RPG Diary

EarthBound

The Mother series is famous for its humor and novelty, but I did not enjoy the first game due to its age. I am hopeful that I will enjoy the second game more, if for no other reason than it's not an 8-bit game! I think that I may have already played this game once 20+ years ago, but I do not remember anything about it.

Title	EarthBound (JP Mother 2 )
Year	1994 (US 1995 )
System	SNES
Developer	Ape HAL Laboratory
Publisher	Nintendo

The pacing and balance of EarthBound is significantly improved compared to the previous game. While I frequently needed to grind to survive the many random battles in Mother, I don't believe I did any dedicated grinding at all during my EarthBound. EarthBound is also much more forgiving as there are many opportunities to recover PP, which is essentially free healing. Finally, the random encounters are replaced by enemies on the map, similar to Chrono Trigger. While I found many of these encounters difficult to avoid, there seemed to be much less battles overall.

The story and presentation is very similar to Mother, but with upgraded 16-bit graphics. Again, the story follows the Dragon Quest II template of a long adventure to assemble the party, gather multiple MacGuffins, and solve whatever unrelated local problems you discover along the way. The main appeal of the game, once again, is the goofy humor and whimiscal tone. The adventure is filled with numerous bizarre events and items, and this really stands out from other RPGs.

However, if you are looking for an epic story against a memorable villain, then you will be disappointed. After the opening sequence, the antagonist is hardly ever mentioned again and is never seen until the final battle. Unfortunately, I personally much prefer an epic story over an adventure, so I was bored with EarthBound's story. The story really felt dated and minimal in comparison to games like Phantasy Star IV and Final Fantasy VI, both of which were released before EarthBound. Perhaps it's a translation issue, but I actually found the story and antagonist of the previous game more interesting than this one.

After completing a game, I add it to my overall enjoyment ranking which orders the games I've completed from those I most enjoyed to those I least enjoyed. EarthBound's story didn't really interest me, but the gameplay was smooth and painless, albeit fairly standard. I was more interested with the stories of both SNES Dragon Quests, but I enjoyed the lack of grinding over Dragon Quest III.

Mother / EarthBound Beginnings

Now that I've completed the mainline Phantasy Star series, I'm ready to start another classic RPG series. Since that was Sega's first-party series, I think I'll go with one of Nintendo's: Mother. I don't know much about the first game, but the series is well-known for it's goofy sense of humor and for its unconventional setting and story (for RPGs). This is another 8-bit game, so I have lower expectations for the gameplay (i.e. I'm prepared for grinding).

Title	Mother (US EarthBound Beginnings )
Year	1989 (US 2015 )
System	NES
Developer	Ape
Publisher	Nintendo

Well, it took me a long time to complete Mother, but it wasn't because the game was long. Mother starts off pretty slow with a lot of grinding (which is not uncommon for an 8-bit RPG), and I just lost interest in the game. I got distracted by other things and took a break from RPGs for 7 months. I picked it up again in May and finished it in a week.

In many ways, Mother plays like a parody of Dragon Quest II. The game starts off linear as you assemble the party, but becomes somewhat open-ended as you collect the MacGuffins scattered throughout the world. Along the way, you stumble through some towns with some local problem that is insingificant to the greater plot, but you still solve it out of the goodness of your heart anyway. The final dungeons are very painful to navigate, and it is best to run from the random battles as they can easily wipe out your party at a moment's notice. (The encounter rate in this game is excruciatingly high too!)

The main feature of Mother, in my opinion, is its quirky and whimsical atmosphere. Instead of the high fantasy setting with knights and wizards, there are goofy kids in suburbia with boomerangs and explosives. Instead of dragons or demons, there are wild animals, hippies, gang members, and trucks. The soundtrack is similarly unconventional, memorably including some early rock and roll style songs.

Unfortunately, I found the story too minimal to keep my interest, especially in the beginning. While there were some interesting lore dumps towards the end, it was too little too late for me. Mother was probably interesting and different at the time of its release, but has not aged well.

After completing a game, I add it to my overall enjoyment ranking which orders the games I've completed from those I most enjoyed to those I least enjoyed. I did not enjoy Mother, and found it fairly tedious to play. While it is mercifully much shorter than Dragon Quest VII, I found it much less interesting than Phantasy Star III.

Phantasy Star IV

To be honest, I haven't really enjoyed the Phantasy Star series so far. The first game had some charm to it, but the first three games were all very dated, grindy, and light on story. It seems like Phantasy Star IV is very popular online, so I'm hoping that I'll finally have a positive experience with the final mainline game.

Title	Phantasy Star IV
Year	1993 (US 1995 )
System	GEN
Developer	Sega
Publisher	Sega

While Phantasy Star II and Phantasy Star III were also Genesis games, Phantasy Star IV is the first one that finally feels like a 16-bit RPG. It's a huge improvement in every way — the menus are much less tedious to navigate, the story is way more fleshed out, and the graphics and music are both comparable to any of the more famous SNES games.

In many ways, Phantasy Star IV reminds me of Final Fantasy IV. It's a short and simple game with a heavy plot focus. I really liked how the manga-style panels added a cinematic quality to the cutscenes — they made the scenes much more vivid and engaging than any other 16-bit RPG that I've played. I was hooked immediately and I couldn't stop playing. I ended up binging through the entire game in only 7 days.

I found the story pretty interesting. The game has great pacing (I don't recall any significant grinding), and there are many plot twists along the way. It did get a little tired "killing" Dark Force three times though. I appreciated the various callbacks and references to the previous games in the series. (But the game also reviews the key events so it's not necessary to have played them.)

There isn't much that stands out in terms of gameplay. Like Final Fantasy IV, the party members change at fixed points in the story, and the character growth seemed fixed. The only relatively novel feature was the ability to define macros: an ordered list of actions for your party to execute in a single turn of combat. However, after a few hours I felt that this was more effort to maintain than the effort saved just manually selecting the desired actions (thanks to the cursor memory QoL improvement). And while macros are probably the only reliable way to use the powerful combo skills, they are not listed anywhere in the game, so I had no idea how to trigger most of them.

After completing a game, I add it to my overall enjoyment ranking which orders the games I've completed from those I most enjoyed to those I least enjoyed. I really enjoyed Phantasy Star IV, so the question this time is just how high it will go. Final Fantasy VI started stronger, but Phantasy Star IV was more consistently entertaining for me. However, I think I enjoyed the plot of Dragon Quest VIII just a bit more.

Phantasy Star III

While Phantasy Star II was technically a 16-bit game, it still felt like an 8-bit game to me — it was tedious and grindy. Will Phantasy Star III be more of the same, or will it evoke my nostalgia for 16-bit RPGs?

Title	Phantasy Star III
Year	1990 (US 1991 )
System	GEN
Developer	Sega
Publisher	Sega

As a 1990 game, it's unsurprising that Phantasy Star III still feels more like an 8-bit game — it was contemporary with Final Fantasy III and Dragon Quest IV. Still, the branching story with actually impactful choices is pretty impressive for its time. The story exceeded my (low) expectations, though it still has a weak and terse presentation (perhaps limited by the era).

Unfortunately, my strongest memory of this game will probably be the endless backtracking across the various maps. The game is quite frankly an endurance test as the plot will force you to travel literally corner to corner, often through the same tunnels and caves over and over again. While there are finally "vehicles" in the final act, they have various limitations that prevent them from improving the travel situation. Inexcusably, the escape and teleport spells from the previous game have also been removed, so I had to backtrack out of several dungeons as well. (Yes, there is a consumable for the escape spell, but I always forgot to buy them!)

Thankfully, Phantasy Star III is not as hard as the previous game, and I spent far less time on dedicated grinding. However, combat is also far less interesting, as spells are essentially useless this time around — every character should just attack, unless they need to heal. I guess this is both good and bad, as it made it easier to just zone out during the long boring hikes to previous locations.

I usually don't comment on soundtracks. While some RPGs do have a wonderful soundtrack, it never raises my opinion of the game — it's just a bonus. However, I found the Phantasy Star III soundtrack so annoying that it was actually detrimental to my experience.

After completing a game, I add it to my overall enjoyment ranking which orders the games I've completed from those I most enjoyed to those I least enjoyed. I'll put this ahead of the similarly backtracking-heavy Dragon Quest VII, because Phantasy Star III is magnitudes shorter in length. I think I had more fun playing Final Fantasy though.

Phantasy Star II

Phantasy Star was a great looking game, but did not have much plot. Did things change with the jump to the 16-bit Genesis?

Title	Phantasy Star II
Year	1989 (US 1990 )
System	GEN
Developer	Sega
Publisher	Sega

While Phantasy Star II is technically a 16-bit game, it still feels like an 8-bit game. This is not really that surprising given it's still a 1989 game — it was contemporary with Final Fantasy II and Dragon Quest III.

I can't talk about Phantasy Star II without mentioning how difficult and tedious it is. This game required a lot of grinding. New party members still join at level 1 and will get easily one-shot, so there is always a bit of grinding to ease them in. Perhaps it is fortunate then that character balance is so poor — half of the characters are barely worth using and there is definitely no reason to bother with leveling all of them. Still I will acknowledge this is the oldest RPG I've played with party member choices (excluding create-a-character parties).

In addition to the grinding, exploration in this game is just a huge pain. Phantasy Star II ditches the first-person dungeon crawling of the first game and replaces it with the typical overhead dungeon view (i.e. like the overworld). However, the dungeons in this game are the most confusing that I've ever seen. There are very few clear landmarks, and most dungeons are dense mazes that are difficult to navigate without a map. If that wasn't enough, every dungeon has annoying parallax effects in the foreground (pipes, clouds, etc) which can obstruct the view of doors or stairs. Even the basic sprites can be frustrating, as there are a few times you need to walk behind things and it may not be immediately obvious that the party can walk through there. I honestly think it's impossible to play this game without a guide. (Apparently one was packed in with the US release.)

Menus in the game are very tedious. Selecting an action will close the entire menu, forcing you to repeatedly navigate menus to repeat basic actions such as healing. It's also very tedious to issue commands to the party in battles. Battles are a real slog not only due to these menus, but also all the combat animations. Targetting is still fairly random, though it becomes less of an issue as the party accumulates multi-target attacks later on.

Finally, the plot was mostly a miss for me. The first half of the game is pretty dull and light on story, especially after considering how tedious the gameplay is. There are some interesting and unexpected moments starting about halfway, but I thought it failed to really tell a cohesive story. The ending is pretty thought provoking (especially for 1989!), but it kind of comes out of nowhere and wasn't really a satisfying conclusion to the game. I noticed the text is pretty terse throughout the game, so perhaps the translation was hampered by technical limitations. I was also a little disappointed that interplanet travel was mostly removed from this game because I thought that was fun and unique flavor in the first game. I also missed the little scenes when talking to NPCs.

Ironically, I thought Phantasy Star II was a step back from the first game in many ways. The first game has very minimal story, but it had a certain charm to it that I think is absent from this game. I really struggled to find a positive quality about this game.

After completing a game, I add it to my overall enjoyment ranking which orders the games I've completed from those I most enjoyed to those I least enjoyed. Phantasy Star II is undoubtedly the most difficult RPG I've ever played, and not in a pleasant way. It's perhaps even grindier than Dragon Quest, but at least there was some story to (barely) keep my interest. (But honestly, I couldn't wait for this one to be over.)