Power

7th Saga II, AKA the 8th Saga, AKA Mystic Ark! 

I’m fourteen, now thirteen, entries away from having 1000 blog posts in Blogger. Does that mean anything? No. But I want to rush it out. Because of that, I want to play some episodic games that can be broken down easily into chapters. And Mystic Quest fulfills that, while also being near the top of my SNES RPGs to play list! I don’t know anything about this, other than it being a quasi sequel to Elnard. It doesn’t have a full shrine on RPGClassics, which I figured it would. So let’s get into it! 

In Mystic Quest, you have a choice in your playable character. A man named Reemer, or a woman named Felys. I think it’s pronounced like Phylis? But Felys is seen running through a cave when another dimensional rectangle slowly floats towards her. It makes contact with her, turning her into a tiny statue and teleporting her to a church in the middle of nowhere. I don’t know if Reemer has a different origin point, but the idle menu cutscene has many others in differing places suffering a similar fate. Through sheer force of will, Felys breaks free and returns to her human self. She notices other statues in the room.

And then a strange voice speaks to her. It grants her the Tears of the Goddess and asks her throw them into the fireplace in a different room. The fireplace speaks. The voice continues to guide Felys outside before giving her her first mission. If Felys wants to return home, she’ll have to do some interdimensional travel and find numerous objects called Arks. 

And first up is an adorable pirate problem. Felys is warped to a strange hut located in the badlands somewhere. There she finds her first weapon, a pot filled with honey, and a map of the area. Leaving brings you to a dry desert with nothing in sight, but we recognize instantly that this is Elnard. The crystal ball is in the corner, and you see all the mobs floating around you. When you eventually enter a battle, the graphics also scream 7th Saga. 

Walking east, you find a beached ship. Guards outside suck at their job and let you in because they welcome all comers in their eternal war, and we enter the Bloodhook base. But they’re cat pirates, so it’s adorable! You eventually speak to your new boss, Sixpack, who tells you you’re a spy now. Your first mission is to find another spy in enemy territory, the Gunboss group. 

Walk around the ridge, and you’ll enter their base. These are also cat pirates, but they’re smarter than the Bloodhooks and don’t let you waltz in. You’ll need to find a back way in, which is via a cave system north. Mystic Ark even rips some enemy sprites from Elnard down here! But you eventually reach the forge of the Gunbosses, find the spy, and then return home. And now you’ve come to the primary game loop of this section. 

There is so much backtracking here. Sometimes it’s because I’m a thorough investigator, but it’s usually because each mission unlocks access to a new portion of a ship, therefore, someone new to talk to. The only distraction is a cave to find healing items way down south, which is part of a Gunboss mission anyway. Each cat pirate group has its own problems in its endless way against the other, and you have to solve them all. Poor weapons and a missing cook for the Bloodhooks, and no potions and a monster invasion for the Gunbosses. Even the penultimate dungeon is tedious nonsense. It’s a tower filled with traps that drop you to the bottom. Thankfully, the difficulty is lower than Elnard, and there’s plenty of healing fountains scattered throughout. 

And it’s not helped by some of the menus. Mystic Ark takes a sorta adventure game aesthetic sometimes. There are a few places you can examine. Doing so brings you to a submenu with options. “Inspect, open, shake,” for example. And that would even have the occasional submenu inside an option. I didn’t like them. For some reason, my controller keeps skipping over a selection, too, but that might just be a me problem. 

But you make a potion for the witch, named Matoya. The potion makes things worse, and Felys has to fight a tedious boss. Note, I didn’t say hard. It didn’t hit hard, but it has too much HP. It’s boring. 

But killing the boss breaks the world, and water returns to the area. Felys and Matoya are credited with ending the endless war! Matoya puts both groups to work fixing her flooded tower, while you find a new temple that may have started all this. Felys descends to the bottom, solves a puzzle, and discovers the first Ark: the Ark of Power. With peace restored, she returns to the church, where the voice tells her to speak to the statue outside. But I’ll do that…

…tomorrow! 

Besides the Ark, the only other major plot point is the strange rectangle that turned Felys into a statue, which did the same with the missing cook. But you find his heart, his statue, and save him. I didn’t want to get lost in the weeds with specifics here because it really was just a lot of ping ponging around the two ships. That would be some repetitive storytelling. Regardless, I wasn’t fond of this section. It wasn’t terrible, but it was hardly exciting.