Replaying Mystic Quest, Part 5

It's getting exciting. I'm actually in the final dungeon and trying to beat the game finally. But before, I'm going to tell you what has happend so far. Yesterday I stopped playing in the Dime Tower, where I got the Dragon Armor and fought in cooperation with the robot Marcie against a Roc. It, like a lot of bosses in the game, could easily be defeated by staying at the entrance and attacking it from there. After that, I finally understood, what the Dime Tower was for. With the help of that thing, I could climb back to the Dark Castle. The waterfalls were still reversed, so I could climb them up too and arrived at the final dungeon of the game. The Tower of Gemma, also known as the Temple of Mana.

The first thing I was going to do here is leveling. I also got the Samurai Helmet and Armor by beating the enemies in that dungeons, which are supposed to be part of the strongest equipment in the game. Talking about equipment, let's tell you a little more about menus and items. Better late than never. First of all, you have two main menus, the Start and the Select menu, which can be called by the corresponding buttons. The Select menu is for saving and looking at your map or your status. The dungeon maps are drawn automatically like in most Zelda games, but unlike in Zelda you can't find a complete map of the dungeon, so you never can be sure, if you have visited all parts of it.

The Start menu gives you four choices: Items, Magic, Equipment and Ask. With the help of the "ask" function you can use the special abilities of your companions, like I've told you before. In the Equipment menu, you can select your armor and your primary weapon, which is placed on the A button. The Item and Magic menus let you select - like you would guess - items and magic spells, placed on the B button. However, the room in both your Item and Equipment menus is limited, so you have to sell or discard old, useless and sometimes even good items to get new ones. This isn't really a problem in the Equipment menu, as long as you keep discarding old armor parts and some of the semi powerful weapons. However, you can't throw away the Axe, the Sickle, the Chain Flail, the Morning Star or the Rusty Sword/Excalibur, because you can't get buy them anywhere and you need them to complete the game.

On the other hand, the item menu is used to be overcrowded by items. Especially at the beginning of the game, you need keys, mattocks, healing cures and some magic items. The latter works like your spells, only in item form and sometimes stronger. You don't need most of them, as soon as you get the corresponding spells. And like I said before, the Morning Star replaces the mattocks. So, the only things, you need at the end of the game, are some magic restoring items and/or the powerful elixirs, as well a good bunch of keys. It seems like keys as well as mattocks are only dropped by the skeleton and bubble enemies, which can't be found everywhere, so better be sure to buy some before you enter a dungeon. There's no discarding option in the Magic menu, you have eight spots there and you get eight spells. At least this worked fine. But one of the problems of the game is definitely, that you have to change items, spells and weapons a lot, because different enemies have different weak spots. But changing items takes you at least 3 steps to do so, so this is getting quite annoying after a while. Also, I'm missing an indicator, which shows me, which items and weapons I currently have selected while playing. As you can see on the various screenshots, there is none. You always have to go into the Start menu to see, what items are currently selected.

Well, see you in the next and final part.