Phantasy Star II is a game I have mixed feelings about. It's very much a game of its time: the mechanics are clunky and the game is extremely grind-heavy. I gave it a try vanilla before installing any QoL mods, but very quickly relented and installed mods that doubled the walking speed and quadrupled the experience and money gain. It didn't eliminate the grind, but it made it bearable.
Phantasy Star II is very clearly an evolution of its predecessor: the infamous dungeons are maze-like in a way that hearkens back to the first-person Wizardry style that Phantasy Star used. The use of specific characters over class-based archetypes continues: all of the party members are predetermined characters with names and defined progressions, a rarity in a genre that at the time typically had custom-built parties based on existing class archetypes. For context, Phantasy Star II released a year after Dragon Quest III and a couple months after Final Fantasy II.
The game is, for lack of a better term, janky as hell. The screen will only scroll when you move near the edge of it, rather than trying to keep the characters centered. The developers wanted a neat parallax scrolling effect but ended up with a foreground layer that almost obscures the characters. As before, none of the items or techniques have any descriptions or even indicate who can equip them; the game shipped with a walkthrough in the US for good reason. Party members have personal inventories and no good way to organize items besides just handing them to each other. Recruiting party members doesn't happen in the story per se: whenever you reach a new town, someone new has invited themselves into Rolf's house, so you need to teleport back to town and greet them in your living room. Two-thirds of the way through the game, the player needs to speak to the natives of the planet Dezolis, who do not speak the same language as the party — in order to speak to them, you need to find and wear a specific magic hat. Sorry, I mean mogic hat, because the magic hats that you'll find everywhere are forgeries and make the locals pissed off.
Special mention must be made for the game's dungeons: these days, the dungeons are what the game is most known for. Maze-like is very much the correct term for them: they are designed to take you down the wrong path many, many times. The environs don't have enough variety to be able to easily tell where you are, making it very easy to get lost. Finding the critical path can generally be solved by asking "what would be the longest walk that the devs would have me do here?" Having a map is vital to the point of necessity: with a map, you can generally plan ahead for where you're going and it's not that bad. Without a map, unless you're drawing one on the go (on some nice graph paper, I hope) you will either need a galaxy brain memory, the persistence of a child who is only getting one video game for the whole summer, or some damn good luck.
I want to meet the person who designed these dungeons and shake their hand.
Phantasy Star II is very much more ambitious than its predecessor, especially when its time constraints are taken into account. The game was developed in only six months; the dungeons were given two and a half months — all this on a new system, no less! The mandate from on high was to develop the game on the new Genesis, while the first title was on the Master System. Within those six months, the combat system and visuals were given huge upgrades in comparison to the original. The story is expanded, with actual plot twists (and one hell of a cliffhanger ending). The long grind and dungeons unfortunately distract from the story, but what's there is pretty solid for the era.
The story mostly takes place on Motavia, the desert planet from Phantasy Star. Now a lush and verdant space, the planet has been completely terraformed thanks to the Mother Brain, which manages all aspects of life and allows the human inhabitants to live lives of leisure. However, not all is well: strange bio-monsters have been appearing more and more lately, to the point where some towns have been destroyed due to the chaos. It's up to intrepid investigator Rolf and his roommate, the enigmatic half-biomonster Nei, to figure out what's wrong.
The first Phantasy Star game mixed both fantasy and sci-fi: magic was very much present, and while you're evading the secret police to get revenge on the planetary governor you're also looking for the mirror shield that Perseus used to slay Medusa. Phantasy Star II eschews the fantasy elements in favor of hard sci-fi: they're not just monsters, they're biomonsters. For a solid third of the game the only enemies are robots. Magic is gone, in favor of "techniques". Dead party members are no longer revived at a church: they're cloned at a clone lab. That last point threw me for a loop at how incredibly fucked it is: by about five hours in, not a single party member was left that wasn't a clone.
The combat of Phantasy Star II is interesting: having played the first, second, and fourth entries, the developers seem keen to provide ways to automate combat. In the first game, there was no way to target specific enemies, so the choice was largely to pick between Fight, Item, and Magic. In Phantasy Star II, the party will run on autopilot: you can give specific commands to specific party members, which they will then repeat on autopilot until you interrupt again to give fresh orders. You cannot target specific enemies, but instead you can only target enemies of the same type. That is, you can't target Goblin A, but you can target all Goblins on screen and the party members will randomly select which specific Goblin gets hit. Different weapon types have different characteristics: guns will do a fixed amount of damage, ignoring both enemy defense and party attack; boomerangs will target all enemies in a given group. Some weapons and equipment can be used as items to replicate the effects of spells — for the last third of the game I entirely eschewed using healing techniques in favor of having party members just infinitely use the items in their inventory that cast the mid-level healing technique. Hell, I stopped equipping two characters with weapons at all and had them only use either techniques or items. Why, yes, the healer does have the highest defense in the group by carrying two shields, why do you ask?
As always, the Phantasy Star games have phenomenal soundtracks. While I personally preferred the smooth FM samples of the first game, Phantasy Star II has some extremely catchy tunes. The upbeat music doesn't exactly match the dark tone of the story, but it provides its own sense of adventure. Of special note are the intro theme, Step Up, Rise or Fall, Advanced Position, Secret Ways, Silent Zone, and the rarely-heard boss theme Death Place. Shout-out to the guy who uploaded the game's soundtrack to youtube with massive spoilers in the thumbnails.
At the end of the day, Phantasy Star II is a game that is deeply frustrating but that I couldn't put down until I finished it. I think any RPG fan should experience it once — maybe not finish it, but at least experience it.
Phantasy Star II is very clearly an evolution of its predecessor: the infamous dungeons are maze-like in a way that hearkens back to the first-person Wizardry style that Phantasy Star used. The use of specific characters over class-based archetypes continues: all of the party members are predetermined characters with names and defined progressions, a rarity in a genre that at the time typically had custom-built parties based on existing class archetypes. For context, Phantasy Star II released a year after Dragon Quest III and a couple months after Final Fantasy II.
The game is, for lack of a better term, janky as hell. The screen will only scroll when you move near the edge of it, rather than trying to keep the characters centered. The developers wanted a neat parallax scrolling effect but ended up with a foreground layer that almost obscures the characters. As before, none of the items or techniques have any descriptions or even indicate who can equip them; the game shipped with a walkthrough in the US for good reason. Party members have personal inventories and no good way to organize items besides just handing them to each other. Recruiting party members doesn't happen in the story per se: whenever you reach a new town, someone new has invited themselves into Rolf's house, so you need to teleport back to town and greet them in your living room. Two-thirds of the way through the game, the player needs to speak to the natives of the planet Dezolis, who do not speak the same language as the party — in order to speak to them, you need to find and wear a specific magic hat. Sorry, I mean mogic hat, because the magic hats that you'll find everywhere are forgeries and make the locals pissed off.
Special mention must be made for the game's dungeons: these days, the dungeons are what the game is most known for. Maze-like is very much the correct term for them: they are designed to take you down the wrong path many, many times. The environs don't have enough variety to be able to easily tell where you are, making it very easy to get lost. Finding the critical path can generally be solved by asking "what would be the longest walk that the devs would have me do here?" Having a map is vital to the point of necessity: with a map, you can generally plan ahead for where you're going and it's not that bad. Without a map, unless you're drawing one on the go (on some nice graph paper, I hope) you will either need a galaxy brain memory, the persistence of a child who is only getting one video game for the whole summer, or some damn good luck.
I want to meet the person who designed these dungeons and shake their hand.
Phantasy Star II is very much more ambitious than its predecessor, especially when its time constraints are taken into account. The game was developed in only six months; the dungeons were given two and a half months — all this on a new system, no less! The mandate from on high was to develop the game on the new Genesis, while the first title was on the Master System. Within those six months, the combat system and visuals were given huge upgrades in comparison to the original. The story is expanded, with actual plot twists (and one hell of a cliffhanger ending). The long grind and dungeons unfortunately distract from the story, but what's there is pretty solid for the era.
The story mostly takes place on Motavia, the desert planet from Phantasy Star. Now a lush and verdant space, the planet has been completely terraformed thanks to the Mother Brain, which manages all aspects of life and allows the human inhabitants to live lives of leisure. However, not all is well: strange bio-monsters have been appearing more and more lately, to the point where some towns have been destroyed due to the chaos. It's up to intrepid investigator Rolf and his roommate, the enigmatic half-biomonster Nei, to figure out what's wrong.
The first Phantasy Star game mixed both fantasy and sci-fi: magic was very much present, and while you're evading the secret police to get revenge on the planetary governor you're also looking for the mirror shield that Perseus used to slay Medusa. Phantasy Star II eschews the fantasy elements in favor of hard sci-fi: they're not just monsters, they're biomonsters. For a solid third of the game the only enemies are robots. Magic is gone, in favor of "techniques". Dead party members are no longer revived at a church: they're cloned at a clone lab. That last point threw me for a loop at how incredibly fucked it is: by about five hours in, not a single party member was left that wasn't a clone.
The combat of Phantasy Star II is interesting: having played the first, second, and fourth entries, the developers seem keen to provide ways to automate combat. In the first game, there was no way to target specific enemies, so the choice was largely to pick between Fight, Item, and Magic. In Phantasy Star II, the party will run on autopilot: you can give specific commands to specific party members, which they will then repeat on autopilot until you interrupt again to give fresh orders. You cannot target specific enemies, but instead you can only target enemies of the same type. That is, you can't target Goblin A, but you can target all Goblins on screen and the party members will randomly select which specific Goblin gets hit. Different weapon types have different characteristics: guns will do a fixed amount of damage, ignoring both enemy defense and party attack; boomerangs will target all enemies in a given group. Some weapons and equipment can be used as items to replicate the effects of spells — for the last third of the game I entirely eschewed using healing techniques in favor of having party members just infinitely use the items in their inventory that cast the mid-level healing technique. Hell, I stopped equipping two characters with weapons at all and had them only use either techniques or items. Why, yes, the healer does have the highest defense in the group by carrying two shields, why do you ask?
As always, the Phantasy Star games have phenomenal soundtracks. While I personally preferred the smooth FM samples of the first game, Phantasy Star II has some extremely catchy tunes. The upbeat music doesn't exactly match the dark tone of the story, but it provides its own sense of adventure. Of special note are the intro theme, Step Up, Rise or Fall, Advanced Position, Secret Ways, Silent Zone, and the rarely-heard boss theme Death Place. Shout-out to the guy who uploaded the game's soundtrack to youtube with massive spoilers in the thumbnails.
At the end of the day, Phantasy Star II is a game that is deeply frustrating but that I couldn't put down until I finished it. I think any RPG fan should experience it once — maybe not finish it, but at least experience it.