One of the Rpg games on the Nintendo 64...And one of the worst Rpg games I think I've ever played.

I first played this game back in 1997...I think...It's been nearly a decade since I decided to find it and play it again because I thought it was fun when I played it a long time ago...However it's not now.

From the first pictures the game looks fun and vast and alot of exploring would be involved, I do like the backgrounds and the fact that the journey is more a straight line than in say Mario and Zelda where your in a big room and you have to go to a certain part of the room after an event, no this game is on a straight and narrow path all the way through, which I think works because...well it's interesting for this sort of game.

I never got the story but your a boy named Brian...a apprentice...something and you have 2 types of attacks, physical and magic attack, but you have 4 elements on magic attacks; fire, earth, wind and water...no heart though. (Captain Planet joke)

One of the first problems I have with this game is this

This is the very beginning of the game, the VERY begining, and as you'll see there are doors...Seven doors...and here is what's inside all of them

NOTHING!!

There's no items or treasure chests in all seven of these rooms...Which is just annoying to go through each and every one of them to find nothing.

Now that that's out of my system, I've looked around and people share some of my thoughts with this game...It's simple...but it's hard at the beginning.

This is how the experience works, you fight monsters and then this screen eventually shows up

Well as you can see I have the top one upgraded more than the others, well that's because I thought the fire attack was the most effective and powerful attack Brian has...although I didn't notice the upgrades later on. There is no leveling up, you don't gain levels...which is odd for an Rpg type game, rather the more you fight the more points you gain to increase your status...But Landon, that's how an Rpg is suppose to work...well yeah, but it doesn't specifically tell you when your at level 3 or 5 or 10...instead your Hp is 80 instead of 60 a few fights ago...To me that's odd...Because if you ask for help...no-one can say "What level are you?"

Here's the menu for experience...but it doesn't make much sense to me...I guess the whole point is to just keep fighting monsters.

Fighting is a bit different from what I've played before, it's turn based but there are good and bad things about it.

See that blue ring around Brian? That's the characters area where he can walk, he cannot go outside that ring for his turn, and it may be hard to see but there's another ring and part of it is cut off but that's the entire battle arena.

As I've mentioned Brian has 4 element attacks, fire, earth, wind, and water and there's a complicated way to use it. First each element is a C button, so fire is up c, earth is left c, wind is right c, and water is down c. In this picture I use Fire, so this menu appears, now I have a choice of different techniques because I have 10 fire points, now when I press Up c again, it activates Fire Ball level 2, then I press A to use the attack......Did that sound complicated? Well believe me it's alot easier to explain than to use. The battle system is far from perfect, pressing A ends your turn so the enemy attacks, but pressing A right next to an enemy makes Brian hit the monster with his staff...But sometimes when I try to hit an enemy my turn just ends and I get hit twice by the enemy, it's silly to use the same button for such a purpose.

Here I'm fighting 3 enemies at once but when I get up closer to attack...

The camera moves! Now I can't see the enemies because that tree is in the way!

CAN'T SEE!!!!!!!

Yeah I got him with wind attack!

I think I should say I felt the water attack was the most useless of all the spells in the game, I mean it only works when your up close to an enemy, but my staff takes more damage than that...what's the point?

I gotta say these camera angles are weird, look I can see through this house on the right and a person down below me.

Hey this looks pretty cool, I can see the town below here. I'd say the graphics weren't bad for what it was in the day.

Alright now let's get down to the reason why I never beat this game period (Or was so sick I couldn't.)

One of your first missions is to get back the Earth stone from the Thief...

The Thief

The entire town people talk about it, even the king orders you to get it back...

"I'D LIKE TO SEE YOU BEAT HIM!"

Something I can't get over is that...It's a thief...I mean...A thief?! How unoriginal is that?

Now if you've played this game I think you'll know what this is...yes this is the small forest before you get inside the forest...with the thief...

Here's the inside, what you do is follow the path, fight monsters along the way, then you defeat the theif...go back...then you go to the castle to tell the king and you'll be on your way.

There's a problem though.

This part of the game is nearly impossible.......Well...why?

I'd say in this part you fight maybe 5 to 9 monsters, or monsters in groups...there's just one catch, you get 1 healing item. Now I'm sure I'll be corrected but as far as I know you can only get one healing item which will heal 50 Hp.

First let's ask why only one? Well in the town near the castle...you cannot buy items...yes you cannot buy items...you can only find them. There's a lady in a certain building who will give you bread...but if you already have bread she will give you no more bread. Now there is a way to get more bread...fight monsters...monsters will drop bread maybe...5% of the time...seriously. In the beginning I got honey bread that healed 100Hp...but I already used it.

I fought one monster...one...and it halved my HP...So now I'm stuck at half HP having to fight more monsters and I get to the thief's hideout...with like 5 HP

...So what?.....I have to FIGHT the theif...that's what....This is almost impossible to do, his attacks take up your entire walk area and drain 20 Hp plus every time he hits you...

Now I know what your going to say..."Well level up more you idiot."

I have, all the enemies I attack outside the forest all die with one hit......I mean...when you kill enemies in one hit you kinda know that it's time to move on right? Well the enemies inside the forest don't take that long either but some of them take me nearly 10 hits to kill....what's the deal?

Now I know what your going to say next..."Landon you can escape from battles."

I know you can, but if I'm too weak the fight the enemies leading up to the boss...there's no way I'll beat the boss."

A combination of things mess me up to get to the theif...first my magic spells don't do enough damage to enemies like these Frog knights, my staff does more damage than anything, so I figure the only way is to whack them up close...however when I do that they release even more deadly attacks that take up maybe 20 HP, not to mention the fact that sometimes the staff doesn't work when I get up to it and it accidentally skips my turn...to get hit again by another heavy attack, and my staff doesn't kill them straight away, it takes 3 times to kill it, and by that time it could have used a heavy attack 3 times on me...so...I would have taken 60 HP damage ...leaving me with less than 10 HP left and only one healing item the entire forest to get there, beat the thief, then get back.

That's when I figured the battle system isn't balanced enough if on the first level the enemies are too weak, on the next they're too strong...I dunno, maybe I'm missing something?......Well yeah actually I am...Healing spells.

I read that you have to upgrade one of your elements and you'll get a healing spell......funny.....If I'd know that I would have probably had more fun with this game, too bad I don't have the patience to go back and get my other elements up. After all that trouble I realized I could have been playing...oh I don't know...Super Mario 64 or Ocarina of time.

One of the things I do like about the game is if you die you keep all the experience you earned so...you never lose upgraded elements and experience ...however this doesn't help all that much as I keep dying too fast to stay in the forest to really rack up kills and experience.

And to end the review, when you die you start over from an Inn...Inn's are save points pretty much, so you'll follow a usual pattern of going to another house, getting bread, healing yourself, getting bread, healing yourself again, then getting bread to heal yourself for future battles.....That gets old real quick.

Quest 64 is a fun game at first, it has decent graphics, at first exploring towns and fighting monsters is fun, there are little secrets that help your element level go up but they're rare, and some are easy and hard to find. There's just one part of it that kills the game for me. I've never gotten past the game but maybe if I had it in me to go back and get that healing spell I would have gotten a bit farther.

Maybe I was hard on this game but I felt it shouldn't have been so hard to figure out at the start. Remember that this is just how I feel, don't hate me for disliking a game ok?

One last thing, all RPG games should have healing spells at the very start of the game...always, AND...You should always be able to BUY items!!