I forgot all about that, and I just played through IV. Fantastic! Thank you!
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The Phantasy Star series
- Thread starter FelixSH
- Start date
I forgot all about that, and I just played through IV. Fantastic! Thank you!
Made a save at the end of the first generation in Phantasy Star III, then played through Nial's generation and have ended up with Aron as my final character. Having an okay time with the game, even though it is far less charming than II. Still, I like III. I think I eventually will play through all four endings, someday, though I think I'll go back to the text adventures after this Aron playthrough of III...
Finished Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom for the second time, got a different ending. This time, I played as Nial in the second generation and finished with Aron.
I don't recall Dark Force being so chatty the last time I beat the game. He even made a pun about blowing up the other colony ship lol.
So that is way different from the other ending I got! I didn't get a photograph of it, but the colony ship we're on went through a black hole after a collision with... something?... then ended up here. What the HECK does that mean?! They traveled in time, so presumably the colony ship lands on Earth and then maybe become the people who eventually travel back to Algol and blow up Palma? Is Phantasy Star III a big time loop, at least in this ending? Lmao I love it
A short review of the Hint Book that players had to order from Sega: largely good and useful, it was nice that all of the maps were at the end of the book, so I didn't have to keep flipping around. They still don't friggin label what is in each treasure chest, and as you can maybe see above, some of the maps are cut off around the edges. Most of the time this is not necessarily an issue, but Skyhaven is literally unusable as the actual route you have to take is partially not visible. That was the sole map I had to look up online.
Thankfully, the former owner of this book drew (in marker
) a line from the entrance directly to Dark Force, which I appreciated and used lmao
Good game. I'll do the other two endings eventually, I am curious how different they are... I do have a save right at the end of the first generation so I can get to the other two endings relatively quickly without having to redo the entire first gen.
I don't recall Dark Force being so chatty the last time I beat the game. He even made a pun about blowing up the other colony ship lol.
So that is way different from the other ending I got! I didn't get a photograph of it, but the colony ship we're on went through a black hole after a collision with... something?... then ended up here. What the HECK does that mean?! They traveled in time, so presumably the colony ship lands on Earth and then maybe become the people who eventually travel back to Algol and blow up Palma? Is Phantasy Star III a big time loop, at least in this ending? Lmao I love it
A short review of the Hint Book that players had to order from Sega: largely good and useful, it was nice that all of the maps were at the end of the book, so I didn't have to keep flipping around. They still don't friggin label what is in each treasure chest, and as you can maybe see above, some of the maps are cut off around the edges. Most of the time this is not necessarily an issue, but Skyhaven is literally unusable as the actual route you have to take is partially not visible. That was the sole map I had to look up online.
Thankfully, the former owner of this book drew (in marker
) a line from the entrance directly to Dark Force, which I appreciated and used lmaoGood game. I'll do the other two endings eventually, I am curious how different they are... I do have a save right at the end of the first generation so I can get to the other two endings relatively quickly without having to redo the entire first gen.
Purple
(She/Her)
Prepare to be profoundly disappointed! I do like the party shakeup when you marry Laya because they weren't progressive enough to let you go dungeon delving with your mom (was Lost Odyssey the first game to allow for that?) and her replacement levels HILARIOUSLY fast, but the second branch point kinda... doesn't particularly branch, so expect to see a lot of the same.
I played through the four main games since I got in the mood for it. These were replays, except for PSIII, which I finished for the first time. I'll talk about the games in a descending order of preference.
Phantasy Star
I think the most important governing factor for my interest in RPGs of this vintage and format are the narratives they tell. I don't mean textual narratives in this case, but the spatial, navigational tale one undertakes in interacting with them; those are the stories that emerge most meaningfully in how these games are structured. With that as a priority, how could one not hand it to Phantasy Star? Its alternating modes of overworld megapuzzle and first-person maze dungeon exploration still strike novel today, and within its own series. The archetypal design language of synthesizing information from multiple sources to find one's way is at its strongest here, partially because the long-term structure of the game with its multiple-planets premise is used to the most diverse ends the series would see. For the following games that shared the concept, planetary travel would often signify a clean chapter break from one stage of the game to the next; you'd have few reasons to return to earlier locations. Phantasy Star's setting under its martial law has made civil liberties restricted, but society still ekes on: Alis and co. eventually need to commission their own private spacecraft but before that they take commercial flights, and there's a back-and-forth to their investigative process across the Algol system that is not seen elsewhere in the series as the player puzzles out the next point of interest to pursue. The penultimate reaches of Baya Malay overlooking the starting meadows on Palma are as memorable a bookend as glimpsing the Dragonlord's citadel over the lake or scanning the corrupted Hyrule Castle across the horizon.
Phantasy Star III
For the above merits present in the original, in my eyes Phantasy Star III is the only real successor the series has. This is provided you play either in Japanese or with a retranslation patch, as the official localization sabotages the game's central strengths in player-directed exploration by rephrasing hints into plain directions. Without that unforced error diluting the experience, there's a wonderfully free-to-get-lost-in world to unravel, populated by the most startlingly odd and barely animated enemies in the series to contend with along the way (within an absolutely brutal encounter rate, to be clear). As a setting, a colony dome ship masquerading as a fantasy RPG society is the kind of fanciful mixing of genres that lived strongly in the first game and didn't necessarily emerge with the same kind of balance in other series games... and yet PSIII does not feel beholden to its past in the imagery it conjures up or the story it conveys, because the legacy elements of the series take a distant and half-recalled nature in its setting, leaving room for the game to craft its own identity. With its story of generational civil warfare amongst what is essentially one great colony ship's crew and population, in their fragmentation and radicalization against one another through the years there's a very palpable encroaching tragedy to all the events that unfold, and one of the starkest portrayals of the series's overarching "dark force" thematics and how they manifest in its world. The androids as a new facet to the series's cosmology feel representative of that quiet march of history: whether it's the half-broken Miun wandering the desert through all the generations searching for her master in futility, Siren perpetuating the cycles of abuse in the name of long-passed masters of his own, or the stalwart Mieu and Wren witnessing all the deeds and fates of Rhys's bloodline, capable of only watching and assisting the inexorable.
Phantasy Star II
This is the Phantasy Star capable of eliciting the deepest and most turbulent pangs of emotion from its audience, whatever the nature of said feelings may be. It could be imprinting upon its period-evocative big-hair sci-fi aesthetics that craft a look that is iconic and singular within the series, while informing what would come after. It could just as well be baffled awe at its dungeon design style: multi-floored, teleporter-happy from the word go, dead-ends aplenty, rejecting the legibility of grid-based layouts. Maybe it's a fascination with its tonal commitment to grim trajectories, from shockingly violent supporting character arcs to governmental oppression to party member death, planetary collapse and pyrrhic victories. And even still, maybe all that bleakness combined with the demands of the dungeoneering and the rigours of surviving the game's challenges--doled out in sequential, repetitive chunks of increasingly convoluted action--translates to players not seeing the adventure to its end. Much of this game plays out as monotonous as one imagines Rolf's government job to be, and I'd be hard-pressed to call it ludonarratively harmonius as much as simply undercooked. Despite its strengths in key plot events and what kind of portrait they paint, the plotting so far as "what you do in an RPG" is at its simplest and most unengaging out of all the series games. I think its fate is to remain that kind of wounded exemplar; a purveyor of big ideas and arresting iconography whose stumbles in structure are just as integral to its character as the successes of its tonal explorations.
Phantasy Star IV
I must deploy a critical platitude at this juncture, because nothing else really suffices: Phantasy Star IV is not a game for me. It's a sensation I feel in preference to RPG design, as well as a literal descriptor. The former is perhaps easier to quantify: a reason for outlining an RPG design style preference at the beginning of this writeup was to provide a foundation to conveying just how disinterested PSIV is in anything of the sort. Its dungeon layouts are trivial, gearing up for more than half the game to reach a point where even the most complex of them offer one doorway branch to a treasure chest and no more--back to following the one path that exists. Its overworld navigation is laughable, with the entire world laid out in what amounts to in practice a straightforward sequence of one primary location to the next; it offers no chances to lose one's way in. Everything in Phantasy Star IV is propulsive, to-the-point and streamlined, and feels like it emerged from an entirely different world of RPG design compared to the previous three games, because in large part it did: a late 1993 release is inarguably worlds apart from even PSIII's early 1990 launch. Trends and conventions had shifted massively in that time, with works like Dragon Quest IV and V, as well as Final Fantasy IV and V, having arrived inbetween; those works too strove to reinvent the design languages of their predecessors. Phantasy Star IV's attentions are no longer devoted to tense long-form dungeon treks or the large-scale investigation of its world: it's a game that acts with the aspirations of a blockbuster in the context of its genre and time, emphasizing the highly ambitious and labour-intensive panel portrait presentation for its cinematic scenes and condensing the time the player spends out of dialogue scenes or flashy and frequent boss battles (something the series also did not previously do much).
Another contrasting aspect with a previous work reads to me as a severe overcorrection to reactions PSIII received: that of series continuity and fan service material. PSIV in general comes off as a reactionary work: it has a reverential relationship to the first game, its newfound streamlining must at least in part be a response to the excesses of PSII, and PSIII's tangential relationship to the rest of the series--a strength in my assessment--is avoided to the utmost by loading the game with so many connections, reverberations and continuations of past series material that it's fit to burst. Trainspotting like this has an easy way into the pleasure centers of those invested in said material, but the more the game trots out these references just for the sake of making them--rarely saying or doing anything new, only reminding--the more hollow the whole exercise starts feeling. The circumstances around this kind of direction are known: the developers correctly pegged PSIV as likely their last chance to get to do one of these under their own terms (or at all), and so resolved to pack in as much as they could, which in one part delights and also reminds one of a theme park ride of recognizable attractions, or perhaps other bookending works that have taken it upon themselves to wrap up years of continuity tangles and asides, the Metal Gear Solid 4s and the like. In being determined to provide a definitive end and culmination to everything the series ever encompassed, a hint of forced artificiality is introduced to the finished concoction.
What makes the game most offputting to me are its deviations in tone from previous series games that are as present and significant as its design shifts. It's hard to find new angles to convey how important and treasured the original Phantasy Star is for people that care about women in video games: their creative participation and their portrayal. It remains so because the rest of the series largely did not follow its lead, as every subsequent game instead cast a gormless adventure man for its lead instead; of any real sin that PSIII committed, its gravest is that instead of starring one such youth it featured seven. Women started dying off to provide audience shock and development to the men who survived them. Costuming turned from pretty and practical to high-leg leotards for all the most central women in the casts. These are real trajectories and regressions that start from early on, but the games survived through acts of omission as the stories largely weren't verbal and their focus on characterization infrequent. PSIV up-ends this functional armistice and finds itself smack-dab in the middle of a path of least resistance common zeitgeist tonality that reminds one of any given comedy OVA of its time, with amped-up comic relief and a pervasive sexism, as well as a harmful conflation of the two. You see the former in the sweat drop emoting that turns up throughout the cast's interactions, or running gags like Alys extorting Hahn for increasingly high amounts of pay for her services; Raja's existence as a pun-slinging party member is as much a signifier of the writing voice as anything. For the latter, the examples are so many that I'd just as well point a few out:
Maybe I'll extend my play of the series to its spin-offs someday. Online looks great!
Phantasy Star
I think the most important governing factor for my interest in RPGs of this vintage and format are the narratives they tell. I don't mean textual narratives in this case, but the spatial, navigational tale one undertakes in interacting with them; those are the stories that emerge most meaningfully in how these games are structured. With that as a priority, how could one not hand it to Phantasy Star? Its alternating modes of overworld megapuzzle and first-person maze dungeon exploration still strike novel today, and within its own series. The archetypal design language of synthesizing information from multiple sources to find one's way is at its strongest here, partially because the long-term structure of the game with its multiple-planets premise is used to the most diverse ends the series would see. For the following games that shared the concept, planetary travel would often signify a clean chapter break from one stage of the game to the next; you'd have few reasons to return to earlier locations. Phantasy Star's setting under its martial law has made civil liberties restricted, but society still ekes on: Alis and co. eventually need to commission their own private spacecraft but before that they take commercial flights, and there's a back-and-forth to their investigative process across the Algol system that is not seen elsewhere in the series as the player puzzles out the next point of interest to pursue. The penultimate reaches of Baya Malay overlooking the starting meadows on Palma are as memorable a bookend as glimpsing the Dragonlord's citadel over the lake or scanning the corrupted Hyrule Castle across the horizon.
Phantasy Star III
For the above merits present in the original, in my eyes Phantasy Star III is the only real successor the series has. This is provided you play either in Japanese or with a retranslation patch, as the official localization sabotages the game's central strengths in player-directed exploration by rephrasing hints into plain directions. Without that unforced error diluting the experience, there's a wonderfully free-to-get-lost-in world to unravel, populated by the most startlingly odd and barely animated enemies in the series to contend with along the way (within an absolutely brutal encounter rate, to be clear). As a setting, a colony dome ship masquerading as a fantasy RPG society is the kind of fanciful mixing of genres that lived strongly in the first game and didn't necessarily emerge with the same kind of balance in other series games... and yet PSIII does not feel beholden to its past in the imagery it conjures up or the story it conveys, because the legacy elements of the series take a distant and half-recalled nature in its setting, leaving room for the game to craft its own identity. With its story of generational civil warfare amongst what is essentially one great colony ship's crew and population, in their fragmentation and radicalization against one another through the years there's a very palpable encroaching tragedy to all the events that unfold, and one of the starkest portrayals of the series's overarching "dark force" thematics and how they manifest in its world. The androids as a new facet to the series's cosmology feel representative of that quiet march of history: whether it's the half-broken Miun wandering the desert through all the generations searching for her master in futility, Siren perpetuating the cycles of abuse in the name of long-passed masters of his own, or the stalwart Mieu and Wren witnessing all the deeds and fates of Rhys's bloodline, capable of only watching and assisting the inexorable.
Phantasy Star II
This is the Phantasy Star capable of eliciting the deepest and most turbulent pangs of emotion from its audience, whatever the nature of said feelings may be. It could be imprinting upon its period-evocative big-hair sci-fi aesthetics that craft a look that is iconic and singular within the series, while informing what would come after. It could just as well be baffled awe at its dungeon design style: multi-floored, teleporter-happy from the word go, dead-ends aplenty, rejecting the legibility of grid-based layouts. Maybe it's a fascination with its tonal commitment to grim trajectories, from shockingly violent supporting character arcs to governmental oppression to party member death, planetary collapse and pyrrhic victories. And even still, maybe all that bleakness combined with the demands of the dungeoneering and the rigours of surviving the game's challenges--doled out in sequential, repetitive chunks of increasingly convoluted action--translates to players not seeing the adventure to its end. Much of this game plays out as monotonous as one imagines Rolf's government job to be, and I'd be hard-pressed to call it ludonarratively harmonius as much as simply undercooked. Despite its strengths in key plot events and what kind of portrait they paint, the plotting so far as "what you do in an RPG" is at its simplest and most unengaging out of all the series games. I think its fate is to remain that kind of wounded exemplar; a purveyor of big ideas and arresting iconography whose stumbles in structure are just as integral to its character as the successes of its tonal explorations.
Phantasy Star IV
I must deploy a critical platitude at this juncture, because nothing else really suffices: Phantasy Star IV is not a game for me. It's a sensation I feel in preference to RPG design, as well as a literal descriptor. The former is perhaps easier to quantify: a reason for outlining an RPG design style preference at the beginning of this writeup was to provide a foundation to conveying just how disinterested PSIV is in anything of the sort. Its dungeon layouts are trivial, gearing up for more than half the game to reach a point where even the most complex of them offer one doorway branch to a treasure chest and no more--back to following the one path that exists. Its overworld navigation is laughable, with the entire world laid out in what amounts to in practice a straightforward sequence of one primary location to the next; it offers no chances to lose one's way in. Everything in Phantasy Star IV is propulsive, to-the-point and streamlined, and feels like it emerged from an entirely different world of RPG design compared to the previous three games, because in large part it did: a late 1993 release is inarguably worlds apart from even PSIII's early 1990 launch. Trends and conventions had shifted massively in that time, with works like Dragon Quest IV and V, as well as Final Fantasy IV and V, having arrived inbetween; those works too strove to reinvent the design languages of their predecessors. Phantasy Star IV's attentions are no longer devoted to tense long-form dungeon treks or the large-scale investigation of its world: it's a game that acts with the aspirations of a blockbuster in the context of its genre and time, emphasizing the highly ambitious and labour-intensive panel portrait presentation for its cinematic scenes and condensing the time the player spends out of dialogue scenes or flashy and frequent boss battles (something the series also did not previously do much).
Another contrasting aspect with a previous work reads to me as a severe overcorrection to reactions PSIII received: that of series continuity and fan service material. PSIV in general comes off as a reactionary work: it has a reverential relationship to the first game, its newfound streamlining must at least in part be a response to the excesses of PSII, and PSIII's tangential relationship to the rest of the series--a strength in my assessment--is avoided to the utmost by loading the game with so many connections, reverberations and continuations of past series material that it's fit to burst. Trainspotting like this has an easy way into the pleasure centers of those invested in said material, but the more the game trots out these references just for the sake of making them--rarely saying or doing anything new, only reminding--the more hollow the whole exercise starts feeling. The circumstances around this kind of direction are known: the developers correctly pegged PSIV as likely their last chance to get to do one of these under their own terms (or at all), and so resolved to pack in as much as they could, which in one part delights and also reminds one of a theme park ride of recognizable attractions, or perhaps other bookending works that have taken it upon themselves to wrap up years of continuity tangles and asides, the Metal Gear Solid 4s and the like. In being determined to provide a definitive end and culmination to everything the series ever encompassed, a hint of forced artificiality is introduced to the finished concoction.
What makes the game most offputting to me are its deviations in tone from previous series games that are as present and significant as its design shifts. It's hard to find new angles to convey how important and treasured the original Phantasy Star is for people that care about women in video games: their creative participation and their portrayal. It remains so because the rest of the series largely did not follow its lead, as every subsequent game instead cast a gormless adventure man for its lead instead; of any real sin that PSIII committed, its gravest is that instead of starring one such youth it featured seven. Women started dying off to provide audience shock and development to the men who survived them. Costuming turned from pretty and practical to high-leg leotards for all the most central women in the casts. These are real trajectories and regressions that start from early on, but the games survived through acts of omission as the stories largely weren't verbal and their focus on characterization infrequent. PSIV up-ends this functional armistice and finds itself smack-dab in the middle of a path of least resistance common zeitgeist tonality that reminds one of any given comedy OVA of its time, with amped-up comic relief and a pervasive sexism, as well as a harmful conflation of the two. You see the former in the sweat drop emoting that turns up throughout the cast's interactions, or running gags like Alys extorting Hahn for increasingly high amounts of pay for her services; Raja's existence as a pun-slinging party member is as much a signifier of the writing voice as anything. For the latter, the examples are so many that I'd just as well point a few out:
- in the starting town, you can "walk in on" an academy student undressing herself, with her yelling for you to get out of her room. They drew an unique sprite for her and everything.
- the Motavian village elder who acts as an information broker asks Chaz what he's there for, and you have to pick the option to inquire about Alys's measurements to provoke a reaction out of her to "comically" slug the elder across the face about it. It's a mandatory, main story scene.
- the Hunter HQ town has a bar with a DQ/FFIV-style burlesque stage show, presented with ass-shaking dancers
- Demi the android child finds a hardware upgrade and asks for Chaz to turn around for its installation, with him acting dumbfounded and Rika pressing him to just do it, on the wavelength with Demi's modesty concerns as the screen fades out. When an identical scene happens later on with Wren installing a part into himself, no such song and dance occurs.
~~~
Maybe I'll extend my play of the series to its spin-offs someday. Online looks great!
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I'll have to try this retranslation patch of III one of these days, then, it seems. The plot and writing is so straightforward in the official English release as to be pretty dull, even beyond just "Wren is in the cave to the west"-style directions, for example. The patch you linked has spell names I recognize, at least, so that's better than the one I tried before which had weird spell names, iirc. Actually, after finishing typing that last sentence, I downloaded the patch and put it on my flash cart, and right out of the gate it's very different. The opening Star Wars-style text crawl is entirely about Layans and Orakians, and how the war they fought reduced a spacefaring world to a medieval one, and that's your setup. No hint at Dark Force like in the original text crawl. Fascinating! I think I'll try for the other two endings via this patch in between my replays of the FF7Rs.
Regarding Phantasy Star IV... It is noticeably dumber than the prior games. There are jokes and references the first three games didn't make as you say - absolutely fair to be turned away by that juvenile sexist crap. I will say I prefer the world map design of IV to something like III, which is sprawling, especially considering some of the dungeons you can get lost (and killed) in. Although this is probably made worse than I'd otherwise feel about it by the sky high encounter rate - frequently going one or two steps before the next battle starts. As always the ridiculously fast battles are nice, though. It's very odd! What I appreciate about IV is the overworld design and the comic book style cutscene presentation, as well as being just a big old series fanservice loredump referencefest (I am, sadly, very susceptible to loving that sort of thing, like the lowest of low nerds lmao). IV is also quite easy compared to the first three games - it's not entirely toothless, but at no point do you feel like you're in danger of running out of resources in a dungeon, like you do quite often in the first three games. My big complaint about IV designwise is that there should be more sidequests at the Hunter's Guild to flesh out the world a bit more. Heck, maybe a few more optional dungeons would be nice, too.
As I sit here ruminating on your post, Peklo, and the past few months of me just mainlining the main series and a bunch of the side games (well, two, so far, PSO and PS0, although I have got to sit down and play PSO Ep III one of these days, I never have), I'm unsure how I'd rank the games. Right now, as of this post, it's probably I > II > IV > III, stressing that I like them all a good deal, even III in it's compromised officially released English form... I am just so utterly charmed by everything going on in II that I just look back on it so fondly, even with it's BONKERS dungeon designs. And my recent playthrough of II was a delight, to be frank (frickin Skure Spaceport aside. I hate that place, and it's nowhere near as complex or dangerous as the other Dezo dungeons lmao).
---
Phantasy Star Zero, an otherwise great game with fun mechanics if you like frictionless action RPGs, does have some of the gross stuff IV does with women, particularly the cherub/child-like Sarisa, who has to deal with two quests (one main quest, one optional) where various references to the octopus boss grabbing her are, while tame compared to some of the stuff I've seen in other games with similar circumstances, are still present and gross. I do not recall anything like that in Phantasy Star Online, although I am completely incapable of being unbiased about that game, so perhaps my mind has forcibly forgotten any instances of grossness lol.
Regarding Phantasy Star IV... It is noticeably dumber than the prior games. There are jokes and references the first three games didn't make as you say - absolutely fair to be turned away by that juvenile sexist crap. I will say I prefer the world map design of IV to something like III, which is sprawling, especially considering some of the dungeons you can get lost (and killed) in. Although this is probably made worse than I'd otherwise feel about it by the sky high encounter rate - frequently going one or two steps before the next battle starts. As always the ridiculously fast battles are nice, though. It's very odd! What I appreciate about IV is the overworld design and the comic book style cutscene presentation, as well as being just a big old series fanservice loredump referencefest (I am, sadly, very susceptible to loving that sort of thing, like the lowest of low nerds lmao). IV is also quite easy compared to the first three games - it's not entirely toothless, but at no point do you feel like you're in danger of running out of resources in a dungeon, like you do quite often in the first three games. My big complaint about IV designwise is that there should be more sidequests at the Hunter's Guild to flesh out the world a bit more. Heck, maybe a few more optional dungeons would be nice, too.
As I sit here ruminating on your post, Peklo, and the past few months of me just mainlining the main series and a bunch of the side games (well, two, so far, PSO and PS0, although I have got to sit down and play PSO Ep III one of these days, I never have), I'm unsure how I'd rank the games. Right now, as of this post, it's probably I > II > IV > III, stressing that I like them all a good deal, even III in it's compromised officially released English form... I am just so utterly charmed by everything going on in II that I just look back on it so fondly, even with it's BONKERS dungeon designs. And my recent playthrough of II was a delight, to be frank (frickin Skure Spaceport aside. I hate that place, and it's nowhere near as complex or dangerous as the other Dezo dungeons lmao).
---
Phantasy Star Zero, an otherwise great game with fun mechanics if you like frictionless action RPGs, does have some of the gross stuff IV does with women, particularly the cherub/child-like Sarisa, who has to deal with two quests (one main quest, one optional) where various references to the octopus boss grabbing her are, while tame compared to some of the stuff I've seen in other games with similar circumstances, are still present and gross. I do not recall anything like that in Phantasy Star Online, although I am completely incapable of being unbiased about that game, so perhaps my mind has forcibly forgotten any instances of grossness lol.
They probably thought they could shove another reference in there by renaming her, I suppose (although just not making her name Alis with an i is odd, too). I'm actually glad to learn that she wasn't called that in Japan, as killing her off, if she is supposed to be an Alis analogue, always struck me as a sour note.
Renaming a lot of these characters is weird to me, anyway. Rolf? Eusis is kind of old fashioned sounding, I guess, but Rolf is just odd. Oh wait, they had to because of the four character name limit, didn't they? I guess Rolf is more interesting than like Greg or something lol
Renaming a lot of these characters is weird to me, anyway. Rolf? Eusis is kind of old fashioned sounding, I guess, but Rolf is just odd. Oh wait, they had to because of the four character name limit, didn't they? I guess Rolf is more interesting than like Greg or something lol
Reading and nodding along with Peklo's thoughts on PS1, I'm just so... impossibly sad that no other game in existence really matches it. Like, I'm playing some Japanese indie RPGs right now on Steam, and they're utterly charming, but they're clearly drawing on Wizardry and early FF, and I just really want to play an indie Phantasy Star that tries to capture some of that magic of the original, because I know I'm not alone among a generation of players who have been looking in vain for another hit of that sweet Algol cake for 40 years. It's why I Let's Played it, and why it remains my 2nd-favourite video game of all time.
I play a lot of old RPGs, with a notebook beside me, and honestly, a lot of games of the era do a pretty good job with the way that townsfolk parcel out information and challenge players to put it all together and use that to find their way forward, so we're reasonably well-served there, but nothing captures the vibe for PS right (even its own sequels being variably successful here), and absolutely nothing in the medium before or sense even gestures at that same magical cadence that Peklo describes above, navigating bureaucracy to find interlocking paths between planets and solving world navigation puzzles that dip in and out of dungeons. The march to find Hapsby, through caves and villages and over lava fields and narrow strips of beach, remains a singular experience all these years later, and one that I would dearly love to recapture.
I play a lot of old RPGs, with a notebook beside me, and honestly, a lot of games of the era do a pretty good job with the way that townsfolk parcel out information and challenge players to put it all together and use that to find their way forward, so we're reasonably well-served there, but nothing captures the vibe for PS right (even its own sequels being variably successful here), and absolutely nothing in the medium before or sense even gestures at that same magical cadence that Peklo describes above, navigating bureaucracy to find interlocking paths between planets and solving world navigation puzzles that dip in and out of dungeons. The march to find Hapsby, through caves and villages and over lava fields and narrow strips of beach, remains a singular experience all these years later, and one that I would dearly love to recapture.
Hell yeah we did.
Gotta eat your first food.
Random things from across the series while it's still fresh in my mind:
- I really do think the PSIII bestiary is special. The common aesthetic between the other three games is consistent enough, with them also being overachievers in terms of battle animation, but for raw oddities there's no topping this one. I love the big head, the giants jiggling their pecs to attack, the strange apparitions that seem to tearing apart at their seams. The rappy is a terrific mascot critter design too, which it was later repurposed as, but only this fluffy orb original really works for me. The Dark Force death cult at the end are downright frightening in battle.
- conditional battle BGM turns up in PSIII, and while the implementation isn't so elegant, the concept is novel. Maybe Kodama remembered it for Skies of Arcadia.
- another thing you can and should see Japanese PSIII do is feature dizzying parallax scrolling for all its battle backgrounds, interiors and solid ground included. It lends the game's visuals a very abstract quality, and the English localization sadly removed all of it except for sky tiles.
- I think the PSIII Wrenformer is one of the funniest and best implementations of an RPG vehicle in existence.
- I like that ability combos in PSIV aren't documented anywhere nor even hinted at that they exist; you may stumble upon them or not. None of the game is balanced with the expectation that you're using them, so they're just a fun discovery to make.
- PSIV reads more awkwardly in localization than at least personally recalled. Stilted conversational flow, missed context and so on turn up consistently in it. Raja's entire character comes off as a weird non-sequitur as his puns and grandpa wordplay were essentially just given up on in translation.
- it can't really be overstated how good PSIV audiovisually is. Every battle background and enemy appearance is an event, and the percussive elements in the soundtrack rival FFV; "Laughter" and "Ooze" naturally stand out.
- despite PSIV being the first and only game to feature native Motavian and Dezolian party members, I feel interactions with both peoples gradually grew less interesting as the series went on. PSI features them as hostile battle encounters, but you can communicate with them if you know how. A large segment of the Dezolian population actively lies and misdirects you on their planet, which conveys the tensions under Lassic's rule and Palman colonization of the star system. For PSII, Motavians are reduced to a thrash-scavenging minority population on their own planet, terraformed and artificially ordered for Palman habitation under Mother Brain; Dezolians remain but are increasingly isolated and so there's a language barrier the party needs to circumvent with a translation tool. PSIV has their representatives in more direct roles, but I felt like it was lacking a solid mechanical worldbuilding texture around them, inferred or otherwise.
It's that one, yeah. You can alternatively use this addendum that retains the more usual series tech terminology if you prefer. You can apply other things like restoring the parallax scrolling I mentioned too.
Whew, it worked, and my save file still works (not a huge deal since I'm only like ten minutes into the game, but still lol)!
Thank you @Peklo!
EDIT: Oh god it applied the walking speed increase, too. I'm moving around FAST, sheesh
EDIT 2: They got rid of the adaptive battle music, too. Each battle starts with the "oh no we're losing" music and after two playthroughs of III, that makes me nervous lmao (I'll get used to it)
Thank you @Peklo!
EDIT: Oh god it applied the walking speed increase, too. I'm moving around FAST, sheesh
EDIT 2: They got rid of the adaptive battle music, too. Each battle starts with the "oh no we're losing" music and after two playthroughs of III, that makes me nervous lmao (I'll get used to it)
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So, because I am stupid, I bought this (I say that because I have zero intention of ever playing this TTRPG, I don't know who I'd play it with and I don't really enjoy TTRPGs all that much anyway). I'd been waiting for a cheap used copy to show up somewhere, and I got one! There is some very interesting stuff in it. For example, literally the second you open the book, you are greeted with this on the first page:
There's actually a lot of Phantasy Star III art throughout. To whit:
Whoever drew this, they have definitely played the third game, because they got that guy's finger sticking out because anyone who has played that game knows wiggling that thing is how that guy attacks lmao
This, though, is the main reason I bought it:
These are the two pages summing up the lore of Phantasy Star I. I was completely unaware of Alis's backstory - she is a princess, apparently? Does anyone know if any of this lore shows up in the Japanese version of the game, or was this all retconned later? I know none of this ultimately matters, but I find it very interesting that the first Phantasy Star hero is basically Luke Skywalker, meaning the Star Wars influences on the game are even greater than I thought.
There are like twelve more pages of this that I've not read yet and don't really feel like posting because this post is ridiculous already, but the other games up through the Online era are summarized as well.
The sources for this information are listed in the appendix as: Toyo Ozaki's "Phantasy Star III Character Book," published 1999, "Phantasy Star Collection," an art book published in 1993, "The World of Phantasy Star," published in 1993 by Tokuma Shoten, three comic books/manga published in 1989 and 1990 called "Phantasy Star: Outside Saga," "Phantasy Star: Phantom Cities," and "Third," as well as a drama CD from 1995 called "Phantasy Star Memorial Drama CD: Sealed Memories," and an interview with Rieko Kodama from 2000 done by Gabriel Alves de Castilho. There's a bunch of Online related texts listed as well, but I've omitted those.
There's a lot of art throughout the book, too, depicting some scenes from the games like this one from what looks to be Phantasy Star II's ending:
Here's one for @Peklo:
I'll be poking around this thing for a while, I'm glad I didn't pay full price for it but it is pretty neat. The art styles are all over the place (some of it isn't great, and I am very suspicious if some of it is AI-generated, although there's like two dozen illustrators listed so maybe not), I have no idea if the game they built within is any good and I suspect I'll never be able to tell you, but I'm kinda into it. What a strange, strange product to come out with in the 2020s lol
The tweet doesn't say it, and I can't click through, but it looks like a 5e conversion—is it? Or a module for some other base RPG? Or its own thing?
@Paul le Fou Oh my bad, it seems to be based on D&D? There's Wizards of the Coast copyright info at the front of the book so I guess? In any case, it's this book. I was just quoting LBD_Nytetrayn's post about it, because he brought it to my attention originally.
It says "this work includes material taken from the System Reference Document 5.2.1 by Wizards of the Coast LLC", whatever that means, if that helps
It says "this work includes material taken from the System Reference Document 5.2.1 by Wizards of the Coast LLC", whatever that means, if that helps
Yeah, looks like a 5e conversion or even just a module. Just wondering 'cause it looked like one from the screenshots. Thanks!
Awesome!So, because I am stupid, I bought this (I say that because I have zero intention of ever playing this TTRPG, I don't know who I'd play it with and I don't really enjoy TTRPGs all that much anyway). I'd been waiting for a cheap used copy to show up somewhere, and I got one! There is some very interesting stuff in it. For example, literally the second you open the book, you are greeted with this on the first page:
There's actually a lot of Phantasy Star III art throughout. To whit:
Whoever drew this, they have definitely played the third game, because they got that guy's finger sticking out because anyone who has played that game knows wiggling that thing is how that guy attacks lmao
This, though, is the main reason I bought it:
These are the two pages summing up the lore of Phantasy Star I. I was completely unaware of Alis's backstory - she is a princess, apparently? Does anyone know if any of this lore shows up in the Japanese version of the game, or was this all retconned later? I know none of this ultimately matters, but I find it very interesting that the first Phantasy Star hero is basically Luke Skywalker, meaning the Star Wars influences on the game are even greater than I thought.
There are like twelve more pages of this that I've not read yet and don't really feel like posting because this post is ridiculous already, but the other games up through the Online era are summarized as well.
The sources for this information are listed in the appendix as: Toyo Ozaki's "Phantasy Star III Character Book," published 1999, "Phantasy Star Collection," an art book published in 1993, "The World of Phantasy Star," published in 1993 by Tokuma Shoten, three comic books/manga published in 1989 and 1990 called "Phantasy Star: Outside Saga," "Phantasy Star: Phantom Cities," and "Third," as well as a drama CD from 1995 called "Phantasy Star Memorial Drama CD: Sealed Memories," and an interview with Rieko Kodama from 2000 done by Gabriel Alves de Castilho. There's a bunch of Online related texts listed as well, but I've omitted those.
There's a lot of art throughout the book, too, depicting some scenes from the games like this one from what looks to be Phantasy Star II's ending:
Here's one for @Peklo:
I'll be poking around this thing for a while, I'm glad I didn't pay full price for it but it is pretty neat. The art styles are all over the place (some of it isn't great, and I am very suspicious if some of it is AI-generated, although there's like two dozen illustrators listed so maybe not), I have no idea if the game they built within is any good and I suspect I'll never be able to tell you, but I'm kinda into it. What a strange, strange product to come out with in the 2020s lol
Maybe I'll grab it someday if there's a good price. Just on the off chance...
I keep meaning to pick up some of those!