I’ve been on a Phantasy Star kick lately. I first discovered the series through Phantasy Star Online on the Gamecube with the Episode I & II release and immediately fell in love. The sci-fi setting with light fantasy elements hooked me, and the dungeon crawling gameplay loop in both multiplayer and singleplayer scratched my brain just right.

I had an online subscription and played with randos, my then best friend (who is now a neo nazi, fuck him¹), and my two sisters. It was an incredibly rewarding experience until everyone fell out of it and the Gamecube servers shut down.

There are a few homebrew servers for every version of PSO nowadays and sometimes I pop my head into Ephinea on either GC or the second PC release which was called Blue Burst, but it’s just not the same anymore, and honestly I know every single inch and corner of that game. There’s not much to return to in PSO itself anymore.

Since those days though I’ve been trying over the many years to get into earlier and later Phantasy Star games. I had tried 1 and 4 many many times on various emulators, but never got that far. I had briefly played Phantasy Star Universe on the PS2 before the optical drive chewed the disc up when I tried to rip it to the harddrive. And I had also tried Phantasy Star Zero on the DS when it came out, but I didn’t have anyone to play with and it felt pretty clunky. Much later on I tried PSO2 when it finally came west on the Playstation 4, but the gameplay was so radically different from anything else in the series and the MMO-ness of it all really pushed me away.

But I decided to dive back into the series last month as a sort of comfort. There’s been a lot of real tough shit going on lately and I’ve always felt at home in this series.

I picked up a save of Phantasy Star 1 from two years ago, a save of Phantasy Star 4 from last year, and started Phantasy Star Zero and Phantasy Star Portable fresh.

This is gonna be longer than my recent game review posts. I just really love Phantasy Star.

Phantasy Star

Master System (but nearly every modern platform via the SEGA AGES re-release)

I don’t recall which original Phantasy Star game I first tried to play. It may have been this one, because it’s you know the first one. I really like this entry because it features a woman named Alis as the lead character. That may seem shallow, but it was incredibly uncommon in the year of 1988 for a big company’s flagship RPG series to star a woman (more on this at the end of this section).

Right away when you boot it up you’re presented with a poppy little theme song (two versions: first on the base Master System, and second with the FM chip addon) and a portrait of Alis next to the logo. It’s fantastic. And wow, the Master System may actually be capable of prettier graphics than the NES. For one thing, the Master System appears to have actual yellow colors! Secondly, pop into a battle on the overworld and tell me what you see: large sweeping backgrounds and large, detailed, animated enemy sprites. It blew me away when I first saw it.

So, this game is a proper old-school dungeon crawler, which I did not know when I first tried it out. That is to say, instead of the top down or isometric view you get in more modern RPGs of this subgenre, when you’re in a dungeon you’re in a first-person view as you navigate (the overworld is presented as top down still). The game does not include any kind of mapping utilities, so if you’re playing the original version of the game you do have to bust out that graph paper or follow a guide because the game deliberately tries to get you lost and fuck you over. And you should save often using multiple save slots. I have three: My major story progress, usually only saved in towns or on the overworld. A backup of that save that lags behind the main one just to be safe in case I missed something and needed to rewind. And a third save called “hmmm” specifically for when I was navigating a dungeon in case I got in trouble.

Now, I did play the SEGA AGES re-release of this game on the Switch, which includes an auto-mapping feature, which I used HEAVILY. And yet even still I ran into trouble in the dungeons! This game means business!

The story is pretty light: Alis’ brother is killed, he tells you to seek out Noah, and then it turns out that you gotta kill some dude to save the solar system. Not much to it, and the twist final boss after you kill him is, um, poorly poorly revealed or explained. But console RPGs of this era certainly tended to be light and obtuse on story. It was still an enjoyable time and I haven’t quite had this experience with an RPG before. There was a lot of non-linear tracking down of Laconian equipment before I could tackle the big bad. I found that I ended up doing some things WAY out of order compared to the guide I was following, which I thought was really cool. I like a bit of non-linearity to my RPGs.

I would also highly recommend a guide, because the game is incredibly light on direction. I had put the game down for some time because I got lost and couldn’t figure out where to go. When I picked it up again a few days ago, I needed a guide to figure out what to do next. It was NOT clear.

I would fully recommend Phantasy Star! It does some really great stuff for a console RPG from 1988 and it’s a great experience. Plus you’ll pick up some knowledge that will matter for the later games in the series.

I’m gonna leave some quotes from two wikipedia pages:

..Kodama discussed various things they wanted to do with Phantasy Star that hadn’t been done before in a game, including a female lead character… She also wanted to ensure that her female characters did not fall into “male fantasy” stereotypes.

Another character, Noah, was made androgynous due to Kodama being unsure if she would need to make Alis more masculine to make her the protagonist, with the mindset that Noah could be made to be a woman.

..Kimberley Wallace credited her for ‘[paving] the way for many leading ladies who didn’t need saving and had their own motivations’. Games TM staff appreciated that her character was not an ‘anime cliche’ and that she did not act like a ‘pouty-lipped sexpot’..

Alis Landale - Wikipedia

Upon its initial release, the series was praised for its unique futuristic setting, something that had not been done yet in the genre.

Phantasy Star is recognized as featuring one of the first female lead characters, Alis Landale, alongside Samus Aran of Metroid.

Phantasy Star - Wikipedia

Phantasy Star 4

Genesis (SEGA Genesis Classics, Nintendo Switch Online Genesis app)

Oh gosh, now this game I ADORE. Immediately upon booting it up you get a real grungy, dark title screen theme, courtesy of the Genesis’ amazing OPN2 sound chip, that immediately sets the tone. You’re thrown into a low stakes mission where Alys (no relation, but an obvious nod) and her mentee Chaz investigate some monster killings. Everything then spirals out of control into a quest to save the galaxy. Sounds familiarish. What’s basically happening is that evil returns every millennium or so. This is not the first time, but it may be the last? I am actually a bit unclear on the ending whether it implies the cycle will just continue or if it got ended for good good (spoilers? whatever, the good guys win, obviously, they always do). And I presume 2 and 3 also talk about the cycle.

This game is just gorgeous visually and musically. The sprites and tilesets are detailed and bright, easy to figure out what’s going on, and each environment is varied and unique. Battle backgrounds are so detailed and feel like you could touch them. The music is engaging and it just feels good if that makes sense. Top tracks for me are the title theme and the battle theme, but the cave theme is really good too. They also did new arrangements of the two dungeon themes from Phantasy Star 1 which are SUBLIME. I will leave it up to you to find them though. I’ve linked enough.

The story is enticing and unique, and the characters all have very unique personalities. It’s night and day between 1 and 4. The characters interact and talk and have emotions and motivations! It’s wonderful! Characters come and go as their individual stories intersect and wrap up. One story took an unexpected twist at one point that really upset me, but it worked pretty well I think. I don’t want to spoil it, it’s pretty big. I really quite liked every character in this game, even Rune who was an ass. Overall the story is a lot more coherent, cohesive, and present than it was in Phantasy Star 1. And that’s not to talk ill of 1 at all, it was a much earlier game. But 4 is just so so so good.

Further, the player is not left guessing nearly as much. Spells/techniques have descriptions for starters, but more importantly, main and side quests are communicated clearly when you get them. There’s also a talk option in the pause menu. When you select this, your party members will actually talk to each other about the current objective. It’s super useful if you’ve forgotten what’s next and helped me avoid using a guide for most of the game, which I really appreciated! I’m not above using guides as I get older, but I do still try my best not to need them if I can help it (looking at you Crystalis).

Battles are a lot more engaging in this game too. Though it’s still a forward facing view at the monster party, your characters will pop up and actually perform their actions, with unique animations based on the spell, skill, or even which specific weapon type they have equipped. There are also macros that let you define preset attack options and attack orders. Not only do these speed up rote random battles, they also help you execute combo moves. See, it’s not communicated in the game (perhaps it is in the manual?), but if two characters do the right moves in the right order, they combine their attacks for extra damage. The best way to insure they actually go in the right order is to set them into a macro. I only learned about this near the very end of the game when I was looking up something else completely unrelated. Would have helped on some of the boss fights earlier!

I definitely enjoyed my time with Phantasy Star 4 and I can super see myself revisiting it again in a few years. Now that I have finished it, I can definitely say that it is one of my top single player RPGs.

If I have to identify a specific major gripe for either game, it is the same for both: There are no usable items that restore character magic or technique points! Which means largely you’re going to be running through dungeons using purely the base weapon attack option until you get to the dungeon boss where you pull out all your magic and skills. It is very frustrating and does feel like it limits gameplay.

After these two I’m not sure whether to start 2 or 3 next. I’ve heard 2’s dungeons are pretty pretty mazey in a bad way, that you still need a guide even though they’re top-down view. 3 sounds neat because you play through multiple generations of characters. But I’ve just been reading that 2 has a really strong story and was one of the best RPGs of its time.

Also I plan to write about Phantasy Star Zero (which I’ve given a second attempt) and Phantasy Star Portable in a new post because this one got so long :)