It is Mystic Quest. That's the one. Played it in '04, same year as FF7. I got through several lands (if they can rightly be called "lands" in that game's world map, lol) before putting it down. All I vaguely recall of the game was this meter-bar thing either on the bottom of the screen or on one of the two sides, and my goal was to get the meter-bar thing to grow in size. I don't remember what it was or why I was to do that, lol. I just remember the game wasn't very fun.
I also used Sheena, because I loved her so much (lol @ teenage crush). I had three different endings in that winter town: one where I had Lloyd pick Collete, one where I had him pick Sheena, and one where I had him pick Daddy dearest.
Ironically, I never beat ToS b/c I was so obsessed with trying to get max spells (or something) on
both a Good Zelos / Bad Kratos path as well as a Bad Zelos / Good Kratos path, the latter being my main path but the former being the one I later learned from people was supposed to be the canonical path (whoops). I always hated Zelos (mostly because of his advances towards Sheena and the fact that he was such a player in general that I felt he didn't deserve her), and his betrayal made a lot of sense to me. I was surprised to discover that it wasn't supposed to happen that way. XD So I went back and was trying to do all sorts of side-quests, and ... I burned myself out, and never finished the game on either path. XD
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I like a good story, and unfortunately for me it's the J-RPGs which tend to have the good stories. You don't get the kind of stories I like out of FPSes, car racing games, fighting games, or puzzle games. You inevitably get them out of only two genres -- adventure (like God of War, or Zelda, or other 3PS platformer-adventure titles) or role-playing (like Final Fantasy, Fire Emblem, Xenosaga, and so on).
My favorite video game of all-time is Shenmue II. It and its predecessor combined my favorite three aspects of three different video game genres together and made for the best experience I've ever had:
- I love the fighting aspect of fighters. Their stories tend to suck though and you tend to only be interested in a small number of the characters. Shenmue had fighting but (see below for story) and kept all of the fighting to the main character, who you cared for greatly.
- I love the story aspect of RPGs, but hate their gameplay. Shenmue had the richest story of any video game I've ever experienced, but it presented it through two forms: fighting and ... (see below)
- Adventure/3PS exploration. That was what most of Shenmue's gameplay mechanic was. You explored an almost-fully interactive world and pointed at and clicked upon a
ton of shit. It was amazing. It was like you really were this Japanese tourist who just showed up out of nowhere in Hong Kong trying to find an underground martial arts sensei who keeps to himself. You talked to anyone you could find, desperate for clues. You entered any building whose door was open. Petted any dog. Clicked on any countertop. Practiced martial arts moves with senior citizens in the park, movers at the pier, and landladies of apartment tenements. It was just fucking awesome, and I loved it. But where do Adventure games tend to fail? They tend to fail in their fucking retarded item collection, of which Shenmue had absolutely zero (any time you had to get an item, it was a plot device that made perfect sense, like trying to get your backpack back since it was stolen, or trying to get a map of the lair you were planning to raid in 3 nights, etc). There was no concern about health points -- either you survived a fight or you didn't, but after every fight you got your health back. There was no retarded armor or equipment shit going on. (Same gripe with J-RPGs.) Instead, you were at max physical capacity from the moment you got off the boat, and at 60% capacity as far as your moves went. That was the only Adventure/RPG element in the entire game -- sutras. You had to hunt for the easier 10%, hunt and work for the middle 20%, and hunt very hard and work fucking hard for the final 10% if you wanted to get Ryo all 100% of his moves. It was 100% optional, but you didn't mind doing the sidequests because it made a fuckload of sense in the context of the story. (After all, if your goal is to exact revenge against a lethal martial artist, aren't you going to be trying to find people to teach you exotic and powerful moves which you can use to surprise your opponent?)
Good God I love Shenmue.
If I could take the story quality of Shenmue, splice it into the fighting engine quality of DOA (fun, flashy, pretty, relatively easy to learn, very intuitive) and the fighting engine realism of the earlier Virtua Fighter titles (realistic moves, no crazy-ass gravity defying stuff), and if I could retain the game's gameplay but give it a visual overhaul to catch it up to 2009 ... I'd pay $250 easy just to re-purchase that Shenmue I or Shenmue II remake.
