Occasionally I have to write a review for a much beloved game from people's childhood that I know certain people aren't going to like. This is one such review. Maybe it's because I had never played it before so it held absolutely no nostalgia for me, but I did not enjoy Phantasy Star.
After my last game I decided I wanted an old school RPG, I looked around and couldn't see one that caught my eye. Then I remembered the Ultimate Sega Collection on Xbox 360, I remembered that it had the Phantasy Star series on it. That's great! I loved Phantasy Star III or IV (I couldn't remember which) so I had found my game. Then I got thinking, maybe I should start the series on the first game. So after the hassle of unlocking Phantasy Star I started playing.
It started off good enough, your kind of standard RPG fare. I decided to get some levels under me at the very start in hopes that it would cut down on my grinding later. It made sense at the time, now I look at it as I was grinding early so I wouldn't have to grind later. That's neither her nor there though, I was having fun for the first few hours... and then things started to go downhill, and the farther I got into the game more we kept going down.
I'm just going to start off with my complaints.
If there's more than one enemy you can't choose who to target. You may think that this sounds petty, but let me tell you, it gets really annoying. Here's an example. I got into a battle with four bad guys who were at or a little above my level, but shouldn't have been much of a problem. They had about 58 health each and my guys seemed to be attacking one of them and eventually whittled down his health to 3. Then they started attacking the other guys. The guy with the 3 health was the last one to die. Instead of killing him he got an extra hit in every round. If I could choose who I wanted to target the one with the 3 health would have been the first to die. This didn't happen a lot, but enough that it got annoying.
Attack power can seem wildly inconsistent at times. Towards the end of the game I had to back track to one of the starting zones where I happened upon a red slime. No problem. Odin attacks and causes... 4 damage. At this point in time all of my characters were about 6-7 levels from the cap of 30 and had the best gear in the game, and Odin couldn't manage to kill something with 12 health in one shot. It was like this through the entire game, no matter what level I was or what gear I had I would occasionally throw out an incredibly weak hit. Again, not a super huge deal breaker but it would get rather annoying at times.
Random battles tend to cluster. Phantasy Star uses the random battle system, that means you can't see the enemies and could get attacked at any time. Occasionally you would run into fight after fight after fight. One times I was trying to get to a town and in eight steps I had five battles. The random battles seem to cluster and when they do, they do it bad. It's not that you run into two battles it's that occasionally you take a step, fight a battle, take another step, fight another battle, and it will keep going. This is especially a problem when you're in a dungeon and fight four battles in the six steps before the boss.
Low level battles, huge damage. After every battle you get a chest, you then can open it and receive the gold and perhaps other items inside. There's a flipside however, you see these chests can be booby trapped as well. And holy hell can they be annoying. I don't know how many times I would fight a battle that I could kill all of the enemies in one round only to have the chest be booby trapped taking sometimes 60 health off of all my characters. It wouldn't be so bad if...
Healing in this game sucks. You have three ways of healing yourself: magic, food, or hospitals. While this doesn't sound bad, trust me, it is... especially farther into the game. Hospitals aren't bad, they're just kind of out of the way. They're only in towns, which would be fine if the other modes of healing worked a little better. With food you have your choice of Cola or a Burger. The Cola heals 10 health and the Burger heals 40. So essentially Cola is useless even fairly early in the game, and 40 health is nice but occasionally not enough. So then you have to carry a ton of them, only problem is that you can only carry so many items and towards the end of the game you've stockpiled a TON of items that you have to carry and can't get rid of, so that really cuts down on Burger space. Magic works the best, you have three characters who can heal. Your main character has a spell that will heal 20 points and two other characters have a spell that heals 80 points. Which is great except for...
You don't have enough magic points. Your main characters heal spell uses 2 magic points and the spell that heals 80 uses 6 magic points. Doesn't sound like a lot until you realize that you only have about 40 magic points... and you still have to use other magic. Having to seriously ration MP because you know that this is a huge dungeon and you're going to have to fight a boss at the end and you NEED your MP kind of sucks. Also? There's no way to replenish MP except by going to a hospital. Which basically makes healing and magic in this game kind of crappy.
There's no map. Now, I'm not 100% sure if this is true. There's a chance that the original copy of the game on the Sega Master System came with a map. Let's hope so because without a map you will wander around hopelessly lost. No one in this game gives you directions, apparently you're just supposed to know where to go... well let me tell you, I for one didn't. Which is especially annoying in the...
Dungeons. Jesus Christ are the dungeons annoying. Basically they all look like this
The walls are all the same color and it's like a goddamn maze. The first dungeon I tried doing without a map, and I managed to wander around lost for about a half hour before I broke down and got a map. I used a map for every other dungeon and cave and still occasionally got lost. I honestly don't even want to know how long it would take you do this without a map.
There's a lot of back tracking. A lot. Now, this one I kind of actually understand. You only had so much memory on a Sega Master System so you couldn't have these huge sprawling maps... but holy hell did I constantly feel like I had to go back to the places I had visited before. After a while it just got repetitive.
My number one complaint is that there seems to be no direction. Look, I don't need a game to hold my hand all the way through but honestly I don't think this game ever mentioned what to do next. I would spend time just wandering around not sure where to go or what to do next. It would often get very frustrating.
Is Phantasy Star a bad game? Not really, it was occasionally rather fun and inventive. At the end of the day however I spent way too much time being frustrated or feeling like I wasn't sure what the hell I needed to do next. Towards the end I just wanted to get it over with, I wanted the game to be over and done with, and that's never a good sign. Hopefully when I get around to playing Phantasy Star 2 some of my complaints will be fixed.
Squid.
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