Yesterday, I decided to return to one of my other great white whales of gaming: Phantasy Star II. See, as a young'n that bought a Sega Genesis fairly shortly after it was released, I had a real need to try anything and everything that I could, so my brothers and I would rent games at least once a week. This was also right about the time that I had played Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy for the first time with my friends, so now that the threshold had been crossed, I was much more willing to give some games that I wouldn't have normally touched the time of day. Now that I had some context to what a traditional RPG was like, playing Phantasy Star II was like going from Metropolis to The Jazz Singer. Over the years I would rent it numerous times, not really getting too far into it (late fees are scary). When I eventually got heavily interested in collecting sometime in the late 90s, I wound up with a boxed copy and began to really give it the time it deserved. One day it all came crashing down; after about 2/3rds of the way through, the battery back up in the cartridge took a shit (which I actually thought of doing on said cartridge at the time) and erased my game and I haven't gone back to it since. A few days ago, I was speaking to a friend of mine on how a few years ago I had the Summer of Shining Force where I plowed through as many SF games as I could to get a perspective on the franchise. This summer will thusly be the Summer of Phantasy Star, so I started, essentially, where I stopped.
Graphically (which was what might have been one of the more important things to an 11 year-old), the extra visual touches like overlays in the dungeons and colors to the expansive over world were a sight to see, but the smooth animation of the enemies and characters during combat was striking. Really, the FF and DW, what animation there was ended up being minimal at best. In PS2, not only would enemies wind up before spitting shit at you, but you actually saw your purple anime coiffed female lead gear up and slash through that same enemy with a pair of claws. The sound, while not even that much to write home about then, was still above its predecessors in that Genesis synth beeping was very neat for the time, but not dynamic or particularly amazing. What gave the game its charm was its overall presentation. Characters have character portraits when and hold conversations with each other at certain places, and actual (albeit primitive) cut scenes where at important story beats making it, basically, the most immersive game since Ninja Gaiden where cut scenes where made common.
Somewhat also like Ninja Gaiden, then, is the fact that the game is hard as shit. Seriously, it's a kick you in the face and drive you to the nuthouse difficult. Enemies gang up on you pretty quickly after leaving the starting area of the game, forcing you to level constantly. This leveling also gets you used to saving your pennies because, like a gay bar in Detroit (don't ask), everything is expensive. When you want to upgrade your entire party's weapons and armor, get yourself a sixer and make some pizza rolls because you're not going anywhere for hours. The dungeons are particularly insidious: multileveled back tracking, pit traps, mostly useless treasure inside of them, mobs of difficult monsters out to get you, and little or no direction from NPCs as a guide mean that you need the drive of a marathon runner and Apollo Creed as your corner man to complete the game with any of your sanity left. At the time of release, the game came packaged with a walkthrough booklet that had maps of the entire game inside, but that didn't necessarily make life easier. The dungeons were so complex that without carefully planning where you were going ahead of time you were left to wander within them aimlessly for hours and, sure as shit, you were going to run out of valuable medical supplies if that was the initiative you were going to take.
But all of that stuff above doesn't hold a candle to the freakish slow pace of everything. Because the game was so well animated (at least, that's where I lay blame), the combat absolutely drags out. With a frame skipper or other form of emulation that spikes the speed of combat, PS2 can take a measly 10 hours instead of probably three times that. It crawls.
The biggest plus, though, is the setting and story. Really, Phantasy Star II is a bleak game. Ok, it's really fucking bleak. Follow me here, because here's the whole plot: The game takes place in the Algol star system (as all Phantasy Star games do) which consists of three planets, Palma, Dezolis, and Motavia. Your character, Rolf, is an young agent of the Motavian government that is haunted by recurring nightmares which happen to be the ending of Phantasy Star 1, which takes place an entire millennium beforehand. Anyway, it turns out that Motavia used to be a desert planet that was terraformed to lush pleasantness with the help of a massive computer called Mother Brain in the time between the two games. Bio monsters are starting to overrun this utopia, so Rolf is assigned by the government to find out what's what. He takes his adorable little half human, half bio monster companion, Nei, with him and it turns out, through a series of wacky, slapstick adventures (alright, that's bullshit, nothing is wacky or slapsticky in this game or, really, life) you find that the cause of the bio monster outbreak is a failed biological experiment called Neifirst that happens to be the evil half of your buddy Nei. Neifirst was so pissed off at humanity that she constructed all of the baddies in a bio systems lab and unleashed them throughout the world. Neifirst then proceeds to kill Nei for the rest of the game (which sucks). After the lab blows up, the monsters of the world are gone (which is good!), but are replaced by an army of robots bent on killing you specifically (which sucks) because Mother Brain branded you as a terrorist. Eventually, the robots catch you and throw you in an outer space penal colony so someone -or something- can use you as a patsy because the penal colony smashes into Palma (the setting of the first PS game, I might add) and blows up the planet. It gets better. After a space pirate saves your ass from jail, you decide to see what's poppin' on Dezolis only to find out that one of the original PS characters has been in some cryo-sleep for however long so he could wake up and tell you that Mother Brain was made for people to be lazy slobs for the rest of eternity and now that it's getting mucked with, it's only a matter of time before the star system sinks into its own despair-fueled destruction. So, being the swell guy that you are, you find your way into the cosmic work station called Noah (where Mother Brain is busy being bad) only to find that a cosmic evil had control of things there which you don't find to be much of a surprise, but it's the same cosmic evil that had control of things in the first game (always back to that) and that it had been biding its time for a thousand years. The big twist is after you do away with that thing, you fight it out with Mother Brain only to ultimately find that an army of Earthlings -yes, the last survivors of our planet- are living on that space station and have constructed Mother Brain because they were slowly taking over the planet anyway. The game ends on kind of a cliffhanger when the whole cast decides to fight all of these guys to the death. The last bit of text in the entire game? "I wonder what the people will see in the final days." Dude. BLEAK.
When you're a kid, stuff like that stays with you. Sure, I didn't finish the game when I was young, but the oppressive murk that hovered over you during your entire journey was obvious to me even then. More so now that I've finally overcome the game, the ending is just plain dark. Still, I have to appreciate that because, especially for the time, video games didn't tell stories like that. They were fun filled treks through mushroom kingdoms and green hilled zones. Somehow, and I'm even more amazed at this accomplishment almost 20 years later, Ps2 found a way to masterfully add gravity to most of its scenarios and situations. This is especially punctuated by the fact that there are only 3 (well, technically 4, but you're supposed to lose one) boss fights in the entire game. When you duke it out with Neifirst, you know that big shit is happening that's going to change the direction of this game, and you're right.
Before recently, Phantasy Star 2 was regarded as something of a real collectible. As one of the real standouts of the early Genesis catalogue, people would search far and wide for it, especially boxed and complete with the afore mentioned strategy guide. I know that when I obtained the game a little over 10 years ago it was going for a hefty amount on the secondary market (though, not as much as, say, M.U.S.H.A.). These days, it's pretty readily available through the Wii's Virtual Console (along with Phantasy Star IV, a superlative game), as well as Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection (along with the rest of the series) for Playstation 3/ XBox 360. It was also released as part of the Phantasy Star Collection for the Japanese Saturn and the GBA in the US, as well as a Dreamcast compilation. With all of these other versions easily obtainable, an original cartridge copy can be obtained pretty cheaply, even though prices on eBay fluctuate wildly. The legacy of the PS2 is really something, though, as it was a seminal step forward in early console RPGs.
To be totally fair, I went back and finished this game because of sentimental value. Someone curious about entries into the genre of yesteryear are going to be put off by its somewhat arcane menu navigating, lousy English translation, and the sheer force of will that necessary in completing it, so it's tough to recommend it to the average person. Still, I sleep a little easier now that I finally put it to rest. Curiously, Sega of Japan had released a remake of the game (along with a remake of PS1) for the Playstation 2 that never materialized in North America under the Sega Ages collection. A shame it didn't end up here, but them's the berries.
Next up on the Summer of Phantasy Star will be PSIV, the most direct sequel. I find that I'll finally force myself to play through III after that knowing that it has little bearing in the overall scheme of the Algol star system. Afterward, I'll blast through the original PS as fast as I can. While I did play PS1 and PS3 before, it was only in passing and didn't have as profound an effect on me since I played them nearly a decade after they were released and I was bit too old to remember them fondly from my youth. Stay tuned, suckas.
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