Apologies for the tardiness folks. Here we are at the fourth and final issue of Maretime Mysteries, where all mysteries are solved and answers are given. How satisfying are those answers? Let's roll the dice and find out, but beware of spoilers.
Our story picks up with Maretime Bay about to be swallowed up in darkness.
The authorities are questioning likely suspects.
Our protagonists recognize, coming off the end of last issue, that the spirit isn't the one in control of this as she reminds us by declaring this is all her fault and that she messed up again.
"D'oh!"
Misty encourages her to share what she knows, though the spirit--whose name is then revealed to be Raneigh--is reticent; not thinking herself strong enough to open up about it. The ponies, being ponies, are naturally quite friendly and encouraging to the spirit who was earlier threatening to curse the town. It's just how they roll.
Sunny: Making friends with trouble-causing spirits and cursed ponies is practically a right of passage here in Equestria!
Having rolled a +20 on diplomacy, Raneigh starts to open up, stating that once she had a friend like them, but let her insecurities and jealousy get in the way. She remembers it all like it was ... a flashback.
An unspecified "long time ago" Raneigh was a young pony who looked ... exactly the same as she does as a spirit. Hrm.
Okay then.
This mare was born to be cursed into becoming an ectoplasmic entity, I'm just saying.
Her best friend is a colt named Kyren, which is not the kind of name we're used to in My Little Pony, nor his interestingly two-toned mane. For a while I thought he was wearing a beanie or something over his mane. I do like his stylish little beard even if it's no match for Sunburst's.
Interesting cutie mark he has. Gotta wonder what he rolled.
The two are known as the Power Pair, local champions of all things board games, like one called Twin Tactics. When they learn of the existence of Maretime Bay Mysteries, both are excited for the prospect of a new game to play and a tournament to play in.
Aww, they're so cute together. I'm sure this won't all end in tears, no siree.
Okay, I'm not a gamer (in either a board or video game sense) but is it typical to release a brand new game with a tournament based on the game that no one has even played yet? Seems a bit weird to me, but I'm not a gamer.
Raneigh's enthusiasm is dampened when she sees the tournament is singles only, no teams, so she and Kyren would be competing against each other. While they had played against each other on their own, doing so in a tournament seems to be outside Raneigh's comfort zone, especially for a game she doesn't know. Kyren's enthusiasm remains unabated and she starts to feel stirrings of frustration and envy--which only grow as Kyren swiftly learns the ropes of the game while Raneigh can't make heads or tails of the rules.
Pathfinder character creation in a nutshell.
Kyren tries to help by playing a few rounds of the game with her; trying to help her get a handle of the rules. While not a bad idea, it probably would've been better had they not done this in public, with a small crowd gathering to watch and enthuse over Kyren winning seven times in a row. To be clear, no one is ridiculing Raneigh or saying anything to denigrate or hurt her, and Kyren himself is quite supportive and even modest when the other ponies confidently comment that Kyren will no doubt win the tournament.
That body language and pose never bodes well.
But for Raneigh, this all just fuels her frustration and resentment. She and Kyren were a team, a team that always won together. Now with her and Kyren competing directly against one another in public, she fears being seen as the lesser half of the Power Pair. Even Kyren's modest response only rubs salt in the wound as they both know who the better player is. Raneigh wants to keep playing, upset at herself for not doing better, despite Kyren's reassurances. I'm reminded a bit of Scootaloo's interactions with the Cutie Mark Crusaders in "Flight to the Finish" when she kept wanting to work on their routine and causing a bit of a rift between her and her friends over her obsessive behavior.
Kyren tries telling her it's just a game, but she isn't having it and the two part ways. During her wandering through Maretime Bay, Raneigh encounters a mysterious store with a mysterious owner--not the one Misty encountered at the start. This one is less energetically cheerful and more "do you have a discount on your black flame candles and zombie chow?"
Just saying, if I see a Power Ponies comic in the back, I would not be surprised.
The raven-haired pony, sensing Raneigh's frustration, offers her a gem of transformation that will give her anything she desires. She doesn't even seem to charge her for it, she just does this because ... I guess you don't have to worry about making rent if your store mysterious up and vanishes at a whim.
"Come on, all the cool foals are trying dark magic..."
Anyway, retreating to the library (I guess?), Raneigh tells our protagonists that in her impatience and frustration she didn't even realize she was dabbling in anything dark. With most other series, I'd balk at that, but this is MLP. I could totally see the Cutie Mark Crusaders accidentally summoning Cthulhu in order to try to get their cutie mark or a pony communing with Khorne because her best friend couldn't make her birthday party. This sort of thing just happens in Equestria.
Instead of saying something like "I want to win" Raneigh asks to "see beyond confusion, the intuition to navigate the board with ease, and the ability to become the only master of the game." The narration is more than a touch vague, speaking only of being ignorant of the consequences of her wish and showing a photo of her and Kyren being ripped asunder. But what actually happened to him, the tournament, Maretime Bay itself when this all originally happened? No idea. We just know that Raneigh ended up trapped as the spirit of the game.
On the one hand, the symbolism tells us all we really need to know, and "show don't tell" is a big part of sequential storytelling in comics. But on the other, considering the importance this act has to the story and is at the heart of the resolution, it feels a little wanting.
Her narration ends and Misty is quick to comfort her when Raneigh believes herself undeserving of help, saying that she too once felt lost in more ways than one which is a nice character moment and helps give the series a bit more of an emotional grounding that it had struggled with.
"Friend Patrol Alpha, GO!"
All the ponies, plus Sparky too, express their support and say they'll help reverse the curse--which they need to get a move on since the mist is moving in and Raneigh is starting to fade. Misty, based on--I'm actually not quite sure what--thinks the way to break the curse is to use the gem of transformation again. She thinks the problem was that Raneigh wasn't being honest in what she really wanted from the gem the first time and if she uses it properly now, that'll fix everything.
'Dark magic got us into this, dark magic will get us out!' doesn't quite have that great a narrative ring to it.
Hitch tries to buy some time by holding the mist back with his earth pony plant-based powers. It goes as well as you would expect, so Sunny steps in with her alicorn abilities.
For the honor of Neighskull!
Misty tells Raneigh to "speak your truth aloud and with conviction" and Raneigh states that she allowed her jealousy, impatience, and selfishness to drive her but she was committed to changing and being better. It doesn't seem to be enough though.
"Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight--wait, wrong franchise..."
Misty, trying to connect Raneigh's plight with her own from the start of the series, says that Raneigh can't give up, that Misty herself was all but ready to let impatience and self-doubt keep her from enjoying Maretime Bay and having fun with her friends but they all have flaws--yeah, I don't quite know how you get from point A to point B there--so Misty avows that she's going to dive headfirst into cool adventures and that, I guess, gives Raneigh the strength to apologize to Kyren. The gem fractures, the mist clears, and Raneigh is no longer a spirit but a flesh and blood pony--looking the same except for having hindlegs again.
"I don't have to throw out half my horseshoes! The long nightmare is over!"
Raneigh is ready to start fresh and Misty offers to continue to help her make that new start. We cut to Misty talking on the phone with her dad as she sets up the Crystal Brighthouse for game night, telling him she's embracing the adventure of life in Maretime Bay. She hangs up to let in Raneigh, who's joining the full Mane Six for games and fun. Sparky hiccups and turns the dice into a DVD and we're done.
"Hey there new girl, nice to meet you. We'll never interact again after this but hey, happy ever afters and all that."
With that, this issue and the miniseries as a whole has come to a close.
Concluding Thoughts
The story of Maretime Mysteries feels very much like an episode of Tell Your Tale, with all its strong and weak points. The story feels small and a bit too fast paced for the emotional moments they were going for to really land. The art was very expressive and cute and worked quite well for the characters, less my issues with Raneigh's design.
I talked about my critiques of the pacing in previous reviews: with problems being solved virtually on the same page that they first appeared on, usually requiring nothing more than the briefest of motivational talks (and then the cycle repeating two or three times in the issue as a whole). This issue is better in that regard though relatively important things like Kyren and the shop-pony just come up and disappear without too much explanation. Overall the lack of a solid emotional core in the preceding issues meant that the finale didn't really land for me.
Misty is one of my favorites of the G5 Mane cast so having her be the driving character should've been a big draw for me. But her problems at the start of the miniseries weren't fleshed out as much as they could've been. It was often framed that her biggest frustration was not knowing her way around town and she in fact started the series by not wanting to admit to not having any plans. She was feeling some frustrations and self-doubts over it, but the connection made in the finale that she wants to take part in adventures and not be held back by self-doubt and everypony has flaws ... the groundwork is partly there, but only in part, it's not fully developed so some of these statements feel almost like non sequiturs. The same goes for her connection with Raneigh.
Speaking of Raneigh, I wasn't bothered that she was clearly going to be given a sympathetic backstory and saved in one manner or other. That's par for the course with MLP. I did find her pre-cursed design to be rather uninteresting, seeing as it's the same as her as a spirit form, not helped by being same sickly green color throughout her body. Even Misty, who started the series with a very monochromatic design (with blue for her mane and coat) was far more visually engaging. It felt a bit incongruous to have her and her best friend be given very unponylike names like Kyren and Raneigh (whose name is admittedly one letter away from being a horse Animal Crossing character, so there's that).
There were a couple of things that seemed like they were building up the importance of, but never really paid off. Sparky's hiccups and Misty brewing tea for him took up two or three pages in the first issue, with him still drinking his tea in the following issue. One would think that would come into play again in some capacity but it never does. Honestly the little guy didn't do all that much, not even having his magic accidentally flare up to do something that would either impede or facilitate the ponies' efforts at a critical moment. Likewise, the artist made sure to capture the same design of the game pieces from the second and fourth issues which, given that there were six of them and of very particular shapes, I would've thought they had some importance but they didn't.
The last issue had me wondering if the creepy shop store owner trying to help in some odd way? The way Misty spoke about it, she didn't seem to think the transformation gem was like a monkey's paw wherein it gave the most harmful interpretation possible of your wish, she thinks the problem was Raneigh not being honest with what was troubling her (and I still don't get how Misty leapt to that conclusion). But if that was the case, was the creepy shop owner actually trying to be helpful? Why wouldn't she have done something after Raneigh vanished and it all clearly went to pot?
Given how short this was for a miniseries and how fast-paced (even rushed) the story felt, I get why half the Mane cast was missing, but it didn't help the overall feel that this was a sort of bare-bones story. It's not badly told and there aren't any moments that make you really irritated with the characters or a moral whose depiction and expression really rubs you the wrong way (which was a fault FiM fell into more than once) but there just isn't too much to this story to really sink my teeth into the way there was for Set Your Sail.
Hopefully I'll have a bit more to say about the next G5 miniseries, "The Storm of Zephyr Heights." Until then!
