Mystery Quest (NES) Playthrough
226A playthrough of Taxan's 1989 platformer for the NES, Mystery Quest.
In this video, I play through the game four times back-to-back in order to get the "good" ending. Taxan games sure seemed to love doing that, didn't they?
Mystery Quest is a conversion of Carry Lab's Famicom Disk System game, Haokun no Fushigina Tabi (ハオ君の不思議な旅), that was published by Square back in the Spring of 1987.
You play as Hao, a wizard's apprentice who is looking to earn his stripes by collecting talismans that have been hidden deep within four "mystery castles."
Drawing clear inspiration from Hudson's Milon's Secret Castle (https://youtu.be/G8pmbMJdiNc), Mystery Quest is a simple mid-gen NES platformer that combines basic hop-and-shoot action with large mazes filled with hidden items and passages.
The world is made up of one long, continuous action stage. As Hao makes his way toward each of the four castles, he'll find himself shooting magical bubbles at scorpions, birds, and the scenery as he attempts to uncover score and stat-boosting items hidden in random blocks.
The castles are self-contained areas that play out much the same way, but unlike the overworld, these stages are non-linear mazes made up of long hallways linked by locked doors that Hao has to work through in order to find the talismans. Once a talisman is found, Hao can return to the overworld where he'll make his way to the next castle to repeat the cycle. When Hao finds the fourth talisman, the game starts over, and after four loops, you're "rewarded" with the "good" ending.
The game is fun, but it is held back by a few issues. The controls are awkward - you shoot to increase your walking speed, and consecutive jumps will increase in height, allowing you to reach tall ledges - but you do get used to them, and the platforming isn't particularly difficult, so the controls probably won't frustrate you too much.
I enjoyed the process of figuring out the paths through the castles, but there are only two of them. Castles three and four are just repeats of the first two with a few minor tweaks and reworked color schemes, and this highlights Mystery Quest's biggest fault. There's just not enough content here to sustain your interest for very long.
The thing is, that wasn't always the case. There was a ton of stuff cut from the American release. Hao's Mysterious Journey featured six unique castles, but the NES game only uses the layouts of the fifth and sixth castles from the FDS version.
Famicom floppy disks held 128K of data, but by 1989, 256K NES cartridges were commonplace, so what was the issue? I couldn't find anything concrete on the subject, but if I had to guess, I'd say that Taxan was being cheap. Mystery Quest shipped on a 64K cartridge, so large chunks of the original game had to be ripped out to make it fit.
Mystery Quest isn't a bad little game, but Taxan's gutting it to save a few pennies on production costs feels like a huge waste. If you like the game, do yourself a favor and check out the Japanese version instead.
_____________
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!