So, I've always had a shameful omission in my backlog: despite being a Phantasy Star super-fan (it's one of my top 3 favourite games of all-time; I even wrote a Let's Play for it on TT 2.0), I never played Phantasy Star IV. I've finally gotten around to fixing that this weekend, and holy shit, I am so disappointed that I wasn't able to play this as a kid, because young me would have lost his goddamned mind.
I had no idea that this is pretty much a direct sequel to the first game (and the others, but obviously the first is most relevant to me). There's a statue/town devoted to Alis, and both Myau and Noah/Lutz are still kicking around in some form or another. And walking into the "Bio Plant" for the first time is such a good reveal: you're basically playing Dragon Quest for the first few hours, and then all of a sudden with a single screen transition and no warning Phantasy Star starts happening and there's glowing walls and robots and parallax scrolling and that old music kicks in and fuck. Plus there's a ton of references and easter eggs for series fans. When I first met someone asking to bake a cake, I almost dove out a window in a panic. And then I found the hidden cake shop! Also, my favourite line so far, from a musk cat: "I can get the top off of this bottle, meow."
Anyway, to the surprise of no one who has actually played it, this game is a fucking GOAT. I just can't get over how good it is. Much like the original PS, it just seems ahead of its time. These combat macros should be industry standard, and are still rare even today (but always welcome). Also, I'm not sure I can recall another game where the map tiles for the big cities are actually reasonable approximations of the buildings/layout in miniature.
There's just so much to love here. I love that the party's main revenue source early on is extorting our 3rd party member. I love how your party is a couple of humans plus a Motavian and a Dezorian and a cat girl and an immortal and two robots, etc. I love how it lists everyone's ages on the status screen and the range is, like 1, 16, 18, 25, ??, 80, 300, 998, ? (these are off the top of my head; don't @ me). Basically every character is great and I get sad when they leave (except Hahn, who was a nerd with bad stats). It makes me so sad that they don't let RPGs be linear and aggressively force you to remix your party like this anymore, because I love it when games do that.
I'm like 16 hours in and I assume like 3/4 of the way through, and I just stumbled across the fact that this game has dual techs. There's just so much here, and I'm loving every second of it. In summary, 12/10, would AROWS again.
