to use items in the shrine to reach those worlds, and when you fiddle with a model pirate ship…
The first world ("Sand World") is populated by cat-pirates who've been at war since forever in their beached ships. You end up joining both armies (or possibly being a double-agent for one, it’s not totally clear, as you never do anything particularly hurtful to either side) and running helpful errands for them, culminating in climbing the heavily-trapped tower of a sadistic cat-witch named Matoya. Who you also run errands for. Eventually, you and all of the major NPCs track a monster to the caves under the boats, and in killing it, you tap an underground water source that floods the world. Which allows you to canoe to a shrine on a precipice and retrieve the Strength Ark from it.
You also pick up on one of your tasks in this game, which is to find people’s “hearts”, and use those to take their Figurines back to their world of origin. You retrieve the vanished cook from one of the ships this way. Your six companions are separate from this, as you can take their Figurines as soon as you get the first Ark, but they can never be permanently reconstituted, only temporarily infused with an Ark’s power.
The second world is "Fruit World", where people live in giant, hollowed-out fruits and vegetables. Your first task involves finding seeds for people so they can grow a new town, with a brief stopover in the fable about the village full of foxes disguised as people. (Turns out that fruit seeds have souls too, as you find their “hearts” and need to retrieve their Figurines.) You defeat some evil Beetles that are threatening the people, run a few errands retrieving a monster crow’s baby and clear monsters out of a fruit town. Then the game goes on to feature an odd plot twist where the village elder who has had you running in circles through that world, and the second-in-command of the evil Beetles, are both actually the leader of the foxes who had taken over a town early on. (I'm having some trouble figuring out how this works, timeline-wise.) Anyways, you beat him and retrieve the Light Ark.
The third world is "Child World". The first half of this world doesn't involve any battles at all, just running around talking to children and a couple of minigames. (The designers snuck some knight moves and sliding-block puzzles into the first few worlds, then math puzzles in world four, then that’s about it. You find them in talking books in this world.) The running back and forth gets tiring after a while, but by that point you get to go to a mountain where there are monsters, and by the end of the story for this world there are monsters overrunning the towns. (They also put in an area where your crystal disappears and you can't see random encounters coming. It's kind of a silly bit, as it just makes the random encounters like any other rpg.) The end of Child World also gives your first glimpse of the actual plot, as the witch Cecille (a child whose powers come from one of the Arks you need, and who created this world) made a deal with something called the Darkness, that it would keep the world monster-free if she would create a mega-monster called Chimera for it. Apparently the Darkness has an interest in turning everything into Figurines. (Including, in this world, a playground.)
World four: "Green World". In a clever bit, this world has an area with no color, an area with no sound (where you need to learn sign language to communicate with people) and an area where time is running extra-fast. With help from characters named Edison and Einstein, you need to repair and activate a machine that takes you under the plant's surface, where a giant computer that runs the world is apparently on the fritz. You also meet a mysterious stranger who taunts you; he's also looking for the Arks and wants to make a world full of soulless figurines. He’s Darkness, but you might not catch that at the time because he escapes while his Death Knights are slaughtering you. Once you survive that, you can fiddle with the machines to fix them (restoring proper color, sound and rate of time flow) and take the Ark from this world.
Mystic Ark’s fifth world, “Wind World,” is a fairly standard fantasy rpg pastiche. It opens with the Ark you’re looking for right in front of you, but you can’t take it because that would upset the locals, who think you’re their prophesized “Wind Hero”. Instead, you need to investigate the strange earthquakes and disturbances in the wind. You discover that the wind is (well, was) caused by a sleeping giant, who wakes and tramples the town. The villagers also notice that the air is getting polluted while they’re standing in the rubble. You hike over a mountain, get attacked by the giant (in a cutscene—this world has more cutscenes than the entire game before it combined) and wake up in a new town. You get sent on fetch quests for a magic book and a magic mirror, then sabotage a bunch of machines and control the giant into knocking down its own control tower, which serves as a bridge to get you to…a cloning lab. The “Ancient One” has apparently awoken and is trying to clone his people back to life, while using polluting machines to block the sun so the ecosystem is more like his time. You kick his ass, and he notes that he wasn’t supposed to wake for another 1,000 years, but the Darkness woke him early. Then the giant walks into the sea and the wind starts up again, and the villagers finally give you the Ark so you can leave.
The sixth world, “Dark World”, is your big chance to use the game’s scenery-manipulation system. You’ve been examining things the whole game, but this world is all one interior set, without the encounter crystal (just spiked squares in some doorways) where you wander around examining items and using commends on them, like a text-adventure game. They definitely try to make it creepy, with diary entries from a madman who was apparently trapped in this world, and comments about hearing footsteps and someone else opening the door behind you. When you get back, the Darkness taunts you, saying that was the world it grew up in, the World of Darkness. It also thanks you for gathering the Arks. A bit worrisome, that.
When you appear in world seven, “Fairytale World”, the Darkness (who apparently is, in fact, the guy who set the Death Knights on you in world four) appears and taunts you, saying that this is the last world you’ll ever visit. Which is a bit at odds with the bright, cheerful setting and the fact that every character seems to be a reference to some western fairy tale—Little Red Hat and her grandmother, three pigs hiding from the Wolf in a house made of bricks, the king with no clothes, etc. You need to defeat the Wolf and save the villagers from a Lion (who’s just looking for some courage), and then you visit the great wizard Woz. Then you get caught up in getting Cindereena an outfit for the ball, which involves the game’s only trip to a different world to find a key item--you take a trip back to a windmill with invisible walls in the Wind World (that there didn’t seem to be a purpose to, before—you need the Water Ark to get the key item from it) and you give the piece of glass from there to a tree to get size 19 shoes for Cindereena. (Don’t think about it too hard.) During the ball, though, Darkness appears and turns several NPCs in Figurines, so you need to gather their hearts and go back to the shrine to get them. Then you go on a wild goose chase to look for Woz, and when you return, ALL of the villagers are gone, so you sneak past an annoying road-blocking man in the forest and head for Darkness’s lair—a lovely set of cave set into scenic waterfalls. There are two mini-bosses, one of whom is the annoying old man, who is once again the annoying fox from Fruit World (I wonder if that was just to try to add in some extra continuity here?), and then there’s Darkness himself. After you beat him, Darkness just hands you the last Ark, tells you where to go with it (implying that what you find there will actually manage to kill you) and his last words are a cryptic, “I am your soul. The evil in your soul is…”
There’s a sidequest you can do here before going on to the final world, in which you reunite Cindereena and the Prince. There’s no reward for it, however.
Finally, you return to the shrine and use the Darkness Ark to go through the mysterious door you appeared in front of in the prologue. It leads to a series of caves with a few unimportant mini-bosses (who you have to talk to for the express purpose of them grunting at you), and then to the lair of the final boss, Malice. Malice thanks you for bringing him the Arks, as he plans to use them to turn your homeworld into his ideal world, a world of no free will. (He’s kind of annoying as a final boss, incidentally, as he has a gazillion hit points and knows every spell, which means the random number generator might make him waste you three times in a row with top-level attack spells, or have him waste turns on stat-down spells that always miss. Also, one of the FAQs translates his name as “Wicked Heart”, which seems fitting given the revelation below.) When he’s defeated, he does that standard “Oh no, my perfect world, oh woe is me” final boss thing, and the Goddess appears.
The Goddess explains that the Arks are the source of her power, and that she created all of the worlds you visited. She had apparently created them to be trials for you to overcome, and Malice was one of those trials, but he grew too powerful, defeated her, and sealed her in the Arks which were hidden in the seven worlds. Malice, she says, was originally the evil from within your own soul. Since you beat him, there’s nothing left that she can teach you about being human, and now you must go to a new world. There’ll be new challenges there, but you’ll be fine, “my child”.
The epilogue montage shows the companions: Miriene appears out of nowhere in a bar and rebuffs a fellow patron. Reeshine appears in a village and is brought to see an old man. Lux appears in a machine area, and falls in behind a parade of other robots. Kamiwoo returns to a flock of…blue lions, maybe? Mesia appears in a city and gathers up a group of children. Tokio appears in a cave and leaps over a chasm. And you walk along a flaming path to a door that magically appears and opens for you, which you enter in a flash of white light.
* * *
If I had to put together a theory of what was going on, I’d guess that the shrine is effectively heaven. The Goddess gave birth to demigod you, but needed to make sure it was okay to let you loose among humans, so she created the seven worlds and their inhabitants and was planning to send you to them over time. But then she made the mistake of turning your “evil half” into a creature and letting it loose in Dark World, where it grew powerful enough to challenge her and seal her away. Malice then split off a piece of itself (“Darkness”) which turned good-half you into a Figurine and went about causing havoc in the seven worlds. You broke free and started retrieving your mom’s powers, which were sealed in the Arks. This would also explain why the main character is the world’s most incredible pushover of a white knight, with all of his evil separated out and turned into a god-beast-thing. Also, why you get the power to create Figurines out of monsters—you, Darkness and Malice are all the same being, and all have that same power.
