Phantasy Star Generation 1

Originally posted on Facebook on 3 January 2021

Since I've been on a Phantasy Star kick lately, I decided to finally play through the PlayStation 2 remake of the original Phantasy Star 1.

... Even though this is certainly an "improved" version, I can't help but still prefer the original 8-bit game a whole lot more. I guess the original version feels more... internally consistent with itself...? 

The PlayStation 2 remake feels really strange to play because it's trying very hard to be as accurate as possible to its source material, yet at the same time it wants to drastically overhaul how it plays by adding or changing or modernising its systems. 

 A good example of this is the tar pit you travel across on your way from Gothic town to Bortevo town. In the original, you had to step in a minimum of 16 tar pit tiles on the overworld, meaning you took damage 16 times, as well as having to fight any encounters along the way. It felt like you needed to really be prepared, and make sure you have enough food so you can heal as you cross. It was an obstacle you needed to plan around.

In the PS2 remake, this tar pit is still there, but since overworld movement is now both faster and no longer restricted to tiles, you can very easily just cross the entire thing taking damage only twice or so. It feels like a complete non-obstacle now. The tar pit is only there in the remake because it was there in the original, but it doesn't feel like it has any purpose any more.

So now you get some cool convenient options such as the ability to teleport to any town you've visited, which is really handy, but then you may also notice that the progression through the game has become a lot more linear, likely in order to accommodate all of the additional dialogue that has been added. (which I can't really understand anyway since the game is Japan-only). It feels like there's a lot more fiddly back-and-forth since you now need to find keys or get certain NPCs' permission to enter certain dungeons, which absolutely wasn't a thing in the original version.

The combat has been expanded upon and improved, and I do like how it is a lot more engaging to strategise how to defeat enemies. But this means that each encounter will take longer to complete - and they unfortunately didn't make encounters any less frequent... so the encounters in the PS2 version just feel so much more obstructive than in the original, since you're going to have to do a whooole lot of battling.

This is especially annoying when you notice that, in the original version, after an encounter, the music would continue from where it left off... but in the PS2 version, the music always restarts from the beginning, which means you'll only ever get to hear the first three seconds of each area's song unless you just sit there and wait in the pause menu. This is a really unfortunate oversight, and it really does contribute to the feeling that enemy encounters are an abrupt interruption, rather than a natural part of exploration.

Oddly enough, the game's famous confusing maze dungeons were kept 100% intact, with very very few adjustments to the layouts. The only layout adjustments I noticed were that now, there's a pointless connection between Medusa Cave and Medusa Tower (I guess to help explain why Odin is found in the cave?), and also they added a way out of the famous Dezorian trap pit. There are also a couple of extra secret walls with treasure behind them here and there. And that's basically it - everything else is 100% identical to the original in terms of maze layout. 

I can commend them for not dumbing down the mazes, but I can't help but feel like the overly-frequent enemy encounters in the PS2 version are extremely irritating interruptions, way more than I ever felt like that in the original game...

 I think trying to figure out such complex mazes is a lot more manageable when the entire rest of the game is so simple. But with the added complexity of a more meaningful combat system, and with such a high encounter rate, it just becomes a nuisance really quickly. 

While I did overall like the game less than the original version, I did enjoy seeing the world of Phantasy Star reimagined for a more modern platform, and I liked seeing all the little changes they made to it. For instance I liked how they changed the town of Sopia into a town inhabited by Motavian natives - that was a good change since the little guys never really got a town for themselves in the original version. I like how every NPC now has a name, and how there are more unique NPCs in the game overall, which really gives each area more of an identity. It's cool to see the world become more fleshed out.

Overall verdict is.... It's good for fans of the original to give them a different experience within a familiar setting, but as a standalone PlayStation 2 RPG it feels incredibly odd, relentlessly annoying, and not very well thought out overall.

Anyways I beat it and I liked it enough.