Quest 64 is Unfinished, and You Should Play It
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 ก.ย. 2024
- Being the most well-known RPG on a console known for having very few games of its genre, Quest 64 was eagerly-awaited by Nintendo Power and other gaming outlets. But somewhere along the way, the game’s ambition made way for a simpler, less interesting game, and was met with lukewarm reviews. How did a minor letdown become one of the most maligned RPGs in all of gaming history? In this video, we take a look at Imagineer’s “Quest 64”, also known as “Holy Magic Century” and “Eletale Monsters” in other regions.
I'm the lead of the Quest64 decompilation project. We're about 50-ish percent done. My goal is to fill this game out and hopefully make it what it was supposed to be, and I am really glad people are talking about it in a better light now.
This is really heroic. Quest 64 has always been a curious slog.
Woah i wish you luck!
Sounds like an awesome project.
I still like that game a lot and to see what storys and events may had happen the gbc title of that game is really good since it got all the missing story parts.
Like that Grand Abott in Meldrode is the evil guy behind all and that the floating monastery is that one fom meldrode
I was planning on remaking it in RPG maker at some point, but I wanted the original developers permission first. I've still yet to hear from imagineer. I was going to primarily base it on the GBC game, because it has more story in it compared to the original 64 release.
This game got a lot of undeserved hate in my opinion. Loved this as a kid and revisted it as an adult and it is really unique in the field of RPGs
The biggest flaw of this game is that you don't see events happen, they're told to you.
It feels like a simpler game, like a nes game, but in full 3d.
It's kind if funny that newer games have sort of the opposite issue, where they get the big animated scenes done first because they take so long. By the time they're done the plot's altered and now they need to figure out how to awkwardly shove in the cinematics that don't quite fit anymore.
I didnt really read the dialogue so there was no story.
@@davidburnett5049I don't think that's how that works.
My biggest complaint was the rotating battle cam making me lose my sense of direction in a long tunnel, causing me to go back the wrong way after multiple battles. I think I gave it away.
@@bruhtholemewif I don't see them, they must not be able to see me 😂
Used to leave a VHS tape on top of the Analog stick to have Brian run into a corner while I was at school to raise my Agility Stat, good times Quest 64.
That's an incredibly 90's DIY solution, I love it!
@@ComputerLabHighjinks to grind my tools in harvest moon id use a tuirbo controller with a piece of tape on the button to just keep pressing toolhit button again and again. lol. isnt it nuts that the first turbo controller wasnt an third party uinlicences product? the turbo pad for the nes was sexy beast...
I love seeing innovative ways to cheat video games.
The easier method was holding the turn around trigger and holding the joystick backwards to the right to make you spin in circles then you simply unplug the control and your last input sticks permanently
@@justinhunt3141
I actually just flipped the controller upside down. The weight of the controller holds the joystick in place.
My favorite joke to make about quest 64 is that someone came up with a prototype for a neat magic system and then was given two months to put it on store shelves
that's how i've always imagined it hah
My favourite joke is that Quest 64 sounds like a placeholder title they forgot to change for the US title, but the European title (Holy Magic Century) sounds like the name of a Dimmu Borgir album.
back in the n64 days 90% of the marketing was about the c buttons xd every game was supposed to use them in an innovative game and this game hyped the magic system as the best thing ever (and it was), back then we cared about the controllers A LOT and the n64 analogue and the Z buttons where super futuristic, also the rumble pack was cool, the only dumb shit was the memory pack and this game used that.
Is that not the truth?
“Joke”
A couple fun facts:
1. All the character models are unique. Even the NPCs.
2. The Japanese version of the game actually released months after the US and EU versions. And some changes were made.
-Sign posts are actually readable, giving you directions.
-You can set a map marker to help you keep track of the direction you need to go.
-Defense and Agility stats are gained twice as fast.
-You can time your melee strike to do 1.5 normal damage.
-Enemies drop more breads. Where previously, enemies would only drop a new bread after you used all of yours. Now after, they continue to drop breads(with RNG), until 3 sit in your inventory.
-An actual ending sequence! Albeit, not very impressive.
And probably some other stuff I'm forgetting.
It's crazy to think that some developer sought to salvage what they could, even post released.
You also had a minor flash and sound effect when a stat leveled up.
The 1.5x melee damage sounds so cool! Makes me want to find that version to play.
There's even a GBC version. (a footage shown inside the video around 7:10.)
I wonder what made the devs so fond about this game.
Enemies dropped bread?!?!?
@@Talon19can probably find it very easily if you aren't against the Big E.
Some Japanese video games are also somewhat cheap to get physically through auction sites if you want to go that route
The weird part about Quest 64 is a lot of the magazine descriptions of the game were wildly different before release. The UK N64 magazine gave a description of the story where Brian (who was originally named by the player) would originally set off on a quest to find 3 legendary swords to defeat Larva, an evil Spirit Tamer who was defeated long ago but has since come back and released the "Evils". The extra party members weren't Leo, but the princess of Dondoran Flora (known as Nina then), and the pirate Kiliac (known as Cozi). It was also an action RPG instead of a turn-based one with ARPG elements.
But yeah, Quest 64 is one of my favorite games of all time precisely because of how weird and unfinished it is. It's got a certain charm that only N64 games really provided in this era and I still really enjoy the combat system, even if it is a bit simplistic it's fairly ambitious and unique. The GBC version is also really good
Indeed! I wish he had discussed those wildly different elements in this video. Quest 64 is unfinished, but that's because what we got seemed to be something with a lot of compromises and cuts to meet a strict deadline. (I somewhat suspect that the magic system may have been very different at one point with not as much freedom to mix and match and to where each party member had their own specialty, perhaps.
Sounds like the Nintendo Power walkthrough of the first level of Superman 64. Which depicted a game where you flew around Metropolis saving people with ice breath and heat vision and x ray vision. You know... An actual good Superman game.
Which was scrapped by management sometime between sending the magazine a copy and actually releasing it.
The weirdest part is how 90% of the old screen shot are clearly of the player character being Princess Flora. Brian was almost like an after thought, and weren't any shots of the player using the Pirate. I feel like the game was actually supposed to have Threads of Fate style character selection, not a party system. Still weird the character they appeared to have worked on the most was the one scrapped.
@@lynnjones9314 Ah, three different perspectives depending on the path chosen?
Unfinished is a perfect way to describe Quest 64. The game had so many good things going for it and all they needed was a little more time which they didn't have. Glad we got it but I wonder what would happen if they got just a few more months to develop.
Yeah stuff like this isnone of the reasons i consider the opinion that restrictions make the game better. Thouroughly debunked
A few more months back in the 90s was a huge world of difference, a lot of games had less than two years of development time.
@@quarreneverett4767 I think it's a case by case sort've thing rather than being black and white. For some people it works, for others they need more time.
@@scottmemelord6130 yeah thats true. My point is that it isnt black and white its a grey area. What truly makes games grest is direction and stuff. Some of the best games with grest potential were cut off too early. I was also mentioning its one of the important things. As you mentioned there is a bit more to it than just that
@@quarreneverett4767 You are definitely not wrong.
Demon's Souls is a game that is already great, but the fact we will always see the reminder of missing content when ever you go to the hubworld. It makes me sad..
I remember having a good time with Quest 64 back in the day. Unfinished, sure, but the combat's still reasonably fun.
The emptiness really is striking. The game is missing so many things you expect from an RPG - party members, meaningful exposition, shops, an inventory system, equipment, little bits and bobs to make the world feel less empty. But as a result it has, almost by accident, a very unique atmosphere. I think there's value in that.
I agree, and I think the developers realised that was the strength they should lean into much later in development. Some areas like the shortcut forest, with the abandoned hut in it, or the hidden city mentioned in the video, really sell that uneasy solitude the game presents.
But then you have the latter half of the game, where you’re in a supposedly much more densely populated area, and the devastation is supposed to catch you off guard… but it doesn’t because the whole world already felt empty and dangerous, like the Bethesda fallout games.
The party members are still in the game! You can tell who they were easily, it's the random npcs with names and fancy character models. They just never implemented a party system.
As someone who loved the Blue Cave for just how unnervingly-long it was...this absolutely clicks with me.
The TH-camr Malefact used the phrase "Suddenly and violently grows a plot" to describe Tower of the Sorcerer, like, decades ago or something. (wow TH-cam old)
The phrase describes a lot of older games, like that, or the original Final Fantasy, and here with Quest 64.
Its not as common a thing to see these days, but its always stuck with me
I'm a non-game-dev who randomly decided to to start making a game earlier this year, and my nostalgia demanded I make something inspired by Quest 64. I'm about a month away from my prototype release, and I'm glad this video popped into my feed because I'm taking great notes!
If you don't know of pirate software/thor, I will quote to you something of his. "You are not an aspiring game dev, you aren't *not* a game dev, if you are working on a game, you're a game dev, simple as that.". Keep up the good work stranger, best of luck with your game. :)
@@Akita23 Thanks! If you saw my game, you'd understand my hesitation to take on the title and sully the name. But maybe it's time for me to just own it regardless :)
@@MamaDespik we all start somewhere. It's not about making a perfect product. It's about making a playable game, and prettying up the mess as you go along. One step, one day, one task at a time. You got this!
@@Akita23 Thor is such an inspiring person, he really helped me start putting effort on my projects and made me stop beating myself when I think things I do aren't good enough.
I hope your game is nice and you can show it any time soon!
I never got very far in this game, but I always found it very charming and full of potential. The simple premise of a boy heading out on a quest in a vast, colorful 3D world is very appealing to me. I also think the emptiness is a part of the game's identity, as it lets you use your imagination as you explore the world, but as you said, it's clear they had bigger plans for this game.
Still, I appreciate how mysterious these early 3D games felt. They were very colorful, yet a bit scary for a few reasons. First, there was very little to no hand-holding, so you really felt alone. Like the first time you go somewhere without supervision. Second, the models were low in detail and very angular, which instinctively made them feel more threatening, as we not only fear the unknown, but also associate angular shapes with sharp things, like fangs, spikes, etc. Third, the thick fog makes you feel a bit uneasy as you can't quite see what danger might lie ahead.
I think this game's formula could be interesting to revisit, honestly. It has a lot of the same design philosophies as an old sandbox MMORPG like EverQuest, but solo. Maybe it could be made into a 2-player co-op adventure, now that I think about it. Just getting immersed with a partner, exploring a vast and mysterious world... sounds like fun. Nice video once again. ^^
If you play the Gameboy Color version: Brian's Journey, they do flesh things out a bit more. For example, when you enter Dondoran, you actually witness Solvaring kidnapping the Princess Fiora, or Leo actually "joins" your party. He doesn't do anything, but he does venture with you in your quest. I would recommend looking into the Gameboy version if you're interested.
Lavaar is pretty much the only actual plot reveal who'll tell you the actual story relating to Epona and Mammon that the rest of the world seems to have forgotten.
Another thing is in the fact the NPCs have so many unique models and they all have names. Tiny changes, but still, they intended for the world to feel alive. I believe it was rushed, despite their emphasizing NOT to rush the game in Nintendo Power. It sure feels like a sudden crash, especially towards the end of the game, The Boil Hole is a very straightforward dungeon and Mammon's sky palace has a lot of empty, long corridors... =w=""
On another note I know how to handle the text rendering for emulation, you just got to tweek the textures to use a completely blank image instead of the defaults.
THERE'S A GAMEBOY?!??!?!?!
I was going to say pretty exactly this; when I played the Game Boy Color version, I was shocked at how much story it had, and how many new bosses it threw at me.
@@yohhh6715 Two Gameboy games even! Brian's Journey and Fantasy Tactics--
@@MotherKojiro Right? You know, I do wonder like, maybe if they had made the Gameboy version first, as a draft, they could have made the N64 version a lot better.... ... Heck, them being squeezed for time didn't help either though. It's always fun to wonder what an alternate timeline for Quest 64 could have been. It may have been the best rpg of the era I think. The potential and creativity are there.
@@Majo_Ellen It's certainly a possibility, but in the end, I think I like it this way; a game in this state gets to be *much* weirder when it's a 3D game, so we got this wonderful ghost town of an RPG. Plus, since it's on the N64, it gets to be the second-best RPG on the system! 😝
Quest 64 is actually one of my favorite games. It could be nostalgia, but there's a real sense of adventure with the variety of settings you encounter. Also, the combat is actually quite deep. Your stats build based on how you perform. For example, your defense increases if you're taking more hits in combat. The staff becomes stronger if you mele more with it and vice versa with magic. Running in the overworld also makes you dodge easier in combat.
I also really love the music. It stays in your head for a lifetime.
The story is shallow, but it also allows the player to create their own lore.
Not everyone has the time or patience to play an rpg that demands time and focus on characters and stories. This is just an easy game to have on and play.
Anyway, hopefully, switch online gets it eventually.
Also, thanks for not just trashing it like everyone else.
I didn't even realize it was so disliked. I don't go looking for old game stuff too often, but among my fellow elder millennial friends, almost everyone who played Quest 64 has fond memories of it. It's up there with Mischief Makers for "N64 game that people rarely bring up but the people that played them back in the day generally have good memories of."
I don't know if I would rank it among "favorite games" for myself, not when games like Skies of Arcadia Legends, Chrono Trigger, and Pathologic exist. But Quest 64 is a game I revisited for an occasional playthrough for as long as I had my N64, and one I still think of as a gem of early 3D games.
Some Quest 64 songs sometimes pop into my head once in a while. I haven't played it in over 20 years.
@@lemond2007 their that catchy!
I love how little story there is in this game. I hate long cutscenes and dialogues. I also love how the combat in quest 64 is more action oriented, and how fast paced it is.
I remember this game. Everything about it was kind of awkward. It came out early in the N64 lifespan, which was starved not just for RPG's, but for anything. So a lot of N64 owners ended up playing it at some point. Once Zelda OoT came out, Quest was very quickly forgotten.
It's too bad the game didn't get finished. From what little I've heard it sounds like the project go rebooted a couple of times, which is why they didn't have the time or money to finish it. The game has an interesting system with the characters moving around in a 3D space and having to think about where you are on the battlefield, and which direction your attacks will go. Clearly they wanted to do more with it, most likely with Brian, Leo, and that blonde princess girl working as a team against teams of monsters.
It's too bad, maybe it could have been a fun little game given some more time.
It did get a Gameboy Color release that's way more finished thankfully. It's well worth a look into as it gives a look into what could have been for Quest 64. I'd love to see a romhack add in some of the changes from the more finished version.
Aidyn Chronicles has a pretty similar battle system, from what I have seen. Not sure what it's actually like as a game, though.
I also recommend trying the Fanmade Mods/patches for this game too!
Quest64 "French Vanilla", which is a Quality of Life update that improves a lot of things.
and the Quest64 Hard Mode which not only adds quality of life bug fixes but also increases the difficulty to make it more challenging!
Another game that I believe is unfinished in a similar way is Rayman Raving Rabbids. The developers were building an honest to goodness mainline Rayman 4 with a ton of new mechanics and systems, beat em up combat, costumes with special abilities, huge open environments with lots of world building… then at some point the developers decided to pivot entirely to making a motion control-focused mini game compilation. As a kid I never knew the development history behind the game, yet I could just FEEL the remnants of an entirely different game all over the place. The way you can change costumes for literally no reason at all, the way Rayman cannot do anything other than walk and yet his walking physics feel like they’re meant to exist alongside other movement options because they’re too complex to have been made just for selecting a mini game, the world building in the game’s environments having literally no context within the game itself, the way the menus look so slapped together at the last minute… It all adds up to the game feeling like it’s been built on the grave of something else entirely, because it was.
Also, within the last couple years, some beta builds of Rayman 4 from before they pivoted direction have surfaced, and they’re incredibly interesting.
The final version of Raving Rabbids is literally built on top of Rayman 4 and just disables most of the controls to lock you into minigames
I remember renting this and I couldn't turn off my console because I didn't have a memory card. I still somehow beat it
Memory card? What kind of N64 did _you_ own?
@@Pixygon Quest 64 was one of the few N64 games that required a Memory Pak to save. Gauntlet Legends was in a similar situation.
That's an impressive level of commitment, I respect it! I have friends who did this with some PS1 RPGs, but the N64 memory card was so infrequently used, I'd assume a lot of people were surprised by Quest 64 requiring it.
@ComputerLabHighjinks Myself included XD. Only game I ever used it for was Mario Kart.
@@ComputerLabHighjinks There were quite a few games that used the controller pak. Perfect Dark, the Tony Hawk Games, both Duke Nukem games, Beetle Adventure Racing, Forsaken 64, Road Rash 64, Turok and a lot more third party games. I know this because my controller pak got corrupted by a glitch in a game and I lost my save data for like half the games we owned. It really sucked.
I loved Quest 64 as a kid. I dont know if younger people realize how hard 3d hit. The sheer fact of the scale of being in 3d environments had such a crazy vibe. It was atmosphere. And I still like that liminal feeling tbh. But I just ran around and explored this world. Kinda huge world for the time too.
I remember renting this from Blockbuster only to discover I didn't have a memory card and no way to save the game. Good times!
Quest 64 does have a unique atmosphere that is kind of comforting and other times terrifying XD
fr
LOL You ain't NEVER Lied!
It's a game that manages to successfully emulate just how rough it would be to live in a world with monsters roaming the countryside.
This video puts it best. So much negative space. It made me think i was always missing something.
Especially the last levels/area, the dark dimension is like hell lol
Would love it if Matt McMuscles did a video on this game and did research on it for his "What Happened?" Series. Very interesting, I like and feel sad for unfinished games, such as Tomb Raider:The Angel Of Darkness and Haze. Hope he makes a video on it one day.
"Man"
-Brian (on the thumbnail)
"all right campers today's Challenge is to find a reason to keep going" vibes
Gotta love how high effort the editing is in such understated ways.
Quest 64 is a game I've always planned on playing, partly because I dig the character designs, and partly because it can't be THAT bad, can it?
I was always interested in how the Japanese version is consistently branded as "Eltale Monsters" everywhere except the title screen; surely that's the first thing you'd update when you change the title of a game?
It's not a bad game imho. The main issue is, since it's unfinished, a bit more than half the world is barebones so you end up running around with a growing annoyance at each fight you run tino (it can get NES RPG level encounter rate at times) because you just wanna move to the next area.
@@MsVilecat My favourite JRPG is Final Fantasy, so NES encounter rates aren't an immediate deal-breaker. I'd guess the real problem is that the encounters aren't very good.
@@Taka_Sakagami How can you say that without playing the game? The battle and magic systems were quite enjoyable, enemies have varied attacks and spells that require different responses in real time. The battles were what kept me playing through the later emptier spaces.
@@RPanda3S As I said, it's a guess. People wouldn't complain about the encounter rate if the encounters were great, so that would, to me, imply the encounters aren't very good.
But like I said before, I plan to play it partly because I'm not convinced it's as bad a game as many make out.
@@Taka_Sakagami It's definitely better when you're a kid with limited game access, but yeah...too high of an encounter rate can make even decent encounters tiring. I think the QoL mods might help that though.
THANK YOU! I'm glad Im not the only one to notice area's that seemed to maybe have something planned for them but never had anything implemented.
One case stuck in my head to this day is a forest that's off the beaten path while you are on your way to the first major town (Dondoran) and bossfight. It had a whole lot of nothing, I think a few spirits? And one abandoned hut in the middle of the forest with a treasure chest, as well as a small lake. And what stuck to me was that this lake had an area that looked like a flooded cave entrance, barred with rocks. That one stuck with me, because it so obviously was probably some kinda dungeon or side dungeon they had planned but then had to abandon and quickly cover up.
Also, as a side note, the GBC port actually HAS a lot more story.
Actually! That one was implemented!
If you remember the encounters you find in that forest, they’re wayyy above the level you’re expected to be at in Dondoran Flats. That’s because the rubble-blocked cave is actually a “shortcut” from Blue Cavern. That’s the intended entry point, and the Dondoran Flats entryway is supposed to be an exit, presumably so you can go stock up on bread again.
Once you get the water level lowered in Larapool, the Blue Cave shortcut becomes usable from either direction
Source: you would not believe just _how_ lost I got in Blue Cave.
@@thesquishedelf1301 Holy shit, thanks for clearing up that mystery for me after...what, 20 years? Dunno when I last played this game but it must have been somewhere in the 2000s when I sat down with a more "adult" patience to try it. That cave entrance always fucking confused me and I never once thought to return there after the blue cave or whatever.
I think I actually got stuck on the island where you have to fight a boss before you can continue, because I didn't knew about the exploit of shield/huge boulder spell combo.
Awesome video! I somehow played through this game twice as a young kid. The first time I was too underpowered to beat the final boss. Then I learned to just concentrate on the earth power for the strongest attacks. I beat the game and of course the ending was highly disapointing lol
Quest 64 had one of the most interesting combat and statistic mechanics I've ever seen to date.
Want to get faster? Run. Like just straight up run around. Rubber band on a joystick and you can basically max out your speed stat overnight, but if you do that, you're kind of screwed, because the only way to raise your defense is to get hit. Want to have stronger spells? raise that element, want to have stronger staff attacks, get those elements close together (but why would you?) and in order to dodge a spell, you can actually move around on the map in order to actively dodge it.
And really the most interesting part about combat? It happens IN the overworld. Wherever you are on the amp when the random encounter hits, that's where you have to fight, and sometimes terrain can be a huge advantage or disadvantage to the point it's straight up cheese. Which is almost certainly why the overworld is so large and empty, because otherwise your combat wouldn't have enough space to let you have a proper combat area when they started.
And I'm pretty sure I can answer why the models had so much work put into them despite their lack of use: Advertising/Investors. They needed to convince someone they could make the 3d stuff look comparable to the artwork in order to get a goahead on the project. Whoever made the models needed to convince someone a game COULD be made, so the models were already done before anything else was even worked on. I can almost guarantee it.
The statement about genre being used as a convention for artists and players to engage with a work gives me a flashback that I wish I had these specific words for.
Years ago, an ex friend was fancying herself an rpgmaker gamedev. She wasn't really a gamer herself, just using it as an outlet for creativity, yet she was still trying to make a GAME. She had one game project she was very passionate about... maybe too passionate as she constantly asked for critique that couldn't honestly be given without her getting her feelings SUPER hurt. It was a very flawed game tbh but also being made on the fly.
One of the most frustrating flaws was that it LOOKED like a horror puzzle solver rpg visually and was being made with rpgmaker, but it didn't play like any of those game types. In complete fairness there was so little choice to the game it was basically a visual novel without any cues to it being so, making it frustrating in a way that took years for me to understand WHY playing it made me frustrated.
That reason would be that it looks like an rpg, but other than story and walking around an enclosed "overworld" it lacks the trappings expected of an rpg. It has an aesthetic of a puzzle solving horror game but it lacks all but 1 puzzle implemented as a character growth moment (and it was said during a Skype call that that was the only puzzle because it wasn't a puzzle it was an "interactive story beat"). It plays like an on the rails visual novel game but other than the lack of anything to do other than consume the story nothing FELT like a VN game and when suggested that the visuals be changed to better convey what kind of game it was she would often fall back on a go to refusal of claiming "It was not that kind of video game. It's an 'experience'."
So thank you for the words to explain why a certain amount of conforming to genre is good to temper expectations. I wish I had these words years ago before our friendship ended.
I always tought the same, this game has a grate potential for someone to hack it and "finish it" Imaginer already did all the assets, the music and the battle system we just need the tools to ad scenes, events and story and fill those worlds with something.
Agreed. I actually enjoyed this game as a kid. I had nothing to compare it to. I just really loved the landscapes and colors.
@@TravelStatusLLC I rented this game twice and after that, I bought it, back them my main complaint was that it was too short (I had already arrived to the fire continent on my two rentals)
The draw distance of the first forest area was so impressive in the game. After shadows of the empire and turok's so close rendering distance, seeing the forest so far away but rendered was amazing
It's a testament to your channel that I usually don't even recognize your thumbnail style. I just look at your videos and think "cool topic I want to watch that" and not "oh yay a new video by computer lab hijinks," which would also be okay
I used to like this game as a kid but me and my friend kept getting lost.. most dungeons are just 1 single path and yet we managed to get lost because of the battle system and then we would walk all the way back to where we came from. I think "lack of landmarks" is an understatement. Not only is there no structures or anything but the paths are all built the same.. Like even if it all used the same texture and all the paths were the same length, there could be path that brances in a V so if you got lost and come back you would go "wait, we came here and turned left!". That cliff side is actually one of the best areas because it's easy to know which side you are going, keep the mountain on the same side and you are gonna make it eventually.
The battle system was also broken, some spells were way too powerful but as kids we liked the element system.
I hated retracing my steps over and over
I remember always being intrigued by Shannon as a kid. The emptiness of the world in Quest 64 and the relentless encounters between towns made it feel scary and lonely. The designs and story of the game are also actually a little bleak and intimidating. So having someone, anyone, that was a familiar face on the long lonely road was a comforting thing for me and the reveal that she was working for the big bad the whole time was actually effectively shocking for me as a kid. I would love to know what could have been done with that relationship if they'd had more time.
You know, one of the things that kept me playing this game was the emptiness. The world felt huge because it had so much space. The areas had eerie, lonely atmospheres. When you finally saw a person somewhere, you were thinking "what are you doing out here? This is a wasteland" I also think the music of this game actually carried it a lot.
Really enjoyed this perspective. I didn't have enough experience with rpgs at the time I played it, but I recall being perplexed at the limited interactivity available with the obviously "main character" looking npcs and the emptiness of the huge, detailed interior areas. You might find two chests in a whole sprawling castle with bedrooms, a kitchen, a dungeon, a library... The world seemed built to be explored and plumbed to its depths, but there was almost nothing to find, after all. I absolutely loved the feeling of journeying long distances from town to town, and I still feel like there's something grand in that concept. But man, you needed party members to talk to, a good map, and in-town adventures to give it some LIFE. Imagine Quest with OOT's quality of NPCs...
The format of this particular game was as follows...
Pay as much or as little attention to the story as you like and kill monsters to level up... Now days we call it sandbox or semi-open world... When you measure it against the greats it falls, but if you consider the battle system was fairly fun and the devs gave the game a unique system with the four stones, you begin to understand the real fun is that the entire "Quest" in Quest64 is optional and I was always ok with it as I talk to each character as if the characters are chests full of items and said items are the story of this game.
Big fan of this underdog.
I remember this one. It was weird how just hitting enemies with your basic staff was stronger than most any spell, so they tried to make it harder to hit enemies with your staff, but since the game was glitchy it was always possible to hit them with it anyways.
Okay you nailed it with the Liminal Space callout. It's almost like the developers accidentally created a legitimate creepy pasta game. Especially that bit about the wizard exiled in the desert. I really like Quest but probably not for the reasons the developers intended. Great video
I have a lot of childhood nostalgia tied up in Quest 64, and this is a great summation of it's virtues and flaws. It's a neat little game with fun ideas, that are poorly implemented. Also, that soundtrack is underrated, it's one of the best OSTs on the N64, period.
random algorithm recommendation brought me to this video. It's nice to see a somewhat positive take on this game. I have a soft spot for it as growing up it was one of the few games i spent my own money on. It's far from a good game, but i do see where giving a little time and effort could bring what the game did do well make make something better. The game seemed built completely around its magic system and positioning, but does nothing with it as the most viable and often best choice in 99% of combat is to run up and hit the enemy with your stick.
I remember renting Quest 64 way back in the day expecting some sort of hybrid between Paper Mario and Ocarina of Time.
Don't think I played it for more than two hours, but I succinctly remember how *empty* everything was, it was unsettling in an odd way that I had never experienced playing a video game before.
Eventhough data says this game was put onto a 16MByte(128MBit) cartridge(only filled up to 4.5MBytes), it took less space than Mario 64; and that was on an 8MByte(64MBit) cartridge( filled up to 5.3MBytes) at the time.
I played this a lot as a kid, and I remember scouring environments, wondering why everything was so empty. I even found the lost city in the desert on about my second or third playthrough (I didn't have a lot of games back then.) because I was so obsessed with the idea that there had to be more to the game than I was seeing. I was positive when I found Lavaar that he was some kind of key to a secret, better ending, but of course that only led to me running around this new environment for two useless hours, and then scouring the rest of the game to see if there were other hidden areas and characters I had missed, as if by finding them all I might somehow trigger the "rest of the game." Things like the weird little fortune teller hut or whatever off to the side of the main path at the start of the game drove me crazy. I wanted the game to be more than it was because I actually liked what was there.
Finally, as I got older and began to understand that video games could have problems stemming from the fact that they were made on limited budgets and with schedules and deadlines, I began to come to the same conclusions as this video: The game was simply never finished. There were weird, stray assets that got used in ways never intended, and probably a lot that was cut entirely.
I still have pleasant memories of this game, but I'm always going to wish I could play it as it was originally envisioned.
Best video on Quest 64 I’ve seen. Thanks for sharing. So many questions about its development.
As someone who grew up on NES and SNES RPGs line final fantasy, ultimate, etc. there was a noticeable lack of any RPGs on 64 when it came out and the ones that did come out were action RPGs which are basically a different kind of game altogether for someone like me who would rather strategize than have to aim and time moves.
For the age target of the 64 I think Quest 64 is one of the best RPGs of the time. Its not text heavy, difficult, and there isn't a ton of mechanic jank. At the time of its release I couldnt stand the opening of SNES JRPGs so Q64 was a good way to ease into the genre in 3d.
As someone who's done a lot of 3D level design stuff I can shed some light on why the towns look like they're built on a grid: It's because they are.
Building 3D architecture on a grid can still make angular structures a bit tricky to pull off, even if it's not as restrictive as a top-down tile-based system. A lot of games nowadays just model whole buildings ahead of time so they can be placed at any angle, but I don't think that's what they're doing here. As long as you have _a few_ things built at odd angles, you can still use clever design tricks to mask how grid-based most of the world is, but I suspect the team didn't really have the experience to know how to do that.
Now that I think about it, Kakariko in OoT is actually almost entirely comprised of buildings on right angles. But they pull it off there because it's a very tightly designed area with a lot of verticality, so it doesn't _feel_ like it's built on a grid.
It’s art. It’s a video game. It’s history.
Heavy facts 💯
What is this midwit babble? Quest 64 blew then and it blows now. This is some major contrarian revisionism to pretend it was some misunderstood gem.
@GurkdaBoy the only midwit babble is a neckbeard trying to use his big boy words to talk shit about a 1998 N64 game. Also, no one cares about your opinion.
quest 64 was my first introduction to a comboing element system. ive seen and concepualized many different ways this kind of system can be and was always both fascinated and impressed on it being as complex as it was for such a unfinished game.
Wow! Found a gem of a channel! Amazing video!
Fantastic video. There are some wonderful insights in here, like the impact of the 3D camera on a traditional grid-based town layout. You're making videos at the standard I'm trying to set for myself. Also, gotta play this game now.
yay! quest 64 is one of my favorite games, i will perish on this hill. the amount of impact this game had on me is hard to overstate. yippee!
No one understands the bond between a child and an esoteric game
I always thought I had it hard as a Threads of Fate devotee. Godspeed
I agree. I actually thought it was extremely difficult.
Quest 64 is a core memory of my childhood. I still listen to the OST today. The game is a very nostalgic game, especially the soundtrack. I love how dreamy it is.
Great video. I lived through the hype cycle for Quest 64 but never played it myself. Even after the reviews came out marking it as solidly average, I still found it sort of fascinating. This video gives me that same feeling I had re-reading old magazines after the game came out, where I can see it's kind of bad ... but what if it's actually good? I'm pretty sure it's not and maybe that's why I've never played it, because I wouldn't be able to tell myself it's secretly good any more ... but what if it is?
I don't think my love for this game is entirely nostalgia. When I was younger, it gave me a lot of what I wanted in a game: a huge space to run around, explore, and admire, and I needed no more reward than the chance to find a hidden treasure chest or spirit bubbles. Hell, I even found the Phantom City without a walkthrough, just out of curiosity if there was an end to the desert. Sure, today I actually notice all the empty space, where when I was younger, all I really needed was the atmosphere (the Blue Cave was long and relentless, but not boring, and Brannoch was legit frightening as a town seemingly abandoned due to the king's madness)...but even today, I still love all the negative space you bring up. It's unnerving in a fun way.
And I disagree in one way, I actually _was_ floored when Shannon turned out to be a villain. I didn't have an emotional attachment to her character, necessarily, but that didn't change that she was the only NPC I ran into consistently, even in the strangest places...which made sudden (if ultimately tepid) sense when I saw the aftermath of her beating up my dad, and realized _she was after the same thing I was_ .
But really, I mostly played the game over and over because of the magic and combat systems. The idea of being given the chance to dodge attacks in realtime blew my mind, and I still have a weakness for elemental magic systems. I spent hours figuring out how to dodge enemy spells, what distance to stand to provoke certain possible-to-dodge attacks, how to grind for which stats (the whole "raise agility by just...running" is hilarious), which spells I liked best (spoiler: Wind Cutter lvl. 3) and where to position them, and once I realized how unfun and broken Magic Barrier was, I started doing challenge runs with lower-than-36 Earth, then Fire/Water-only, and finally Fire/Wind-only.
So yeah, "worst RPG ever?" Unfathomable hyperbole. "Unfinished?" Literally true and an entirely justified analysis.
I've beaten this game multiple times and never encountered Lavaar 😭 Guess I need to go back and play it again...
Yeah, it's easy to miss. In the desert "Not sure what exact area" in the desert but in the Foreground if you see a floating diamond fixture.... Thingy, run towards it and you'll find that area.
Excellent coverage for a childhood semi-favorite! Also any discussion of Quest 64 cannot be left without the fascinating paratext that is the screenshot Let's Play of the game, on the LPArchive: It really manages to create a tone all of its own without contradicting or working against the original material, just stretching it wafer-thin over a framework of strange quirks to make something new.
This was a fascinating watch. I probably won't play this for myself since I'm not a fan of RPGs, but I always wondered what exactly happened with this game since I had heard about its less-than-stellar legacy.
I thought it was really interesting that you took the approach of what feels like it's missing rather than going out of your way to do a bunch of research on what was meant to be in the game.
Sometimes, I feel pressure to be complete in the videos I create, so I appreciate you creating a fresh-feeling video and helping me remember that sometimes you don't need the entire story, just what matters to you.
“No one writes a story this inept on purpose.”
Disney- “Hold my beer…”
Great video! This game has picked my curiosity for years and the more I learn about it the more I want to play it despite its known faults. I really like the way it looks and sounds and there's a certain kind of charming aura surrounding the whole thing : )
Great video! 👍🏽
Even if this might be a crowded subject online these days, this is genuinely a really refreshing and properly informative video on the subject! I feel like I learned a lot more, especially when it comes from the place of giving a game like this a fair shake. I've never come across your channel before, and I seriously love your presentation style- I really look forward to more!!
Nice
The segment about the towns feeling like they're designed for a top-down grid for a sprite-based RPG is kind of funny: There's a port of Quest 64 for the Gameboy Color! Having played it: I can tell you that it feels way more complete on a handheld console, rather than what the main Nintendo 64 version had to provide.
I love Quest 64. It was one of my first RPGs, but you're right. There was clearly something more that happened in development that the devs couldn't quite pull off in time for release. I'm looking forward to seeing what the decomp project results in!
cool
I appreciate that you always take the time to have a fully researched and considered point of view on whatever you talk about, even if it is a relatively obscure topic. Your thesis with this is how I feel about a lot of works that I love (usually not games) and I've had to make this same argument on the spot before to less successful results lol
The best way I would describe this game is "the skeleton of a great game that never was."
This is the type of IPs that should be picked up for remakes, not games that are already great.
I rented Quest 64 from Blockbuster once. I don't remember a single thing about it, I played even less of it than I did of Buck Bumble or Space Station Silicon Valley. If it couldn't hold my attention back then, it probably wasn't a good game.
i grew up in the early 2000s mostly with n64 and snes until 05 when i got my first gamecube. i remember seeing pictures of this game a lot and feeling disappointed when reviews in later yesrs called it bad. i'll try it myself someday, i really like the environments and colors.
I remember finding that castle in the desert. It was so memorable, it's stuck with me through all these years. A castle with greenery and water in the middle of the desert, how cool is that?? It doesn't appear on the map, and if I remember right you have to follow some flames to the right place and it appears before you like a mirage. The rest of the game I have almost completely forgotten (except it's where I learned what a glade was, and I still think that's a cool word), but that desert castle with the magician has stuck with me.
I remember getting this game because I wanted at least ONE turn based RPG on my N64 back in the day. When compared to the ones I'd played on SNES and Playstation, it didn't measure up in a lot of ways. Heck, it's biggest shortcoming from a gameplay perspective is how hard magic recovery items are to find in the game. That long LONG trek through the underwater cave kept me dipping in and out. Suffice to say when Ocarina of Time finally came out, I simply left Quest 64 behind. I did beat it, but didn't want to go for any sort of 100% completion run.
Knowing that the Japanese version not only fixes that magic recovery issue a bit by making boss defeats recover both HP and MP, and that it also has a drastically expanded ending, made me curious about looking into it again. Now, seeing this video? I'm really curious what others might end up doing to expand this game into it's original vision, or beyond.
Loving reading all these comments! I did play the game when it was new. I loved RPGs back then so of course I was very drawn into this game. Even besides the weird lack of narrative and no money system, I found this game incredibly difficult as a child. I seem to remember spending just as much time waiting around to heal in between battles as with progressing through the game. I did eventually did make it all the way to the very end but my save file corrupted.... never did beat it
I've play this game. I didn't think it was terrible, but I definitely agree with a lot that has been said. Some more story and character development, and just more things to find in the dungeons and over world and/or more side content certainly would of gone a long way for this game. Equipment and/or a currency system would of been great too, as there's no way to get stronger other than beat monster, go rest, do it again, and although you can find enough healing items throughout the game to carry you, if you use up everything, it's gone with no way to get more. There is one aspect this game does that I do like, in that simply leveling up isn't the only way to get stronger. Using attacks, running, or getting hit slowly raises your respective stats outside of leveling up which is a clever little mechanic. It also has a day and night cycle, maybe something like different monsters and/or music during the night time, or different NPC placements and dialogue during nighttime would of added a little more depth too.
I loved Quest 64 as a kid. It's one of the many, many weird things I was exposed to growing up in the 90s, and is part of the reasons I still love weird stuff to this day.
I loved the game so much I beat the game not only once, but 3 (maybe more) times: after my first playthrough, I completed it again to explore the other fields of magic I hadn't used previously, and another time to see if it could be beat using only the melee staff attack.
Turns out a melee build is actually quite strong, especially in the end-game. You end up having tons of HP and dealing several hundreds of damage with each attack. Most enemies and bosses become a breeze.
It's very unfortunate however that the game basically forces you to level up Water magic, because otherwise, with how scarce the healing items are and how little you can carry, there is no reliable way to survive the looooong journeys through the game's dungeons.
I remember this game having a stat system like Final Fantasy 2, where your character grew by doing things. In order to get HP, you need to get hit. To get MP, you need to cast spells, to get more agility, you got to run around, and to get more strength, you need to hit things with your staff. Problem was, if you are hitting things with your staff, you aren't casting spells. If you ran around and built up your agility to dodge attacks, you weren't getting hit to build your HP, and if you were getting hit a lot, you die.
I really enjoyed this game as a kid, it was called Holy Magic Century in Australia. It definitely felt unfinished, like the developers had a great idea for these massive sprawling zones, and in the end they are completely empty. You can enter so many nooks and crannies and so many houses in these massive towns and they all have nothing inside them. The enemies are cool, the combat system was fun and you had some variety and the bosses were decent. And yet it was always left like it could have been so much better. or if they made a sequel, they had a solid base to work with.
I love Quest 64, I believed the hype back then and had an N64, while all my friends were playing Final Fantasy VII, Symphony of the Night, and Resident Evil 2, I was playing Goldeneye, Mario 64, Mystical Ninja 64, and Mortal Kombat Trilogy while waiting for Quest 64, and once I got it, I knew it wasn’t as great as all the other games that I just mentioned, but it had something special about it that kept me playing it and having a good time with it.
When I finally beat it, I had a great sense of accomplishment.
I am convinced that all the asset in the game are for a story that was scrapped. NPCs, side areas, villains, and everything else are all complete (for the most part). For example, Leila seemed to be a guardian sage intended to protect the water stone. Add a few scripted events and cutscenes, and she would be a powerful caster protecting her home from the chaos of the world. It looks like Shannon was supposed to have multiple cutscenes across the game to establish her as a fixture in the world. Maybe someone who you'd have to actively seek out for advice or aid.
All the models and environments are ready. Once the storyboards are finished, the scenes can be added. Except the story, for whatever reason, was never finished.
I'm glad you took some time to mention how good and polished some of the character models look! It's so mysterious and interesting to ponder about what could've been!
the explanation for a lot of the cut back on content in this game is that it was started with the original N64 specs, which had more ram and a disc drive not a cartage system. many other early N64 titles also suffered from this including OoT who cutting several parts that were shown off in their magazine previews.
Oh, hey! Thanks for that Earthbound 64 preview screenshot. This doll was always *sure* it saw some previews that seemed to feature the Runaway Five or something like them, but no-one ever knew what it was talking about, and well, there's the screenshot of them!
I feel like the notion of the towns feeling like they need fixed cameras suddenly makes me realize why some of the towns bugged me in Dragon Quest 8. A few towns just felt REALLY cramped for a 3D game so I often felt easily disoriented. They sometimes felt like they had some older design philosophies.
I loved this game as a kid! The huge, colorful castles and variety of enemies were always fun to experience. I didn't understand why it ended so abruptly, but this video really shed light on a childhood mystery.
I remember playing this as a kid. I remember filling in the blanks in my head and enjoying it. Down to the twist. Interesting.
I'm sorry your kirby like
"Welcome to the computer lab" thing in the background is fucking rad dude, I dunno why but it makes me chuckle and is really endearing.
Great video btw, I've known about Quest 64 from ProJared's video on it years ago and always found it intriguing, having a deeper dive into what went wrong really fascinates me.
the level up system was something unique. I had it as a teen and it was almost impossible to beat without a guide. You rarely know where to go and traveling takes A LOT OF TIME due to rng encounters every 2 step and a camera that doesn't let you see much far.
I was one of those kids who got Quest 64 near its launch and absolutely loved it. I beat it in the 90's and have played it in my adult years. Still love it and wish another game would come out like it but more polished.
Quest 64 growing up was one of those bizzare games to me that i was interested in because it felt like there was stuff hidden. A lot of early 3D games had this feeling.
I'm so happy a lot of people love this game despite it's flaws. And I am so so happy people are giving Quest 64 love and adding more content to it
So far as I'm aware, this and Aidyn Chronicles are the only two RPGs on the Nintendo 64. Both, interestingly, have a similar flow to their combat system (take turn, move within a range on a 3D battle map, attack or cast a spell if you're in range). Aidyn had more in-depth character customization and more character development and plot, but is less fondly remembered on the whole.
You forgot the goat of n64 rpg and arguably one of the best rpg ever made the original paper mario!
This was one of my favorite N64 games (behind only the two Zeldas and Starfox) in my teenage years. I didn't mind the vast empty spaces (and I thought the city of Limelin, Baragoon Moor and the exterior of Brannoch Castle in particular were absolutely beautiful for the time), though in the final dungeon, it often seemed a bit weird at times how things looked (and, without any spoilers, how things worked). And yeah, the game itself is a bit weird occasionally, but I still found it an enjoyable experience. Heck, I still remember how I chose my leveling path...water to 50 before anything else gets to 5, that way I could heal myself if necessary. And I still remember Guilty seeming markedly more difficult than the rest of the bosses in the game...but it might've been my play style.
I can remember waking up early the summer morning that Quest 64 was released, having my mom drive me to Toys'R'Us, and being worried that the game would be sold out before I even got there. I was surprised when I saw a truckload of copies but was also relieved that I'd be able to secure the game. I remember getting it home and being...kind of underwhelmed, but I still enjoyed it, played through, and beat the game before it was time to return to school for the fall. I both do and don't miss those days.
I will say, that if you have not played the Quest 64 "Hard Mode" mod, I would suggest you play through it. It makes a good amount of changes to combat, implementing a lot of the Japanese version changes they made, but also making changes to enemy damage output. A very fun way to go back through the game, even though it does nothing for the story, etc.
I rented it once or twice and I remember liking it enough that I chose to buy a copy for my N64 collection that I accumulated in the late 00s back when used N64 games were super cheap (typically around 3-15 USD). I have about 33 games in my collection. It was a good choice for my collection because it is actually one of the only true RPGs that was ever released, and, in a way, an important part of the history of the system, and certainly indicative of the fact that RPGs were one of the types of games which the Playstation was much better suited for. Had the N64 been released with an optical drive, or if the planned disk drive had been released early in the system's life, or even incorporated into the system from the beginning, that would have made it a lot more practical and affordable to make RPGs for.
While the 64MB floppy disk (DD) size might still seem super small compared to the size of a CD (around 650MB), that would have put the minimum amount of space available at 64MB, and would have still been cheaper than the cost of an 8MB cartridge, I think. While developers could theoretically make cartridges up to 64MB in size, that wasn't a financially feasible option until very late in the system's life (when the cost of the ROM chips had gone way down), and even though larger than 8MB cartridges were a potentially feasible option for game developers from the beginning, there was a strong financial incentive to keep the size of the ROM down to 8MB (or even lower in some cases), because the added cost of even going up to 12 or 16MB was quite a lot, especially in the first couple of years. To put it in clearer terms, the profit per cartridge sold would be a lot higher if you could fit the game inside 8MB, so if you chose to use a higher ROM capacity, you were making less money per copy sold, and needed to sell a lot more units just to break even. 12 or 16MB only became common after the first couple of years of the system's life, and it was mostly only the higher budget games which went above 16MB until late in the system's life. If 64MB was the minimum size available, that would have had an ENORMOUS impact on the amount of content which developers could put into the games. And likely would have resulted in more RPGs being made for the system.
It's not a coincidence that many of the best games for the system used larger ROM capacities (often 16, 24, or 32MB), and it's also not a coincidence that many of those were made by Nintendo themselves, as they could much more easily afford to use larger ROM capacities, but even many of Nintendo's games still only used 8 or 12MB of total ROM capacity.
Thank you. I remember renting Quest 64 from my local Blockbuster as a child and being so confused but so entranced at the same time. Thanks for the dive back inro memory.
It's probably telling a bit on my age that Quest for the first RPG I ever played. I didn't go into this game with the set idea that RPGs should have a party system, currency, lots of hand-holding cutscenes, etc. The lack of a preconceived idea of what and RPG 'should' made for the game being a fun, if unfinished experience. The open, empty seaming areas just made my brother and I want to poke around more searching for secrets and as a result we found the Phantom City on our first play through of the game.
The game is unfinished, no question there. But it was still an enjoyable experience and probably helped spark my interest in the kind of story-telling shown in Souls games where you have to find most of it, and my dislike of being constantly stopped for seemingly interminable cutscenes.
I played Quest a lot as a kid, but the N64 memory card we had didn't work so I just replayed the beginning a lot. Looking back, I understand this game isn't "good" but I still have a nostalgic comfort for it.
Your minimalist presentation with solid narration and writing is 1000x better than channels that have subs in the millions. Your efforts are not going unnoticed
I totally forgot about this game. I now have to find it and play it.
Oh wow. I remember seeing previews and stuff for this game in magazines, that opening stuff was such a weird flash back to it. I feel like it just dropped off my radar entirely and I forgot all about it. Could have easily believed it didnt even come out.