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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 shin-kickingly popular Final Fantasy franchise, released for the Super NES/Super Famicom in 1992. The game was developed primarily as a way to ease western audiences into the JRPG genre, which at the time was niche to the point of borderline commercial impracticality outside of Japan. As a result, today it's widely considered to be outmoded, laughably easy and hastily-written at best — although it does have a vocal fanbase who cherish it despite those faults.

The story revolves around Benjamin (you only learn his name from the manual, since 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 is connected to nature; Tristam, a ninja treasure hunter with his own jazzy musical theme; Phoebe, a mage who joins you to help her grandfather stop an endless winter; and Reuben, a warrior who is searching for his lost father in a volcano. 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 useful items.

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

Mystic Quest is considered the red-headed stepchild of the series, and it's still criticized for being too easy and full of cliches that most JRPGs have long-since abandoned. The relative ease proved beneficial to newcomers to the genre, but Final Fantasy IV and VI (along with Squaresoft stablemate Super Mario RPG) ended up becoming the 'gateway drugs' that Mystic Quest might have been. Another reason why the game is so hated is that many mistakenly assumed it was shipped as a replacement for Final Fantasy V, which was never released in its original form in the U.S. Although this is not the case, the two games shared enough visual similarities to raise eyebrows.

That said, the game's music is among the greatest 16-bit soundtracks. Composer Ryuji Sasai also wrote the soundtrack for a much lesser known SquareSoft game, Treasure of the Rudra, as well as Final Fantasy Legend III.

It finally got some true acknowledgement in Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call, which includes the regular and boss battle themes and adds Benjamin as a playable character. (This is the second time Mystic Quest has received any kind of Shout-Out or spinoff inclusion since the original game was released, with the previous being a referance in the Mognet letters in Dissida). The original game was also released for the Wii Virtual Console.

Not to be confused with Final Fantasy Adventure, whose European title is Mystic Quest.note 


This game contains examples of:

  • Ability Required to Proceed: Benjamin's path is frequently blocked by an obstacle that he can only overcome once his latest partner gives him the appropriate piece of equipment, eg, the "corrupted" trees in Level Forest.
  • Accidental Misnaming: Tristam only calls Benjamin "kid". Benjamin's attempts to correct him never stick.
  • Actually Four Mooks: A single monster icon can consist of up to three monsters in a given battle.
  • Affectionate Parody: There's a pretty solid argument to be made that the game was at least approached in this fashion by the developers; the Old Man who is actually the Light Crystal, at least, seems really pretty flippant about the whole "the world is doomed" issue. There are also a rather disproportionate number of comedy scenes, given the length of the game. And then there's some of the stuff in the endgame, like the double subverted prophecy.
  • All the Worlds Are a Stage: Doom Castle, where each of the four floors the player visits are thematic recreations of the final dungeons of the four regions, complete with powered-up versions of their bosses.
  • American Kirby Is Hardcore: The original box art shows Benjamin striking the same pose, except that he's Super-Deformed in the Squaresoft fashion (He actually looks a lot like Bartz Klauser). This also applies to the rest of the playable cast—this is the Japanese art, and this is the European art.
  • And the Adventure Continues: The game ends with Benjamin and Tristam sailing off on Captain Mac's ship to travel the world.
  • Anti-Frustration Features: Every party member can cast the Life spell, as can Benjamin once its book is found.
    • Losing in battle allows you to simply retry from the exact state you were in when the battle started at no penalty.
  • Attract Mode: Amusingly, Benjamin is renamed "DemoPlay" in it.
  • Autobots, Rock Out!: The boss battle music.
  • Because Destiny Says So: Subverted twice. Not only does the Old Man admit Benjamin isn't actually as destined as he'd said, it's implied in the ending that he already knew the prophecy was a fake but decided to use it anyway.
    Old Man: It was really more of a guess...
    The Final Boss (Dark King): Alas, silly humans, I must share a terrible secret! That Prophecy? Ages ago I started that rumor! Welcome to the power of Darkness!
  • Black Magician Girl: Phoebe. She's essentially in a dead heat with the hero for "strongest magic user in the game"; Ben can eventually pick up a greater variety of spells, but her magic stat ends up in the nineties when everyone else, Ben included, caps out around 40-50 or less. If you're lazy about picking up the strongest magic spells, she'll be the most powerful spell-flinger by a county mile.
  • "Blind Idiot" Translation: Though the game was developed for the U.S. (and released there first), the names "Iflyte" and "Zuh" are applied to enemies that would be called Ifrit and Zu in any other Final Fantasy game. The former is especially strange since Iflyte's Japanese name is Cyclops.
  • Bottomless Magazines: Averted with Ben's bombs, Tristam's shuriken and Phoebe's arrows, which have a max capacity of 99. However, ammunition chests are frequent inside of dungeons and respawn when you leave the area, so unless you are really wasteful, the amount is rarely a problem.
  • Bowdlerise: As in Final Fantasy IV, Holy was changed to White. Not that it really affects anything, as Holy is non-elemental in this particular installment.
  • Canon Name: Though the game has no default name for your hero, the U.S. manual refers to him as "Benjamin". The Japanese manual names him Zash.
  • Can't Drop the Hero: Naturally. This is Ben's story, after all. Others will cycle through your party fairly regularly.
  • Character Tic: Benjamin has the most understandable reaction to weird events in video game history: *shrug*
  • Color-Coded Elements: Your party members dress in the color scheme that matches their hometown's element: Green for Kaeli, blue-purple for Phoebe, red for Reuben. (Tristam doesn't have a specified hometown.)
  • 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 to fully heal itself. Fighting mage-type enemies, especially when they outnumber you 3-to-1 in this game, is REALLY annoying. You can get this to work for you, if you set your ally to Auto... but that had problems too.
  • Convection, Schmonvection: One of the dungeons, the Lava Dome, is inside a giant active volcano. You enter through the volcano's mouth and hunt down the boss with the Crystal of Fire inside the dome of a volcano filled with boiling lava. And when you beat him, it erupts, and the party is still just fine.
  • Crutch Character: Literally everyone that joins your party: since they don't level up, you will always be several levels below them, and get to spend your time playing catch up. By the time they leave your party, you'll likely be even with or stronger than them, which means it's time for them to leave and be replaced with someone who's stronger than you once more. The worst offender is Kaeli: she's your first party member and joins at level 7, but quickly gets poisoned and taken out of the party to recover. When she joins you much, much later, she's apparently recovered so well that she's now level 31, despite spending that time bedridden.
  • Cutscene Incompetence: Unlike the other characters, Reuben doesn't leave your party after beating the Lava Dome and saving Fireburg, but when you get to the rope bridge and get jumped by a single Mummy, he rather oddly engages it in a duel and gets knocked off the bridge(despite the fact that he should stand a reasonable chance against it one-on-one), making him unavailable for the entire Windia area.
  • Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You/Disappeared Dad: Your orphaned hero notwithstanding, most of the people you meet are looking for a father figure. Your first partner, Kaeli, and her mother from the Forest world are waiting for Captain Mac to return from his voyage at sea. In the next plane, Phoebe is asks you for help in freeing her grandfather from the ice. In Fireburg, you partner with Reuben and find his lost dad trapped in a volcano. You could say that Tristam's constant meddling earns him a Promotion to Parent to the hero.
  • Damsel in Distress: Kaeli is poisoned and incapacitated for a little over half the game, and Norma is caught on the wrong side of the bridge when it collapses. (Why her grandpa Otto Cid Bekenstein let her wander near The Dragon is... yeah.. but at least she has the sense to stay outside the lair.)
  • Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: The game allows you to redo any fight you lose right then and there. If you were ambushed, then it turns into a normal fight.
  • Degraded Boss: Every single boss except for the four crystal guardians and their boss, the Dark King.
    • A meta variation with the Behemoth. In other Final Fantasy games it is a very powerful late game enemy. Here it's the tutorial boss.
  • Dem Bones: Skeleton warriors are a tough early-game enemy and they later receive upgraded versions. The two T. rex-type bosses, Flamerus Rex and Skullrus Rex are also made only of bones.
  • Descriptive Ville: Foresta, Aquaria, Fireburg, and Windia.
  • Doomed Hometown: You see it on the world map for about five seconds in the opening, until an earthquake takes it out. Ben complains about it when it happens, and then never mentions it again.
  • Early Game Hell: The game has the opposite difficulty curve to most other Final Fantasy games, as the hardest parts are actually encountered early on, with your attacks having an annoying habit of constantly missing and the enemies quite easily able to score critical hits. Once you've levelled up and got some better equipment, things quickly even out.
  • Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors:
    • The game makes a point of telling you when an attack was more or less effective against a target. In addition to the magical Elemental Powers there are also Bomb, Axe (including Reuben's Morning Star as well as the hero's and Kaeli's axes) and Shoot (Phoebe's Bow and Tristam's Ninja Stars) type attacks. Most of the strategy in the game is matching attacks to monster weaknesses.
    • What enemies are weak to what element tends to throw players off when they expect standard FF elemental rules to apply. Flying and digging monsters in particular tended to throw a curve, with flying monsters being weak to wind and digging monsters being weak to earth, despite using those elements to attack. Though in retrospect, a targeted tornado is a pretty good way to ruin a bird's day.
  • Empty Room Psych: The Kaidge Temple, Light Temple, and Windhole Temple. All of them predominantly featured on the map, the Old Man can be encountered in the former, the middle requires the Mobius Crest to reach, and the latter just sounds important. And yet, there's nothing to do in any of them besides find a few restoratives.
  • Endless Winter: Aquaria is covered in snow and ice thanks to the water crystal being dimmed.
  • Epic Flail: Reuben's morning star, 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. For the first "half" of the game companions outlevel Ben when they first join. The queen of this is Phoebe, given how strong she has to be for the final Aquaria dungeon. Unless you've been grinding like crazy she'll have ten levels on Ben and somewhere around three times his health. She can solo many of the early battlefields and possibly even the first dungeon by herself, were it not for the emotional breakdown you find her in.
    • Cap: Specifically, level caps. As noted, all of your party members have set levels that don't go up, giving them hard caps. (Kaeli and Reuben max out at 31, Tristam a measly 23, and Phoebe is the highest at 34.) The game doesn't allow you to go higher than level 41, however, and since you don't actually gain any actual stat bonuses at 41, the "real" level cap for Ben is 40. Surprisingly, you do earn added spell slots if you keep amassing XP (the counter continues to climb) after level 41.
  • Fake Difficulty: Monsters that can inflict Confuse, Petrify or Paralysis become game-ending encounters when you only have two party members and Benjamin can't get equipment to nullify those three statuses until the end of the game — your second party member doesn't find new equipment at all. As well, the Life spell for Benjamin cannot be found until the end of Lava Dome (read — final dungeon in the 3rd of 4 regions), so for a good chunk of the game he's unable to revive his ally if they die, and the spell is fairly easy to miss given how large and confusing the dungeon is.
  • Fan Remake: Final Fantasy Mystic Quest Remastered
  • Fantasy Character Classes: Despite none being named, there actually are elements of this in the game. Kaeli is, despite the green dress, actually a sort of armor-wearing, axe-wielding Druid/Barbarian hybrid. Tristam is basically a ranged Ninja who uses light armor and throwing stars. Phoebe is a bow-using Caster of all three magic types (making her the second most powerful character in the game in terms of raw potential), and wears "cloth" armor to match. Reuben is pretty much a vanilla Fighter type - tough, big weapon, heavy armor and not much else, though he's strangely given access to Holy in his second joining. There are even HP total differences between everyone - Ben gains exactly one "block" of HP per level, and everyone else is adjusted around this (Phoebe takes a rather significant penalty to HP, Tristam takes less, Kaeli's about equal to Ben, and Reuben has bonus HP).
    • Meanwhile, though, Ben kind of does everything.
    • To simplify the character’s ranks: for the first half of the game, Benjamin is a Knight (only person capable of using swords), Kaeli’s the White Mage, Phoebe’s the Black Mage, Tristam’s the Thief, and Reuben’s the Warrior. For the second half, Tristam’s the Ninja (no change from the first half of the game, Dragon Claw access and he’s faster), Reuben’s the Monk (access to White/Holy and Life, extra HP and physical damage), Kaeli’s the Priest (uses “maces”, or rather axes, most Healing spells, her first quest is to try and heal a dying forest) and Phoebe’s the Red Mage (access to nearly every single spell, significant HP penalty). Benjamin’s the Paladin who can do nearly anything. The entire cast is a homage to the original game!
  • Final Dungeon Preview: After defeating the Hydra boss in Lava Dome, a path opens up in the Focus Tower that leads to the lowest level of Doom Castle. You can only explore a small part of it that's walled off from the main part of the level, but you can fight some monsters and access a chest containing the Aero spellbook.
  • Find the Cure!: Part of your motivation for going to the Bone Dungeon is looking for the Elixir that will cure Kaeli. More specifically, you're going to the Bone Dungeon to help Tristam find treasure so that he'll be satisfied and give you the Elixir - it's implied he's the one who took it from the Sand Temple.
  • Fisher King: The monsters that stole the four crystals cause the surrounding land to rot by draining their power. Once defeated, the crystals restore that section of the world to its natural state.
  • Flechette Storm: Tristam's shuriken and Phoebe's arrows are fired off in multiples.
  • Foreshadowing: The game repeatedly tells you that there are four magical Crystals that Benjamin needs to restore to put the world back into balance — so why are there five crystals on the title screen? After defeating the Dark King, the fifth Crystal, the Crystal of Light, is revealed to be the Old Man that has been guiding Benjamin on this quest all along.
  • Generic Doomsday Villain: The Dark King has a rather generic name and no apparent motivation besides being evil for the sake of being evil.
  • Giant Enemy Crab: The Snow Crab and its Degraded Boss form, the Freezer Crab.
  • Giant Spider: Dark King's second (six arms, two legs, fangs), third (an actual spider) and fourth (final) forms. (Though the final form is only part Spider; the rest is an octopus-tentacled abomination.)
  • Golem: The Ice Golem and the Stone Golem.
  • Girlish Pigtails: Norma has them.
  • Grappling-Hook Pistol: The Dragon Claw functions as one.
  • Guest-Star Party Member: Everyone you encounter will join your party exactly twice. To her credit, Phoebe joins for what are easily the longest stretches of the game (the three dungeons of Aquaria, and then the entire Doom Castle sequence). Tristam is infamous for his short appearances (one dungeon early on and then half a dungeon later). This gets a bit annoying later as many people find themselves pining for Phoebe again, since she's way, way, way more powerful than any of the others (moreso if you take advantage of Good Bad Bugs).
  • Headless Horseman: Dullahan and its Degraded Boss form, Thanatos.
  • Hit Points: Curiously, this installment allows you to select in the Options how you view them in the status window. "Figure" presents a standard numeral pairing of current versus total, while "Scale" is more like a series of horizontal bar graphs, Presumably, the intent was for people who might not be good with numbers at a glance to just see the graphs and think, "Lots of yellow = good; lots of red = bad, time to heal".
  • Hyperactive Sprite: Enemies, NPCs that don't wander around, and PCs during battle all have a constant animation that usually looks kinda like walking. Curiously, Benjamin is fine staying still outside of battle, and NPCs that do wander around will hold still between steps; the intent seems to be specifically to communicate that immobile characters aren't also inactive.
  • Ice Palace: The three dungeons in the Aquaria region are all ice-themed, with the Ice Pyramid most befitting of the "palace" type. Once its boss is defeated and the Crystal of Water is restored, most of the ice covering the land thaws out, shutting out access to the Falls Basin (which is now simply a waterfall pouring into a lake).
  • It's All Upstairs From Here: The final jaunt up the Focus Tower to face the Dark King in Doom Castle.
  • Kicking Ass in All Her Finery: Kaeli wears a long green princess dress complete with poofy sleeves and a tiara, for reasons that are not unclear (given that she is an ordinary village girl). She also routinely traverses the woods armed with a battleaxe.
  • 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.
  • Leotard of Power: Phoebe's outfit is a leotard with some armor pieces and a cape—though given her origins, it could well be a bathing suit.
  • Lighter and Softer: In comparison to a lot of Final Fantasy games before and after it, Mystic Quest is a lighthearted adventure. The body count is virtually non-existent (though Benjamin does mention his hometown being destroyed in the beginning, he doesn't mention causalities) and the game gives off a goofier vibe that doesn't take itself seriously. Even other lighthearted Final Fantasy games, such as FFIII or FFV, don't go that far.
  • Low-Level Advantage: It's possible to severely damage the final boss by casting Cure on him. The spell will actually do MORE damage at lower levels. (This does not work if your partner casts cure though.) Though the advantage hardly matters; even at max levels, it will do over ten-thousand damage a hit (in a game where no other attack is above the low thousands) and kill him with very, very few castings.
  • Luck-Based Mission: The very first battle of the game. Benjamin has no healing items or spells, you can't run away, and the Steel Sword tends to miss often, so you're just sitting there constantly selecting Attack and praying that all of your strikes connect, and that the Behemoth doesn't get a Critical Hit. (Thankfully you get unlimited continues.)
  • Magic Knight: The main character, who eventually gets every spell in the game in addition to his arsenal of weapons. Kaeli may also qualify, since she uses an ax as her weapon.
  • Meaningful Name: Among the more generic names of the Vile Four, Pazuzu stands out for being named after the Babylonian wind demon.
  • Midair Bobbing: Airborne enemies like birds and mages bob up and down on the battle screen.
  • Moe Greene Special: Phoebe's arrows inflict Blind on enemies not resistant to it.
  • 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. Notably, Tristam is the only character in the game who even has a personal piece of theme music.
  • New World Tease: Traversing the Focus Tower between Fireburg and Windia the player can find a staircase leading to a very small section of Doom Castle, the final level of the game, long before the player reaches it, properly. If nothing else, the kick-ass music and awesome rock guitar riffs should be enough of a reminder to the player that this location has future importance.
  • No Hero Discount: People still won't cut you a break on restoratives even when they all know you're trying to save the world.
  • Oddball in the Series: Interestingly, this game was developed by the same team as Final Fantasy Legend III (and even shares some enemy sprite graphics and mechanics with it), which is also the oddball in its own series.
  • One-Winged Angel: The last boss is interesting in this regard. First he goes Multi-Armed and Dangerous, which is fairly impressive, and then he does the spider thing which seems a bit of a wet noodle. Then you realize those aren't legs in the traditional sense...
  • Palette Swap: EVERY enemy in the game is subject to this at least once, usually twice, with the sole exception of the Final Boss.
  • Patchwork Map: All four regions are neatly divided by the Focus Tower into their own climates.
  • Permanently Missable Content: Any treasure chests you leave in a one-time area such as Falls Basin cannot be reclaimed. As a variation, you can return to the Charm Claw's chest later on if you skipped it by accident, but if you already have the better Dragon Claw, you won't pick it up because you have something better, leaving a hole in your collection.
  • 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.
  • Poisoned Weapons: Tristam's shuriken and the claw weapons, with the latter inflicting lots of other status ailments besides poison.
  • Post-Victory Collapse: Kaeli stays on her feet throughout the battle with the Minotaur, but collapses to the ground from its poison once it's defeated.
  • 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 Benjamin first meets at the start of the game. It's justified, though, since he is the Light Crystal.
  • Redhead In Green: Kaeli.
  • Reverse Armfold: Otto's sprite depicts him in this position.
  • Revive Kills Zombie: Naturally, since this is a Final Fantasy game. Cure damages the undead, which the game describes as a "zombie attack" and they are invariably weak to it. Life should One-Hit Kill the undead, and does in the EU and JP versions, but in the NA version a flag accidentally got inverted somewhere and it one-shots everything except the undead. Also an Exaggerated Trope for the final boss, who wasn't supposed to have this trope apply to him; however, due to an overflow bug, instead of healing him healing spells do so much damage to him that they kill him in just a few shots. However it only works when the Hero does it, if Phoebe tries it, her ridiculously high magic stats make it overflow TWICE and loop back around to healing.
  • Ribcage Ridge: The Bone Dungeon.
  • Schizo Tech: A standard medieval fantasy land... except for the rock band in Fireburg. Dodged with the Refresher item; while its ingame sprite is clearly a Coke can, the art is a glass bottle.
  • Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The prophecy was just a rumor the Dark King started ages ago. Sure enough, the player ends up fulfilling it anyway.
  • Set Piece Puzzle: Many of the dungeons require you to press switches, move around blocks, or blow 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. Even more odd is that very few games with the name have tried to further what the game began, or even tackled the same gameplay ideas.
  • Sink or Swim Mentor: The old man. When Benjamin asks what to do, he gets "Go save the Earth Crystal. See you!"
  • Skeleton Key: Downplayed. In Fireburg, Tristam gives you a multi-key which he says will open any locked door. You use it once (to enter the house of a Fireburg resident so he can upgrade your bombs into grenades), and it becomes of no use for the rest of the game.
  • Speech Bubbles: Characters talk through this instead of Final Fantasy's traditional bar atop the screen.
  • Shout-Out:
    • A triple-headed boss — one of the heads being a dragon — is named Gidrah.
    • The rock band's theme has an intro that is an obvious Shout-Out to Chuck Berry, particularly the intros to "Johnny B. Goode" and "Run, Rudolph, Run".
  • Shows Damage: Every single enemy. Normal enemies have two images, major enemies have three, and bosses have four. Pazuzu and his recolor Zuh are a special exception as one of his 4 sprites is used for his shield stance where he covers himself with his wings.
  • Shrug Take: Benjamin's response to just about anything the Old Man says before flying off.
  • Squishy Wizard: Phoebe again. She might have the (arguably) best magic in the game, but she doesn't gain HP nearly as fast as the hero (note her HP total at level 15, for example, when Ben gets that high) and she'll end up with a Defense stat easily forty to fifty points lower than an equal-level Ben at the end, especially if you bother to get all the best armor.
  • Technicolor Ninjas: Tristam is dressed in white ninja clothing.
  • Too Awesome to Use: For the first entire half of the game, you can only get three Seeds (magic restoring items) which are hidden in a single chest deep in the Bone Dungeon. Sure, you can leave the dungeon and reenter to get more, but that takes ages and is incredibly boring. So, until you get to Fireburg (where you can buy as many as you want), you'll be rationing those things (and spells in general) like they were made out of diamond.
  • The Unchosen One: The Dark King mocks the hero by revealing that he fabricated the prophecy and there is no Chosen One destined to stop him. The hero kicks his ass anyway.
  • Undead Counterpart: The Minotaur who serves as the boss of the Level Forest has weaker counterparts in the Bone Dungeon called Minotaur Zombies. Interestingly, the original Minotaur lacks the Contractual Boss Immunity to the Life spell that the later bosses do, but the Minotaur Zombies can't be killed by it thanks to a bug (but they are still weak to healing magic).
  • Underground Monkey: Many, including several Degraded Bosses.
  • Useless Useful Armor: Tristam's armor, the Doom Robe has no status resistances except one: Doom. It's the only armor in the game which resists Doom. The first enemy in the game to use a Doom attack appears immediately after Tristam leaves your party for the last time (leading to speculation that he was intended to be around longer). The next partner may temporarily steal this resistance due to a bug, though.
  • Vancian Magic: White, Black, and Wizard spells all share pools of spell charges for the four possible spells in each category, instead of using traditional MP.
  • The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Early on, you might suspect that the Focus Tower is this. You'd be sort of right; "Doom Castle" is built under, around and inside of it and you get teases about it at various points. The Very Definitely Final Room of the castle is suitably impressive, too, with the floating alien eyes and whatnot.
  • Wake-Up Call Boss:
    • Flamerus Rex has much more HP than the previous two bosses, and has attacks that hit both party members, showing you that it's important to pace yourself and stay healed.
    • Squidite is the first minor boss to come with two minions. Not only will you need to take them out before focusing on the boss, but you'll also need to consider Squidite's elemental weaknesses.
  • Weaponized Teleportation: The "Exit" spell can be cast on most enemies to remove them from battle, but you lose out on any XP and GP gains by doing so.
  • Western Zodiac: The Libra and Gemini Crests. The Mobius Crest is instead emblazoned with a lemniscate, or infinity symbol.
  • When Trees Attack:
    • One of the first bosses disguises itself as a tree and attacks Kaeli, poisoning her.
    • Final Fantasy Mystic Quest: The only RPG where trees put you in wrestling holds.

Alternative Title(s): Mystic Quest Legend

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