RETRO REVIEW: Phantasy Star

The battle mechanics in Phantasy Star are very simplistic, and by “simplistic” I mean that Final Fantasy Mystic Quest required more strategy. A lot of people have claimed that Phantasy Star is a very difficult game, but that simply is not the case. The only ways that Phantasy Star can be considered difficult is if needing to level grind or being nigh impossible to figure out without a guide is enough to make a game difficult. Even if that was the case, however, Phantasy Star still has better balancing than games like the first two Dragon Quests, Final Fantasy and Mother, but this ends up being a problem because of the limited amount of strategy during battles.

The battles in Phantasy Star pretty much all come down to “Press X to win” (or Press 2 to win, in this case). Granted, that is technically oversimplifying things, but not by much. To be more specific, your only strategy against normal enemies is just selecting Attack until every enemy goes down. Hell, one cannot even choose which enemy to target, so you cannot even try to take shortcuts to kill them more quickly. Also, you will only ever run into one type of enemy at a time, although you can end up facing more than one in a battle. Most enemies only have one attack with a few exceptions. Generally, the only strategy is to know which enemies will take too much time and resources to defeat and when to run in order to conserve supplies, and this does not even become vital until towards the end of the game. There is also a very limited number of boss battles in the game, and the majority of them are as weak as normal enemies.

However, this can also be seen as a good thing, and I plan to explain why. Sometimes, it is just enjoyable to play an RPG that lets you mow down enemies quickly and just explore on your own. Despite this game being very simplistic, I still personally found it to be enjoyable because of this factor. While it may not be enough to carry everyone all the way through, I can still say that it can at least be enjoyable if you like more laid back RPGs. Unfortunately, there are also some aspects that hinder the laid back appeal of the game.The first issue is the amount of money grinding you’ll have to do. The only time that I ever needed to grind for levels was at the beginning of the game and the rest of the time it was for money. What makes this particularly annoying is that you oftentimes need to buy key items for absurd amounts of money instead of receiving them naturally. If these items were received the same way that normally would be obtained in an RPG, then one would likely have not needed any grinding outside the bit at the beginning.

Another one of the major issues with Phantasy Star is the lack of direction. Phantasy Star is one of those games that gives incredibly poor direction in terms of what the player is supposed to do, and, as a result, it is very easy to end up getting lost. I have already mentioned the dungeons and how difficult it is to navigate them without a map, but that is not the only confusing part of the game. Many of the dungeons that you are not supposed to visit until late in the game are ones that are open right from the get-go, and it is possible to enter them as long as you make it there alive. This basically means that you could somehow go through a dungeon far earlier than you are supposed to, and, in some cases, be unable to complete it due to not having a certain plot-related key item yet.

Speaking of key items, the number of them that you need to hold onto creates another problem. This game has limited inventory space, and each key item you find takes up another spot. This would not be a problem if it were not for the fact that you will end up carrying 20 different key items by the end of the game, and only have about 10 spaces for healing items. This ends up becoming even more infuriating when one realizes that most of these key items have already served their purpose and are not even needed anymore, yet the game still makes you hold onto them just so that they take up inventory space.

Yet another inconvenience with this game is the way that the Fly spell works. Normally, spells of this type are supposed to be a way to teleport yourself back to a previous town in order to save time backtracking. Instead of being like Dragon Quest 2, which took you back to the last town you visited, Phantasy Star teleports you to the last town where you visited a church. The problem with this is that the church is not even used for something common like saving (Phantasy Star allows you to save anywhere). It is, instead, used to bring back dead characters, which is not something that one would find themselves doing each and every time they end up entering a town. To give a particularly egregious example of this, during the second-to-last dungeon of the game, using the normal exit spell only took me to a previous section of the dungeon, and I needed to use the Fly spell to leave the dungeon at all. Seeing as how I was ill-prepared to fight the boss of this dungeon, I ended up using the Fly spell to leave, only to discover that the town it warped me to was literally on a different planet. It just so happened that it took 10 minutes of backtracking to even get back to the same planet, and then it took at least a half hour to get back through the dungeon.

That brings up yet another point; there is a rather high difficulty spike during the game’s end stretch. The game’s penultimate dungeon was particularly difficult not because of the enemy encounters, but due to the aforementioned lack of inventory space for healing items, in addition to the level’s absurd length and labyrinthine structure. Also, what is absurd is that there is no way to restore HP or MP in dungeons, nor are there even any MP-restoring items. As a result of the limited healing items and MP, the boss of this dungeon ends up becoming much harder than it needs to be.

Phantasy Star may not have necessarily held up to today’s standards, but it is a game that can still be enjoyable to those who can appreciate old school JRPGs. While certain aspects about it are rather archaic and frustrating if one does not use a guide, it is otherwise a rather laid back experience that picks up in intensity towards the end, ultimately taking somewhere from 10 to 15 hours to beat. It was not hard for me to notice this game’s various flaws, but I did not find them having a major effect on my overall enjoyment. Really, though, I can only recommend Phantasy Star to dedicated JRPG fans, seeing as how it is not necessarily a particularly deep game. It was enjoyable, though, and I can see why it was considered a product of its time. For the 500 Wii points that it costs on the Wii Virtual console, Phantasy Star is a worthy purchase.