The first Phantasy Star on the Sega Master System was a surprise to me. Maybe it's a feeling I had that because it was the oldest one in the series on an earlier console it would be bad? It's dated in many ways but bad? Not even close. Impressive art, music and technical feats on the system made it a really fun little game. The second Phantasy Star title is equally a surprise to me but literally in the polar opposite direction. I assumed because it was on the megadrive it and a sequel it would be an improvement on everything laid before it.
I was wrong.
I actually kind of actively hate this game and I just didn't expect that going in. The story starts with an interesting premise. Set 1000 years after Phantasy Star the Algol star system is ruled by a super computer called Mother Brain that has made every decision for it's residents. Controlling everything to make their lives easy but when something goes wrong they are not equipped to deal with it. As an agent of the governor you are chosen to find out the cause behind a new wave of monsters appearing due to Mother Brain not taking action. I like the idea a lot of people becoming too dependent to act on their own though the game never feels like that in the actual world.
The 80s/90s anime sci-fi visual design is still quite striking. Characters have mixture of, knives, boomerangs, magic, laser swords and plasma pistols in a mixture of high fantasy and sci-fi. It's a great blend the game works well cohesively with the character designs of shoulder pads and big hair dos with obvious Star Wars influences. Whilst I like the art and atmosphere I did find it actually less impressive from a technical standpoint than it's predecessor. The dungeons losing their first person view into the more traditional top down exploration with that was disappointing though, but that's the least of the dungeons problems.
They. Are. Terrible.
Initially they aren't too bad but as the game progressed further and further my drive to continue lessened with my progress. Each dungeon is a giant sprawling maze filled with warp points zooming you from floor to floor. It's full of unrewarding dead ends and twists with no in game map to help you navigate the labyrinthine nightmares. It's no wonder on release the game came with a guide book with a walkthrough and maps, they knew. I followed an online walkthrough in the end because I couldn't see myself brute forcing through without one. At one point the guide describes a new dungeon you come to as: "The first floor has no less than 69 chutes leading up to the next floor (No, I'm not kidding. There really are 69 chutes. Stop laughing.)" and many later are even worse. In an interview in 1993 whilst promoting Phantasy Star IV the game designer Kotaro Hayashida discusses Phantasy Star II and when asked about the dungeons he is translated as stating:
"Another issue was related to the dungeons, which were created by a new employee. Because he was new, he put a ton of effort into the maps and kind of overdid it… the game became more about the complex dungeons than anything else. I think you really see that on the Dezolis dungeons. They were really well done, and when Chieko Aoki saw them she didn’t want all the new employee’s work to be for naught, so we ended up using those maps… albeit with some mixed feelings. They contributed to the latter half of the game being unbalanced"
I agree with this though think Phantasy Star II being generally unbalanced from the get go. Due to the huge twisting warping bland looking dungeons and encounters every two steps the amount of combat in the game is kind of staggering. The amount of experience you get from them though is pitiful to the point that grinding and battling over and over just to gain one level up that does little towards improving your overall strength made the experience of playing extremely tedious. (Fans have created a double money, double experience hack due to this) I was even using fast forward playing this on the Playstation 4 Megadrive collection so god only knows how it would have felt at the original speed. To compound matters the games combat feels slightly unwieldly but to it's credit also a little ahead of it's time in some ways. There is a button to fight where the party will just auto combat each turn. In between you can manually select orders to the team to make them use spells, items or defend but it means going through extra menu steps each time unnecessarily. The menus generally feel kind of poorly implemented and equipping items, giving them to each other or using healing spells outside of battle was irritating every time. Despite all of this I did continue on as I wanted to see all the game had to offer only to reach an ending that actually made me think all the effort flat wasn't worth it.
In the same interview mentioned above on shupcompilations they discuss the game originally being made on the Master System then changed and ported in an extremely short amount of time. It sounds like it was a miracle and hard work the game came out at all to which I respect them greatly. I'm glad I finally finished the first RPG released on the Sega Megadrive and such a pillar of gaming history I was missing. It doesn't change my opinion though that Phantasy Star II is actually pretty poorly designed and not actually very fun to play.
As a Sega fan, retro gaming fan and RPG fan, this hurt to write. Half a star for the art design though, especially the cover art. Hitoshi Yoneda's work is stunning.
+ I like the story premise.
+ The ingame art design and promotional artwork is wonderful with a blend of high fantast and tech heavy sci-fi.
- It has possible the worst dungeons of the nearly 150 JRPGs I have played. Extremely tedious. Every one made me want to quit.
- It's a huge grind but feels unrewarding with it.
- Story is generally unsatisfying.
I was wrong.
I actually kind of actively hate this game and I just didn't expect that going in. The story starts with an interesting premise. Set 1000 years after Phantasy Star the Algol star system is ruled by a super computer called Mother Brain that has made every decision for it's residents. Controlling everything to make their lives easy but when something goes wrong they are not equipped to deal with it. As an agent of the governor you are chosen to find out the cause behind a new wave of monsters appearing due to Mother Brain not taking action. I like the idea a lot of people becoming too dependent to act on their own though the game never feels like that in the actual world.
The 80s/90s anime sci-fi visual design is still quite striking. Characters have mixture of, knives, boomerangs, magic, laser swords and plasma pistols in a mixture of high fantasy and sci-fi. It's a great blend the game works well cohesively with the character designs of shoulder pads and big hair dos with obvious Star Wars influences. Whilst I like the art and atmosphere I did find it actually less impressive from a technical standpoint than it's predecessor. The dungeons losing their first person view into the more traditional top down exploration with that was disappointing though, but that's the least of the dungeons problems.
They. Are. Terrible.
Initially they aren't too bad but as the game progressed further and further my drive to continue lessened with my progress. Each dungeon is a giant sprawling maze filled with warp points zooming you from floor to floor. It's full of unrewarding dead ends and twists with no in game map to help you navigate the labyrinthine nightmares. It's no wonder on release the game came with a guide book with a walkthrough and maps, they knew. I followed an online walkthrough in the end because I couldn't see myself brute forcing through without one. At one point the guide describes a new dungeon you come to as: "The first floor has no less than 69 chutes leading up to the next floor (No, I'm not kidding. There really are 69 chutes. Stop laughing.)" and many later are even worse. In an interview in 1993 whilst promoting Phantasy Star IV the game designer Kotaro Hayashida discusses Phantasy Star II and when asked about the dungeons he is translated as stating:
"Another issue was related to the dungeons, which were created by a new employee. Because he was new, he put a ton of effort into the maps and kind of overdid it… the game became more about the complex dungeons than anything else. I think you really see that on the Dezolis dungeons. They were really well done, and when Chieko Aoki saw them she didn’t want all the new employee’s work to be for naught, so we ended up using those maps… albeit with some mixed feelings. They contributed to the latter half of the game being unbalanced"
I agree with this though think Phantasy Star II being generally unbalanced from the get go. Due to the huge twisting warping bland looking dungeons and encounters every two steps the amount of combat in the game is kind of staggering. The amount of experience you get from them though is pitiful to the point that grinding and battling over and over just to gain one level up that does little towards improving your overall strength made the experience of playing extremely tedious. (Fans have created a double money, double experience hack due to this) I was even using fast forward playing this on the Playstation 4 Megadrive collection so god only knows how it would have felt at the original speed. To compound matters the games combat feels slightly unwieldly but to it's credit also a little ahead of it's time in some ways. There is a button to fight where the party will just auto combat each turn. In between you can manually select orders to the team to make them use spells, items or defend but it means going through extra menu steps each time unnecessarily. The menus generally feel kind of poorly implemented and equipping items, giving them to each other or using healing spells outside of battle was irritating every time. Despite all of this I did continue on as I wanted to see all the game had to offer only to reach an ending that actually made me think all the effort flat wasn't worth it.
In the same interview mentioned above on shupcompilations they discuss the game originally being made on the Master System then changed and ported in an extremely short amount of time. It sounds like it was a miracle and hard work the game came out at all to which I respect them greatly. I'm glad I finally finished the first RPG released on the Sega Megadrive and such a pillar of gaming history I was missing. It doesn't change my opinion though that Phantasy Star II is actually pretty poorly designed and not actually very fun to play.
As a Sega fan, retro gaming fan and RPG fan, this hurt to write. Half a star for the art design though, especially the cover art. Hitoshi Yoneda's work is stunning.
+ I like the story premise.
+ The ingame art design and promotional artwork is wonderful with a blend of high fantast and tech heavy sci-fi.
- It has possible the worst dungeons of the nearly 150 JRPGs I have played. Extremely tedious. Every one made me want to quit.
- It's a huge grind but feels unrewarding with it.
- Story is generally unsatisfying.
10 Comments
That's really funny you don't usually get a smoking gun like that of "Yes, we know X was bad, here's why". You're right about that cover art, though, it's incredibly reminiscent of softcover sci-fi/fantasy novels of the 70s and 80s. I do sometimes feel like we lost a little something when graphics got so good that there's no real room for artistic interpretation anymore; nowadays the key art usually just looks like the game.
I agree with nearly everything here - on so many occasions I would end a random encounter to find myself in the middle of a 69-way intersection with completely no memory of which direction I was headed in. Made the much-maligned 'empty trap rooms' in FF2 look like child's play... I mean, yeah it's a pointless empty room that wastes your time with an extra couple of encounters, but you're not going to get lost from that!
don't agree that the dungeons themselves are bad, they just don't really compliment the rest of the game (and I think that's more or less what hayashida's saying too). as far as that style of graph paper mapping goes they're pretty good and achieve what they set out to do; getting lost is a feature not a bug
what's truly bad here is the encounter rate / grinding. if those were lessened it'd be a perfectly fine dungeon crawler, albeit one that's a lot more demanding than most jrpgs
what's truly bad here is the encounter rate / grinding. if those were lessened it'd be a perfectly fine dungeon crawler, albeit one that's a lot more demanding than most jrpgs
@Lemonstrade - I really wanted to emphasize a point XD
@cowboyjosh - Exactly! I've picked up old books like that and I love the aesthetic. Reminds me of old vinyl album covers too.
@iyellatcloud - absolutely. I had read your review of this a while back and was surprised by the score but I now fully understand why and agree with your points.
@curse - Hey mate, thanks for the input. If we were talking about Phantasy Star 1 I would agree! The dungeons in that game are perfect graph paper moments in design for discovering where to go by exploring. The combat design and first person view whilst grid traveling is a blast. Having large dungeons to explore can absolutely be a feature.
In Phantasy Star II? I didn't feel that at all, the complete opposite actually where every new dungeon made me sigh in exasperation before I even entered. They flat out aren't well designed. Sure you can find your way eventually but it's both boring and tedious in it's implementation when every dungeon is the same. The encounter rate, grinding and combat just makes it worse. Being lost isn't what I am criticising. The design of it is.
@cowboyjosh - Exactly! I've picked up old books like that and I love the aesthetic. Reminds me of old vinyl album covers too.
@iyellatcloud - absolutely. I had read your review of this a while back and was surprised by the score but I now fully understand why and agree with your points.
@curse - Hey mate, thanks for the input. If we were talking about Phantasy Star 1 I would agree! The dungeons in that game are perfect graph paper moments in design for discovering where to go by exploring. The combat design and first person view whilst grid traveling is a blast. Having large dungeons to explore can absolutely be a feature.
In Phantasy Star II? I didn't feel that at all, the complete opposite actually where every new dungeon made me sigh in exasperation before I even entered. They flat out aren't well designed. Sure you can find your way eventually but it's both boring and tedious in it's implementation when every dungeon is the same. The encounter rate, grinding and combat just makes it worse. Being lost isn't what I am criticising. The design of it is.
I can admit that my opinions are completely biased for the game, dungeons included. BUT! It's worth noting that probably one of the biggest reasons is that if you owned the original game, it came with a map guide that MOSTLY helped you figure out exactly where you were going and what items were on given floors, so you could pick out your most reasonable path and only stop for things you thought you might want on the way. Well, other than Uzo Island, since the exits weren't labeled on the map guide that came with the game so you were just guessing the whole way.
Congrats on getting through it, though! Don't worry, if you haven't played Phantasy Star III yet, you're going to be let down even more!
Congrats on getting through it, though! Don't worry, if you haven't played Phantasy Star III yet, you're going to be let down even more!
@Shenobi - I thought I had mentioned it in the review about the hint book but I think I forgot it! I totally understand people liking it, especially if you played it at the time rather than now.
I started III last night, I lasted an hour. I'd heard it was bad but it's truly shocking and made me think perhaps I treated PSII too harshly! lol.
I skipped it to IV which in the 3 hours I've played so far I am genuinely loving. It feels like it takes the good aspects of II but stacks it with quality of life improvements!
I started III last night, I lasted an hour. I'd heard it was bad but it's truly shocking and made me think perhaps I treated PSII too harshly! lol.
I skipped it to IV which in the 3 hours I've played so far I am genuinely loving. It feels like it takes the good aspects of II but stacks it with quality of life improvements!
Woah great work covering this. I honestly expected a higher or same score after the first installment. So im pretty surprised with your score on the 2nd. Understandable though! The interview included helped give context I feel. And worst dungeon of the nearly 150 jrpg you played says a lot. Damn now im wondering if I should dive in to experience this.
You mentioned the guide, I just apparently missed the line about it because I got caught up in reading about the interview stuff regarding the dungeon design (I knew nothing about this because I don't generally read up on the games I've played and design decisions about them)!
I really do think it's a case of having a very limited pool of game options back in the day to fill particular genres, so at least for me, the Phantasy Star series was a blessing in a time where your Genesis JRPG selections were...Phantasy Star games. :P Also, my kid brain just latched onto most games as being the next cool thing to play if I got my hands on them. I think I was 12 when I played PSII.
I really do think it's a case of having a very limited pool of game options back in the day to fill particular genres, so at least for me, the Phantasy Star series was a blessing in a time where your Genesis JRPG selections were...Phantasy Star games. :P Also, my kid brain just latched onto most games as being the next cool thing to play if I got my hands on them. I think I was 12 when I played PSII.
@Detectivefail - Thanks, to be honest I don't like being negative in reviews as I love gaming as a medium but this disappointed me. Perhaps self inflicted for building it up in my head for many years that it was a gem I missed.
@Shenobi - Totally understandable. For me back then it was Shining Force 1 & 2, Beyond Oasis and Landstalker. In my eyes all near perfect games as I played them over and over as a 10 year old lol. :D I never found a copy of Phantasy Star II - IV at the time sadly.
That website has some fascinating interviews with developers. I'd recommend a read through when you have time. There is also the Phantasy Star Cave that has a great article on parts of the intended story of PSII before it was changed. Really interesting, I love stuff like this!
@Shenobi - Totally understandable. For me back then it was Shining Force 1 & 2, Beyond Oasis and Landstalker. In my eyes all near perfect games as I played them over and over as a 10 year old lol. :D I never found a copy of Phantasy Star II - IV at the time sadly.
That website has some fascinating interviews with developers. I'd recommend a read through when you have time. There is also the Phantasy Star Cave that has a great article on parts of the intended story of PSII before it was changed. Really interesting, I love stuff like this!
Lemonstrade
21 days ago