Quest 64 - Gotta Catch 'em All, Element Version.

Quest 64 is a game released back in 1998 by THQ. It was the first RPG that was made for the Nintendo 64 after it's release, and was known as Holy Magic Century in parts of Europe and Australia when it was released. The story itself is simple. You play as a boy of unknown age as he travels across the continent gathering elements and elemental stones while searching for his father who disappeared a month previous, and in the end unearth a big bad evil monster trying to take control and banish it. In other words your more or less typical RPG story.

The graphics for the time the game came out were amazing. We look at them now and see all manner of crazy pixels everywhere and badly defined monsters, uninspiring attacks, but looking at it when it was released as a new game, those same things were amazing, awe inspiring, and a tribute to the power of technology.

The sound was uninspired, even in that time. They played very little variation in music, and they didn't even have battle music for anything except for the final boss. The sound effects for the attacks was nice, but they really should have spent a little more time on music for the rest of the game.

World design. Now this one I have to give them credit for. While there are still ways they could have improved things, they did a really good job I think of designing a large and beautiful world for you to explore and find things in. From towns to forests, caves and deserts, every part of the world is designed amazingly well for a game as old as this.

For game play you don't get much special. Single button interaction with most things which is also the same button you use for attacking something physically in combat. What really interested me was how they work spells. You start with one in each of the four elements, fire, water, earth, and wind. Each of these gives you the most basic spell for that element. As you collect more elements, you choose where to put them, and start getting new spells.


Fire spells are generally the offensive spells, with most of the attacks being either beams that can hit multiple opponents, or pillars that have a smaller range of effect, but often do more damage over all. You also get the power to buff your physical attack through the fire element.







Water spells can be and do many things, but the primary use is healing. Unless you plan on carrying a lot of items with you, healing with water element is going to be your best friend through most of the game. Water element also gets some of the same high damage, low accuracy pillars flame does, as well as ice attacks that could freeze a foe in their tracks.





Earth spells involve a lot of chucking large rocks at people's heads, but also allows you to tap into and shake things up by hitting people with earthquakes. Earth hits hard, possibly even harder than fire, but requires a lot more skill to be able to aim and use well.  They also govern the buffs to increase your defensive stats.

Lastly wind spells. Wind spells are generally the weakest attack wise, but make up for it by firing multiple blades at a time, allowing the damage to really stack up quickly, especially against an opponent weak to it. But you can also make one large attack that hits lots of enemies in a line, or buff up your agility to make it harder for you to get hit by anything.






The surprisingly large variation in skills combined with enemies that will have varying levels up weakness or resistance to different elements makes this a really fun game. It might not catch the attention of someone who's played a lot of RPGs before due to rather simplistic story and sound elements, but is still a fairly solid game for people looking to get into RPGs for the first time.

To read more reviews by other people you can check out the ones here by IGN, Gamespot, and RPGFan.