“Quest 64” — A Meh RPG from the N64 Era
The game’s name pretty much tells you what to expect from Quest 64 – a rather generic RPG that isn’t even worthy of more of an original name than simply “Quest.” As sad as this game’s name might be, I actually read up on the game and found out that in Europe it was released as Holy Magic Century (odd, sure) and Eltale Monsters in Japan. Both of those names would have been better than Quest 64.
The game was released back in 1998 and was developed by Imagineer and published by THQ. I remember playing the game way back then and getting a bit through it, but never really getting far in it. I think my opinion back then was that, despite having nice visuals and overall fast gameplay (e.g. no real loading time like on PlayStation discs), the game was bland and there were too many RPG offerings on the PlayStation to spend time on and thus wasting time on this one wasn’t a worthwhile effort. Yet, I decided to give the game another look to see how it stacks up all these years later.
Well…Honestly, I did have fun messing around with it for an hour or so, and so my initial impression is that the game isn’t that bad. It’s certainly not fantastic either, and has a rather generic story with pretty basic gameplay. Still, it’s serviceable and made me want to press on to make it to the first castle to see where the story would take us. Honestly, even though parts of the game are indeed bland, the game is probably worthy of an average score. I’ve played enough RPGs released in the last few years, particularly those released on the PC, that were far more bland than this game was, so I can’t fault it all that much.
It is rather impressive the scope of the game given the technical limitations of its presentation. Still, I think Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage might have been a greater technical achievement, but that game wasn’t released until 2001 and really made use of the console’s hardware.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this little adventure into Quest 64, and stay tuned – more awesomeness is coming soon!
My little brother and I played this ALL THE TIME when we were little and the only thing I remember was the obnoxiously large dust clouds that were created when you ran (?) and we would, being no older than 10 at the time, make fart sounds and giggle.