The Mystic Sword

From Slinkiwiki

The Mystic sword was the original adventure that fathered Beyond Lunch and the Yui Chronicles. For a brief time, it was titled The Mystic Sword of Phantasy. It was attempted on a Commodore 64 and on Qbasic, but neither version got very far.

Contents

Story

The main character, "You", was walking along one day when suddenly he (er, you) was attacked by a strange monster! The fight was evenly matched, and either way you, er, he gets saved by a mysterious sword that then tells him of an Alien Invasion that he, er, you, now have to stop! You meet with a girl (who is named Hikari in the Yui Chronincles, but had no name when MSOP was worked on) who joins you in heading from your Hometown to the Alien command base. Along the way, you face off multiple foes, figure out the truth behind this mysterious sword that seems to strengthen with you, and you even spend some time in a strange dimension where being hurt heals you and being healed hurts you, and you have -50 hp instead of 50. hitting 0 still means death, though.

Game Mechanics

The Mystic Sword used a somewhat dice based system. You began with 10 hitpoints, doing 1d2 damage. Oddly, you first fight a boss with 10 hp and 1d3 damage. Win or lose, you gain a level and have 20 HP and a magical sword that does 1d8 damage. Each time you'd gain a level, the sword's "dice" would increase by 1. At level 20, the Mystic Sword woud do 1d28 damage. You could pay for upgrades to the sword (Ie: From 1d8 to 1d8 + 1), but there was no real way to give it more dice except for a plot point neat the middle of the game that enhances it to 2dX + Y. In theory, had it been completed, there'd have been a quest or two to raise it to 3 and 4 dice.

There was no Defense in the game. You relied mostly on raising your HP, which went up every time you leveled or when you found a Health+ Potion. There was no system for how much to increase HP. The numbers were pre-chosen based on what seemed right. At level 50, the max was 400 HP. If you found every Health+ potion, the grand total was 620 HP.

The Magic system was never thought out beyond you having the ability to heal yourself. Presumably it would have used an MP system.

Compare and contrast vs the BL universe

This was the "prototype", as it were, for Beyond Lunch's worldset. Beyond Lunch was given its own story, however, and the plot for Mystic Sword was morphed into Yui's Chronicles.

Mystic Sword of Phantasy

This version of the Mystic Sword of Phantasy was a scimitar (vs the broad sword of today), and became more powerful as the user leveled up. It retained this ability in early versions of Lunch, but the RPGmaker version didn't allow for this. Instead, the modern version employs blacksmiths to upgrade your weapons for you.

The sword's max damage was 2d58 + 35. Occasionally, You would run into other swords that usually did more damage than the MSOP, but the swords were far enough apart that the MSOP would always manage to pull ahead (Example: The Metal Sword (seen again in Beyond Lunch) did 2d7 + 2 damage when the MSOP did roughly 1d10 + 1).

Main character

Yui's name in the Yui Chronicles is a play on the word "You" used by this game to describe, well, you. You were turned into an assassin. Thank me later. I mean you. I mean... what? Mystic Sword left it up to you to come up with a backstory, but Yui was given his own. Yui also has spoken dialog, when you, obviously, didn't.

Both games had the hero travel with a female companion. In Mystic Sword, she was automatic, and didn't do much more than attack. In Yui's Chronicles, Hikari is an Archer of the Wind element (see: Magic) who could use Wind Magic to attack the enemy, do fancy Arrow tricks, or do moderate levels of healing. Past a certain point, though, the only healing spell she'd generally use is Regeneration Breeze (Enables Regen).

Basic Plot

Mystic Sword had you fight off an Alien commander who was invading the world, whereas Yui's Chronicles had you face the Great Demon of Fire that came from Another World. The path from start to finish is fairly similar in both-- even the trip to another dimension was mirrored with a trip to Another World. In Yui's version, however, the hitpoints aren't inverted.

Availability

The original beta versions of the Commodore 64 and Qbasic incarnations of Mystic Sword were (unless that one guy kept a copy) Lost to all of Space and Time.

Personal tools