Retro spotlight: Phantasy Star II
Phantasy Star moved to the Sega Genesis for its second entry, and it's an old-school classic JRPG just like the first.
This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
So much of Phantasy Star II seems straight-up old-school that, if you’re not already well-versed in the history of Japanese RPGs, it can be a little hard to recognize just how ambitious and innovative it was when it came out. Sega’s Genesis sequel to the Master System classic arrived in Japanese stores in March of 1989 — nearly a full eight years before SquareSoft’s Final Fantasy VII, which is mentioned intentionally as PSII featured one of your playable characters suffering a surprise, tragic, and most vitally, permanent death. An entire planet — the one you spent much of your time on in the original Phantasy Star, not some random location introduced solely for this purpose — is destroyed instantaneously, and it’s something that happens mid-game. Your heroes become fugitives, the paradise of the climate- and artificial intelligence-controlled Algo solar system is shown to be a fiction, and in completing the game, you potentially doom its people. It would take two more games, the entirety of the original Phantasy Star series, to finish sorting through the ramifications of everything that happened in PSII.
All of this for a game that arrived on store shelves in the late-80s in Japan, and in North America, just seven months after the Sega Genesis had debuted. Square’s Final Fantasy IV gets a lot of credit — and much of it deserved — for showing what was possible from JRPGs from a storytelling perspective, but a lot of that has to do with the character work that was new to a franchise that had, to that point, been pretty focused on customization and letting much of the game’s narrative dynamics play out in the players’ heads. Sega’s Phantasy Star II still didn’t include a ton of dialogue, and there remained work to be done on the character side for much of the cast, but narratively speaking? There’s a cohesiveness here, and a darkness, that remains impressive to this day. It was mind-blowing over three decades ago now, and it predated rival franchises’ major leap forward releases, too: Final Fantasy IV wouldn’t arrive until the summer of ‘91, Dragon Quest V a year after that, and the console debut of Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes wouldn’t occur until holiday 1991, as well. And with the exception of The Legend of Heroes, those games were all singular releases, not part of a larger narrative: Phantasy Star II managed to impress on its own, and then only became that much more fascinating and vital as the series continued to tell its story elsewhere.
If you aren’t convinced that old-school JRPGs like those mentioned above are a good time all these years later, well, Phantasy Star II isn’t going to convince you otherwise. If you’re into the older Dragon Quests and Final Fantasy games and know Falcom for more than just their modern releases, though? You’ll love this one, as it’s both an obviously influential title, as well as, despite its faults, clearly a standout in the years before the first golden age of JRPGs.
Phantasy Star II retained the overworld travel of the first game, but switched from the first-person dungeon crawling of the original to an overhead perspective for the dungeons. The thing is they retained the spirit of those first-person labyrinths in the dungeon design. You are going to get lost, a lot. You are going to retrace your steps, and then realize things look similar here as to other places, and then hope you have the Technique Points and healing items to survive your missteps. It's just as brutal and full of secrets as Phantasy Star’s setup; only the perspective has changed. As game designer Kotaro Hayashida explained in a 1993 interview (translation courtesy Shmuplations), a new employee handled dungeon design for the game, and, “Because he was new, he put a ton of effort into the maps and kind of overdid it… the game became more about the complex dungeons than anything else.” Hayashida would go on to say that this is why the latter half of the game is “unbalanced,” since the Dezolis dungeons were an intense example of this design, but they’re certainly playable. They’re just far more dungeon crawler than typical overhead JRPG, in terms of what they expect from you.
Example: The very first dungeon in Phantasy Star II has four floors with teleporters that bring you not just up, but also back down to what are otherwise inaccessible portions of the floors below. If you walk right into it without enough healing items or enough leveling up beforehand, you will die. If you don’t pay careful attention to your surroundings and consider where you are going and where you have been, you will eventually, inevitably, die. If you don’t occasionally go back to heal and maybe stop in at the home of the protagonist, Rolf, you might miss out on the third character who wants to join your party, whose presence will make this difficult opening dungeon a little less so. (As you progress through the game, various invisible checkpoints will trigger an as-of-then unmet ally’s interest in you and your fight — they’ll be waiting back at Rolf’s house to introduce themselves and volunteer, so you have to check back regularly!)
Again, this is the first dungeon, and things only get more complicated from there. Phantasy Star II was so full of complexity in its design — both in terms of dungeons and its series of “spells” known as techniques that all had non-traditional names that required some experimentation from you, as well as the various methods of customization in both your party and their arsenal — that it was packaged with a strategy guide by Sega in North America. A 112-page “hint book” with maps of the towns and dungeons, explanations, and clues that went beyond the standard manual, and which is mercifully scanned and available online in the present.
There are an exceptional number of these dungeons, too, far more than there are towns to visit. And Phantasy Star II does not lack for towns. The scope of the game is part of why it was, at the time of its release, the largest console game ever: Phantasy Star II was on a 6MB cartridge, and it only fit on even that because of some of the design decisions. The overhead dungeons were smaller in size, from a memory perspective, than another round of first-person, pseudo-3D dungeons would have been. That there is really just the one battle background — a futuristic blue-hued grid that makes it look like battles are taking place on a Star Trek holodeck someone forgot to program walls and floors for — was also a way to save some space. Dialogue between party members is almost nonexistent outside of specific story beats and introductions. It was needed, to contain the two planets, the array of dungeons and towns, the NPC dialogue, the static cutscenes, the larger character sprites on the overworld and dungeons and even larger and more detailed ones beyond those in battles, and all of the character and enemy animations, as well.
Much of that can be seen in this video below, which kicks off with the title screen and opening cinematics before getting into early gameplay. It’s genuinely difficult to reconcile that a game looking like this arrived on the scene before Final Fantasy IV, also on 16-bit hardware:
As for the gameplay itself, it’s pretty standard Dragon Quest-esque JRPG fare as a foundation goes, though with some changes that make it decidedly its own thing. There are the large sprites and animations in battle, for one, but you also have the ability to do a bit of autobattling to move things along, or to be more specific with your targeting and moves. The game remembers what you’ve done, so, for instance, if you want to keep using a piece of equipment that actually casts a powerful Technique every turn instead of selecting attack or using a Technique the character could cast on their own, you don’t have to select it every time. That action is the default until you change it, just like if you were having them attack regularly — when you use a healing Technique or consumable item, however, the battle system resets you to the default attack for the next turn. No accidentally consuming more items or limited TP than you had planned to.
Specific characters have some specific strengths: Kain is practically useless against monsters compared to some other characters, but his array of sci-fi rifles are death for robots, meaning he’s a much more valuable ally in the second half of the game when that very thing is hunting you. Conversely, Hugh is more helpful earlier because his weapons are excellent at harming biomonsters, but a waste of time against robots. You’ll have to make decisions about whether to use a dedicated healer (Amy) or if pure offense is your game (Rudo uses high-powered cannons and rifles that can attack multiple foes, and Anna has a similar usefulness, albeit with “slashers,” which are attack boomerangs), or if you’re going to present a balanced attack. Should Rolf have a sword for a single high-powered attack, or is equipping him with two high-end knives a better bet, since that means two attacks? And for how long does that plan make sense? That so many characters can equip so many different kinds of weapons means you have plenty of room to play, but some of them will do a better job than others due to base stats and growth rate. Nei, for instance, levels up incredibly fast, to reflect that numans have an accelerated growth pattern — Rolf found Nei when she was just a child, but not all that long after, she appeared as a young woman, and so on — but her actual statistical growth is awful: she needs the extra levels just to keep up with her companions. She’s essential early on, though, since being ahead of the curve helps you keep your footing as you attempt to navigate Phantasy Star II’s challenges.
I mentioned a permanent character death occurs in Phantasy Star II, and since the game released well over three decades ago, it’s a bit hard to call this a spoiler, but consider that a warning, anyway. Nei, Rolf’s companion who he has a sibling relationship with after rescuing her when she was very young, ends up being killed by… Nei. It turns out that the Nei who Rolf knows is one of a new line of manufactured “numans,” and that the first Nei — Neifirst — had a bit of a personality problem. Not entirely of her own making, mind: the scientists who created her deemed her to be a failed experiment, so they decided to put out a bounty on her. Understandably, Neifirst got a little heated about the whole attempted murder thing, and decided to seek revenge by firing up the biomonster manufacturing process at the planet Motavia’s Climate Control system, which is the mission Rolf initially went out to solve. Where were all those monsters coming from? A very angry numan.
Once that question was answered, Rolf’s close friend was dead, and monsters were no longer an issue, a new one arose: with Neifirst defeated, the systems of Climate Control went haywire, with Rolf and his friends blamed for it by the solar system’s AI overseer, Mother Brain. Biomonsters out, government-produced murder death robots in. Rolf and his companions decide they might be fugitives but they can still attempt to stop the flooding the collapse of the climate system was bringing on, and while they succeed, somehow things get worse for them from there. They’ll end up as prisoners aboard a satellite on a collision course with the planet Palm, blamed for the destruction of said planet by the same authorities who tossed them on the satellite in the first place, find themselves on the snowy planet Dezolis, meet a very important man from the first Phantasy Star who had been under cryogenic sleep for 1,000 years, encounter the latest incarnation of Dark Force — the same Dark Force that Rolf saw in his nightmares featuring his ancestor, Alis Landale — and, of course, take care of that rogue AI system with complete control over an entire solar system. Which simply leads you to quite the twist ending, in terms of how that AI came to be, as well as the realization that the Algo solar system had become wholly dependent on Mother Brain for both the long-term and day-to-day lives of its citizens, and now Mother Brain was gone.
Nei's death doesn't hit as hard as Alys' in Phantasy Star IV for a number of reasons — Alys’ character is much more fleshed out, the localization and writing are vastly superior, the static cutscenes and soundtrack play a vital role in getting the emotion and weight of the moment across — but it's still wild that a character you used for as long as you did is just... gone. Forever! In 1990! This paved the way for Alys’ criminally underrated character arc, not to mention something like Tellah’s death in Final Fantasy IV and, eventually, Square having the courage to leave a dead, young character dead in Final Fantasy VII. On that note, yes, it bothers me that the Playstation Portable remake of Phantasy Star II lets you go through a convoluted procedure to bring Nei back to life. Let her rest, let the moment’s meaning linger.
Destroying Mother Brain is permanent in every iteration of Phantasy Star II, at least, and actually does wreck the entire solar system of Algo: just climate control’s errors wreaked havoc on the terraformed and computer-controlled planet of Motavia, so, extrapolate that to an entire solar system. Peoples' lives were run by this AI program, and you can see the degradation of it all when you eventually get to Phantasy Star IV. Backup systems kicked in to stabilize things to a degree, but Motavia, for example, was a desert planet turned into a lush green planet in PSII, and in PSIV, it's reverting to desert once more, the backup systems barely able to keep things together for the population that remains. But Motavia, at that point, is free from the control that had plagued it for millenia, isn't it? Its people have freedom to choose once again, they are able to live their lives how they would like to do so, they can forge their own destiny, innovations, progress, what have you. Destiny once again in the hands of the people, tyranny toppled. Wasn't that what Alis and Co. were fighting for in the first game, before it turned out they were also fighting a manifestation of pure evil that was pulling strings behind the scenes?
All of that being said, it’s still quite the downer of an ending, in the sense that you only know, at that point, what Rolf and his companions know. That the Algo solar system will be forever changed, and possibly for the worse, but that this still has to be done — that the reign of Mother Brain, much like that of self-appointed god-king of Algo, Lashiec 1,000 years earlier, needed to come to an end if there was to be any future. That’s all pretty heavy for a JRPG from 1989, is all I’m saying — a downer ending is not the same thing as a bad one, and I like Stephen King too much to say ambiguity in an ending is wrong — and it’s not a coincidence that how storytelling in the genre worked changed after Phantasy Star II. Maybe the Phantasy Star games were never the commercial success of Final Fantasy, but you can bet the people making Square’s flagship played and enjoyed Sega’s attempts at the genre.
For as dark as Phantasy Star II can get, it’s actually quite the hopeful game. All of your many companions are inspired by and drawn to Rolf because of how he seems to be trying to better the world. People around Motavia don’t turn Rolf and his companions in for the same reason: sure, they know that they are fugitives on the run, but they see a group that tried (and succeeded) to solve the monster problem, and is then attempting to keep floods from overrunning their home. Why would anyone snitch on these people? Even the ending, with its dark implications for what’s to come, posits that there is hope that things will only temporarily be worse, and that what’s to come will be worth it when the world is made anew, without its previous masters. The bright colors of the game and its mostly upbeat soundtrack reflect this hope and optimism — it’s quite the bouncy synth soundtrack, atypical for the genre, but perfect for the game’s messages and futuristic, sci-fi setting.
I sympathize with the idea that Phantasy Star II would be more beloved and get more credit if it had come out a few years later, when the golden age of JRPGs was occurring and everyone had a better sense of what these new consoles could do. And maybe if Sega didn't blitz through development like they did in order to have a potential hit JRPG released in the early days of their new console, some of the aforementioned balance issues could have been sorted out — the current superior (legal) way to play Phantasy Star II is on the Sega Genesis Mini 2, where there is an “Easy Mode” that isn’t actually easy, but reduces the encounter rate, ups experience and gold rewards from battles to compensate, and increases the walking speed, which all lets you get to the fireworks factory within this game with a bit more ease and convenience — or a little more care could have gone to battle backgrounds and such so that everything looked as great as the best parts, or maybe some of the narrative and character work that went into the Phantasy Star II Text Adventure spin-off could have ended up in here instead, or… you get it. What's here is still great if you're into these old-school JRPGs, however. It’s not like Dezolis being a challenging labyrinth ruins the game, it just further emphasizes the dungeon crawler roots, which is perfectly fine if you’re into that sort of thing.
Phantasy Star II isn’t my favorite Phantasy Star, but I absolutely understand why it is for those that feel that way. It was an ambitious title, and that ambition still sticks out decades later if you know anything at all about what its peers were like. It’s worth playing if you've never played before but enjoy early Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest titles; you might even find yourself looking for Phantasy Star IV afterward, so you can see what kind of state Rolf and his friends left the solar system in. It’s pretty easy to find, too: it’s on the Sega Genesis Mini 2 in its optional altered form, but it’s also available in basically every major Genesis collection, past (Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection) and present (Sega Genesis Classics), on its own on the Xbox Marketplace due to its Xbox 360 release, as well as on Steam. In lieu of a Sega Ages release like with the original game, you can always emulate it with mods that do the exact same thing the official version on the Genesis Mini 2 present as an option, too. Basically, you have to not want to find it to miss it, but if these kind of older JRPGs are a thing you enjoy, I suggest you pick a platform and go.
This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.