Backlog Bingo 2025: Mystic Ark

Hoo boy.

I've been an RPG fan...basically forever? Like, I got in trouble as an Actual Child for rambling about the Rat Tail dungeon in Final Fantasy (yes, FF1, I am old) to my mom instead of saying goodbye to a family friend that was over. (Definitely zero AuDHD tendencies though, what could possibly make you say that? /s) So for a long time, I'd played pretty much everything in the A-list but also most of the B-list. (These days, I don't have time, and also RPGs have gotten longer, but I digress.)

One of those B-list SNES games was the Produce-developed, Enix-published Elnard, released in the US as The 7th Saga. The 7th Saga did not survive the localization jump untouched, getting "balance changes" that basically broke the game, resulting in a game that is...difficult to enjoy. But it does have its fans, and it's not like it's not trying to do some interesting things: the core conceit of "you choose one of seven characters, some of the others will join up with you, but the others are in competition with you throughout the game, some party members might betray you, etc etc" is at least interesting on paper. (In practice, though, if the wrong person betrayed you at the wrong time you were hardlocked, so, maybe not.)

Because this game was what industry experts call "kinda a mess", we never got its spiritual successor, Mystic Ark, also on the SNES. And, hey, I'm always one to go to bat for a game that swings and misses, sometimes "kinda messy in interesting ways" is significantly more interesting than "good but uninteresting". Mystic Ark, though, is a fucking mess cover to cover, and the fact that it's consistently trying interesting things didn't mean any of them landed for me.

I like to make sure I give credit to the good things about media that I hated, so I'll open with this: the soundtrack to Mystic Ark absolutely rules. Every track is great at what it's doing, there are several different battle themes and boss themes depending on if you're indoors or outdoors or in different biomes, or if a boss is a middle-of-chapter boss or end-of-chapter boss, and just, yeah, Akihiko Mori (who, weirdly enough, also scored Lennus II, still to-be-completed on my bingo card, so we'll be hearing from him again) absolutely cooked here. Excellent music.

This game gets massive points for trying interesting things. It's eight self-contained chapters (...mostly, more on that), but instead of choosing a scenario Live-a-Live style, you're still progressing through them linearly. You don't really learn why until after the final boss, but you're supposed to go to a bunch of different worlds and find a thing called the Ark, which basically always requires you to solve that world's problems. And, other than a late-game world that is just "we stuffed a bunch of fairytale characters in the game" and one that's "the haunted house level", the worlds are all really fresh: the first Ark is in a shrine guarded by a pirate ship full of cat pirates, but they won't help you until you end their war with a different group of pirate cats, which you do by proving to both sides that they've been fighting for so long that they can't remember why they're fighting. The third is a world in which there are only children (minus one adult) in which you can only travel to a place on its designated day of the week. There's a lot of interesting worldbuilding in individual bits of Mystic Ark.

Unfortunately, the game...kinda does nothing with this. You choose "the boy" or "the girl" for your main character, but the other six playable characters have literally zero lines of dialogue: they're statues that you can put Ark #1 and Ark #3 into to animate them, so they're all just...there, which means you can literally reduce them to their character design (and at least one gamefaqs guide does so: this is a weapon for the robot, this is great armor for the mage, the ogre will love this, use the ninja and the healer to kill bosses). It's also horribly disrespectful of the player's time, in many small and large ways: going back to the hub world which connects you to all of the Ark worlds empties your party, forcing you to go back through four or five menus to add the party members back, watch the animation of animating their statues, etc. World two has a dungeon that you do by getting to the end, learning that you need to go find a person to move a rock at the end of the dungeon, forcing you to leave and immediately do the dungeon a second time in its entirety. It follows this up by a second dungeon which makes you do it twice, and then this second forest dungeon requires you to visit it a third time in its entirety after the final boss of the penultimate chapter for a sidequest that turns out to have no reward. By this point the dungeon is completely trivial, so it's just...god, I haven't seen a game that respects my time this little in a long time.

I'm going to paste the gamefaqs description of a lategame mandatory quest in its entirety to demonstrate a point:

Now, go back to Fairytale Kingdom.
Considering how far a journey it is, you may want to warp, but it's up to you.
Talk to Gretel in the inn 3 times.
Now, go talk to the king.
Go back to the inn and talk to the fat guy upstairs.
Go to Ant's house, which is in the northwest corner of town.
Go talk to Cricket, who is standing next to the moat.
Now, go south from Ant's house and into the one house that's not destroyed.
Talk to the pig in green, then the pig in blue.
Go to the southeast corner of town and into the house.
Go upstairs and talk to Cinderella.
Go back downstairs and talk to the woman in the brown dress.
Go to the inn and talk to the girl out front.
Go into the inn, go upstairs, and talk to the fat guy again.
Go talk to the king, then go downstairs and out the door.
Go into the western door, then the western door again to find the tailor.
Agree to help him, even though he's a huge pain in the ass.
He'll give you the White Dress. Bring it to Cinderalla.
Leave her house and go to the house next door to find Gepetto, who you helped earlier.
You can go to the tree now, but you won't have the proper materials, so go back to the Shrine and back to the Giant's World.
Go to Kumu and go into the tall windmill I told you to ignore earlier. You'll know you're in the right place because there are enemies.
All of the walls are invisible and the staircases you can see aren't real.
The real staircases are invisible.

For those playing along at home, that's a mandatory quest consisting of seventeen conversations in a row followed by a puzzle dungeon. It's...exhausting. The whole game is exhausting. Why am I doing this dungeon a third time? Why am I doing any of this? I need an Ark but...why do I care? Why am I learning my main character's motivation after the final boss??

This extends to combat. The game operates in one of two modes. The first of these is "absolutely disgustingly easy": I autobattled every random encounter and all but two bosses in the game, the final boss of chapter 4 (which is an absolutely enormous difficulty spike out of nowhere) and the final boss. (n.b. that this is severely inefficient: it literally halves the ninja character's dps because he will not reliably spam his free "attack twice" skill) By the time I was done, one of the running "bits" about this game was that I'd start a boss fight, hit Auto, and hand the steam deck to someone. A friend's cat even killed a boss! (by which, of course, I mean that she stood there and stared at the steam deck while autobattle killed the boss for her) Alternatively, it's SMT-tier bullshit: if your main character dies, it's an instant wipe of the rest of the party, and if a party member dies, there's no revive spell, you have to go all the way back to the hub world to grab their statue again, which of course means watching the "you have added a party member" cutscene twice, sigh. One screen from a dungeon boss and a random encounter yeets an instant death spell on your healer and it sticks? Get fucked, leave and redo the dungeon or fight the boss with no healer. Did they hit your main character instead of one of your party members? Doubly too bad, load a save or lose half your money. There is a spell, Death Guard, that prevents instant death hits, but playing a constant game of "can this random encounter nuke my party from 100% or is it trivial" is not fun. The penultimate chapter boss has a full-party instant death attack, and is otherwise largely trivial, but...again, losing the "the boss is faster than me so I literally do not get to take a turn" coin flip is not...interesting, or challenging, or respectful of my time in any way whatsoever.

I extremely wanted to like this and I hated it enough that it's making me worried for the fact that there's a second "sequel to a bastard child SNES RPG" game on my card this year. Please, please, Lennus II, do not be something that I have to force my way through as much as I did this, my poor heart cannot take it.