Originally posted on Facebook on 27 December 2020
Woo. I've just beaten Phantasy Star II, a game I've been curious about for a very long time.
The first Phantasy Star game was one of my childhood favourite RPGs. But every time I tried the sequel, I would get lost in the first (or second?) dungeon and would never be able to make much progress. ...So I left it alone for a long time.
But after seeing that the game was included in the Mega Drive Classics on the Nintendo Switch, I really wanted to give it another shot.
First of all, Phantasy Star II is extremely difficult and obtuse, and without an online guide, there would be around four or five points in the progression where you'd have no idea where the heck to go next.
For example, there's a building in one of the towns that looks like all of the other generic buildings that can't be interacted with, but later on, it suddenly becomes a dungeon entrance with no visual change to indicate that.
And four of the later dungeons only appear on the overworld after a specific point, so if you did your exploring before then, you'd never have seen them and would be lost.
The dungeon layouts are all ridiculously complex mazes, filled with a crazy amount of dead ends, and random encounters with monsters every few steps. The dungeons are navigated by stepping on teleport pads that are scattered all over, making it extra hard to keep a mental map of what's going on.
It doesn't help that the screen doesn't actually scroll the view until you walk up very close to the edge, which means you won't notice dead end paths until you're halfway down them. And additionally, every dungeon has distracting foreground graphics that can mess with your head and obscure your perception of where the walls are.
Overall, it's a nightmare to traverse the dungeons unless you use online maps. And so of course, I did indeed use online maps, because it's just a painful experience trying to play without them.
Usually I like to explore my RPGs fresh and blind, playing by myself, and only looking up information once I've explored it by myself... but doing so in Phantasy Star II is just an exercise in losing your mind. For this game, the choice for me was to either use maps, or just give up again.
The dungeons being confusing is one thing, but the actual difficulty of the monster encounters is an entirely separate ordeal. When figuring out the mazes, every few steps your team is attacked by a group of monsters that will deal some real damage. You do get some healing spells, but there is no way to restore magic points without returning to town.
So very often, halfway through a dungeon, you'll need to just leave and go back to town to heal up.
Each dungeon usually takes multiple trips:
Follow the path to an objective, leave, save, heal up, follow the path to the next objective, leave, save, heal up. etc. It's very risky to try to get multiple things done in one trip.
It doesn't help that the combat sequences are all increeeedibly slow-paced as well. The enemies appear with a slow fade-in, and everyone's attack animations take their sweet time too. So not only does every interruption take up more of your time, but you'll also likely lose track of your place in the maze once the combat ends.
...For this, I'm just glad I played on the Mega Drive Classics version, because it includes a fast-forward button. ...and I had that fast-forward button held down for maybe 80% of my time in the game. If I had actually tried to play the old GBA version I owned when I was younger, I would likely still only be halfway through the game at this point, and I'd be getting pretty exasperated about it too.
Phantasy Star II is truly an old-school JRPG with its mentality of being almost impossible to figure out by oneself.
There are certainly some interesting moments in the game, and I did enjoy finally getting to see everything the game has to offer, but overall... I just don't like it nearly as much as I love the first Phantasy Star.
I'm not surprised I loved Phantasy Star 1 but never got into Phantasy Star II as a kid. Phantasy Star 1 lends itself much better to a player who just wants to play a videogame and have fun exploring and killing monsters and stuff... while Phantasy Star II just destroys you immediately unless you know exactly what you're doing. ...which can be a fun challenge in its own way, for sure, but it certainly isn't very approachable.
It's a good game, but it's extremely overtuned to suit the tastes of a very very small subset of RPG enthusiasts who enjoy grinding and minmaxing and mapping and being lost. ...I do love me some old-school RPGs, but PSII was just too much of this fiddly stuff for me to really enjoy it.
I'm very glad I finally got to see what this game was about, though, after years and years of curiosity! No regrets here - I love knowing as much as possible about as many games as possible.
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