| Ah, the days of the Genesis. That unique little system that seemed to fit oddly between the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Back in 1989 when Phantasy Star II was released the system's graphics and sound blew away the competition, but still it was scorned. Maybe fans of that chubby plumber felt threatened by our lovable hedgehog's attitude. Or maybe their heads were too full of thoughts of Dragonlords, rescuing princesses, and of Chaos to take notice of another little RPG series called Phantasy Star. |
| But wait a minute, who am I talking about? I was the one too busy with the NES and SNES to take notice of the Genesis. I was the one becoming enthralled with Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy. |
| Let's flash forward 12 years... 2001, Sega's cult following is diminishing, right along with their profits. Their next generation system Dreamcast, though arguably has graphics and sound just as good as the PlayStation 2, is not doing well enough to keep Sega out of the poorhouse. Blame it on poor marketing, blame it on a lack of variety of genres, say what you wish, but whatever happened, Sega had to stop production of the system, and to get rid of stock the prices were slashed. So there I was, in my typical wannabe game collector fashion, counting my cash hoping to have enough to get a brand new Dreamcast before I lost my chance. A couple weeks before doing so, a friend mentions something that catches my attention. "Huh? Smash Pack? 12 games for only 20 bucks more? Awesome." So my decision was made. Not only would I get a nice shiny new system, but I'd see what I was missing back in those long forgotten Genesis days. |  |
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After fumbling with a A/V cable and my VCR for about an hour and swearing like a sailor the whole time, I finally got the system to work, and I put in my Smash Pack disc and started to form some first impressions. I thought Columns seemed like an addicting, though very difficult, puzzle game, I liked the speed in Sonic the Hedgehog, Vectorman had excellent graphics, Shining Force seemed like great strategy RPG, and then there was Phantasy Star II... My initial impressions? The graphics are ugly, the music is irritating, and the battle system is completely lackluster. But the final opinions one forms after spending a lot of time on a game are most important, right? That's what this review is for. I'll keep in mind the time when this game was originally released, but time cannot always be an excuse. |
| So what exactly is Phantasy Star II about you may ask? Well, imagine every RPG cliche you see nowadays, and you got this game. Of course, I can't go spoiling the story here, but let's just say that after seeing Phantasy Star II, Square went a little nuts with Final Fantasy 4. But can you really hold starting a cliche against a game? I mean, back in 1989 the story of Phantasy Star II was unique. But, hey, I don't tend to get impressed by RPG stories anyway. ;) |  |
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For those of you who must know about the premise, Phantasy Star II is about a solar system consisting of three planets called Algo. On the planet Motavia lives an orphaned young man named Rolf (you actually have to name him yourself. I imagine in the Genesis manual they called him Rolf since that's what I see on the internet, but the Smash Pack manual sucks and doesn't include such information.) He works as an agent for the government, which at the beginning of the game sends him out to find out why the once peaceful and beautiful planet (controlled by a computer system called Mother Brain [how original *cough**cough*]) is now overrun with monsters and plagued with weather problems. Surprise, surprise, this is the main character. While leaving, his companion, a part human/part monster woman called Nei, forces him to take her along. They explore the planet travelling through tedious, er... treacherous dungeons, and they meet lots of senile old men and two sets of long-lost twins! Well, not really, but they do meet six other characters who will join the party. |
| The meat and potatoes of any video game is the gameplay, which is the battle system for RPGs. I could sum up my opinions on the Phantasy Star II battle system in one word: "Eh..." Okay, that's not really a word, but you get the idea. In Phantasy Star II you control as many as four characters at a time. You get the standard "attack", "magic", "item", "defend", and "run away" options. And how shocking, you have HP and the equivalent of MP, TP (toilet paper? Probably not, but it wouldn't be that inappropriate for this game *evil grin*). |
| What makes Phantasy Star II special, or rather, unspecial, is the way it's handled. Instead of giving each character orders, you give each a strategy, and as long as you don't press any buttons during the battles, they will continue to do those moves until the battle is over, or you die. And honestly, that's all you're going to be doing for 3/4 of the game. Set everyone to attack, and go get a cookie while the characters and monsters beat the snot out of each other. The majority of the battles in the game are easy enough that you won't actually have to heal during battle, nor do you need to use magic attacks. The game doesn't make you very inclined to either since you're given such little TP. |  |
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And then there's the fact that the magic spells are given such moronic names that it's impossible to figure them out unless you read up on them. I'm not saying that a developer should be uncreative and name a fire spell "fire", but come on, how about "blaze", "eruption", "flare", "explosion", "volcano", etc.? Something, anything that would indicate what the spell is. Instead you got to rack your brains trying to figure out what the heck "foi", "zan", "rimit", "nathu", "sak", etc. are. I still don't know what half of them do. "Res" heals, "rever" revives a character, "anti" heals poison, and "foi" attacks, but that's about the extent of my knowledge of the spells. Oh, sure, I've read a FAQ about them, but the names are so forgettable that none of it stuck in my memory. I do recall, though, both from experience and from the FAQ, that a lot of the spells only do things randomly to the enemies. Sometimes a spell will work, sometimes it won't. That doesn't help in the struggle to actually tell heads from tails out of all of them. |
| But, anyway, back to the battle system itself. Late in the game you start discovering weapons and armor that will cast magic when used as an item. Sounds promising but all it means is that you use those over and over instead of your weapons. Ho-hum. The battles do get a bit more challenging late in the game, so you have to heal during the battle itself quite a bit. Trust me, it doesn't help end the monotony. You'll find yourself have to switch between using your weapon, magic, and items constantly. This means stopping the action every turn hitting "order" for each character, selecting him or her, selecting something from their individual menu, and then selecting yet another thing if you're using magic or an item. Granted, RPGs are all about menus, but the ones in Phantasy Star II just take too long to mess around with. |  |
| Phantasy Star II suffers from the fact that you're either simply viewing the battles or spending so long fumbling with uninspired menus that you lose all feeling of excitement and action. Throw in random encounters that occur far too often, regular enemies that show up in the same bunches over and over, and an almost complete lack of boss battles, and you got a RPG that literally puts you to sleep. |
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Oh, yes, it can. Okay, okay, I'll try to be lenient on such an old game's graphics. It looks pretty dang good compared to its NES relatives Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy, but... the choice of colors and such at times is quite ugly. I guess the developers assumed the signs on shops weren't enough. They had to make them so bright red that they practically jump out of the screen and strangle your neck. The towns are also filled with buildings that you can't enter. Why? Other than to irritate the bejeezus out of the player, I don't know. Maybe the people in Phantasy Star II are smart enough to not let complete strangers enter their homes and fondle their stuff. That's a first. There are also lots of people with really good posture wandering around. It appears no one in Phantasy Star II is able to bend their limbs. The people are always willing to chat with you about how they don't have a job or that they love the smell of garbage. Be careful when talking to the senile old men, though. They startle easily, and then they'll shout at you. On the overworld there's lots of green and blue, oh, and there's some brownish-orange too. The second planet you visit in the game is covered with ice and snow. |
| Phantasy Star II wins the award for "most crap blocking your view in a video game". I'm sure this is how the development went (in Japanese, of course): Developer #1: Hey, dude, I figured out how to make layers! Developer #2: That's totally awesome! Developer #3: Let's put pipes and stuff in the high-tech places, so it's like you're looking down from the ceiling! Developer #2: Excellent, man! Unfortunately, the atmosphere soon turns to annoyance, when those pipes block your view of your characters, treasure chests, and the walls. The other layers in this game aren't much better. You want to see good layering? Check out Super Mario World, Super Castlevania IV, and Donkey Kong Country. Impressive and not a hindrance. Who would of thunk. |  |
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I take it back, if Phantasy Star II wins any award, it would be for "most palette swaps in a RPG ever". It's used on the enemies, dungeons, non-playable characters, planets, you name it. Believe it or not, even the recruitable characters have palette swaps! Hugh and Kain have the exact same sprite, as do Amy and Shir. Now that is laziness. They couldn't have made two more unique looking characters? I think the dungeons and enemies are even worse, though. When almost every dungeon in the game looks exactly the same... I'm not a happy player. There aren't even any real puzzles to make the dungeons unique. Basically in 90% of them you wander around in a huge maze, either wasting hours drawing a map or printing one out (the latter being the wiser and more entertaining choice, in my opinion. The dungeons are boring as it is; I don't recommend you make the game even more slow-paced. I believe the Genesis manual came with maps of all the dungeons, so it's not really cheating if that means anything to you.), and you have to find one or more items that allow you to enter the next palette-swapped dungeon. As far as enemies go... well, Phantasy Star II has the habit of throwing three or so palette-swapped enemies at you all at once in an area, rather than spreading them through the whole game. I can't say that I like this much. |
| Rotting bunnies are fun. At least that's what the Phantasy Star II developers thought. The monsters in Phantasy Star II manage to be boring, unintentionally hilarious, and downright frightening all at the same time. First, the boring part. Phantasy Star II's monsters can be divided into three groups. Bugs, robots, and animals. That's it. For one large chunk of the game you're fighting pretty much nothing but bug-themed monsters, then just robot monsters, then just animals and some other assorted freaks. Each monster has their own unique animation (sans palette-swapped monsters...). That's pretty impressive for the time, so got to give them that. |  |
| The monsters are supposed to be taken seriously, but some of them are just way too goofy looking. For example, in the ultimate epitome of laziness, they stuck an old monster on another old monster's head and called it a new monster. WTF? The robots are by far the strangest. The Metal Man and all its palette swaps looks more like a metal kangaroo with a nervous twitch. Last I looked, I didn't have a tail. Then there's another that looks like a duck-billed platypus shaking its head ferociously at you. Maybe I just have too big of an imagination. |
| On the second planet I had the ice cream scared out of me by those aforementioned rotting rabbits. Their animation shows their guts falling out of their bellies, and they scoop the intestines up and shove them back in. If that wasn't bad enough, the bunnies attack you with their guts. Sometimes you're poisoned by them too... Ewww... |
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Here's a tricky category for me to judge. Sound. It's well-known that the games on the Smash Pack are little more than ROMs playing on an emulator, and the sound wasn't emulated well at all. It even skips at times. But when looking purely at music composition, I'm not impressed. Most tracks are irritating. When someone was around while I was playing I would actually turn the sound down low because I was embarrassed by the annoying music. When others did hear it, they definitely didn't have anything positive to say about the music. In all honesty, some tracks aren't too bad, but those that I do somewhat like aren't fitting for their areas. |
| The sound effects are even worse than the music. Though they're great enemies to use for leveling up, I dreaded encounters with the Blasters because their shooting sound effect is so freakin' awful and much louder than the music. The sound your characters make when hit is just well... a sound. It doesn't have any sort of bad quality to it that would suggest injury and it doesn't sound like anything else. It just... is. That basically describes every sound effect. Pick a random sound, pick a random action, stick 'em together, boom, Phantasy Star II sound effects. |
| I can honestly say that I don't plan on ever replaying Phantasy Star II, and I'm the type of person who usually replays every game I own eventually. It just has nothing to offer to me. Unless I'm mistaken, there are no secret items, characters, places, or anything else to get in subsequent playthroughs. You never acquire any items after battle, and for the most part, there are none to be acquired in towns. As long as you return to Rolf's house every now and then to switch characters, you should get every recruitable character. Visit every town and scour every dungeon, and you'll get everything easily. Shir randomly steals from stores, but that's hardly what I'd call bonus or secret stuff. I also wouldn't play through the game again for the fun of it because quite simply it isn't fun to begin with. Phantasy Star II is like a fancy version of Dragon Warrior. You spend all your time fighting random battles to level up and acquire enough Meseta (money) to buy stronger equipment. |  |
| For someone who cut their teeth on RPGs with Phantasy Star II, this game probably brings back a lot of fond memories, but sometimes nostalgia can blind someone of quality. At times it can be fun to see the beginnings of video game genres, but these games are usually rather unrefined. This is the case for the RPG genre, which didn't truly become great until a couple years into the '90s (with a few exceptions). |
| For those who haven't play Phantasy Star II, I don't recommend you purchase the Smash Pack for this game. Get it for the classics on the collection that are actually good. If you really want another RPG for your Dreamcast, and you don't mind old graphics and sound, get the Smash Pack for Shining Force. It's by far the better of the two RPGs on the Smash Pack. Shining Force alone isn't worth paying 40 bucks for (the Smash Pack's MSRP), but well... that's another review. ;) |
