Early this morning, I beat Final Fantasy USA: Mystic Quest (a Super Famicom/Super Nintendo game). I have been playing this game since at least 1999. I played through the entire thing on my Android phone using the SNES9X emulator and defeated the "Dark King" early this morning. Emulation is often illegal, but in this case, it was legal emulation, because I own the cartridge (I got a great deal on it—¥105 at the HardOff store). Screenshots follow.Final Fantasy Mystic Quest (as it is known in the USA, where the "USA" part is omitted) generally received negative reviews when it was released. Reviews generally seemed to average about two stars out of five. I actually take issue with this. I would give it three stars out of five. I think most reviewers at that time just felt betrayed that America got Final Fantasy Mystic Quest instead of Final Fantasy V, which remained untranslated into English until years later. Gamers also felt condescended to that Squaresoft would make a special "beginner RPG" for American audiences that was "easy" (at a time when most American console gamers did not play RPGs—this was primarily the domain of personal computers with series like Ultima).
While I agree with those angry gamers that FF5 should have taken precedence over this, I do not think Final Fantasy Mystic Quest was all that bad. I think reviewers came down especially hard on it because they felt betrayed by Squaresoft. Had this game been released by another company under a different name, I am pretty sure many reviewers would have given it somewhat more favorable reviews. That said, it still is not great, and is probably not worth playing, with so many great games out there, in this day in age, for anyone but a die-hard Final Fantasy fan.
