When I first started this blog so many years ago, one of the main recurring features was the “Check-In” series. This was a weekly feature where I played a few hours of a long game every week and then talked about my experience. I always compared it to a “let’s play” video, but in written form. In the past, I played games that would go on to be some of my all time favorites, like Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE and Xenoblade Chronicles X. Will that be the case this time?

Quest 64 is a legendarily terrible RPG on the Nintendo 64. At least that’s what you would hear for years on the internet. In recent years, there’s been a bit of a re-evaluation of the game, maybe most prominently by one of the most earnest shit posters on Bluesky, Quest 64 Official. I’ve been wanting to bring back the Check-In series, but haven’t been completely sure on what game to do it with. Having my Bluesky feed filled with Quest 64 memes every day led me to finally deciding to sit down and play this thing.

So, the game starts with our hero, a little mage apprentice guy with a quail-like hairdo named Brian, is being informed by the Grand Abbot of Melrode Monastery that his father went looking for a book a month ago and hasn’t returned. Apparently this book, called the Eletale Book, could bring ruin to the world or something. And with that direction, Brian is off on an adventure!

I was genuinely really surprised by just how big this monastery is. Brian goes down several large flights of stairs and walks through a bunch of rooms. And I mean, there’s a lot of rooms. Several of them are bedrooms, and as far as I could tell, they really served no purpose. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I was taken aback by just how many of them there are. But I suppose, if you were walking through a monastery, there really would be a bunch of rooms for the people living there to sleep.

It wasn’t all pointless though. There was some items to pick up, as well as several NPCs to talk to. One of them explains that if you find some lights flowing up from the ground, you can walk up to them and press the Z button. This was allow you to raise one of your four elemental powers. Raising these four powers is how you gain new spells. This game does not feature traditional RPG leveling, but you can earn an elemental power raise by fighting monsters or by finding them in the field. The total amount of these upgrades you’ve gotten also affects how strong your regular attack is, and other stats are raised by doing certain actions, such as hitting enemies with your staff and taking damage will lead to increasing your HP.

For full transparency, I had already heard that the only element that grants healing spells was water, so that’s what I started with. I had also heard that the earth element leads to some really overpowered spells down the road, so my strategy was to raise water until I could heal, and then put all my points into earth.

Alright, so Brian leaves the monastery and heads to the first town, Melrode. There’s not actually that much story going on here, but you can talk to the townsfolk who are concerned about monsters outside the town gates. Going to the inn, Brian meets a white haired woman named Shannon. Shannon tells Brian that she will surely run into Brian again. Okay? Anyway, talking to the innkeeper, you can save your game and heal, which is free in this game apparently. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be money at all. Kinda neat.

Afterwards, Brian leaves the town and enters the Holy Plains, which is, as it sounds, some plains. This is where players experience this game’s battle system for the first time. Like most RPGs of this era, as you walk around, you’ll get into random encounters. In this game, you can actually move Brian around the battle field a little bit each turn, which is not common at all for this kind of game. Once Brian gets into range, he can attack, either by using his elemental spells or by smacking the monsters with his stick. I’ve been mostly using the stick, because like I said before, this leads to more HP.

After each fight, I spam the heal spell. This has two purposes, keeping me alive as well as eventually increasing my total MP. For a good while in my play session, I thought that you always enter every battle with full MP, so there was literally no reason to not cure as much as possible. Turns out, you actually get MP back as you run around, and it doesn’t take that many steps to get maxed out, so it just took a really long time before I had a fight where I didn’t have full MP.

Anyway, after a bunch of fights, mostly against wolves and weird little creatures call Wererabbits, I find my way to the next town. This one is called Dondoran, and everyone is really concerned about a thief being in the forest. This seems really weird to me. There’s swarms of monsters just outside the town gates, and you’re that worried about a single thief? Going into the inn, Brian once again encounters Shannon, who is also concerned about this thief. Okay?

After a bit of exploring, I come across Dondoran Castle. Apparently, the Grand Abbot had told the king that Brian was on the way. The king informs Brian that the thief everyone is scared of has stolen the kingdom’s Earth Orb, which granted him a lot of power. Also the kingdom really needs this orb back. The king says he will allow Brian to go to the next area if he can recover that orb. So, time to leave Dondoran and head to the forest.

According to the map, the forest is called Connor Fortress. I feel like this has to be a typo, because it’s definitely a forest and there’s no fortress to be found anyway. I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but I really struggled to find my way through here. There’s really only two paths, one that leads to a gate that won’t open, and one that leads to a hut. And that seemed to be it? But actually, there’s a path past where the hut is, but for some reason, I had a really hard time seeing it. But eventually I found it, and after fighting a bunch of random encounters, I eventually found my way to the boss room.

The boss is, of course, that really scary thief. His name is Solvaring and he’s wearing some kind of dead animal skin on his head. He says he’s going to use his new found power to kill all the humans for the beasts, which is weird because he’s totally a human, but alright. We fight and I lose, by like, a lot. So at this point, I decide to grind out a bunch of elemental, HP, and MP levels. I basically just ran in a circle for like forty five minutes fighting everything that got in my way. Then, I went back in to the Solvaring fight and this time I destroyed him.

Afterwards, I went back to the castle and talked to the king. He’s really happy that the thief is dead and lets you keep the Earth Orb as it’ll help you on your journey. I thought the orb was really important to the town, but whatever, I’ll take it. And now, Brian can move on. But this is where I decided to end for the week.

If you’ve read any of the other Check-In series, you know I always say how much time I’ve put into the game as well as the level of the main character. That’s a little harder with this one, with no traditional levels, so I think I’ll say where I’m at for each element. So, for week one, I played two hours and fifty-seven minutes and my water element is at 8, earth is at 17, and both fire and wind are at 1. Let’s see how much progress I make next week!