Phantasy Star Series

[Blinge]

Oh no... The Phantasy Centipede, Can't unsee!!

Edit: Y'know-

Probably the worst thing about this game is the search for the bubbles in the ocean. No NPC gives the slightest hint where it might be. They just talk about discoloured parts of ocean.. and something about being connected to the lake? It's not. Utterly unhelpful.

I stumbled across it accidentally once so all I remembered was " south from the island. " Obviously not close enough as I looped the planet without finding it, eating damage from random encounters the whole time.
Found it now, but that was pure luck.

[MX7]

Even if they're not stitched mouth-to-anus it's still pretty funny how politely the PS2 gang follow each other in a neatly regimented line in even the most hellish dungeons.

And again, could never fathom playing this without a guide. I don't think it's conspiracy theory territory to suggest Sega made the game deliberately oblique to encourage kids to buy the guide...

You've made me consider replaying Phantasy Star 3. I love that game in concept, and the soundtrack is extremely underrated but it really doesn't have enough going for it to actually warrant playing it lol.

I love how the core PS series is so wildly disparate:

1 - Extremely competent and technically marvellous Wizardry style bobber with a sci-fi theme
2 - Nightmare hellgrind of the highest order
3 - iconoclastic noble failure
4 - Hyper polished FF6 beater

It took Final Fantasy decades to evolve this much

I would have loved to have seen the PS series continue on the Saturn and take on FF7 et al. Would they have done pre-rendered backdrops and gnarled cyberpunk? Or something more like Panzer Dragoon saga with real-time environments? Or something hypercolourful and atypical, closer to Burning Rangers or something? Who knows

[FinalBaton]

I really need to give PSIII a go. Growing up I was exposed to it (friend had a Genesis and all the PS games) and something rubbed me the wrong way about the presentation. But now I recognize there's some weird charm to it, plus the concept is at least interesting.

Pretty cool to see your maps Burinju

[Blinge]

And again, could never fathom playing this without a guide. I don't think it's conspiracy theory territory to suggest Sega made the game deliberately oblique to encourage kids to buy the guide...

I mean, we can gush about the game all we want but that is a failure of game design no matter how I slice it.
Although maybe there are better hints given by NPCs in the original japanese text ?

You've made me consider replaying Phantasy Star 3. I love that game in concept, and the soundtrack is extremely underrated but it really doesn't have enough going for it to actually warrant playing it lol.

It's such a bizarre experience, honestly. There's a couple of utterly brilliant story beats let down by a lacklustre presentation. The soundtrack is middling, the battles kinda suck. The animated enemies with their pulsing-ness are gone from 2. It's too easy.

Hyper polished FF6 beater

there he goes again!

y'know i've tried to preach PS to a mostly FF crowd before, even 16bit fans, and I get nowhere.

Haha i bought a stylus for my shitty old Ipad that won't even give me grid paper to draw on.. the maps are a bit better now, but still there's not enough screen space to be effective really. Dezoris may force me back to paper.

[BIL]

PSIII's New Game intro gets me right in MUH FEELS Between the lines is a wistful sense of futility and impermanence in the face of an ambivalent universe. Some sad shit.

[vol.2]

After watching a little bit of that I'm reminded of the one thing that really did upset me about PS3; there aren't the character attack animations. That's like my favorite thing in PS2/4 how there are different animations for each character with different classes of weapons.

[Blinge]

Yes that's a good point, why didn't I think of that when trying to place what i don't like about 3's battles.

[MX7]

@Blinge — OK, FF6 is a better game, but it gets more than enough love already.

@BIL -- This is a perfect example of a bad game being inexplicably perfect. That opening is so plaintive and wistful and ugly. And the twist, when it comes is also perfect, though by that point I really didn't give a shit.

@Vol2 - - The battles are also hilariously janky, especially with those stuttery, constantly cycling soundtracks. I think they were going for something very arcadey and high impact, but 2/4 did it loads better. It is quite charmingly abrasive though.

[Blinge]

"Hugh.. this monster won't be appeased, we can barely walk, let alone fight..
You know what you have to do, I'm so sorry it's come to this. Please, Hugh.."

"You're gonna have to.. "

Spoiler

[FinalBaton]

Lmao


also MX7 I'm on your side I think PSIV rivals FFVI. and I'm a yuge FF mark.

[BryanM]

y'know i've tried to preach PS to a mostly FF crowd before, even 16bit fans, and I get nowhere.

yeah, it's a waste of effort trying to get people to try new things, I resisted giving Firefly a chance purely on my misanthropy for so long ("if so many humans like it, it must be terrible."). And here you are playing a game you've probably played at least three times already instead of giving a Zeboyd Games game or something a try. Just like me!

There was this line in this current Full Dive: Kusoge show berating the protagonist for being a franchise zombie: the thing's at its 23rd title, everything that was new and exciting about it in the first place is long gone now, you're just buying these things out of habit.... it was so savage, just made me think of the thousands of people online bitching about stuff like Pokemon and Diablo who still hand over fistfulls of cash for the things.

[Blinge]

Well said.

well i'm a stickler for series, like a lot of people. Not following them to the ends of the earth but instead having an (often unfulfilled) desire to play every one in said series. I once played every available Zelda to completion. It's no longer true since BotW came out.

btw the PSII maps have fallen off a fucking cliff. Doodling on my ipad.. it's too zoomed in, I can't fit a floor of Climatrol on one page. But I refuse to try a different method while i'm still in Climatrol.. gonna have to see this one to its bitter, awkward end.

[Blinge]

There's the abomination haha.

Obviously another problem for mapping is say you go up some stairs/chute, well - You don't know whereabouts on said floor you'll end up. Maybe you might re-enter that floor from a completely different position and not be able to situate the fresh mapping you're doing correctly; relative to the previous time you visited the floor.

Yep, looks like there's significant inaccuracies.

Spoiler

Edit: Well climatrol is over. thank fuck for that! NeiFirst fucked me up one time. Second time I actually had to do a strategy, as it were. hugh and shir alternating blocking and healing duties. hugh fucking useless. shirs knives did better.

[Blinge]

The new mapping style.

Spoiler

Now Hugh's techniques are useless against all the robuts, i guess he's the MP tank/healer.
It's a shame you can't change equip midbattle cause he does more damage with knives but now and then there's a tough robut that takes more dmg from his Acidshot.

Anna has replaced Nei.

Edit: actually, what the hell is going on here - like, what do the Dams do? What is the hoverjet sitting on?
The dams previous to the flooding.. are doing what? There's no water inside the lake at the beginning.

[vol.2]

That's a good point. Also, if the hover jets can't move on land, why the hell can they travel up the canals when the water has been stopped?


Honestly, the Dam areas were meant to be played with Kain. His character was specifically designed to fight the robots in the Dams. That's why his magic is all anti-robot magic and also why the Storm Gear (which only he can wear) is in the Dams. You can obviously do it anyway you want, but that's what you're "supposed" to do.

It's a shame you can't change equip midbattle

Even if you could, the battle system is so broken that the penalty to for doing so would be too high. Unless you could do it for free, but PS2 doesn't seem to roll that way.

[Mischief Maker]

If memory serves, the lake drying up at the start was a symptom of the malfunction at Climatrol.

After Neifirst dies, the opposite problem happens, the lake starts overflowing and the dams need to be opened.

I don't think the canals are empty before opening the dams, just very shallow.

[vol.2]

I don't think the canals are empty before opening the dams, just very shallow.

There's no evidence of that at all in the game.

[Blinge]

If memory serves, the lake drying up at the start was a symptom of the malfunction at Climatrol.

After Neifirst dies, the opposite problem happens, the lake starts overflowing and the dams need to be opened.

I don't think the canals are empty before opening the dams, just very shallow.

Makes sense


Ah vol2 ( SaVol ) I know I'm supposed to use Kain . My final party in my previous playthrough was rofl, rudo, kain, amy.
Ye he's great against robuts.
But this play I insist on what rpgclassics ranks as the worst chars. So anna and hugh and shir are here for the long haul, and the robots!

[Mischief Maker]

Wait, Anna one of the worst?!

She's one of my mains. The group damage of her slicers is invaluable.

[Blinge]

Yeah working off this list

http://shrines.rpgclassics.com/genesis/ ... anna.shtml

[Mischief Maker]

It's been years, but as I seem to recall her laser slashers have armor-piercing against robots.

The nice thing is the endgame monsters in the Dezo temples and Noah are vulnerable to both robot and biomutant techniques.

[Blinge]

Oh. is my whole playthrough a waste of time then.

[Sengoku Strider]

And again, could never fathom playing this without a guide. I don't think it's conspiracy theory territory to suggest Sega made the game deliberately oblique to encourage kids to buy the guide...

Outside Japan the game shipped with a 110 page guide, so it definitely wasn't that:



( The full pdf of which can be downloaded here: https://segaretro.org/File:Phantasy_Sta ... S_Book.pdf )

Obtuseness was a grand jrpg tradition, Japan has always loved Wizardry, and many of those early Falcom games were obtuse in their own ways. And the reality is Phantasy Star II wasn't ahead of its time, it just seemed that way outside Japan because our console scene was so far behind theirs in terms of rpg releases.

When Phantasy Star II hit the West in March 1990, it was only a few months after Dragon Quest 1 (Dragon Warrior) released for the '89 fall/holiday run. Final Fantasy 1 wasn't even out yet. To anyone who'd just splashed out the cash for a Genesis, Phantasy Star II seemed like it came from the Moon compared to the NES turn-based JRPG library, which at the time consisted of Dragon Warrior and...parts of Magic of Scheherezade. That was it. The Master System had only seen Miracle Warriors and the original Phantasy Star.

But when PStar II hit Japan a year earlier in March '89, Dragon Quest III had been out for a while, and IV was just on the horizon. Final Fantasy II had released the previous year. Dragon Slayer IV, Legend of Heroes, the genre had done a lot. PStar II's framework is basically Dragon Quest II, albeit with more characters.

I don't mean to hate on it though, the world it builds has a cool aesthetic that comes across as really unique despite how much it cribs from other franchises. It remained memorable where hundreds of jrpgs came & went.

[vol.2]

Oh. is my whole playthrough a waste of time then.

Nah. The slashers are good, but not super useful when you starting fighting stuff like this:

[Blinge]

It's quite tiresome but this architect's tool i'm using on my ipad "Draft Paper" is great for mapping. I'm getting better at using it too.

Red Dam is done. This Fireslasher is great. got the sword of Ang. Fire Rod doesn't seem very useful without Amy.

Edit: Making a brief montage video about my psII struggles does seem a bit redundant now as there isn't really a broken party of bad characters like shrinesrpgclassics led me to believe.

[Vanguard]

Oh. is my whole playthrough a waste of time then.

I only played PS2 once, but imo Shir and Hugh are the only clear cut bad characters. Use those two and anyone else except Rudo and you can fairly call it a bottom tier team.

[Sengoku Strider]

Fun fact: Did you know the telepipe/escapipe in Phantasy Star II are literally musical instruments - specifically ocarinas?



From the top:

Travel Ocarina (Telepipe)

Lost Ocarina (Escapipe, for when you're lost)

Shinobi Ocarina (Hidapipe)

On the Western cover of the game (same as the guide book image posted above), heavy metal Rolf isn't holding some exotic weapon, it's the Shinobi Ocarina. Which I guess explains why they can stand around all those monsters without them noticing.

I'd always figured the telepipe/escapipe was the same concept as the boom tube from DC Comics:

[Blinge]

Pfft what's Japan's obsession with Ocarinas. They don't sound great IRL.



This is how I deal with the problem of not knowing which segment of floor slots into where..

In Yellow Dam now.. going in the order of ascending difficulty that the woman in the library told me about. I hope she's correct.
In yellow though, the weakness of my party is becoming clear. Sonomech and Eyesore are a horrible combo.

Edit: I'm remembering the problem I have with PSII, I felt it way more on my first playthrough in like 2015 or whenever it was.
The fact that in I, there's a sense of wonder at having 3 planets to flit between, it kept things fresh.

In II the crushing atmosphere isn't really born out by the bright colours and music in towns.. and you're stuck on Mota for a long time without much variety. I mean.. the Dams are literally four dungeons in a row with nothing to break up the monotony.

[Mischief Maker]

You're about as far as I got in my no-map playthrough several years ago.

Though my quitting that challenge had more to do with a huge real-life interruption followed by upgrading to a DSiXL that isn't compatible with the GBA cart than the game itself. (My old DS suffered a broken hinge).

[vol.2]

I'm at the last dungeon now. Rolf, Anna, Kain, Amy.

I had very little trouble with the dams at the levels I was at, around 22 I believe. If Kain has the Storm Gear, that plus Anna let me smoke most of the robots, Rolf pulling cleanup. The strategy I used was give Anna Shune boots so she always goes first and have her use the color scarf for Agility boost. Then I have Amy use the Snow Crown to halve Tech damage. I didn't have one single death for the whole dam section.

On Dezo, I got lazy about leveling up, and I had a couple deaths and had to restart the dungeon (I don't clone). I'm still at around level 25, so I think I'll grind for awhile to get Rolf the top magic at level 35.