RPG Diary

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.)