Quote Originally Posted by wereotter View Post
I still have my SNES copy of FFIV.... and yeah. They had low expectations for us since it had a complete walkthrough for the game up till the point you enter the dwarven underground on top of being dumbed down.

I'll say this much in defense of Mystic Quest, though. When you consider it as a product of a specific time, and what goal it was trying to accomplish, it was a pretty solid title. It was a fairly early SNES title coming out before the games like Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, FFVI, etc and was created to intentionally introduce western gamers to the ideas of turned based combat and elemental weaknesses. It was simple by design, and I actually appreciate that. I think it was one of many games that helped set the stage for better RPGs that came afterwards. Even if you didn't play the game yourself, the ideas that were introduced into the western market lasted and became more well accepted. RPG style games before that were more in line with things like Zelda or the Quintet games, games we'd consider as more action/adventure games today.
It just reminds me of those dark days when we didn't have *any* of those games - the EU got stiffed on everything (apart from SoM) up until VII. I had to import VI and play it through a converter.
The issue being that Square (and others) just assumed that we didn't want RPGs and then put some effort into getting the US up to speed and left Europe and the PAL regions in the dust. Dark days.

When VII launched and went supernova and everyone was banging on about it like it just came out of nowhere, I was just like *I KNOW* . (Still think they peaked with VI though)