Hoping to make your life's design a bit more dynamic!

Knowing Enix if they had brought Mystic Ark to the rest of the world, they would have called it 7th Saga 2. So which game did everybody here like best?

I thought both games had great music. 7th Saga was insanely hard but I have to give it credit for providing the challenge and also shocking me with an entire new world after beating what I thought would be the last boss. Mystic Ark I thought was really easy but had a very interesting concept and some creative puzzles.

So I would definitely pick Mystic Ark as the game I liked more.

My quick answer is Mystic Ark.

I guess I'll draft a mini-reflection. I was equally shocked upon learning of the rest of the story in 7th Saga. I initially sought to translate MA because I wanted even more of 7th Saga. For 10 years I carried a file called 7th Saga-II, transferred over and over into probably 20 different PCs. I finally renamed this particular file about a month ago. I didn't mind the difficulty in 7th Saga. Some time ago I brought home a newly released cart from Toys R Us and methodically picked that game apart on an actual SNES console, grinding and grinding until I had savored every possible experience. I literally hungered for every new Enix release in those days.

When Draken turned over a formatted and first-drafted MA to me last spring, I had no idea how the game would proceed. I wrote part of Cat World ten years ago and had a rough idea of the game's style of play, but still wondered if all eight chapters would be standalone quests only loosely tied together. I didn't bother Draken to explain very much of what he learned during the six months he had it because I was pouring all of my juices into Feda.

Talk about a change of pace when I finally finished and polished Cat World! Then, each successive chapter surprised me even more. In the end, I must say that MA rose into my top 10, whereas 7th Saga probably sits somewhere in the 30s. MA is special, so unique it stands alone among all of the RPGs I have played through the years.

The game almost wrote itself. I did very little with the work of Akujin, Shirley, Varkon, and Draken, just polished it mainly and filled in a few blanks and obvious holes in the storyline. Bongo` created about 30,000 extra bytes for me after Draken strained along with about 7,000 bytes to spare, omitting all double spaces and most ellipses. The gain in space was sufficient for me to fix all of those shortcuts and expand the English story to a well balanced level. In some cases, I even discovered that less was more in various parts of MA, especially Dark World.

The puzzles reminded me of Lufia-II. I enjoyed them, but wanted to strangle the guy with the apple puzzle at the gourd bridge! I was tempted to write a line that went like this: I spent half an hour solving the apple puzzle and all I got was a lousy Fruit World tee-shirt!

My extreme enjoyment of Fairytale World surprised me most of all, a theme I thought I'd outgrown. I worked on it the longest, striving to blend Draken's and my styles seamlessly. Fruit World cruised along. Somehow, that nutty plot element worked, allegorically. Kidsdom was the hardest for me to write. I gritted my teeth the whole way, I guess because I have spent 25 years raising children and consider myself overdue for a break. Talk about a bus driver's holiday!! After it assumed the exact shape I wanted it to be, however, it was a real pleasure playing through it and enjoying the kids' antics. I had much fun with the Einstein, Edison, Mozart, and Beethoven characters. Wind World drove me nuts with bugs! Every time I tested through the Clone Cave I held my breath. Dark World was so spooky, I didn't want to go in there... alone! Oh, and Cat World brought my old nautical terminology out of retirement - for a while.

Yes, definitely Mystic Ark! Meeting a challenge is always satisfying, but great stories make special games, and unique plots combined with pleasing soundtracks create unforgettable gaming experiences.

I suppose my own input in this is also in order.
The answer is clear, Mystic Ark of course, for reasons all too many to number, but I will list a few of them
as to not end up writing a mini essay as I already have in the MA project page.
In a nutshell its not merely a line that must be drawn between 7th Saga and Mystic Ark; more like a barbed wire fence I'd say.
They are worlds apart in every level, and so much its not even funny.

* 7th Saga has no real plot: Oh I'm a hero chosen and trained under the king to save the world!
Seriously people, this sounds like Ultima, and Ultima isn't something I'll ever miss.
Mystic Ark is a trip of self discovery and amazement. If you pay attention to the script,
you'll be surprised by each world you step into and enriched by each world you step out of

* 7th Saga has horrid graphics: They tried to use mode 7 to create the ground level of the battle
backdrop...guess what? didn't work, looks pixelated and ugly. The field sprites and tiles are really
bad too, way too large, clunky and unproportioned. The character sprites and animation
were okay, but don't get close to the quality we see in Mystic Ark.

* 7th Saga had overly stupid difficulty: Its easy to see devs were forced to make the game
harder than it should be. Proof? 7th Saga was originally called Elnard, and had a much more
manageable difficulty level then, just download the difficulty restoration patch and you'll
see that I'm right. Mystic Ark is not by any measure easy; true to the old school spirt,
if you don't know what you're doing, you WILL get your ass kicked all around Earth's
orbit, but its something manageable, not over the top.

* 7th Saga's apprendice idea was one of most crummy implementations I've ever seen:
Okay, its cool for a challenge, but its ridiculously thought out. The apprendice
grows in level with your main character, which would make things hard already but
passable, still, worse yet, they made apprendice stats always go way higher
than the player's, regardless of level. So how's that for a hopeless fight?
Oh and if you lose your runes you're back to square one. Cool huh?
"Challengening"...it wouldn't take me two seconds after that to just
send the cart flying off the atmosphere.
I'd rather have a recurring nemesis like Mystic Ark's Coscarra.

That's basically it. Actually there is more to say but I'm not looking
towards breaking some kind of typing record.

Actually... I never played 7th saga...

/runs and hides

I liked 7th Saga a bit more than Mystic Ark. MA seemed like a confusing eternal nightmare for the main character. I understood the ending, but it still made me raise an eyebrow. The ending was not my cup of tea either, but then again, neither was 7th Saga's. I like somewhat more conclusive endings. And not the stero-typical "Hey, you saved the world, but your brother/sister/best friend is dead... Tough luck!" I've noticed that a lot of good RPGs have disappointing endings. Or perhaps my standards are too high... Man, I've really got to start writing my own stories...

One of the biggest things I wished I could have changed in 7th Saga was the fact that you only had 2 party members. I chose the old healer as my second party member which limited my offense quite a bit but considering how challenging the game was, I felt I needed that healing power. Fortunately Mystic Ark went up to 3.

Same here. The best team I've had in 7th Saga was Lux and Valsu. The Kamil and Esuna team was also pretty good. In Mystic Ark, I had Remeer, Tokio and Lux at first, but then I switched Lux for Meisia. She's awesome once she gets that Prayer tech which recovers her mp in battle. 7th Saga also could have used a third character, but it was still okay with just two. I've heard that some people have actually beat the game with only one character and without that easy patch! Speaking of which, I've never used it. I usally prefer more challenging games. Just as long as it's not cheaply hard like Actraiser II where you always fall into those darn pits!

To me the ideal party was Kamiwoo and Meisia; I never had problems with the combination and I used the same party
throughout the whole testing phase and the several playthroughs I took.

Mystic Ark felt much better, but I didn't very far in 7th Saga, I'll admit it.

I don't mind hard games, but I felt 7th Saga was hard for all the wrong reasons. I didn't find any amusement in it >_<

I think I tend to like harder RPGs if they are Western RPGs that are nonlinear so you have a lot of freedom and can always do other things if you really reach a challenging part of the game. Japanese RPGs are often so linear that if you reach a challenging point, you really are stuck until you complete it. I can't really think of too many challenging Japanese RPGs (7th Saga, maybe Dragon Quest 2)