I love Phantasy Star I-IV (except III, mostly everyone agrees it's too flawed and wacky despite some good ideas). I never got into Phantasy Star Online, which is the only game people today seem to be familiar with, though. Is it even related to the original RPGs? I heard 2 has Dark Force as a boss but the events of IV make it...strange. That shouldn't be possible in-universe.
Still, Phantasy Star IV is my favorite and most likely the best RPG on the Megadrive by a long shot. It had good combat, good music, it stayed away from medieval fantasy and generally speaking was full of good vibes (except after the first battle with Zio. If you know you know.).
If you want to replay it there is a randomizer called Profound Distortion that allows to mix things up and I believe it's still in active development.
Anyway, I really loved some of the things it did with enemies like the witches using combined attacks or monsters fusing together like the Dualblade and the Life Deleter. Even today that stuff is rare to see, last game I remember with enemy fusions is Etrian Odyssey V.
I never managed to find the game in a normal shop, but when the local Blockbuster closed up, they happened to have a rental copy that I managed to get. It's still with me.
Sega decided to make a console-first online game. It was sci-fi from the beginning, but the Phantasy Star veneer was added later in development. The creators of PSO are on-record saying that the only thing PSO shares with the classic PS games are names of things.
Strangely, I posted this just a few days ago (I've been playing Phantasy Star Portable recently)
The OG phantasy Star was a little before my time but the GameCube version of Phantasy Star online was so good. They even have community servers for it today as Phantasy Star Blue burst. The game is now dated but honestly I could still play it because it had a good grind formula
This brought back a flood of wonderful memories. Tying up my parents phone line with the Dreamcast's 56k modem was a formative experience for me as a nerdy middle-schooler.
- The Dreamcast keyboard made communication so much better - I was studying French, and joined European servers sometimes for the thrill of using the language with real Francophones (VERY rudimentarily)
- I once met someone whose job was composing jingles and writing slogans for a greeting card company, which I found really fascinating for some reason, and I spent an hour peppering them with questions about it
- The lore of the "gladius spike", a supposedly really rare dual-saber weapon that never actually existed
- Being given a treasure trove of the rarest items in the game by a duper named "Cap'n PooBeard"; the drop rates were so ludicrously, absurdly low that I would never have seen some of this stuff otherwise (Chain Sawd, Spread Needle...)
- The fear and thrill of playing with strangers, due to the mechanic that you drop your weapon when you die, allowing others to steal it
- The vibey, synth-heavy soundtrack and diverse biomes
I haven't played it in decades, but I bet that it still holds up. :)
To clarify: Blue Burst was actually the PC port. [0] I put alot of time into that one, once an English patch became available on Schtserv. They made a bunch of the perks/models available to everyone that were previously only available to Sega employees and holidays. Running through the game with a trio of friends, all skinned as Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles, is one of my treasured gaming memories.
Thank you for the clarification! When you say you put a lot of time in do you mean as a developer or just game time? I find it facinating how that worked. I personally enjoyed the game cube version but the time to actually port it and get it work on PC most have been fairly interesting!
> When you say you put a lot of time in do you mean as a developer or just game time?
As a gamer, not as a developer. I can only dream of accomplishing some of the reverse-engineering those guys have to do to setup private servers and the like!
I spent so much time playing PSO on the DC. I'd start the night playing with Americans, then Europeans, then Japanese. When the Japanese guys started getting on I knew it was far past my bedtime. My whole sleep schedule was messed up from it, but that's ok, I had fun. I made a bunch of online friends and we'd chat on MSN messenger and the PSOtakus message board.
Uff Blue Burst, fantastic online game, it's one of those blasts of sheer nostalgia that is almost unbearable, I'd give everything to go back. It's partly the game, and partly my life around the time I was playing the game, a time of constant wonder and exploration and true excitement. There are times every few years that I just put the games' music album on a loop to relive the memories. Though just watching some gameplay is also fantastic with the sound and graphic design.
> partly my life around the time I was playing the game, a time of constant wonder and exploration and true excitement
It's those feelings that I miss the most. Sometimes when I replay old games or rewatch childhood stuff I only end up destroying my memories because it's not as good as I remembered it being.
Phantasy Star Online was so far ahead of its time. I remember connecting it up to my early modem via phone jack.
Gameplay was amazing, story and graphics were great, the community was really fun.
Oddly it’s also the last MMO I ever really played. As I got into high school I focused more on music and whenever I would try a new MMO game they never felt nearly as good as PSO.
It's free and they're almost always some open parties available for people to join (or create your own team and randoms will almost certainly join and help you level up).
I'm usually around on Tuesday evenings (UK timezone) but the guild meets other days too.
Do you have any characters already leveled up? Or would you be starting from scratch?
The Dreamcast has it's own community servers and isn't compatible with Schtserv. Though I believe that might just be because Episode 2 wasn't release on the DC.
I do have an account for the DC servers too but I wouldn't recommend them. The DC takes too much hassle to get online for the value when most people on the DC PSO server are there for the novelty rather than the grind.
Blue Burst (PC) has it's own community servers too. But I've never owned nor played PSO on the PC.
I've played a few hours of the gamecube version online. I honestly would rather play the dreamcast version, I'm not a big MMO person so the novelty is why I'm playing
I'm a massive DC fanboy but even I have to concede that the GameCube version of PSO is better:
- you don't lose any unequipped items when you die (this is super annoying on the DC)
- you can level up your character to 200 instead of 100 (or 150, I forget which). Which is very useful in Ultimate campaigns (as well as lengthens the game)
- GC also comes with Episode 2, which is something like 6 extra dungeons. Some of them look absolutely gorgeous too.
The DC PSO is a fantastic game, but he Sonic Team basically doubled the scale of game when they released it on the GC.
---
Edit: thinking about it, `Ultimate` mode might not even be available on the DC version. Or if it is, it's only available on the v2 of the DC version (there were two versions available for the DC). Ultimate is like another mod for Episode 1 because it comes with new skins for the mobs and the campaigns happen at different seasons and/or times of day.
Reiko Kodama did some incredible work for Sega, Skies of Arcadia probably being her most notable after Phantasy Star. She unfortunately passed away in 2022, and it took some months before anyone was even aware of it due to her family's desire for privacy.
Yes, it is surprisingly polished. I tried playing the first three Phantasy Star games, but each time was put off by one annoying design flaw or another (such as the camera not being centred in II, so that you can't see very far ahead when exploring). In the fourth game, everything just works.
Just about the only annoying flaw still left is that it's not obvious what items do, and you kinda will need to memorize lots of random names... (Well, or have a reference near you while you play) This is actually mentioned in the interview as them not wanting to be too explicit about what things do (not saying "attack +20" etc.) - unfortunately, it's one of those design decisions that does create friction for the player.
edit: If you have the space, a Nintendo Wii running Genesis Plus GX with the video mode set to "Original" and a CRT with at least composite (yellow cable) blows all of those handhelds out of the water. If you only have composite, the emulator has a "trap filter" option which utilizes some custom hardware and the Nintendo Wii's graphics chip to isolate the chroma and luma channels, resulting in a much cleaner composite image. Of course, component is still better, but it's becoming harder to find a 15kHz CRT with component hookups.
Otherwise, I recommend Retroid Pocket 6 if you like Android or want to play GC/PS2/N64, or a Miyoo Mini Plus if you don't care about any of that. Neat thing about the mini plus is its 640x480 screen, so you get Genesis/Mega Drive games edge to edge 2x integer scale if configured properly. Also has OnionOS which is a pretty good custom firmware.
Other than that, lots of these things have major problems. Watch out for things like improperly calibrated joysticks (can't run in certain directions in 3D platformers, only walking speed), screen tearing, saves disappearing from the filesystem if the system shuts down improperly during gameplay, audio crackle/poor audio in general, IPS bleed around display edges, soggy dpads, face buttons too firm, etc. A lot of problems with any given device you can run into that don't fall under the usual umbrella of review metrics, so you won't know until you realize a week into owning it why something feels off about it...
Incidentally, there are remakes of the first two for PS2, released under the Sega AGES line of discount games. Unfortunately, only in Japanese at the time I played, though translation patches are now available. They’re called Phantasy Star Generation 1 and 2. There is also a release of a compilation of the original games for PS2.
Oops. Yea. It works great as your first game. I recommend PSIV->PSII->PSIII and maybe skip the original unless you're really into it. It's quite outdated.
The original is still a great game. But I'd recommend the `Sega Ages` version on the Nintendo Switch rather than the original because the Sega Ages version includes a couple of quality of life improvements such as a map of the dungeons. It's also a lot less "grindy".
I might agree with you if it wasn't for those annoying trap doors. I got so lost as a result of them back when I originally rented the game back in the 90s that I never managed to complete it.
Phantasy Star I was the first RPG I played when child. I remember my father showing us the basic commands, and then my brothers and I taking notes of items, magic, and drawing cave maps.
I like Phantasy Star IV, but my main love of the franchise is still Phantasy Star Online 1. From my understand during the planning phase of PSO it hadn't been decided to be a Phantasy Star game. It wasn't until later that they decided to skin the game to Phantasy Star. Funny how you can be well into development on the fundamentals of a game and not know what it will be called or exactly what it will look like.
This part fires me up to create art for arts sake:
Kodama: That’s also partly why this development was a lot of fun, I think: we (the developers) started the project on our own initiative, and many people on the team had worked on PSII and were able to address the shortcomings and unfinished ideas they had from that game in PSIV.
Phantasy Star is such an underrated series. They're all far before my time, I was exposed via a sega genesis collection on the xbox 360. I've played a lot of I, II, and IV. I've also played and enjoyed phantasy star zero on the ds and got some enjoyment out of it
Fantastic game, and the only PS game I actually finished! Unfortunately Rieko Kodama passed away not too long ago, fantastic game director and artist she was...
I really like the Manga style cut scenes in the game, it really added to the production value, and the plot is once again, full of twists and turns.
This is a JRPG that did age well and it's still engaging to play today, so it's a classic... like Breath of Fire III, Final Fantasy 6, Chrono Trigger,... they have well crafted stories & characters and they are not too hard to play or too grindy... and they all have a certain care for presentation.
Proud player of phantasy star I on sega master system here (I was a really, really, young kid when I played it)
Yeah, and I don't want to play more phantasy star games, and you know why? I am klinging to those amazing positive emotions I can still remember, namely I don't want to ruin them.
Raise your hand if you got Megid without a guide.
I love Phantasy Star I-IV (except III, mostly everyone agrees it's too flawed and wacky despite some good ideas). I never got into Phantasy Star Online, which is the only game people today seem to be familiar with, though. Is it even related to the original RPGs? I heard 2 has Dark Force as a boss but the events of IV make it...strange. That shouldn't be possible in-universe.
Still, Phantasy Star IV is my favorite and most likely the best RPG on the Megadrive by a long shot. It had good combat, good music, it stayed away from medieval fantasy and generally speaking was full of good vibes (except after the first battle with Zio. If you know you know.).
If you want to replay it there is a randomizer called Profound Distortion that allows to mix things up and I believe it's still in active development.
Anyway, I really loved some of the things it did with enemies like the witches using combined attacks or monsters fusing together like the Dualblade and the Life Deleter. Even today that stuff is rare to see, last game I remember with enemy fusions is Etrian Odyssey V.
I never managed to find the game in a normal shop, but when the local Blockbuster closed up, they happened to have a rental copy that I managed to get. It's still with me.
Sega decided to make a console-first online game. It was sci-fi from the beginning, but the Phantasy Star veneer was added later in development. The creators of PSO are on-record saying that the only thing PSO shares with the classic PS games are names of things.
Strangely, I posted this just a few days ago (I've been playing Phantasy Star Portable recently)
https://www.avclub.com/sega-phantasy-star-online-gaming
The OG phantasy Star was a little before my time but the GameCube version of Phantasy Star online was so good. They even have community servers for it today as Phantasy Star Blue burst. The game is now dated but honestly I could still play it because it had a good grind formula
https://www.phantasystaronline.net/
This brought back a flood of wonderful memories. Tying up my parents phone line with the Dreamcast's 56k modem was a formative experience for me as a nerdy middle-schooler.
- The Dreamcast keyboard made communication so much better - I was studying French, and joined European servers sometimes for the thrill of using the language with real Francophones (VERY rudimentarily)
- I once met someone whose job was composing jingles and writing slogans for a greeting card company, which I found really fascinating for some reason, and I spent an hour peppering them with questions about it
- The lore of the "gladius spike", a supposedly really rare dual-saber weapon that never actually existed
- Being given a treasure trove of the rarest items in the game by a duper named "Cap'n PooBeard"; the drop rates were so ludicrously, absurdly low that I would never have seen some of this stuff otherwise (Chain Sawd, Spread Needle...)
- The fear and thrill of playing with strangers, due to the mechanic that you drop your weapon when you die, allowing others to steal it
- The vibey, synth-heavy soundtrack and diverse biomes
I haven't played it in decades, but I bet that it still holds up. :)
To clarify: Blue Burst was actually the PC port. [0] I put alot of time into that one, once an English patch became available on Schtserv. They made a bunch of the perks/models available to everyone that were previously only available to Sega employees and holidays. Running through the game with a trio of friends, all skinned as Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles, is one of my treasured gaming memories.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantasy_Star_Online#Blue_Burs...
Thank you for the clarification! When you say you put a lot of time in do you mean as a developer or just game time? I find it facinating how that worked. I personally enjoyed the game cube version but the time to actually port it and get it work on PC most have been fairly interesting!
> When you say you put a lot of time in do you mean as a developer or just game time?
As a gamer, not as a developer. I can only dream of accomplishing some of the reverse-engineering those guys have to do to setup private servers and the like!
I spent so much time playing PSO on the DC. I'd start the night playing with Americans, then Europeans, then Japanese. When the Japanese guys started getting on I knew it was far past my bedtime. My whole sleep schedule was messed up from it, but that's ok, I had fun. I made a bunch of online friends and we'd chat on MSN messenger and the PSOtakus message board.
Uff Blue Burst, fantastic online game, it's one of those blasts of sheer nostalgia that is almost unbearable, I'd give everything to go back. It's partly the game, and partly my life around the time I was playing the game, a time of constant wonder and exploration and true excitement. There are times every few years that I just put the games' music album on a loop to relive the memories. Though just watching some gameplay is also fantastic with the sound and graphic design.
> partly my life around the time I was playing the game, a time of constant wonder and exploration and true excitement
It's those feelings that I miss the most. Sometimes when I replay old games or rewatch childhood stuff I only end up destroying my memories because it's not as good as I remembered it being.
Phantasy Star Online was so far ahead of its time. I remember connecting it up to my early modem via phone jack.
Gameplay was amazing, story and graphics were great, the community was really fun.
Oddly it’s also the last MMO I ever really played. As I got into high school I focused more on music and whenever I would try a new MMO game they never felt nearly as good as PSO.
I still play PSO weekly online with a small guild of friends.
How can I play with you all!?
If you already have a copy of PSO for the Gamecube and a GC or modded Wii, then sign up to https://schtserv.com/forums/app.php/welcome
It's free and they're almost always some open parties available for people to join (or create your own team and randoms will almost certainly join and help you level up).
I'm usually around on Tuesday evenings (UK timezone) but the guild meets other days too.
Do you have any characters already leveled up? Or would you be starting from scratch?
what version do you play? I believe that affects it. There are custom servers for pc and gamecube, but there's more work on dreamcast
I use https://schtserv.com which supports both GC and Xbox versions of PSO.
The Dreamcast has it's own community servers and isn't compatible with Schtserv. Though I believe that might just be because Episode 2 wasn't release on the DC. I do have an account for the DC servers too but I wouldn't recommend them. The DC takes too much hassle to get online for the value when most people on the DC PSO server are there for the novelty rather than the grind.
Blue Burst (PC) has it's own community servers too. But I've never owned nor played PSO on the PC.
I've played a few hours of the gamecube version online. I honestly would rather play the dreamcast version, I'm not a big MMO person so the novelty is why I'm playing
I'm a massive DC fanboy but even I have to concede that the GameCube version of PSO is better:
- you don't lose any unequipped items when you die (this is super annoying on the DC)
- you can level up your character to 200 instead of 100 (or 150, I forget which). Which is very useful in Ultimate campaigns (as well as lengthens the game)
- GC also comes with Episode 2, which is something like 6 extra dungeons. Some of them look absolutely gorgeous too.
The DC PSO is a fantastic game, but he Sonic Team basically doubled the scale of game when they released it on the GC.
---
Edit: thinking about it, `Ultimate` mode might not even be available on the DC version. Or if it is, it's only available on the v2 of the DC version (there were two versions available for the DC). Ultimate is like another mod for Episode 1 because it comes with new skins for the mobs and the campaigns happen at different seasons and/or times of day.
Reiko Kodama did some incredible work for Sega, Skies of Arcadia probably being her most notable after Phantasy Star. She unfortunately passed away in 2022, and it took some months before anyone was even aware of it due to her family's desire for privacy.
Awesome game, highly recommended. It's fine if it's your first PS game
Yes, it is surprisingly polished. I tried playing the first three Phantasy Star games, but each time was put off by one annoying design flaw or another (such as the camera not being centred in II, so that you can't see very far ahead when exploring). In the fourth game, everything just works.
Just about the only annoying flaw still left is that it's not obvious what items do, and you kinda will need to memorize lots of random names... (Well, or have a reference near you while you play) This is actually mentioned in the interview as them not wanting to be too explicit about what things do (not saying "attack +20" etc.) - unfortunately, it's one of those design decisions that does create friction for the player.
PS3 was one of my favorite games, maybe it's time to get myself one of those pocket emulators and play PS4 finally.
edit: If you have the space, a Nintendo Wii running Genesis Plus GX with the video mode set to "Original" and a CRT with at least composite (yellow cable) blows all of those handhelds out of the water. If you only have composite, the emulator has a "trap filter" option which utilizes some custom hardware and the Nintendo Wii's graphics chip to isolate the chroma and luma channels, resulting in a much cleaner composite image. Of course, component is still better, but it's becoming harder to find a 15kHz CRT with component hookups.
Otherwise, I recommend Retroid Pocket 6 if you like Android or want to play GC/PS2/N64, or a Miyoo Mini Plus if you don't care about any of that. Neat thing about the mini plus is its 640x480 screen, so you get Genesis/Mega Drive games edge to edge 2x integer scale if configured properly. Also has OnionOS which is a pretty good custom firmware.
Other than that, lots of these things have major problems. Watch out for things like improperly calibrated joysticks (can't run in certain directions in 3D platformers, only walking speed), screen tearing, saves disappearing from the filesystem if the system shuts down improperly during gameplay, audio crackle/poor audio in general, IPS bleed around display edges, soggy dpads, face buttons too firm, etc. A lot of problems with any given device you can run into that don't fall under the usual umbrella of review metrics, so you won't know until you realize a week into owning it why something feels off about it...
Not sure if it was on PS (except as part of the Sega Collection disc), but I played it on the Sega Genesis. Loved it.
Incidentally, there are remakes of the first two for PS2, released under the Sega AGES line of discount games. Unfortunately, only in Japanese at the time I played, though translation patches are now available. They’re called Phantasy Star Generation 1 and 2. There is also a release of a compilation of the original games for PS2.
PS = Phantasy Star
Oops. Yea. It works great as your first game. I recommend PSIV->PSII->PSIII and maybe skip the original unless you're really into it. It's quite outdated.
The original is still a great game. But I'd recommend the `Sega Ages` version on the Nintendo Switch rather than the original because the Sega Ages version includes a couple of quality of life improvements such as a map of the dungeons. It's also a lot less "grindy".
imo part of the fun when I went back to it was drawing maps on graph paper :)
I might agree with you if it wasn't for those annoying trap doors. I got so lost as a result of them back when I originally rented the game back in the 90s that I never managed to complete it.
The original is amazing for an 8 bit game. If I was going to suggest skipping one it would definitely be 3.
Phantasy Star I was the first RPG I played when child. I remember my father showing us the basic commands, and then my brothers and I taking notes of items, magic, and drawing cave maps.
I like Phantasy Star IV, but my main love of the franchise is still Phantasy Star Online 1. From my understand during the planning phase of PSO it hadn't been decided to be a Phantasy Star game. It wasn't until later that they decided to skin the game to Phantasy Star. Funny how you can be well into development on the fundamentals of a game and not know what it will be called or exactly what it will look like.
I would say it showed though. The game basically had zero story, and that's why.
one of the best RPGs on Mega Drive
I wish like for Sonic (Mania) there would be additional Phantasy Star entries in the IV formula
This part fires me up to create art for arts sake:
Kodama: That’s also partly why this development was a lot of fun, I think: we (the developers) started the project on our own initiative, and many people on the team had worked on PSII and were able to address the shortcomings and unfinished ideas they had from that game in PSIV.
Phantasy Star is such an underrated series. They're all far before my time, I was exposed via a sega genesis collection on the xbox 360. I've played a lot of I, II, and IV. I've also played and enjoyed phantasy star zero on the ds and got some enjoyment out of it
By far one of the best games I have played.
Phoenix Rie <3
Fantastic game, and the only PS game I actually finished! Unfortunately Rieko Kodama passed away not too long ago, fantastic game director and artist she was...
I really like the Manga style cut scenes in the game, it really added to the production value, and the plot is once again, full of twists and turns.
This is a JRPG that did age well and it's still engaging to play today, so it's a classic... like Breath of Fire III, Final Fantasy 6, Chrono Trigger,... they have well crafted stories & characters and they are not too hard to play or too grindy... and they all have a certain care for presentation.
This game was ahead of its time, and had a most excellent sound track.
RIP Rieko Kodama
Proud player of phantasy star I on sega master system here (I was a really, really, young kid when I played it)
Yeah, and I don't want to play more phantasy star games, and you know why? I am klinging to those amazing positive emotions I can still remember, namely I don't want to ruin them.