A look back at: Phantasy Star IV

Character interactions, decent gameplay, good curve. Things that describe Phantasy Star IV, all for the good of it. I'm really glad that I played this, finally. A bit on the short side, but still charming. See, this is the kind of thing I like about some turn-based RPGs. Let's make special skills unrelated to the thing that takes away your TP, except still making it finite but powerful. Develop actually important strategies for certain bosses, like using the Psycho Wand to remove Zio's stupid buff. And the combination of certain techs and skills can all but break the game. Triblaster at the beginning? I'm sold. Grand Cross doing upwards 700 damage to foes whose overall HP value usually doesn't go above 600? Yikes, this game is much easier than the earlier titles. But given how I get annoyed at grinding that is both required and excessive, this felt pretty lukewarm. For once, I didn't grind excessively for cash, which is great too.

I'll admit, it still has some flaws. Why so many instant death attacks? Pretty much every party member in the game gets one, which is ridiculous. And the final stretch still involves a lame fetch quest, except you're not really doing anything but "proving" you're the protectors, which is just eh. It's not completely shoehorned though, thankfully. Alys' death is a surprise, along with the reveal that Dark Force himself isn't entirely the real bad guy behind everything, even though he's been a legacy villain. And gee whiz, look at all those homages to previous games. The Elysdeon scene just makes fans drool with the appearance of all the other characters from before. Rune being Lutz the Fifth is a cool reveal. The town names definitely are something too, with Piata and Uzo on Motavia being familiar (though Uzo was a dungeon in II) while there's a town named Tyler (after the guy that rescues you from Gaira in II, for whatever reason). Also Termi, which is a town fully dedicated to Alis, the original Phantasy Star hero. And let's not forget the survival of the Air Castle and the revival of Lassic, now called Lashiec. It's just all so charming. There's even Myau being alive and large in this game, as well a couple of optional dungeons with homages to Phantasy Star III even. Just so much to ooh and aah at. But these homages aren't too bad and don't feel like "hey we just mentioned things from previous games, notice us", they integrate into whatever story is in as well. What a great game to experience. The one Phantasy Star title I will recommend.

A look back at: Phantasy Star III

Yeah, I still don't like this series that much.

Phantasy Star III sticks out by offering character generations, so whichever male main character you have marries one of two women, you produce another male main character from that and it goes from there. Quite a lot of playable characters, although up to five for each main one, and two of those just so happen to be cyborgs so they stick around for all generations. Phantasy Star III offers a simplistic combat system, nothing really too new, but it's sure a lot better than Phantasy Star II by not making characters miss all the time and also allowing for players to have the initiative this time around. Man, the fact that I still hate II's battle system still lingers even here. Not a fan of tech distribution as they now call it, but since all my regular attacks seem to do way more than techs do overall I could care less about techs as a whole.

Now Phantasy Star III isn't just the easiest in the series (until I played IV), it's also quite frankly the ugliest. They didn't really need to have this kind of art design for the characters, and the music though just as Genesis-y as one might expect, could've at least not sound grating. I'll give it credit for changing the main theme whenever you get new characters, but bleh overall. The apparent world in Phantasy Star III is actually up to seven biodomes, on what appears to be a flying ship. Said ship apparently isn't known until you reach one of two satellite moons, on whichever second-gen protagonist you're gonna use. And it's pretty weird, since it looks like these things have made fantasy kingdoms for the most part instead of nice sci-fi locales. That right there is a throw-off.

I'll give this game credit for its many generations and the somewhat different personalities of the main protagonists. Rhys certainly seems heroic towards a girl who pretty much kicks off the plot, getting thrown in a dungeon seems a bit of a dick move that his father employs on him. It's quite interesting when the other girl joins up too, along with Lyle, who's practically his arch-nemesis. So choosing to marry that Layan girl Maya ends up with Ayn, who can then have either Crys or Sean, or marrying your childhood friend Lena ends up with Nial, who ends up having Adan and Gwyn or Aron. A few of the characters seen as villains aren't really villains anyways, they sort of come to their senses given how it's a conflict between two nations and such. Still, what's the deal with how Rhys was responsible for just about everything?

I also give Phantasy Star III credit for actually having multiple endings for its four final protagonists, Aron, Adan, Crys, and Sean. Somehow Adan and Crys have similar ones, Sean and Aron have much more interesting endings, of which Sean also has potentially a tear-jerker of a beginning too. Aron is probably seen as the canonical ending because it involves Earth, but hey, good job with these multiple endings. No thanks for the torture that I had to endure which involves some grinding (as usual).

A look back at: Phantasy Star II

Ah yes, more Phantasy Star stuff. This apparently is one of the more popular entries along with Phantasy Star IV, and it has a pretty weird cover art, at least for the North American version. But it is a Phantasy Star game, and would you believe it, I hated it more than the first one!

So why do I? Well, the most annoying aspect of grinding for money to buy equipment is still prevalent, so I spend a whole lot just to get what I need. Monster encounters are also much tougher too, and while they now place multiple enemy types in and added a few new status ailments in, a whole lot of battles are just excruciating to go through. Why though? Well I mentioned grinding for one. But as you will see, enemies can ambush you often, and you cannot ambush them. Furthermore, both attacks AND magic (techs) frequently miss enemies often at random, making most battles last longer than they should, yet enemies NEVER miss! Oh yeah, two types of enemies, monsters and robots, is unique, but then you have abilities and weapons that obviously won't work on the latter very well, and there's even one entire character that loses his effectiveness rather quickly once the robots take over the planet.* Why? Why must these battles be so annoying? And why is the only really reliable way of reviving besides a revive spell some weird cloning machine? Not to mention to get new characters, you have to keep going to your house, which gets quite boring. One particular character is a thief who sometimes steals from a store, leaving your party, and you have to keep fetching her because she ends up back at your house.

To further hit the nails on the head, the dungeons, while getting rid of the first-person perspective, are somehow even harder to go through. There are only four bosses, but the first two you fight are unwinnable. Neifirst is fought with Nei alone, and while it technically can be won, Nei's supposed to die regardless of the battle outcome and everyone else comes in at that point. Then there's the three Army Eyes, where they are supposed to last a few turns before they decide to use your move to imprison the party, all part of the plot. Like Neifirst, you can theoretically win against these Army Eyes, but if you do, somehow you can't go on with the plot! Who didn't see this when they created this battle?

Other things annoy me here. The whole subplot involving Teim was a waste of time. Her father Darum is a dick who won't let anyone pass a certain checkpoint until he finds his daughter time. Problem is, when the party finds her, she doesn't want to reveal herself. What happens? Oh, well Darum kills her because she won't reveal or answer to him. Then Darum realizes this and kills himself. Way to freakin' go, two completely unnecessary deaths instead of a family reunion for the price of actually getting through the damn tunnel.

Oh yes I did mention the party gets imprisoned on a satellite after the Army Eyes imprison them. They are stuck without weapons and have to go through random encounters and damaging floors. What happens to the satellite is that it blows up the main world from Phantasy Star 1, which the player will never explore. Great job there ruining Alis's home planet! And if that weren't enough, the ending is just awful. You defeat the two end bosses, then find these Earthlings were actually responsible for the creation of the final boss, and what's the ending? Oh it shows some heroic words from the playable cast as they apparently fight off the Earthlings, which unfortunately stops the game there. I want to know what happened for crying out loud. An ambiguous ending is a bad ending in my book.

So yes, I hate Phantasy Star II, it's hard, and it's plot has some really bad moments. The game is often overrated due to how it's all sci-fi and all that, also for being the Mega Drive's first RPG and because of Nei's iconic death scene being better than Aeris's.** Here's an example of a game that really had the bad far outweigh the good.

*Hugh, for the record. On the plus side Josh becomes a lot more effective by then since he specializes in robots, but I still was annoyed overall with the change.

**Which it is to be honest, even if parts of it don't make sense.

A look back at: Phantasy Star

Sega honestly never was one for RPG games as much as it was more for Alex Kidd and Sonic back in the day. But when they did, it was the Shining series and the Phantasy Star series that shone the most. Here, I look back at how the first Phantasy Star is still the best game in the series and why I actually don't like the series as a whole.

There's no real beating around the bush when looking at a list of best Master System games. Phantasy Star is on pretty much all of them considering it was probably the only RPG that people will even recall from that system. And it did its job rather well. It's as basic as Final Fantasy is, but it's got a more fleshed out story and some actually interesting characters, managing to be less static than the first Final Fantasy. Right off the bat, Alis, our female protagonist, witnesses the murder of his brother who is naturally one of those rebellious dudes against the government, which starts her journey. Now, revenge is often a common motivator for someone to set off for something. But I will say that during the story, it's becomes less about Alis's ultimate revenge against Lassic and more of the goal of liberation. While said goal isn't very well implemented, players can tell that this is what Alis ends up doing with her companions as they journey along.

So yes, the plot actually has quite some meaning for a Master System game. Let's now look at the gameplay. Well, you will always fight certain monster types one at a time, but only one is displayed even though you can fight up to seven enemies. The 3d dungeons are pretty cool overall and I like them, although you'll need a map to really traverse these places. Still though, the immersion of a 3d dungeon is pretty cool, and is explored almost entirely exclusively as the dungeon in the very first Shining game, Shining in the Darkness. As for Phantasy Star, this feature is honestly the one thing that makes it the best in the series.

So why do I not really like this game? It's sort of the same reasons I actually don't like the other games I've played.* There's a ton of grinding here. While this is par for the course for many old-school RPGs, I'd like to point out I grind more for money rather than experience, just because the equipment in this game is very expensive and there are barely any other decent ways to get equipment overall. Other things, well the Talk magic is useless, there is one space in game where an NPC decides to lure you into an inescapable trap, and quite a few plot-required items can be easily forgotten. But all things aside, this is probably the one Phantasy Star game worth playing the most, not just for nostalgia, but because it does well for its system.

*aside from Phantasy Star 4, which actually manages to not be as grindy.