RPG Diary

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.