Quest 64 is the best RPG on the Nintendo 64.
This shouldn't be a very controversial statement, but I bet at least one person flinched about this. Like, what else is it gonna be? Pokemon Stadium? Oh, now you want to count that? It's either that or they'll start getting all defensive and talk about how it's beating a weak field. Perhaps so (the other two games cited as RPGs by most folks are Hybrid Heaven, which is not very good, and Aidyn Chronicles, which is even worse; suffice to say, you don't hear about them for a good reason). Still I would stand by Quest 64 as an actually halfway decent game. Its main flaws are that its plot is pretty spare, and it is not well-balanced. The first I'm increasingly convinced isn't that much a downside. Sure, I make video essays about game lore and stories, but I can't help feeling like a lot of gamers don't like to read... honestly, spending a decent amount of time around the fandoms for things I enjoy has mostly just made me even more nihilistic. The latter, though, is indisputable. I'm not an idiot; I'm not going to tell you that the well-known dominant strategy for Quest 64 is anything but the preferred build.
EDIT on 14 Jun 2025 sometime late in the PM's: For the folks asking "but what about Paper Mario" - I've never vibed with Paper Mario. Sorry, folks. I also tend to forget about it entirely because I feel like I don't see a lot of people talk about it! I'm still not even sure the game exists. Wasn't The Thousand-Year Door the first Paper Mario game? As for folks asking about Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber: Ogre Battle 64 is very good, but it's a strategy-RPG, and with RTS aspects at that - at this point, that's a niche inside another niche! I think that makes its appeal too narrow to fit here. But it is pretty good.
But what if you chose not to take that path, and in fact, disdained everything from those strategies?
It'd be kind of rough. Oops, spoiler alert.
So, let's start off with a brief explanation as to what the usual way you'd play this game is, for the less-well-informed.
Quest 64 is a turn-based RPG. Battles take place on an octagonal field; each turn you get an octagonal area to walk around in and cast your spells (or hit an opponent with your big freakin' log) from. Spells involve aim and have area of effect and stuff. This matters... a little bit for our explanation. What matters more is that you don't have levels the same way as most other RPGs; probably your closest things are the levels of your four elements (Fire, Earth, Water and Wind), which grow from defeating enemies and picking up very hard-to-see spirits on the field. When you gain a level this way, you assign it to one of the elements, which can have values between 1 and 50 (and all start at 1). At level 7 Water, you learn Healing, a spell that does exactly what it sounds like and is usable out on the field. Meanwhile, Earth has your best damage and buff spells; at level 24 Earth, you get perhaps the most unbalanced move in the game, Avalanche. Avalanche drops several high-damage rocks around you. It's a bit luck-based, but it can do wild amounts of damage. Meanwhile, at level 36, you get Magic Barrier, which makes you immune to magic damage for several turns. Most attacks in the game are magical, so this is tantamount to damage immunity for several turns. With these three spells, you can steamroll the game, with further levels just boosting your damage. (Because Earth and Water are adjacent in the element rotation, every 4 levels also further boosts the power of the other element's spells, roughly equivalent to one level of the supported element for every four levels of the supporting element.)
So, here was my challenge: not just don't do that, but get as far away from that as possible. Sure, I can level up Water and Earth (you cannot skip element levels unless all four elements are maxed, so not being able to do this would require a lot of precision and running from encounters), but I cannot cast Earth or Water spells. Not even to heal before bosses.
Understandably, this presented some serious problems.
For, once again, the uninformed in the audience, there is only one source of magical healing outside of Water: at level 32 Fire, you do learn Vampire's Touch - a buff to your extremely powerful staff that makes you heal based on how much damage you deal with it. This is strong, but understandably, it presents some problems. In some encounters, fighting enemies physically is simply not a feasible choice. Sometimes targeting them is difficult because they sway around horribly. This causes the most problems in the Baragoon Tunnel dungeon - a long area that's very easy to get turned around in, far from a save point, making it monstrously tedious. Two of the four random encounters in this dungeon are not really viable choices to attack physically. The other two thankfully are easy pickings for physical damage, and don't do much damage in return. (They also use multi-hit moves, which is helpful as well, as I will explain later.)
"But Delia," you might be thinking, "why don't you just use some healing items? Surely you have access to a ton of those and your inventory is as horribly overcrowded as usual, right? And if not, you can just buy some more, right?" Ha! You're confusing Quest 64 with a feature-complete RPG! Quest 64 doesn't have currency or shops. The closest you have are NPCs who will give you free items, and infinitely... provided you don't have any more of that item in your inventory. Furthermore, enemies only drop items if you don't have the item in your inventory. This makes every healing item precious; I was really not interested in using them at all against bosses, unless I could be reasonably sure it was possible to get a replacement from enemies and only if I didn't have many to begin with. Good stuff like Healing Potions (150 HP back) were not getting burned until the end.
Needless to say, this challenge is very time-consuming, but it's ultimately fairly simple to defeat - I beat it in less than 12 hours of streaming with minimal grinding. "Simple," however, should probably not be confused with "easy" per se, and it's certainly something that will annoy you severely. You need some strategic know-how to understand how to build yourself, but that's easy enough to pick up. Additionally, it really helps to know the mechanics. So here's where I will share my wisdom with you if you decide to do this:
In short, this "toughest challenge" in Quest 64 ends up being significantly more intimidating on paper than it is in practice. If you're a fan of this game already and looking for a challenge, give it a shot. It's actually almost fun! For those of you who haven't played the game before, you should give the game a whack too, but don't do these builds. Just use a regular water/earth build, at least your first time through, it'll help keep the experience reasonably smooth.
At some point, I'll probably get around to writing more of a guide for this challenge to help anyone who decides to go after this. There's one on GameFAQs that is not very good or in-depth; I looked it over but it proved to not be very useful.