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popculturebuffet · 2 months

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More than Meets the Eye Retrospective: Dark Cybertron Part 1

Hello all you happy autobots and welcome back to my long look at Transformers More Than Meets The Eye. When we last left I looked at the sister comic, Robots in Disguise.

But a necessary one for Today's review: Dark Cybertron, a crossover between both books.

Dark Cybertron is the cumilation of a plot that had been slowly building in the background of Robots in Disguise while Bumblebee dithered, Prowl tried to install a dictatorship long before he got a bug in his brain telling him to keep going with that, and Starscream was awesome. Shockwave has been up to SOMETHING over the issues, working with his mentor Jhiaxus.

Chasing Jhiaxus in the best part of RiD was Optimus Prime, redubbing himself Orion Pax out of disgust with the legacy of the primes, alongside his friends Hardhead, Wheelie and Garnak, who soon found themselves chasing Jhiaxus. Mr J eventually lured them to a dead planet, where he and Waspinator, yes the boy himself, ignited a titan and made tracks for cybertron while leaving our heroes to their deaths as Shockwave held back Soundwave and his decepticons , igniting his final plan.

It's here that mystery plan comes to fruition as the lost lighters split up gang to help save the unvierse, while Bumblebee and his Cavlcade of Fuckups, and also Arcee try to stop the apocalypse and Starscream gets a new paint job as he tries to hold on for dear life to his throne with a big ole event.

This crossover's notable for a few reasons: it's the first proper event comic for the transfomers: While there had been previous event style arcs with All Hail Megatron and Chaos and crossovers with the IDW wide Infestation and the marvel crossover Transformers/New Avengers, which also means the new avengers and likely all of marvel exisit in this unvierse.

But this is the first crossover between books within the line, something that would become a tradition as IDW liked money and Hasbro liked free advertising for whatever they were doing in the toys at the time, either threading in designs from their current lines or in the case of combiner wars and titans return, just straight up having IDW model their events to match the toyline. . This lead to the ambitious and failed Hasbro Universe with Revolution, and the universe even ends on one with Unicron.

Ironically though.. this is the ONLY one to loop in more than meets the eye. And thank Primus for that. Look i'm not anti-event comic, sometimes an event can be a total banger. For a recent example see Marvel's Judgement Day. But the big two tend to do events and crossovers EVERY damn year, not giving books a chance to rest or status quos to breathe for a bit. So having More than Meets the Eye sit that shit out is a fucking relief.

It's also from a practical standpoint as this crossover shows both creative teams had trouble meshing the two together: the narrative splits into four plot threads, one in the dead universe with Optimus, Rodimus and CO, one with the rest of the lost light , one with the cavlcade of fuckups and one with god emperor starscream. the latter two evnetually intersect and the two casts DO interact towards the end of the crossover.. but in the six issues i'm covering today the only ones to interact with the lost lighters are Starscream in a brief video call and Optimus in one of the main plots. It's clear that while the two writers liked each other.. they may not of known entirely how to make the two casts function together, and thus kept them to their corners.

The result isn't a bad story but a fractured one. I will say upfront I won't be able to judge the story as a whole till next time, but I needed to do it in two parts as it's a big boy and there's a lot to go over. So join me under the cut as darkness falls over cybertron, titans rise, and rodimus gets a new toy so stupid it will bite him in the ass for the rest of the comic. IT's Dark Cybertron and it's under the cut.

We open with Nova Prime's crew. Nova Prime was a prime who was seen as a great one.. but in reality was an supremacist piece of scrap who wanted to conquer all other forms of life. He will not be missed. Among him are our boy Cyclonus and Jhiaxus, who tells Shockwave to FINISH MY WORK.

In the present.. Shockwave almost has, having seeded ores aroudn the galaxy and experimenting on a titan, both the same one that declared Starscream chosen one and then vanished.. and that Waspinator just brought home. It starts screaming in terror and bleeding out it's eyes

Elsewhere on Cybertron, Starscream woke up from a nap to find a few hours ago the sun rose.. and hasn't gone down. He also has a new all red everything paintjob, a familiar one

As i've been told and found out.. this is Starscream's look from Transformers Armada, which I did watch when it was coming out but entirely forgot this is what Starscream looked like because my memory is quicksand and only few things escape it like X-men trivia.

It's.. not my faviorite. It's almost ENTIRELY red and whlie it does look better in later shots, it's just not as fun to look at as his classic look and while he'll keep this look for the windblade mini series, i'ts telling the artists reverted to his old standby as soon as they could. The Armada look isn't bad and looking at stills from teh anime it loks GREAT there.. but it's a bit too one note for the page, at least these pages.

Starscream decides to call the autobots for help.. not the ones he exiled, an I told you so from prowl is death in it's purest form, no OUR autobots.

For now though we cut back to Optimus. Since we last left him he and his crew are trying to escape.. and luckily run into some old friends

I love this so much. Unsuprisingly Swerve made it his ring tone. Naturally Rodimus dove in anyway to save his old friend/boss/dad.

Rodimus shows his dad around, which really feels like a teenager accidently exposing his dad to all the stuff his dumbass friends do while trying to be respectible. The wind's taken out of his sails by Ultra Magnus who asks if Optimus is taking command with all the tact and grace he's known for.

Optimus isn't, he's only here for the guest spot , he's got his own leading roll to play in the other books, but he is happy to get the tour. .until Starscream calls. Screamer of course can't help but passively agressively brag about how he was elected in by popular demand after bumblbee fucked up hard

Then asks Cyclonus for help since he knows the dead universe better than anyone. The Dead Universe is a parasite, a universe that should fucntion right but is instead both sentient and EVILLLL. And it's hungies.

Back on Cybertron, Team Fuckup is starring in horror and the Dinobots want to punch the fuck out of the sun. Bumblbee tells them to wait for it... and granted he's telling them not to punch a bright light on the horizon, something even prowl can tell is stupid which tells you something, but honestly after the last two years worth of comics, the bar for Bumlebee's competence is low.

He ends up being right as the necrotitan lands. Meanwhile Shockwave goes into a whole rant about hwo this is all ineveitible that has a bunch of vauge images and two optimus primes about ot throw hands for some reason. none of this is relevant to the rest of the crossover, it's a clear misdirect and it sure does exist. The real point is who he's talking to: Nova Prime and Galvatron, who somehow returned. Also Galvatron and Megatron are two seperate people in this continuity, happens a lot, moving on.

Onto chapter 2 and Team Fuckup's strategy is now suns out guns out.. though Bumblebee's redemption arc continues as when the Autobots want to punch the giant, Bumlebee tells them no and tells them to either get in line or fuck righ toff, which actually gets them to listen. Seems Bee got a spine with his new form and I like it. After 20 some issues of him listening to whoever yelled the loudest while ignoring the people he's supposed to be serving, this is nice. It's clear field command fits him better.

He does have a bit of an exestial crisis wondering if this is the titan that choose starscream and I THINk it is. I'm not sure. But either way it's here and i'ts big.

Back with Team Rodimus, Brainstorm tells Optimus the dead unvierse is alive and that's why going into the dead universe is tricky: it'll kill anything it senses shouldn't be there. Luckily he has a plan.. and a weird creepy parsite in a jar. It's also so fun seeing the straightlaced optimus interact with the lost lighters. So dang good seeing Chromedome resisit the urge to condescend to Optimus.

Back with Starscream he's doing what any sensible cybertronian would do in this situation: GET HIS GUN. Or a lot of them hidden in a closet Rattrap is telling him to come out of. Please everyone knows Starscream as pansexual as fuck. Rattrap urges caution.. which is like saying it's tuesday but still when Starscream is whiffing it you know it's .. also tuesday but also probably an issue.

Back on the lost light we get a great scene as Rodimus, Magnus and Optimus hit swerves. Magnus is curious if they should be having command discussions in a bar but Rodimus for once isn't snippy, which tells us deep shit is a comin: he simply wants to be by his men.. granted he regrets that when he finds Swerve taking photos but for once Swerve is also not as flip: it's three of the greatest autobots of all time, on the preciipce of SOMETHING happening, something they call feel.. that shared feeling of dread. Something's coming and it ain't good.

The trio get a text from brainstorm: He's ready. This being brainstorm the most he has is a palm thing that keeps the dead universe from killing you using the venom of a monster from there he keeps in a jar. Granted this is only because it's short notice.

So our heroes come up with a plan: split up. Rodimus, Optimus, Hardhead and Cyclonus (Since he has experince) will go into the dead universe to plug whatever stygian hole is leaking. Wheelie and Garnak will stay by in Optimus' ship to pick them up after. Meanwhile the Lost LIght will head after Jhiaxus. Magnus is doubtful he can lead.. but Rodimus perks him up, assuring him he can do this: he may of been thorugh a lot.. but this is his comfort zone: "You're chasing a war criminal and i'm leaping into the unknown"

Back on cybertron Starscream talks with Scoops, a cybertronian ratrap framed for him and who belivies in screamer's prophecy. And as it turns out Screamer REALLY shoudl've payed attention to what that prophecy was or asked or.. anything other than accept it as face value as it turns out he's pegged as a "false leader" one who will bring on the coming darkness... "The stars shall scream and the symbol of the uncreator shall become clear" and said symbol is.. not encouraging to screamer or us

Anyways back to Shockwave: he's talking to Nova, and reveals the space bridge in the Necrotitan isn't working.. but luckily he has a backup plan: megatron.

We end the issue with two more cut tos: in the dead unvierse, Team Rodtimus fight some parasites hoping to snack on them since the signal their using reads "FOOD' to them and while they get away from them fine.. someone else notices. more on him soon. Back with Team Fuckup, the Calvary arrives: SOUNDWAVE BABY.

Part 3 begins with Starscream, whose assuring his adoring public.. only for a meteor to apparnetly land near the titan.

Speaking of shooting the Autobots wage a war to destroy the not so evil forces of Soundwave, only for the metor thing ot distract them too.

Before our next plot point let's talk about this series pacing as you might of noticed the last paragraph or two was just "this plot point, now this". And that's because the series likes to jump around, jump around, get up get up and get down. It has FOUR plots it's juggling and rarely do the issues just.. focus on one or two, especially early on. So each issue is bouncing around several subplots often for just two pages at a time. I don't mind a big story having to move around, but you have to let things settle for a minute. Let a plot point marinate a bit. I shouldn't feel rushed in a 12 issue crossover. 12 issues is a LOT for a story, again why this is a two parter. We do get some good character stuff like Bee growing a spine, a lot of it feels like a reahash. For instance did we need the starscrema going to get his gun scene? no we coudl've had rattrap suggest talking to scoops earlier. None of this is bad and some of the character stuff is necessary: Rodimus showing optimus around both moves the plot along with starscream's call and is objectively hilaroius. But a lot of it feels like thumb twiddling to get to the next plot point. We probably coudl've compacted most of team fuckups scenes into half an issue, if that. It feels like their cutting to each plot to make it seem important instead of carring how a story should progress. It feels like the writers took turns with scenes instead of truly colaberating on the crossover an das a result we just jump jump jump.

So we jump! Jump for the plot to our next point: the lost light where their being pushed off course... turns out Metroplex's thumb what got embedded in the ship after the annual is alive again.. and Getaway knows why: Tyrest, for all his madness, once said you can find a titan with a titan.. and figures Metroplex is trying to reunite with itself.

At the Necrotitan, Team Fuckup sadly gets back to buisness as usual.. arguing with each other. Fortuantely this time, Bumblebee.. is still a compitent leader. He's still on "wait for it" mode.. because they really CAN'T do anything and attacking a giant statue is a death warrant, and he's taken Team Soundwave's help as while they aren't on great terms, they have the same goal: Stop Shockwave. Prowl takes this with the grace, dignity and cool he's known for

God it's good to hear ANYONE, especially Bumblebee, tell Prowl to "shut up for once". And Bee's not wrong. While wait and hope things go well was a TERRIBLE strategy when Bee was running the planet and all it did was get starscream on the throne and all of them exiled, in this case.. their facing a giant cybertronian with weird glowing eyes who they can't really understand. As we'll learn shortly titans function SORT'VE like regular transformers, but are so giant, massive and ancient their hard to parse. A small band of semi-reformed fuckups, an asshole, and a bunch of casette tapes and their player/dad isn't REMOTELY enough to stop that thing and interacting with it might just piss it off.

And sure enough Starscream seemingly prooves that hypothesis as he tries to manipulate it by talking to it.. only for it to explode into 2 or 3 pages of purple light. And This.. I like> it lets the MAGNITUDE of this thing's power play out, it's sudden, and it's shocking, and the effects afterwords aren't good as Arcee is out, the death wave having taken down their forces. once again Prowl won't shut the fuck up, wanting them to attack... and bee brushes him off essentially asking

He points out the death wave, his words not mine, is heading towards the city and despite Starscream's efforts.. it goes off. Shooting the titan would've eithe rdone nothing or set this off SOONER. There is NOTHING they can do and that.. works for me. As douchey as Prowl's being which, par for the course and all that aside, you understand his want to do SOMETHIGN.. but their in a situation where all they can do is just sit, wait, and HOPE they can figure something out. Shockwave said it best as Starscream tried talking to the titan. "We were all too late from the beginning". Unlike the bulk of the comic thus far sitting and reacting is all they have. .because they don't know the full scope of what's going on here. WE as an audience don't know what the hell the necrotitan just did: I only have it's name thanks to the wiki.

The wave not only hurt the living.. but wakes the dead as Metalhawk is back, on the bad guy's side now.. and pisssssseeed. Starscream to his credit reacts more with "Oh goody another cherry on the shit sundae that is today." but he still gets stabbed and Metalhawk is taking Megatron, bye. While Scoops goes to help people, the citzens surround starscream, his star falling.

On the lost light thei rleft with a decision: follow Jhiaxus.. or follow the severed thumb. Ratchet dosen't wanna as he feels their back in the "autobots mainstream" again... but Brainstorm disagrees.. and Perciptor shockingly AGREES: an ancient god has asked them to come find him, and given the end of days is going on back at home, an ancient god could REALLY come in handy right now. Magnus agrees and they head to a planet full of blood red water. At least I hope it's water. THey go deep into planet danzig, and find a horde of microbots ready to tear them apart. These are the amonites from the 25th issue adn they aren't happy.

Closing out the issue Shockwave prepares to make Megatron into a spacebridge. It's very impressive and not at all healthy.

Chapter 4 begins back with the lost light and with good art for those portions again! Yeah while i've glossed over it because this is a LOT of comics to go over and i'm already behind, the art for the lost light sections of parts 2 and 3 is once again by James Raiz, who has a very sketcyhy lifeldian style.. and not bein ga fan of those styles in general, I like it even lest on the quippy, weird lost light. It dosen't fit at all and the lack of expresssion dosen't really work with characters who thrive on expression even when they got no mouths.

It also works as we get bits like Brainstorm trying to hop onto Perciptor's exposition and Magnus announcing himself as "duly apointed enforcer of the tyrest accord" before remembering "Oh yeah the horrifying events of the last arc right. Just an autobot now". I'ts a bit funny but also very sad. All it gets is the super combinining amonites blowing up their window.

Back on cybertron the mob turns on starscream, with Scoops rightfully calling him out for dooming them and pointing out the black mark on him as a sign.. whne really he just tried to schmooze an elder god of a robot, but semantics. poitn is time is running out for our faviorite boy.

Back on planet Danzig, Skids remembers the amonites and wonders why their pissed.. forgetting they you know, ended their forever war and one of them tried to kill thunderclash, something the lost light prevented. Take your pick.

With the Lost Light too big a target the crew decides to split up: they have a few water vechiles and half of the aquabots, so they should be fine, but they still need more... so Magnus gets an idea: they'll take the rodpod. Like the audience Getaway wonders "what the fuck is that" before we gaze on it in all ti's glory.. or as glorious as it is as for some reason we're suddenly back to raiz art.

Yes the rodpod, which Magnus was worried about as naturally Rodimus loves this stupid fucking thing as mucha s I do. But Skids is banking on Rodimus' short attention span.

The important thing here, besides this very hilariously stupid thing happened in a major crossover and that's awesome, is Getaway's reaction. His disguist, his sheer confusion.. for now it just comes off as most people's reaction to this ego piece who aren't used to Rodimus shit by now. But true to roberts.. this bit is one of the MAIN REASONS why we still had to cover this crossover. It's not the only one but this one small character moment.. ends up changing the entire course of this entire comic and our heroes lives forever. Yes the RODPOD is so rediculous and breaks a man's brain so bad, it has deep lasting conseqeunces that will last to the finale of this comic. I love that more than words.

Our heroes take the rodpod out for a spin, and while Rung kills a guy, and it's awesome, our heroes blow up a giant super combined amonite as they apparently have no upper limit but no upper limit dosen't mean "can't blow up real good"

Back to the dead Universe where Optimus deals with some squabbling from the kids

See this.. really shows the contrast between the two styles: the bickering over with Team Fuckup is annoying at times, bette rin this series but still annoying. The banter between the lost light on the other hand feels both more genuine and funnier. And I get the quippy style isn't for everyone: The MCU has gotten some fatigue fo rthat.. but I like a bit of back and forth. it shoudln't be the whole thing, and MTMTE succeeds largley because the characters are deeply made as well as deeply hilaroius, but a little humor helps. It breaks up the dark exesntial terror of everything to occasoinally have things like Rodimus' stupid headship he built for his own amusment or Optimus being about 5 mintues from turning this dead universe around so help me god.

Yet the questions he brings up .. arne't unfair as his next cuts deep: if Optimus had asked him to stay, would he have? And the answer.. is yes. Yet what cuts deeper.. is optimus response: He has the utmost faith in Rodimus and the progress he's made.. and it's clear form his silence he both regrets he's hardly made any and the choices he HAS made. He saved the world, something he rightfully rubbe din Hardhead's face as he was one of the many who nearly died thanks to Tyrest's attmepted genocide, but it's clear the thigns he's done weigh on rodimus: Would staying have helped? Could he have made a bette cybertron?

And the hard answer is.... no. Him staying wouldn't of been a good thing: he didn't want to be there, none of the bots who left really had ideas for a new better cybertron and MORE autobots wasn't going to fix a situation where autobots being there at all was causing tension with the nails. The sad truth is Bumblebee failed not because Rodimus left, but because he didn't have any plan other than "We want to retain power" , and with a throng of people crying for a better government and something NEW that was never going to happen.

The ironic thing is while Rodimus is on a quest for the old... his going out, exploring, doing daring due war or no war.. IS something new. He's letting his bots be who they are, having down time, movie nights, open bars. Sure he's also shoved some of them into very bad situations, the whole overlord mess was a waking nightmare and should never have happened and swerve shooting rung is ENTIRELY his fault. Rodimus, like Bee, often tries to lead like this is war time instead of a shaky peace. Yet despite also operating from that style.. he's casual enough and caring enough deep down that his bots.. get to have lives. Be who they want to be. He's not yelling tat them for daring to want to not shoot people or trying to create infastructure, he's just like "when I need you, do your fucking job bro". He may be embarassed around optimus.. but his letting his crew be people instead of weapons is better than Bee trying to lead like this is a war of attrition and not "what comes after" or Prowl acting like the war neve rended and a shiny new police state is better and not what caused the war in the first place.

OUr heroes soo seen Cyclonus is bleeding.. and soon have bigger issues as Nightbeat has arrived.

Back on cybertron Prowl sucks suprising no one wanting AGAIN to attack the giant robot that just wiped out hal fof them despite having no plan other than "shoot it REAL hard" Bee once again calls him out

He brused Prowl's ego enough to actually get him to pause.. well huff like a child but Prowl does have soundwave scan the city, which picks up something bad: Megatron SCREAMING as Shockwave both turn shim into a bridge and tries to get him to join. He naturallyr efuses ESPECAILLY since the primes are involved, so instead of joining in the new world order.. he gets prime coming out of his chest.

We end the issue on Team Magnus as they find Metroplex.. and end up in his eye socket.. which is hollowed out. Which is impressive but horrifying. And also not very healthy.

Onto part 5, and Shockwave is helping his pawns out of a screaming megatron's chest

When Team Fuckup arrives... Bumblebee has no idea what Shockwav'es doing but it end snow.

It dosen't though because Metalhawk is here, and Bumblbee's attempts to pull an "I know your in there somewhere fight", failed as Metalhawk is consumed by vengance and purple stuff. Skywarp attempts to just free megatron but his teleporting fails.

Prowl questions WHY Shockwave is helping nova.. not getting that maybe, just maybe the One Eyed Two Horned Grounded Purple Plotter whose already manuvered you all like chess pieces.. is using them as pawns for something much worse. Either way he gives Nova time to escape and his best buddy Waspinator time to bring him the staff Waspinator used to awaken the titan and summons it as if it were one of his x-men.. and has it crush them as if it were his juggernaught.

Back to the dead universe, let's talk about Nightbeat: Nightbeat is an autobot detective. During Nova Prime's previous plot, he had a thing installed in Nightbeat's head to turn the poor guy into his sleeper agent. Unfortunately for him he again picked a detective and one of the best at that so while he coudln't do much, Beat at least figured out he was being brainwashed and after shooting Hardhead had enough will to beg heardhead to shoot him.

So naturally his sudden return is a lot for everyone to process. As for how the shore he died on WAS connected to the dead unvierse, Optimus correctly guesses he got swept in with the tide. We get a sense of Nightbeat's personality too, as doing a simple look at Cyclonus tells him about Tailgate's near injury: he has facial scars, they were self inflicted, and they were patched recently. Cyclonus responds to this invasion of privacy mixed with genuine sympathy by trying to choke a bitch.

Back with team fuckup they TRY to count up their wounded.. but they hav ebigger issues: Megatron is craddling Ironhide crisis on infinite earth's style, before Galvatron rips him the fuck in half, starting his streak at one and declaring WHOS NEXT.. and somehow that's not their biggest issue as the titan is still active and shockwave is now in control.

Back in the dead universe, we find out how Nightbeat survivied: he was dead going through the portal and sense dead equals alive in this universe, he's spared. Sorta like how a healing spell usually hurts a zombie in an rpg just reversed.

At any rate he has some bad news for cyclonus: his hand generator thingy broke nad the Dead Universe has reclaimed him.. and he also has time to ominously say "your all home now" before triggering a giant force field around them. Turns out his death didn't undo his sleeper agent brain thing and Nova has come for them.

Before we move on to our final chapter for this batch, let's look at this cover. Which I rarely do for tim's sake but this one well

It looks like Nova Prime is playing with his dolls again.

At any rate we're back with what's left of Team Fuckup: bumblbee' smissing while what's left is running from the titan. The Dinobots plan to lead it away.. but it was already going this way they just were running away from it and are only pulling a prometheus because their genuinely not fast enough to get out the side, especially with some of them carrying wounded.

Back with Team Magnus, they notice Metroplex is decaying... partly due to age as getting spare parts is hard for titans and partly due to the weird blood water all around Planet Danzig. Theya lso find that Metro's BRAIN is missing: he's still alive but without that he's clearly dying. Getaway notices something in the water and calls Swerve for help but h'es a bit busy getting his groove on

They do however find a place to drydock. Back in the dead universe, Hardhead tells his friend he's going to rekill him while Optimus fakes a fight with rodimus to tell him there's a hidden barrier. While Hardhead tries to reach him Nova arrives.

Back on cybertron Starscream's no good horrible very bad day continues as he finds not only is his mark of shame spreading, but he's not the only one dying. After getting yelled at by his second tankor today he finds the titan heading right for him and the wounded

Back on Planet Danzig, our heroes find some arrows in the dry dock.. but it takes them around in circles.. then an Amonite blows up the ship, leaving them stranded.

We end this issue and the first half of dark cybertron with Nova Prime megomanically gloating... Hardhead escapes to shut him up.. only for it not to go well> Turns out PRime is not only crazy strong, but he CRUSHES Hardheads fist in his hands and then watches the poor guy desintgrate. He has plans for those left though: he's taking them to see a new friend he's made: bumlbee whose the shiny new space bridge.

So that's where we end it? Can Team Fuckup somehow save cybertron? Did any of team magnus survivie? Can Optimus shut this dude the fuck up. Find out in april folks! Thanks for reading

#transformers #comics #optimus prime #rodimus prime #ultra magnus #bumblebee #starscream #rattrap #waspinator #shockwave #swerve

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ducktracy · 1 year

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!!!NEW REVIEW!!!

it seems unlikely that one of Tex Avery’s most contentious cartoons would be the one that’s a standard chase cartoon between a dog and a quail. indeed, that is the case—the cartoon was rejected by the censor board in its original form. the offending cause? a plethora of raspberry noises. the enemy of the Hays Office.

thankfully, The Crackpot Quail remains coherent and (most importantly) funny following its redubbing of the offending noise with whistles instead. a freshly redesigned Willoughby pursues not a fox this time around, but the eponymous quail who seems to be a close relative of Bugs Bunny’s. while a routine short for Avery, it features some groundbreaking subversions and absolutely gorgeous character animation that the Warner studio is lucky to call its own.

#I ❤️ Willoughby #lt #the crackpot quail #avery #looney tunes #reviews

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wonderfulworldofmichaelford · 2 years

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Michael After Midnight: Saki Sanobashi

[Here is the next entry in my journey across the multiverse (backstory here). This entry is from what I’ve dubbed Earth-4444. In this universe, it seems like I’ve actually spent a lot more time talking about anime than I have in this universe, and I seem to have some level of respect if the jealousy-inducing note count on the posts are any indication. Maybe I chose the wrong field. Anyway, here’s Weeb Michael’s review of something that’s probably not real in our world, but is definitely real in his. The above image was not originally attached to his review, but as it turns out I can’t save photos across dimensions. Very inconvenient.]

Last week I talked about the codifier of animated tentacle porn, The Legend of the Overfiend, a film that actually managed to subvert its own reputation in a lot of ways. It is a film that actually showed the horror of being fucked by tentacles as opposed to using it for mere eroticism. Now, tonight, I’m going to talk about yet another piece of Japanese animation with a rather edgy reputation that precedes it, and yet might be one of the most unique, bizarre, and even startlingly philosophical works to come out of 80s anime.

I am, of course, talking about Saki Sanobashi, or Go for a Punch as it was known when it originally was localized. There’s an interesting story here: This did not come to America through legal means at first, being distributed as a bootleg at conventions for years due to the graphic content making it seemingly unfeasible to get out normally. It wouldn’t be until 2015 when the OVA saw any sort of physical demand, mainly due to fan demand as well as the spreading knowledge that the OVA had influenced many big names in the industry, most notably Hideaki Anno. Because of this, the OVA has been dubbed by many “The Evangelion of Guro,” and in some regards this is not an unfair comparison.

It’s actually fascinating how philosophical this work manages to be. The plot is rather simple, featuring five girls trapped in a bathroom with no obvious means of escape, and from there the five women contemplate their situations, delving into intricate discussions of their place in the universe, the concept of destiny, the cruelty of the world, and even Gnosticism. You can definitely see how this helped inspire Evangelion in certain regards, especially with the use of religious imagery in cryptic ways that may or may not mean anything at all. You can also see how it influenced Silent Hill in some regards, though obviously Jacob’s Ladder still deserves the credit far more.

The animation is horrifyingly well done. It very much resembles the sort of things that Miyazaki was making at the time, so of course this makes it all the more unsettling when you see the girl’s mental states deteriorate to the point where they gruesomely and graphically commit suicide. The level of detail put into the gore is just nauseatingly incredible, and the deaths themselves truly live up to their infamous reputation. Of particular note is one of the girls bashing her head repeatedly against the wall, slamming harder and harder until her head cracks. Even worse, though, is the one girl who tears her own throat out with her bare hands--and yes, we get a lovely closeup. It’s rather telling the tamest death is an assisted drowning.

Not everything is perfect, though. The original dub, the one that landed this work into infamy, is rather low quality, and lends a rather narmy quality to the proceedings. The 2015 redub, which was done with professionals, is much better, and it’s understandable given the circumstances of the original release, but it certainly can be jarring to see such flat line reads punctuated by shit you’d see in Higurashi. It’s also a little bit too short for my liking; at only a little over thirty minutes, it just seems to go by too quickly. While it certainly doesn’t misuse what little it gets, and manages to make you really care for these poor girls in record time, I think this definitely could have benefitted from a little extra runtime. The 2015 release does include an extended cut that’s an hour long that feels so much more fleshed out and even features an unsettling ending that seems to hint at the cyclical nature of time (something discussed at length in one of the more poignant added scenes), but if we’re talking about the original, infamous iteration of the anime, it’s a victim of its own runtime.

Overall, I’d say this is one of the more interesting pieces of animation to come out of the 1980s. I certainly wouldn’t call it one of the greatest of all time, but it certainly managed to leave an incredible mark on the anime industry. It’s honestly hard to imagine what it would look like without this OVA, honestly; it’s a niche, underground production that managed to rise to lofty heights due to fan demand and the influence of bigger artists, so it certainly did something right. Definitely check it out if you’re big into anime history like me, or if you’re really into gory stuff. You definitely won’t be disappointed in that case. Frankly, even if it’s not my favorite work by any means, I find it really hard to imagine an anime landscape that looks as good as it does without this work’s shockingly wide influence.

#Michael After Midnight #review #anime review #Multiverse of Mikeness #Saki Sanobashi #Go for a Punch

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medea10 · 11 months

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My Review of Lycoris Recoil

How did I get into this anime? I had a few open slots for new anime last summer. Plus, this came on the recommendation of one of my friends.

Japan seems to be at the most peaceful here than I’ve ever seen in any anime. That’s thanks to these assassins (known as “Lycoris”). Their jobs are to stop crime before it starts. One such Lycorsis is named Takina Inoue. There’s no doubt that she can get the job done, but really has no mindset for innocent bystanders. For fuck’s sake, she used a machine gun to take down some kidnappers and no fucks given about the hostage. Takina has a mindset that goes like, “You’re alive, right? So, you’re fine!” Takina was later moved to another section by a DA. Takina will now live and work at a café named LycoReco. Random. Actually, quite the opposite as this café has quite the crack-team including the hacker Kurumi, the getaway driver Mizuki, and the bad-ass teacher Mika.

Takina is now the newest member of this little section under the careful eye of Chisato Nishikigi. Chisato is another young girl that’s about Takina’s age and is considered to be the best Lycoris to learn from. However, Chisato is the polar opposite of Takina. Chisato is a lot more extroverted and has a philosophy of avoiding casualties during missions and that includes the bad guys. Can Takina learn something from spending time with Chisato and the other workers at LycoReco?

BETWEEN THE SUB AND THE DUB: This has been claimed by Aniplex of America and Crunchyroll. I got the opportunity to hear the English dub to this and thought they did a really good job. But I already knew it was in good hands when you’ve got Xanthe Huynh and Lizzie Freeman in the cast. Here’s what you might recognize these folks from.

JAPANESE CAST: *Takina is played by Shion Wakayama

*Chisato is played by Chika Anzai (known for Mina on Attack on Titan, Barbara on The Promised Neverland, Ryou on Taisho Fairy Tale, Nanamine on Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun, and Sugawara on O Maidens in Your Savage Season)

ENGLISH CAST: *Takina is played by Xanthe Huynh (known for Platelets on Cells at Work, Hanyuu on Higurashi Gou, Menma on Anohana, Nagisa on Madoka Magica, Hanayo on Love Live, and PallaPalla on Sailor Moon [redub])

*Chisato is played by Lizzie Freeman (known for Chizuru on Rent-A-Girlfriend, Trish on Jojo’s Pt. 5, Hinata on Tokyo Revengers, Cardinal on SAO: Alicization, Mujika on The Promised Neverland, and Kizuna on Shield Hero)

SHIPPING: Let’s just say I ship these two the same way I ship Mikoto and Kuroko from the Railgun/Index series. I support it. I know it isn’t canon-canon, but enough hints were dropped for a majority of fans to support this.

CONTROVERSIAL EYE-CATCH: Has there ever been controversy revolving around an eye-catch? You know, those 5-second eye-catches animes put up halfway into an episode! In episode 11, we get an eye-catch of the girls putting spider lilies (a.k.a. those fucking flowers) in their mouths and smoking them like a cigarette. The higher-ups said, “Oh no, we can’t have our fans mimicking this. Those flowers are poisonous AF!” And so, it is changed from now on! One might think that this was taken way too far. But again, those fucking flowers are poisonous. Cosplayers will do anything to get that perfect shot. I wouldn’t put anything past anyone.

ENDING: Pretty much every major showdown this series has given us is connected to everything that happened in the first few episodes, those ammo hijackers. The one that seems to be pulling the strings is this guy named Majima. He’s the one who looks like a poor man’s Meme Oshino. Majima knows that he’s been tracked by a Lycoris, mainly Chisato. As it turns out, the two of them have more in common than one would think. Both were involved in a major event that caused the massive destruction of the Tokyo Tower. And both had extreme surgery by an institute.

It was made clear that Chisato had some major surgery done. She has no heartbeat due to this advanced machinery put in. Mika and the Alan Institute took a chance with this as Chisato was already showing promise as a Lycoris. But the heart condition she had would have squashed that. Unfortunately, Chisato’s life has been significantly shortened. A shady nurse that’s in cahoots with Mr. Yoshie (the man who gave Chisato’s life a second chance) drugged Chisato during a physical and tinkered with her ticker. At most, Chisato has two months to live.

Bigger changes are also on the horizon. Chisato got the DA to allow Takina to return. And most surprising of all is that LycoReco is going to close down. This means that Kurumi and Mizuki can leave Japan and do their own thing before coming into this life. We gotta start wondering why Mr. Yoshie is behind this sudden change with Chisato. Well, he and Mika made arrangements on how many kills she’s able to make. But as we all know, Chisato doesn’t want to kill anyone. Mika just wanted Chisato to live a happy life. We might have to put all that drama to the side as Majima hijacked all communication and revealed of the Lycoris’s existence (as the group has been top secret up to this point) and kinda set traps all around the city. If the Lycoris see civilians with firearms, they get in position out of habit. So, this is not good. Not just that, but Chisato and Mika are dealing with a hacker who kidnapped Mr. Yoshie.

Chisato made it to where Mr. Yoshie was being held and was confronted by Majima. He was able to tilt the fight to his own advantage and got in a couple of cheap-shots. In the meantime, his hijacking broadcast is still making airwaves showing the residents of Japan that yes, killer little girls walk among us and 3000 people disappear a year because of them. Okay, enough of this Meme Oshino knock-off. Let’s get this LycoReco crew back together again. The crew was able to temporarily knock-out Majima and hack into the system to stop broadcast of the Lycoris. Unfortunately, the higher-ups are ready to exterminate every, last Lycoris because their identities were revealed.

Okay, now is when I can be suspicious of this anime. Never trust an anime that features those red fucking flowers in the opening sequence. Because there’s a chance many characters are going to be killed.

Anyways, Chisato and Takina were able to save the Lycoris that were about to be exterminated. The only thing that fell through for Takina was that she was stopped by Chisato when she tried to go after Mr. Yoshie. He was of course responsible for Chisato’s shortened life-span. But Chisato’s kind nature once again prevents anyone from dying. Although, she does shoot Mr. Yoshie (it just doesn’t kill him). Mika might kill him though. He shows he can really kick ass! Chisato winds up alone with Majima again. He’s going to suicide-bomb the building. Luckily, Takina is coming to the rescue. Now the next things that happen I can only chalk this up as convenience.

Majima takes a nasty tumble during the altercation and is somehow still alive. The “bomb” he set off was really fireworks. Chisato is going to remain alive thanks to Mr. Yoshie again.

Okay then. I’m all for happy endings, but all of this seems rather too convenient.

In the aftermath, LycoReco is back open. But Chisato never returned. Takina eventually went on a mission to track her down. In Chisato fashion, she decided to heal herself alone. Well, everyone wound up together again and end up in Hawaii. Okay, that sounds like something Chisato would do.

This anime was definitely a wild card of excitement. Usually, the summer anime seasons are the “lull” season with not much going on. Last summer was no exception, it was a bit of a lull. But Lycoris Recoil and Made in Abyss were the big hits of that season in my opinion. What’s even better is that Lycoris Recoil is an original anime. The manga adaptation only came out 2 months after the anime’s premier. This anime was silly, action-packed, and just a joy to watch. For all of you action fanatics, this might be right up your alley. Many reviewers say this is like John Wick. I have never watched any of the John Wick movies, but that’s probably an incentive if you have.

I’m glad this anime is getting more attention here and there. I mean, they collabed with Pizza Hut recently. God, could these two be any more like the girls from Railgun?! Okay, that’s all from me. I say give it a go!

If you want to check this out, Crunchyroll has every episode available for streaming (and in several languages as well).

#anime review #lycoris recoil #takina inoue #chisato nishikigi #majima #kurumi

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deerstar4 · 1 year

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Little known digimon fact: in the early days of the first localized airings of the animated series in America, episode 6 of the dub had to be briefly taken off air. This was due to a translation error as a result of a lack of budget and mistranslation.

Basically, spoiling as little as I can here, in the plot the characters are faced with 2000 enemies (“ni sen no teki” in the original Japanese, said by renamon) however, when the animation was being localized, the American directors didn’t have enough budget to reanimate renamons talking animations. They originally thought they would be able to get away with renamon saying “twenty one enemies” in English for the dub, but after its airing in 1999, many reviews and comments were made about the odd translation. Since it was one of the first newer Japanese animations to be localized in America, the directors were worried the confusion would turn viewers off of the series so they pulled the episode and scrounged to redub the line properly.

I wish I could find the screenshot of the frame with the subtitles, you can see just how ridiculous it is. If you image search renamon e6 21, you’ll know it when you see it

#ori #joak

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filmbrainbmb · 2 years

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Hey there! I've been wondering for a while: are you ever planning to put your review of "Bear" on YouTube? Because even now the line "No, she's gonna give birth to a rubber chicken – OF COURSE SHE'S WITH CHILD!" cracks me up. I even had it as a phone alert for a while years ago (which got me some weird looks when my phone went off on the train, that's for sure). Would love to re-watch it if you ever do put it up!

Sorry for the delayed answer on this one!

The reason Bear hasn't gone back up is that is one of the more problematic episodes - specifically, the episode has a lot of uses of the word "Slut", as I derogatively nicknamed one of the characters that. While you could make an argument that's the character's archetype, I shouldn't have really been using that word at all. I have debated redubbing the word to "slag", but only softens the wording with the same connotations. In some other episodes, some of the more objectionable language was easily cut, but the repeated use of that specific word in Bear has been the main reason I have not reposted it on YouTube.

It is a shame, as it does have some of my favourite moments, but it is also one of those times I want to give myself from a decade ago a slap.

#film brain

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anxiouspotatorants · 2 years

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I've been watching reviews of cheaply done/old horror movies that became cult classics and given how wide Rory and Lorelai's palette of movie knowledge is, I'm obsessed with the idea of Rory and Jess stumbling across these types of horror movies in video stores and try one out for Halloween, only to end up laughing more than being scared because some of these movies are truly horrendously made but really great fodder for being made fun of. I think Jess would possibly hate the giallo genre because many movies of it are all about the gore and style of the film and less about the story (plus many of them were always dubbed in English or redubbed in Italian and it was always in cheap quality, which I think he'd be annoyed by). For Rory I do wonder if she'd come to appreciate old horror classics like The Innocents or Dracula, though the latter also has some bits that are more funny than scary. I think that Jess would def like some of Mel Brooks' work, so they'd probably enjoy watching Young Frankenstein. Also, all four of them huddling together to follow a drinking game based off of an infamous horror movie would be hilarious.

Yes! They'd definitely do marathons based on movements and subgenres. Both Rory and Jess strike me as people who watch horror movies to study them, because they like learning about and understanding new and different things. Horror comedies would definitely be Jess' preferred subgenre, and I see Rory watching Cubrick and Hitchcock and lesser known wavemakers like Ganja and Hess.

And oh my god of course all four of them having movie nights where they get stuffed on snacks or do drinking games for how many tropes they spot!

#I just love the idea of this so much #honestly any headcanon where they spend time together having actual fun is what it's truly about #literati #underdog quartet #rory gilmore #jess mariano #lane kim #paris geller #gilmore girls #my headcanons #other people's headcanons #gilmore girls headcanons

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cheddarchaser · 2 years

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mario movie prediction: movie is released to mixed reviews, someone who can do a really good charles martinet impression uploads a version of the movie with all mario’s lines redubbed, this edit is briefly celebrated before nintendo nukes all traces of it from existence one day with zero warning

#mario

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lastchance1art · 21 days

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Here are my Headcanon Cast ideas if I ever decide to do an adaptation of Dead-End's Love or Childhood Friends. Cast list with origins of the audio clips I used

Arta Chance: Cassandra Lee Morris (Audio from Gundam Iron Blooded Orphans fun fact Atra got her name from Atra Mixta who is a character in the show) or Imshadow007 (best known for her My Little Pony video and voice of Fandom Twilight Sparkle however I got the audio from a Little Witch Academia x Owl House comic dub)

Emma Daaé: Cristina Vee (Audio from the Redub of Sailor Moon) or Heidi Tabing (Best known as Marinette and other female voices in Phantom Savage's comic dubs and Liliya Reznya from Moonshine Animation and the Reznya Iron Man MKI Review is where the audio comes from)

Suki Honda: Sarah Anne Williams (Audio from Kill la Kill)

Craig "Dead-End" Ryan Jr: Jacob Takanashi (Audio from Far-Fetched Pilot Teaser and Jacob Takanashi just popped in my head as I was editing the video)

Adam Taylor: Ben Diskin (Audio from Beastars)

Michael Davis: Johnny Yong Bosch (Audio from Transformers: War For Cybertron)

#Headcanoncast #dead end's love #michael davis #adam taylor #craig ryan jr #atra chance #emma daae #suki honda

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dynamite-derek · 3 months

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Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest: Another Side, Another Story

Please note, this is the latest entry in my series of Final Fantasy retrospectives that I write for a website called vidyathoughts.com. I am not able to post every single one of them on tumblr due to image restrictions, so please consider checking out the site and reading my other reviews in full. This post was edited slightly to remove some images that put me over the limit, so I apologize for the occasional long block of uninterrupted text. Thanks!

Here’s your new Final Fantasy, bro

Final Fantasy IV had come and gone and Square was very intent on making a push into North American markets. They had released SaGa games and redubbed them as spin-off Final Fantasy titles (The Final Fantasy Legend, Final Fantasy Legend II and Final Fantasy Legend III.) The first Mana title had also made the journey stateside, rechristened as Final Fantasy Adventure. The franchise seemed ready to really spread its wings with Final Fantasy V set for release in Japan in December of 1992.

Let’s revisit a quote related to the release of Final Fantasy IV in North America.

“I guess the biggest change is that they made it a little bit easier for the U.S. market, but that was because we already had Final Fantasy I, II, and III in Japan, whereas Final Fantasy I was the only one released in the states,” Final Fantasy IV lead designer Takashi Tokita said in a 2007 interview with 1up. “Final Fantasy II and III had some experimental elements to them, and so for U.S. users to suddenly dive into IV… it just seemed a little bit difficult. So we balanced it out to present it as a follow-up to Final Fantasy I. And, you know, the NES platform had a very wide range of users where the bottom end was very young, and we took that into account as well”

The difficulty issue was weighing heavily on the minds of those at SquareSoft. Final Fantasy V was the most difficult Final Fantasy title yet and the West was comprised of RPG babies at the time. They didn’t get to experience the other two Famicom titles and grow with the franchise, so they could not be expected to handle the hardcore gameplay of V. So a decision was made to release a Final Fantasy game specifically for North American audiences in order to get them more accustomed to the genre. Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest was born.

Despite being made for an American audience, development for Mystic Quest was handled by an internal Japanese SquareSoft team led by Kouzi Ide. Ide’s most notable work to this point was as the lead for the third SaGa title, which North American players would receive as Final Fantasy Legend III. Ide would only direct one more game after Mystic Quest, Treasure of Rudras, which only saw release in Japan. I would normally say that since it’s been nearly 30 years you shouldn’t count on ever getting a version of that game in North America, but they released Live-A-Live over here eventually so I guess anything is possible.

Mystic Quest is also the first game credited to Ted Woolsey, who was the lead localizer at SquareSoft during the SNES era. His translations are known to be a tad bit more colorful than your typical works of the time. This leads to a lot of his writing quirks being referred to as Woolseyisms. This ranges from his take on Frog speaking in olde English in Chrono Trigger (despite nobody else in the middle ages knowing what thees and thous are in that game) to Kefka’s infamous “Son of a Submariner” line from Final Fantasy VI. Most of his work has been retranslated over the years, but odds are if you played a SNES game made by SquareSoft, you’ve experienced his work in some way.

Woolsey at his finest, in my opinion anyway, is Super Mario RPG. I think his quirky style helped give that game a lot more of a life than it could have had. SMRPG was my very first role playing game and I credit it with getting me into the genre. It accomplished what Mystic Quest was trying to.

Here is what Woolsey said about the prospect of moving Final Fantasy V westward in an interview with Super Play Magazine in 1994:

“The Final Fantasy series basically has two separate tracks: the odd series (FFI, FFIII and FFV) are controller command drive games, whereas the even series are more story line driven games. As for FFV though, well, although we’re sure it’s a great title it hasn’t been a hit with too many people in our focus groups, although experienced gamers loved the complex character building – it’s just not accessible enough to the average gamer. But we’re determined we want to release it so we’re going to wait and introduce it once there’s a larger audience for that particular style.”

Now obviously Woolsey isn’t a major decision maker at Square. He didn’t pull aside upper management and warn them about the dangers of the Job system. But he would certainly know of what games are being localized and why certain ones are being skipped over.

Mass appeal

From the above quote, we can guess that Final Fantasy V’s fate might have been determined by focus groups. Before I even sat down to write this retrospective, the feeling I had while playing Mystic Quest was ‘this is a focus grouped Final Fantasy.’ It’s nice to have the lead localizer sort of confirm that there might have been a little truth to that. The original plan for Final Fantasy V would have seen it released as a spin-off title of some sort, but I will get more into what they did with V later (Spoiler: not release it in America at all until the next console generation.)

Mystic Quest would release in North America just two months before the Japanese release of Final Fantasy V. It would later go on to release in Japan as Final Fantasy USA: Mystic Quest in September of 1993. Final Fantasy VI was released in April of 1994, so expectations probably weren’t too high for the spin-off title in Japan.

The first time I saw MQ was as a middle schooler. I wasn’t terribly interested in playing it, I was too hyper-fixated on the PS1 Final Fantasy games I could not play for myself at the time, and for some reason a shard stuck in my mind that correlated Final Fantasy II (IV) with it. So for a long time I knew the first four mainline Final Fantasy titles North America got as: Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy II: Mystic Quest, Final Fantasy III and Final Fantasy VII. The 90s were a different, more confusing time.

In discussing how Mystic Quest differs from your standard Final Fantasy, let’s explore the focus group idea a little bit. Allow me to pretend to give feedback to SquareSoft as a non-RPG playing fella on Final Fantasy IV and talk about how these concerns were addressed. Remember: Square wants Final Fantasy and role playing games to be a massive hit in North America. They want what Enix had with Dragon Quest where Japanese police officers beg them not to release the game during the school week. Final Fantasy definitely had a host of hardcore fans in North America, but an absolute mainstream fervor would not encompass the west until Final Fantasy VII’s release.

“Five is a lot of party members, I can’t keep track of all this stuff!”

Mystic Quest trims your party down to only two characters and if you so choose, you only need to control one character. The game defaults to your secondary character acting automatically, though you can press a button to change to manual commands. MQ also utilizes the Final Fantasy II and IV approach of having characters constantly entering and exiting your party. The secondary character is always a fair deal stronger than your main character when they show up but by the time they leave, your protagonist should be equal to or greater than them. It’s an easy way to determine whether someone is going to leave your party soon or not. Are you their level? If so, prepare to say goodbye!

I find that if you play on auto, the computer will cheat for you. At some point I switched to auto mode because I wanted to move this along. The combat system isn’t terribly deep with two people so the battle-to-battle strategic decisions didn’t matter so much. I would notice on certain turns that sometimes my main character would get hit with a big critical by an enemy and then my partner would heal me back up before it became time to input moves again. My character gets stoned – no I do not know a better way to word this – and my partner would cast heal. In manual, I would have had to plan ahead for that. I guess they try to give you every leg up that they can?

There were a couple of times later on I had to switch back to manual combat for my partner to do something specific, but it was very seldom.

As a result of having only two party members, battles don’t have a lot of strategy. Towards the end of the game, some encounters will feature minor hurdles with enemies that will reflect your magic or give you a status effect if you attack them physically, but outside of that most encounters feel the same. The only real differences come down to the sprites. You either both attack or one of you heals. There are status effects to manage but there’s no buffs or nerfs. It’s very straightforward.

“This ATB system is so hard to figure out. I was browsing that old guy’s spells looking for meteor and some random bad guy called Red Eye swooped in and killed me while I was looking!”

True turn-based gameplay is back. So if you were getting sick of holding it in while you wait for battles to play out, you can once again tell your main character to act and then run out to the bathroom while everyone takes their turn. Given that you only have to put in your main protagonist’s commands if you’re on auto battle, this can lead to some very repetitive encounters. For a large portion of the game, I was just having my two characters attack. I know I said in my FF1-3 recaps that I spend most of my battles just physically attacking but at least there were four party members to choose from. Like if I wanted to attack enemies in other ways, I definitely had options. It felt a little more in depth.

“What’s the deal with all these status effects? How do I cure them? What’s the difference between confused and charmed?”

Status effects remain, but dealing with them is a little simpler than it was in the past. Up to this point, each status effect could be cured with a specific item. There was also the ‘cure all’ item, remedy. These are usually rare and expensive, so it encouraged the player to only use those in emergencies. Better yet, use Esuna! Forget items!

In MQ, there is only one item that heals status effects. It is pretty easily obtained and ensures that status effects will never really hamper your playtime unless you just outright ignore them for some reason. Which you can certainly do because I tackled the first major dungeon of the game poisoned for at least 3/4 of it. Your rotating secondary party member almost always has some white magic, so they’ll usually be able to heal you too. And if they can’t heal you, they’ll probably have the Life spell which will revive you. They also very generously make Life the equivalent to Full Life in Final Fantasy IV, i.e. you respawn with full health.

I will say that with two party members, encountering enemies that throw around status effects willy nilly can be slightly frustrating. There were a couple of times where both my party members were confused or asleep or something and I had to wait for the enemy AI to smack me before I could do anything. I also had a couple of unlucky battles where both of my fellas would get stoned right away, which is an instant game over. It doesn’t happen enough to be annoying but it does happen. Generally if you heal status effects as they come, it’s no big deal.

“Why are there so many spells? How do I know which one to use? Is Fire 2 better than Blizzard 2? Why does Fire need a sequel? It takes me forever to see my spells!”

Your total spell count is really low. Observe.

The spell book on the left is the main character’s magic and those 12 spells represent your entire catalogue. You have four white magic spells, four black magic spells and four wizard spells. For white magic you get Cure, Heal, Exit (for leaving dungeons) and Life. Black magic gets Quake, Fire, Blizzard and Aero. Wizard magic gets Thunder, White (holy, or as Kingdom Hearts fans know it as, Pearl), Meteor and Flare.

First, as you can see the magic charge system is back for some reason. I don’t understand the logic behind it because it’s far less user friendly than MP but whatever, maybe they were operating under the assumption that Americans were scared of big numbers not tied to their health pool. The game defaults to having a lifebar instead of HP numbers, you have to opt in to seeing more precise health statistics. Second, the limited number of spells really lowers the number of strategies you can use in battle. No buffs, no debuffs, just the basics on white magic. Black magic? In what could be described as a series tradition at this point (not counting IV), black magic isn’t very useful. There are some enemies with elemental weakness out there, but usually you can just hit them every bit as hard as you can magic them. It’s also really weird that the first spell you locate (we’re back to finding our spells, the main character can’t learn anything) is quake. Quake! That’s endgame shit! Well, not here, but you know what I mean. But there is another reason black magic isn’t useful.

Wizard spells just eat their lunch. It’s black magic but good. I have no idea why thunder was upgraded to a wizard spell away from its blizzard and fire brothers but good for it I guess. If you’re ever in an argument over which basic magic spell is the best one, I guess you can just point to Mystic Quest. Every single wizard spell hits hard. Yes, you have fewer magic charges for those, but they can get you through battles very quickly.

Now you might be thinking having fewer magic charges for wizard spells helps balance things. You might feel desperate enough to actually use quake or something! But no, because…

“This item conservation business is hard work. I run out of MP or mana or magic or whatever weird thing halfway through a dungeon and it sucks. Why can’t I just buy ethers easily? Rydia should be able to nuke at will. Also why are there like eight different potions? What’s the difference?”

MQ offers you the ability to purchase MP restorative items called seeds. Seeds are fairly cheap for how effective they are. You only need to spend something like 25GP to get one and there really isn’t much to spend your money on so it’s pretty easy to get a whole horde of them to carry you through the majority of the game.

By the time I unlocked White, which was immediately my best spell by a country mile because it targets every enemy and hits them for a respectable amount of damage, I basically exclusively used that ability. There was no reason not to because why would I conserve? Yeah I only had like four wizard spell charges but the second I run out, I can just pop some seeds and go right back to town. It makes battles go blazingly fast but it just lowers the already low difficulty level. I am not kidding when I say I barely used black magic. I do not think I ever ran out of black magic charges. Wizard charges though? Wewie brother, I was popping those seeds like mad to keep it up. I think by the end of the game I had eight charges, which felt luxurious. I could make it through eight battles without opening the item menu!

There are other consumable items, but just like with seeds, you don’t ever have to second guess using them. You only have one type of potion that cures something like 300 HP. They are littered all over the map and you can also buy them. You get bombs and arrows but around every other corner there is a treasure chest that contains 10 bombs or a merchant that will sell you a bomb for 10 GP. It’s so wild going from playing Final Fantasy I, a game that demands the player horde their items like some sorta dragon, to playing MQ, a game where you have such an embarrassment of riches that tossing out an item here or there just doesn’t matter. Nothing matters! Why I could say this is a commentary on the haves and have-nots in society but I don’t have enough brain power to activate a think piece like that.

“I keep getting lost. I don’t know where Mysidia or Myst or Riven or whatever is and it’s seriously driving me insane.”

The world map as you know it is completely gone. Instead, you get what looks like a Super Mario World map.

You just guide your little protagonist to the next area and go from there. You usually go to a town and talk to a bunch of NPCs and one of them will say something like “hey bro, go to the bone yard to get the earth crystal” and then a new map will open up for you to explore and you go from there. There’s no fear of getting lost or deciphering NPC dialogue to determine where certain towns are. I mean, as someone who gets lost all the time in real and fictional life, I certainly appreciate that there are people looking out for me. But this format really hampers this era of Final Fantasy where world exploration really feels like it’s part of the experience. A map of this style wouldn’t come around again until Final Fantasy X and X-2, where I feel it’s handled a lot better for what those games are going for.

Part of the leveling process of old Final Fantasy titles was running into random battles while you desperately searched for where to go next. Since that’s no longer the case, Square implemented 10 encounter long “battlefields” throughout the map. You just fight 10 battles, one at a time, and at the end you get an award…sometimes. Other times it’s just a bunch of EXP. So if you ever feel underleveled, just do those. I did them all because I hate myself and try to do every objective that comes across as long as it’s reasonable, but the average person can just skip these. I do not see ‘being underleveled’ as a problem many people will have with this game.

Probably the strangest part of this title is when at the very end you need to backtrack for an item called the Thunder Rock. Since you don’t need to get into an airship to fly to a different part of the world, you just move your character across the map city by city until you get to where you need to go. Then you go into the city, talk to the NPC, and then go back. There isn’t a boss battle, the NPC doesn’t give you any narrative, there’s no trick – you just get your item and that’s that. It takes like five minutes and I can’t understand the purpose of it. It’s like in a modern game when you need to flip a power switch but oh no! The power is out! You need to flow power to it in order for the switch to work! It just comes across as pointless padding.

“I never know when I’m going to get into a battle. Cecil will just be walking around and POW I’m in a fight. That’s so annoying, I’m just trying to become a Paladin.”

For the first time in the franchise, random battles are completely gone. Instead, you just see enemies on the world map. They are always in the same spot no matter what you do and they will always reload if you exit the dungeon or whatever you’re doing, but you can avoid excessive battles if you want to. Even though the implementation of encounters is kind of basic and makes the world feel very artificially created, it’s still nice to see this in a SNES Square game. They would later go on to do this better in Super Mario RPG. Really if you look at the basics of how this game operates and then compare it to Super Mario RPG, it’s very similar. One is just way better and actually did convince people to try this strange turn-based genre and the other is Mystic Quest.

For mainline Final Fantasy titles, non random encounters would not appear for quite a while. I don’t count XI in this because an MMO with random encounters seems absurd, so the first single player game you see this in is Final Fantasy XII. Encounters have been not-so-random since then. It’s interesting that they kept that staple of the franchise in for so long since other Square games like the aforementioned Mario RPG and Chrono Cross both ditched them.

“Why are there so many weapons here? Should Cecil use a sword? A bow? No weapons? It’s a little overwhelming.”

Early Final Fantasy games were pretty lenient with what they would allow your characters to use. With I and III it makes a lot of sense because those characters are just avatars for the player, but II and IV were pretty loose with it too. If you’re more familiar with later games in the franchise, you’ll know that they eventually migrated to a system where each character has a weapon dedicated to them. You can’t have Squall equip one of Quistis’s whips for example.

Mystic Quest dumbs this down to the point of just removing the ability to equip things entirely. Yes, you will find new weapons and armor, but they will just stack onto your character and replace what they had beforehand. If you get a sword upgrade, you can’t switch back to the old sword. You just have your new blade. Going to the equipment screen is just for reference. Your character has access to four weapons (sword, axe, a grappling hook-like thing and a bomb) and you can switch between them as much as you like by pressing R and L. In old Final Fantasy titles, flying enemies were often weak to bows but not very many other enemies had weaknesses related to physical attacks. That is not quite the case here, with multiple enemies having weaknesses to your various weapons. I would like to think this is to make up for how shallow the magic system is.

To me, the way this works comes across like an old Zelda game. I’m thinking Link’s Awakening here. You get your seashells and then you get your fancy new sword and the old one just vanishes. That works pretty well for a more action-focused game but in a turn-based RPG, I think it takes some of the player agency away. What if I wanted to have a challenge run and equip really weak items? I guess you could just avoid all treasure chests if you really wanted to but…oh who am I kidding, who the heck would try a challenge run of Mystic Quest?

“The overworld is so boring. All you can do is walk and talk to people. You can’t even swing your sword out there!”

Speaking of Zelda, I feel this part of Mystic Quest was probably designed with games like Zelda in mind. In the overworld, your character can take various actions. You can swing your sword or axe, you can blow up certain rock or bone formations with your bombs or you can use your grappling hook-like-thing to climb up walls. You can also jump! This leads to some dungeons having some very light puzzle elements. Combined with how massive some of these places are – seriously the dungeons here are about as long as Final Fantasy II’s and definitely longer than most of IV’s – you have some really annoying levels.

My least favorite was probably the ice temple. This might have been my emulator legal SNES playing tricks on me, but this was the one place in the game where random encounters were turned back on. Enemies were still stationary but I couldn’t see them, so it felt like an older game. That dungeon was like a giant maze where you had to jump carefully over things, fall down multiple floors and flick switches with your sword to open new paths. Combining that with the non-random battles, it was probably the most miserable I have felt playing one of these games so far. I was trying to figure out where the hell to go and then every fifth step I’d have to fight some battle and it’d really break the flow of things.

The jumping thing leads to some really unfun positioning puzzles that require you to leave the area and come back in some way. They aren’t hard by any means, but with the glacially slow walking speed it sure is annoying putting blocks in the right place. This game would have been a lot more tolerable if it kept things simple. But hey, it’s neat that jumping made its debut here. The next Final Fantasy title to try that was X-2 and it was in very limited quantities. You couldn’t jump on will until XV. No, MMOs do not count.

“This story is too wacky. Some moon guy hypnotized some guy named Golbez and also Golbez is your brother? A little kid fell into some weird dimension and aged into an adult? What the fuck is a Namingway? Also those fakeout deaths had me sweating.”

MQ is like a meeting ground between NES-style Final Fantasy storytelling and the FFIV style. The overall narrative is very straight forward – the crystals have been shut off and the world is fucked and you need to fix everything. You go to four distinct areas and fight your new version of the four fiends and then you find out the true master behind it all and deal with him. NPCs have more dialogue here than they do in the older games, but it’s more flavor text than anything.

You don’t actually learn anything about your character though, he’s just a plucky brave kid trying to save the day. There are no character arcs to be seen here, but your entire cast is still well more defined than the main cast of II I suppose. It’s not bad or anything like that, it’s just exceptionally dull. It feels like a giant step backwards from Final Fantasy IV.

Now you might remember IV had a lot of fakeout deaths. I would like to think this was based on feedback from Final Fantasy II, but whatever. Some characters are gone for hours of game time only to pop back later.

Here, there is exactly one time a character is seen to be in mortal danger. You’re walking along a bridge and some bad guys attack you. Your party member of the hour, Reuben, bravely sacrifices himself so you can escape. You aren’t even allowed to think he’s dead for a millisecond as the screen pans down so he can assure your protagonist that he’s okay and you just move on. Come on Reuben, the enemies in this area were kinda weak, I probably could have just cast White and finished them! There was no need for that kind of bravery!

“So if I lose and I didn’t save, that’s it? I lost hours of progress?”

Here is what the game over screen of Mystic Quest looks like:

If you click no, it just restarts the battle from the beginning. It’s a convenient feature because you will waltz your way into an accidental death or two, but it makes marching into any battle feel bereft of consequences. Going into battle and just mashing on the A-button over and over again will usually get the job done anyway, but if you blindly do it and get yourself killed, it’s cool. Just try again.

I think retries are fine. It’s just that this game is already so devoid of challenge that placing a little player inconvenience there wouldn’t really hurt. You can already save whenever you want, so even if you did die to a random battle, odds are you wouldn’t lose a whole lot of progress. Still, a feature like this is console generations ahead of its time. Very few games just send you back to the title screen anymore. It’s just a little weird to see such convenience in a 90s RPG for the SNES.

“That music sure kicks ass”

You’re damn right it does and I can say that Mystic Quest also has an excellent soundtrack. The main composer credited is Ryuji Sasai and he turns in a performance that is different from what you’d hear from Nobuo Uematsu, but is still one that you won’t want to mute.

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I’ve mentioned the walking speed very briefly before, but let me reiterate: it’s slow. Like, heinously so, to the point that I think most players would probably drop this game without utlizing an emulator’s fast forward function. If this game had a bad soundtrack, I truly believe most people would bail in order to play something a little more fast paced. The music here truly carries MQ and in some ways saves it. This is a game almost nobody talks about anymore and yet it earned a place in the most recent Theatrythm (Final Fantasy rhythm game) title. That’s impressive! I don’t think it’s a top-tier Final Fantasy OST by any means but it could have been so much worse. Like, have you played Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood? …If not, please don’t.

While I may have come off as slightly harsh on this game, please understand that there are things I do like about it. It’s not one of the worst games ever made, or even close to it really, but it’s painfully boring and slow. It feels like a weird missing link between the Famicom titles and Final Fantasy IV, even though it was released AFTER IV came out. The cover art does say “Entry-Level Role Playing Adventure” so I guess they do try to warn you a little bit.

Notable characters

For the playable characters, this title does not include character portraits like the mainline games do. So I grabbed character portraits from the instruction manual (thanks to the Final Fantasy wiki) so you could get an idea as to what your heroes are supposed to look like. The chibified character art is pretty common in the series up to this point, as seen in the Super Famicom cover for Final Fantasy IV.

I like that the art style can at least be tied to the original series.

Protagonist

Here is the very first screen you are greeted with in Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest

It starts out totally blank, implying that there is no true name for this fella. However, if you open the instruction manual, you will find out that his name is Benjamin. Very cool. I decided to just name him after myself, like any good middle schooler would do. “Benjamin” is the only character in the game that you get to name. So if you wanted a group of you and your best bros to take on the Dark King, well, too bad. I have referred to him as ‘the protagonist’ up to this point in this retrospective, so I will continue to do so. Though if I accidentally call him Benjamin, Benny, Ben or Benmothy…I apologize.

The journey starts with your main character’s village getting destroyed by an earthquake. A mysterious old man shows up and tells him that this is because a group of villains called the “Vile Four” stole the power of the crystals and locked up the Focus Tower, which is at the center of the world and basically brings everyone together.

The old man says that there is a prophecy that states a hero will show up and save the world and wouldn’t you know it, the old fella thinks you’re that hero. Exciting!

The protagonist is the only character you have complete control of for the entire game and yet he spends a lot of the game being outclassed by your other party members because they always join like five-or-so levels above what your protagonist currently is. This changes in the late game when your protagonist has the best magic, but until that point your buddies will often be more useful than you are. Some legendary hero! I guess he’s by far the most useful character by the end of things, so it all works out.

Kaeli

Early on in the game, the protagonist travels to the Level Forest – a bad name for one of the first areas in the game, made me think the fire area would be called Level Lava or something – and discovers it is in bad shape. He takes a withered branch and presents it to Kaeli who is something of a nature lover and vows to go to the forest and help you fix it. It’s unveiled that an evil minotaur is poisoning everything in the vicinity and he also poisons Kaeli, but that doesn’t stop her from helping you send the Minotaur packing to save the forest. She still collapses from all this and your main character must now focus on saving her! Wouldn’t you know it though, the cure for her illness is in the BONE DUNGEON which is also where your first crystal is. How about that! Her illness leads to one of my favorite exchanges in the game.

It gives me some serious “LOOK MOM IT’S A DIGIMON, IT’S NOT A POKEMON, THEY ARE DIFFERENT.”

Kaeli’s defining combat characteristic is that she has an axe. It makes her very useful against creatures of the forest, like evil trees, because they are weak to axes. She comes back later in the game with an even better axe to use against even more evil trees. Heck, you enter a giant tree during her return to root out the evil in th…wait a minute, did Ocarina of Time steal from Mystic Quest!?

I think they hint a couple of times about her having romantic feelings towards the protagonist, but I might have been trying to find a character where there wasn’t one.

Tristam

Your mandatory ninja companion! You meet him while trying to save Kaeli and he agrees to let you have the elixir if you help him clear out the BONE DUNGEON. This works out because, as I said, the earth crystal is there. He sells you explosives once you get there, which will go on to become one of the most important items in the game.

When you get your single fake death in the game, Tristam rejoins you very briefly. Like 20 minutes later you run into another character who says he might have found a treasure somewhere and Tristam immediately takes him at his word and fucks off for the rest of the game. Well until the credits. I had a good laugh at him leaving you at the mere suggestion of treasure though. Maybe this fella was inspiration for everybody’s favorite Final Fantasy ninja, Yuffie Kisaragi.

Tristam uses ninja stars, which are not an infinite resource. I never ever came close to running out of ninja stars so I don’t know what happens if you ever do, but the number ticks down every time you attack so I figure it’s worth noting. He teases you early on with a grappling hook only to just give you one for free later on, which is very nice of him.

Tristam is probably in your party less than any other character in the game and that probably makes him my favorite one. As they say, absence makes the heart grow fonder!

Phoebe

You meet Phoebe while you are trying to find your second crystal. Her hometown, Aquaria, has been frozen over because the water temple has been taken over by an evil Ice Golem in the Ice Pyramid. Killing the golem frees Aquaria. Phoebe is the character you probably have in your party the most, simply because she is your companion for the final boss of the game, the Dark King. You’d think it would give her more of a character, but no. The only thing you need to know about Phoebe is that she loves her town and that her grandfather likes to dig a lot.

From a gameplay perspective, Phoebe hits really hard with her arrows and has the highest magic stats in the game. She has access to a wizard spell in thunder, which is extremely useful when you recruit her. During the final stretch of the game, she gets access to the White spell and has 10 wizard charges which is really nice. But for me, she was basically just around to heal the protagonist if he got put under a status effect or something. He has access to more powerful skills, so even if his magic stats are technically weaker, he still is more valuable than Phoebe because Phoebe can’t cast flare.

She’s also your partner during the most annoying part of the game, which most definitely put her in a negative light in my eyes. I cannot stress how much I hated the Ice Pyramid.

Reuben

Your final party member! Hey you make four friends and the main bad guys are called “The Vile Four.” Do you think there’s a correlation there? Who can say. You meet Reuben when you’re trying to find the fire crystal. He tells you his dad knows where it is, but his dad is trapped behind a boulder somewhere and he needs your help to save him! So everyone wins by this alliance. Reuben is the first party member you get who doesn’t seem like he wants to ditch you, so the game invents a reason for him to ditch you by giving him the half-a-second fakeout death I mentioned above. How rude. He comes back later to help you reach the final dungeon but quickly leaves again.

Reuben hits really hard but his magic skills aren’t terribly useful. The first time you get access to him, the only spell he knows is Life. Life is handy in case an emergency happens, but it’s not something you would get a use out of in every encounter. He returns with White much later on, but much like Phoebe, by the time he returns to the protagonist, your main character is just too strong. He’s there to support and keep ya moving. By the end of the game, I was pretty ready for it to be over so maybe I’m being unfair to these guys, but if the protagonist can solo most everything so efficiently, why would I shake things up?

Spencer

When grabbing screens for this game, I forgot to grab some for characters I thought were important. Every single stinking picture of Spencer I have in my FINAL FANTASY: MYSTIC QUEST folder is from a side profile, the end of the game with the entire main cast that would be really weird to use here or from the back like this. So I went ahead and attached my favorite Spencer screen and just hastily placed front-facing Spencer on there. There might be one or two more guys I do this with. Plus I just love this dialogue exchange because Spencer just likes digging. Dudes rock, ya know?

Spencer is Phoebe’s grandfather. He is trying to dig a tunnel from underneath Phoebe’s hometown of Aquaria all the way to a lake where another important character, Captain Mac, is trapped. The goal of this is to get Aquaria’s water into the dried lake where Mac is stuck. A one man digging operation seems like the most efficient way to do this, sure. Unfortunately Aquaria is frozen over when you reach that area and Spencer is trapped down in his little tunnel. Not to worry, his plight is why Phoebe joins your party, so his suffering is your gain. When Spencer gets free, our good friend Tristam lures him away from his work with the promise of a treasure hunt. He bails and then in the best scene of the whole game, Phoebe gets frustrated and throws a bomb in an effort to complete the tunnel really quickly but this fails and just destroys this guy’s hard work.

Despite not really needing his zany tunnel anymore, he goes back to it at the end of the game to continue digging. Even though Spencer doesn’t get a ton of dialogue, he came across as a crazy old coot (kinda like FFIV’s take on Cid) to me and I found him very charming.

Arion

This Indiana Jones looking guy is Arion. He is Reuben’s father and a major reason why that particular rapscallion joins your party. Just like with Spencer, the crystals going haywire has trapped him somewhere. In Arion’s case, he’s trapped behind a boulder that can only be destroyed by mega grenades (an upgrade for your bombs that Tristam so nicely hooked you up with). Once you save him, he just tells you where the Fire Crystal is, which allows you to finish up your journey through the fire nation.

Arion is also the NPC that you have to visit for that garbage fetch quest I mentioned above regarding the thunder rock, so I am inclined to dislike him a little bit.

Otto

This guy’s full name is apparently Otto CID Bekenstein. That’s right, even Mystic Quest has a Cid! Now I didn’t encounter this anywhere in the game myself, but I read it online and I choose to believe it. It also makes sense because Cid is a mechanic which falls in line with every single incarnation of Cid ever up until this point.

Otto operates a machine that generates a rainbow road, which would help the party get to the wind crystal that is located in Pazuzu’s tower and doubles as a sick go-kart track. Pazuzu is one of the Vile Four, for the record. His daughter just so happens to be trapped there too, but unfortunately there is a lot of wind disturbance going around and his machine is broken so he tasks your crew with fixing that and then saving his daughter. He’s also involved with the thunder stone fetch quest I mentioned earlier, so I can’t say that I’m a fan.

Since this is the last time I’ll mention it, I’ll just explain it real quick. The thunder stone is used to power up the rainbow bridge machine so that the bridge extends to Spencer’s zany tunnel, which allows your party to get to Captain Mac and his boat, which then allows you to get to the end of the game. Cool? Cool.

Captain Mac

Mac is Kaeli’s father and goes on an expedition at the start of the game to learn more about the prophecy that states a warrior will take down the Vile Four and restore the crystals. Unfortunately while he is sailing, crystal shenanigans occur and his boat is stranded in a dry lake. Using the powered up rainbow machine, your protagonist proceeds to set off another bomb in Spencer’s place which floods the lake Mac’s boat is stuck in. Whenever you reach the captain, he informs you that there was more to the prophecy than anybody realized. He states that the true fiend behind this is someone who is commanding the Vile Four: The Dark King. You then can take his boat, head to Focus Tower and finish the game.

Mac is strange because I feel like the game talks a lot about him before he shows up, but when looking over my notes while writing this section, I have towards the end “I still don’t really know who Mac is.” He’s important because he unveils the mastermind of everything, but I’m not sure how everybody in the world knows who he is or why Spencer is trying desperately to save him. I guess all we need to know is 1. he’s an explorer 2. he’s Kaeli’s dad 3. he has found some neat information and 4. he gives you his boat.

White or "Mysterious old guy"

Throughout your journey to save the crystals and the world, a weird old guy will pop in and give you vague information and then go away. He seems to know a lot about the workings of this world and he shows up a lot to sort of guide you along. You might even briefly think that he knows too much, but at the end of the game the nature of the mysterious old man is revealed.

He’s a crystal! Like, you know, one of the tentpoles of the franchise at this point? Kind of an interesting idea for a character reveal because it makes sense that a crystal would be interested in saving the crystals, but I wish this idea had been explored in a Final Fantasy game that actually has an interesting narrative. Wait…I activated and rescued all four crystals. How could he contact me while deactivat-

The title screen hinted at this. Five crystals! It’s right there! Well played.

The Vile Four

The Four Fiends return again and just like in the Famicom titles, they even come back from the dead at the very end of the game as part of a little boss gauntlet during the final dungeon. In the above compilation, the original bad guy is on the left while the revived one is on the right. The little fella in the middle is the overworld sprite of the original encounter. The final dungeon is probably my favorite dungeon of the game because it reminds me of Hyrule Castle in Ocarina of Time. What I mean by that is it’s comprised of tiny bite-size portions of the major dungeons you’ve encountered so far. This part of the game is pretty straight forward, so even the annoying ice pyramid isn’t so bad when it only lasts two screens. I’m just a sucker for when a game puts you through a microcosm of itself. It’s a trip down memory lane!

As for the boss fights themselves? They all kind of run together. The only one that requires any strategy is Pazuzu because there is a brief period during battle where he will counter your magic abilities. It is one of the few times the game outright forces you to ‘strategize’ so it stands out. The rest are just ‘cast a big spell and heal’ so I will take what I can get.

The Dark King

Here’s the final boss of the game. He’s the only baddie in MQ with multiple forms. He has four of them and in the little grid above they are ordered clockwise starting in the top left. There doesn’t seem to be any differences in the four forms as far as combat goes, so just look at it as a way to tell your progression. My favorite one is his second form because he looks like a poor man’s Gilgamesh from other Final Fantasy titles. Just like every other non-Pazuzu boss, all you need to do is hit him hard and heal and you’ll be fine. Somehow he is harder than the final boss of Final Fantasy II, but to be fair I used a blood sword when dealing with that boss so I might have had an unfair advantage.

As our good friend Captain Mac told us, the Dark King is the one behind everything. He’s the key to all of this. He has basically no personality outside of “boss of the bad guys.” It’s not quite a Necron situation because you’re explicitly told he’s the main bad guy by Mac before the final dungeon even starts and wait shouldn’t White have told you about him? He should know about this guy! Oh whatever. He’s evil and you need to kill him. Simple as that.

It started here

I’m not going to pretend later Final Fantasy games pilfered ideas from Mystic Quest, but I still wanted to point a couple of things out. Think of these as an early cameo.

No overworld, retries instead of a game over

Both mentioned above. The no overworld thing is interesting because every mainline Final Fantasy title would have one until Final Fantasy X. Then they just kinda vanish until Final Fantasy XV. That’s not to say other SquareSoft titles evaded an overworld, the other beginner friendly Square title Super Mario RPG also chose to go with a level select screen, but it’s definitely interesting to see a SNES title with Final Fantasy branding just not have that.

Battle damage

I would like to think focus groups were bothered by how you just can’t tell how much health random enemies have (without casting magic that explicitly tells you), so their solution to this problem was having enemies have different sprites based on how much health they have. It’s fun when you one-hit a bad guy because their battle damaged form will pop up very briefly before they vanish entirely. It’s actually admirable how they gave every enemy multiple sprites because not even later Final Fantasy games do that, usually the only characters to show a ‘weakened’ state are boss monsters. Going back to Final Fantasy X, a lot of bosses show fatigue when they’re close to going down but I can’t think of a single regular encounter that has enemies acting differently when they’re about to die. Mighta been kinda nice for when you’re fighting Sand worms or a Zu, ya know?

My favorite sprite in the game is the werewolf as seen above (you thought I forgot about that in my character recap? hah!) He’s CLEARLY waving a white flag. He’s surrendering to you! And yet the protagonist must wail away on him anyway to get that sweet EXP. My second favorite is the little Edgehog because it looks like he got a bad haircut. It’s cute.

Bosses have multiple damage sprites, which helps give character to those battles and helps those characters stand out from the rank-and-file. Hey man, the battles themselves aren’t that interesting so they gotta do something, right? The Dark King seems to eschew battle damage to give you forms, which I think is a poor substitution because it just makes the Dark King stand out as the only bad guy in the game who doesn’t show proof of your prowess.

Spin-offs

Now you might try to take me to task by claiming that Final Fantasy Legend or Final Fantasy Adventure count as the first spin-off titles but I disagree. Those were SaGa and Mana games that got rechristened so a North American audience might be willing to try something new. Mystic Quest, from the ground up, was designed to be a Final Fantasy spin-off title. It may not be the greatest game ever, but there are roughly 83,000,000 Final Fantasy spin-off titles now and this is where they start.

Before you ask, no, I’m not going to do retrospectives on every Final Fantasy spin-off game. The only other one I plan on doing right now is Final Fantasy Tactics. I will be doing select sequels (like X-2), but I don’t consider those spin-offs. I chose to recap Mystic Quest because it was the first major spin-off title and it is also what Westerners got instead of Final Fantasy V.

In conclusion

This is likely a game many people wouldn’t even bother with (myself included) if the words FINAL FANTASY were missing from the title. It’s a game that would probably be forgotten to history if it wasn’t for those two simple words. It’s not absolutely horrible by any means, it’s just dull and forgettable. A middling title in a sea of more interesting Super Nintendo games.

I think if Square’s aim was to get Western children into RPGs, this was a bad way to do it. They would eventually figure it out with Super Mario RPG, but I don’t think a playthrough of Mystic Quest would convince anybody to try out Final Fantasy IV or the relatively soon-to-be-released Final Fantasy VI.

#Final Fantasy #Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest #Final Fantasy retrospectives #video games #vidya thoughts #opinion #super nintendo #squaresoft #square enix #retro gaming

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popculturebuffet · 3 months

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Thomas and Friends Retrospective: The Magic Railroad: The Workprint Cut (Comissioned by Lachie V)

Previously on this blog:

Also I may or may not have reviewed a bunch of Thomas the Tank Entine, cumilating in a look at the disasterous theatrical cut which you can find my barely coherent thoughts on that barely coherent film here. We haven't gotten the results back from the lab yet.

The Theatrical cut is so legendarily wonky I just.. coudln't leave it at that and feel like I gave the film a good shake. So I took on the arduous task of watching an unfinished workprint that I erronously said last time was on the blu ray. While the blu ray has some scenes from this version, the full workprint was leaked seperately and god bless those who did as it gives us something of a look at what this film was supposed to be. So join me under the cut as I see what this film WAS and if what it was was any good.. or at least comprehensible. After the nightmare of that last review i'll settle for "Makes sense from point a to b" that's the state we're entering this review at people. You've been warned.

The workprint of the Magic Railroad is interesting. This is the first workprint i've ever seen and thus the first i've ever covered on this blog. For those unaware, as I was before I googled it, a work print is an unfinished version of a film, with effects, adr and the soundtrack largely missing. So it was fascinating to see just how many pieces of the film, even things as simple as a line that LOOKED on screen are put into place after the fact. Film Editors don't get enough credit.. plenty of blame when it's earned but not enough credit and this made me respect them all the more.

That said watching a prototype of a finished film i'd seen.. was a lot. It seems easy, the effects just aren't there right? Well it's not just visual effects: it's SOUND effects. The only sounds are either ADR from the various crew member and anything on camera. And said ADR is not from the actors yet but various voices i'd never heard before and also Britt Alcroft. It's fair and I don't blame the cut for it, this wasn't MEANT to be viewed by anyone but editors. It's just hard on my autisim: whlie i'm functional and can handle sensory changes normally in a film, having there be no sound where their clearly should be in a lot of places... was just weird. I KNOW why it's not there, and usually my mind fills in the gaps but for some reason here it just felt extra off when an explosion or heavy digging happened with no sound. It's just this freaky effect and it took some time to get through it as a result, not helped by me only realizing what was really throwing me off towards the end of the film.

I can't recommend this cut as a film.. because it's not finished nor was it intended to be a finished product. It's not really something for bad movie night like it's theatrical cousin. As an interesting artifact of this film and Thomas as a whole though, I am delighted it exists as it fills in a LOT of the gaps and is complete enough I can judge what aspects were cut by their own merits.

Let's start with the big one, the most infamous and curious of the bunch: PT Boomer, played by Doug Lennox who realizes exactly what kind of film he's in and hams it up accordingly. Boomer is one of the films big bads... and was almost entirely cut from the theatrical cut, with only one brief scene that was redubbed, a scene so plot important and load bearing I forgot it even happened.

PT Boomer is all about

Wanting to make profit off things. That's.. about what we get. Seriously we have two seperate scenes where one of the kids asks Billy then Stacey about boomer.. and they just say essentially "He's greedy and wants to buy everything" without ever clarifying who he is, what he does for his BUISNESS, or what his goals are beyond "profit off a magical lady train he broke in the past." I am so sad he got cut as while he woudln't of made the film much better, he is so bad it's good glorious: even in this his plans literally boil down to

KIDNAP MAGIC LADY TRAIN FOR REVENGE

?????

PROFIT

It's still not much above Disel's plan that just replaces kidnap with kill and profit with "become train king". It is funny though and gives this guy a leg up.

The most we get is his backstory with Burnett, Lily's grandpa who gets fleshed out considerably in this version. In the original his backstory was just "diesel nearly killed this train I found and my wife never got to ride her" which is prettty damn thin and even before the workprint cut I could tell something was missing.

The actual backstory is still as thin as a sheet of paper covered in bacon grease, but it's at least.. something: He swored to take her on a ride but before he could Boomer, who had also wanted to bang Lily's grandma but lost out to burnett because well evil I guess, found her and threatned burnett if he didn't let him drive the train. He ended up driving too fast, making this a dramatic version of that trampoline scene from community.

youtube

I've tried not to use youtube videos as the thumbnail takes up the link but it really is just this exact moment but with trains and a dead wife.

We also get a minutes long montage of Burnett dancing with his wife. it adds nothing to the plot and is one of the cuts i can absolutely see why it happened. We also get a scene of Stone and Lily having dinner where he says I don't like trains.

Another change as a result is that the big cave scene with Patch.. is towards the end. In the thetrical cut we get 80 gallons of train expoision while the workprint at least plays it as a mystery: a whistle is heard in the mountain and instead of finding out what it is seconds after we hear it, it's played up the whole film. IT's a much better fit and I question why this was changed at all.

That also goes for Boomer. I went back and checked and. .he's not really IN the movie that much. He shows up, meances a bit, hams it up and leaves. He spends most of the film either trying ot find stone, buy shining time for some reason, which makes mr conductor's visions of an apocalypse make far more sense, and the rest trying to dig his way to the hidden railway then blow everything the fuck up when that dosen't work out. Keeping him in.. really wasn't going to hurt the film and I don't really buy reports "he scared children". The evil brother of the attention all gamers guy isn't going to be in any child's nightmares.

Cutting boomer also makes the non lily or coked out conductor characters feel more suplerfous as it turns out the original cut had way mroe for them to do. Not a lot, but still more. Patch has a horse.. which WAS in the theatrical cut but I did not notice. Probably because he's also lacking his sweet cowboy hat... it's like taking away knuckles cowboy hat from the sonic ova: you take away the source of his powers. Billy likewise gets a scene with boomer and a scene getting a warning. He still dosen't DO much but I feel bad for clowning on his actor last time: Russel Means is actually a wonderful billy replacement. He's not as good as Tom Jackson is in the role, but he's still pretty neat but in the theatrical cut he's there for all of two seconds and seemed a lot stiffer. That was really the editing's fault not him as he has billy's laidback charm and wise nature down pat. Stacey also gets an extra scene, though she still got PLENTy in the theatrical. Cutting this plot was unfair to the actors involved and their screentime and especially douchey to Doug Lennox, who put in a great performance. .that got cut entirely.

To my shock though the mass cuts... really aren't responsible for the film being pretty hard to parse. The workprint cut IS legible at least as a few confusing bits are explained: instead of wanting to kill all trains disel wants to conquer them, and he's unaware Lady is connected to the magic, meaning he GENUINELY dosen't realize he dies if he destroys her. So instead of stupid his plan comes off as dangerous and just the right amount of sinister for a preschool film instead of

We also get clarifcation on the "My Universe" thing. The narration for the work print still referes to it as mr. conductor's universe.. but they actually explain what the hell they were saying with that: The various mr conductors built this universe. Granted

Unlike the theatrical though, I can at least accept that answer: the mr conductors do have godlike powers and it makes Mr Conductor speaking with authority on his power loss possibly killing him less ass pully: it makes sense they'd pass this shit down through generations and makes sense Mr C Junior wouldn't know it as he's a fuckwit.

It makes the film less maddening.. but it dosen't change the fact this new lore is just kinda jammed in there, a square train in a round station house. The lore still dosen't make a ton of since even for a film for small children, and again thei rparents and possibly older siblings still have to watch it with them so why punch down. All punching down did was get parents to cave and go take their kids to see X-Men or Pokemon 2000 instead, both much better movies. Especailly pokmeon 2000. Fuck I really need to cover both of those don't I.

It also dosen't explain simple shit like "Why does lady tie the two universes together" and "after being in a coma for so long why is magic just fading now". It's still at the end of the day an overcomplicated mess that creates it's own weird lore never to be used again that no one vibed with because even for the stupid train children show it was baffling instead of fairy tale style like they were going for.

The other scenes cut are far more understandable: that dance scene I mentiond went on to long and we get a brief prologue of Lily in the big city and the reason behind the fire escape line. It's.. nothing we honestly needed mostly Mara wilson wistfully starring outside a train.. which is adorable but dosen't really move the plot along.

So that leads us to the final cut and the final change worth talking about between versions: the voice actors. Like with boomer the executives tried overcorrecting to test audience complaints. They dont' like one of the villians? Cut him out entirely. They don't like the voices for some of the characters? replace the bitches! Yeah originally Thomas was voiced by John Bellis, Percy and James by Thomas UK narrator Micheal Angellis, Splatter and Dodge by Patrick Breen, and Disel 10 by Keith Scott.

Unlike with removing boomer I get most of these edits: Unlike boomer I completely buy that D10 scared children as Keith Scott's voice for him is terrifying.. though the terror is undrecut by the adr version of him sounding like Lumpy Space Princess. It's a great voice and I feel bad for Scott.. but it is a bit too scary> Granted they coudl've just.. worked with him to find another voice as they had before (He tried a russian voice before this that was apparently even creepier), so it's shitty they fired him and everyone here instead of simply recasting them or giving them something else.

LIkewise I love MIcheal Angellis and having him voice cameo was a good idea.. but they shoudl've had him do Henry instead. His voice works when he's narrating every character.. but I get why having an old gentleman voice for Percy and James, both younger engines dosen't quite work. Granted unlike with D10, where his replacement got the tone better, making Percy and James small children dosen't fix the problem. Their youthful not 8. Stupid Train Children is not that literal a term.

Thomas on the other hand.. was fine: he sounded youthful, had a nice plesant voice and I honestly prefer it over the final cut voice with Eddie Glenn. Glenn isn't bad.. but Bellis just got the character better. Splatter and Dodge are also way better and the film does a far better job conveying thier reluctant minon status and making them humorous foils to dissel.

So all in all the Work Print version is a better film.. but only by comparision. It has some good stuff that was cuts and the edits done were mostly moronic but it's still a film that alternates between boring and WHAT THE FUCK. it just explains more, which helps with the latter

The Magic Railroad in either film is a film that tried to cram way too much shit in. It tried so hard to escalate thomas to save the world level shit when that just .. dosen't scale with either Thomas and Friends or Shining Time Station. Both are about small scale problems in small slice of lifey places: a cozy british isle and a whimsical train station. Their biggest issues are dickheads like Disel and god emperor or schemer. You could've had thomas go on a treasure hunt to save the rail way or shining time or both. Maybe Schemer is trying to buy the failing railway. I mean if their going to go with the skeezy buisness douche cliche at least make it the guy you already have who would defintely do that if he could. Give him Boomer as a boss if you want. It keeps the tension, the two worlds element and mr c going back and forth as he could've taken Mara Wilson to shining time to go on the hunt to save the station. Give her an attachment to it. Make Burnett stone a conductor. You don't have to throw everything out, but simply lowering the stakes would've made this a more coherent film. I"m not sure how GOOD it woudl've been bu tit would've been a better Thomas Movie, a better shining time movie and something people would've actually wanted to see.

Instead it's a mess that changed Thomas as a whole, with Britt's failures here leading to her stepping down and eventually the company being purchased by HIT. But more on that another time for now we can put this train to bed. These reviews have been exausting as I don't want to be negative but these films, both cuts, are hot garbage. one just makes more sense. Hopefully if the proposed thomas film goes through they get it right... until then all we're left is a mess of what could've been and alec baldwin on cocaine.

Next Time: Turns out there is one as we have a new plan. I'll be covering season 6 sometime later this year, season 7, then teaking a break while Lachey figures out the rest of the schedule and I cover venture bros seasons 4b- the end. Thanks for reading

#thomas the tank engine #thomas and friends #thomas and the magic railroad #mara wilson #peter fonda #alec baldwin #mattel #britt alcroftt #childrens media #the 2000s #Youtube

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