"All the young girls love Alis/Tender young Alis they say". It is an absolutely true fact that this famous Elton John song was based on the 1987 hit RPG for the Sega Master System.
Anyway, it's been almost three years of doing this blog regularly, and this is my very first Master System game reviewed for the blog! It happens to be my very first completed Master System game. It's also my first non-Nintendo clear of the year. Should I feel proud or ashamed of this?
I had precious little experience with the Master System as a kid. I played one at a friend's house once (I think we played an Alex Kidd game), and we also played his copy of The Final Fantasy Legend (he was very cool before I knew it). I, thus, have precious little nostalgic reason to hit the Master System up, but I've really been feeling playing some classic RPGs lately, and I thought this would be a good time to break out my copy of the game on the Game Boy Advance Phantasy Star Collection, which includes the first three games in the series (there are four total). I got extremely lucky and happened to pick up the very pricey Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom and Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium at a garage sale along with a Wii and a stack of other Genesis games for $20 a few years ago (one of my finest hauls of all time), so lacking the fourth (and reportedly best) game in the series on this cartridge isn't a big deal for me, but beware if you think you're getting the total package. One word of cautionary note about the Game Boy Advance compilation-it has a hugely annoying bug that causes the game to freeze if you try to save it while the music is looping, so be sure to either memorize all of the music in the game, or just save liberally. I saved liberally.
Phantasy Star's creation is really a fascinating story. It was created on the heels of Dragon Quest's smash success (true fact-more people in Japan know the creator of Dragon Quest than they know Miyamoto), as Sega felt that they needed to have an RPG competitor to provide a competent alternative to the Famicom, which already had Dragon Quest and Dragon Quest 2 would would soon receive an additional juggernaut in Final Fantasy. Yuji Naka, the creator of everything you love about Sega (only mostly true) was the programmer for the game and its sequel on the Genesis, and it launched a star studded career that featured such hits as the Sonic series, Burning Rangers, and Nights into Dreams. The game was a love letter to Dragon Quest, but also included more traditional RPG elements seen in CRPG classics like Ultima, most notably fully 3D first person dungeons (seriously).
The game tells the story of Alis, a girl whose brother is killed by the wicked Lassic, set in a futuristic science fiction setting. She sets out on a perilous adventure for revenge, and that's the whole story. It's not deep, and I do prefer the stories in Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, but it's fine, especially for the era and the limitations of putting RPGs on a console.
Speaking of console limitations, boy does Phantasy Star absolutely shatter some. I'm dead serious when I say that if I'd have booted up a copy of Phantasy Star on my SNES or Genesis, I probably would have been at least mildly impressed by the 3D dungeons. But this is two years before the launch of the Genesis, and 4 years before the launch of the SNES, and it was so far ahead of its time that it's ludicrous. Add in the huge enemy sprites, which actually move and attack with unique animations for each enemy, and you have an absolute titan of technical accomplishment. The combat is even more impressive when you consider that they reuse so few assets for enemy recolors, a JRPG trick as old as Dragon Quest itself, that it almost seems like they just didn't know any better that they could save a lot of work by changing colors. But it's so impressive that they didn't, and the raw ambition and creativity of the choice was jaw dropping. The 3D dungeons themselves are improved in technicality due to the fact that monsters would randomly appear within the dungeon, rather than following jarring cuts to a new battle scene. This is something that Chrono Trigger, released in 1995, would be rightly lauded for, but here's Phantasy Star achieving something very similar a full 8 years earlier. The game is huge, spanning three separate planets (and they really do feel like separate planets with their size and setting). I just can't say enough about the graphical and technical accomplishments of this game.
Not everything graphically has aged perfectly, however, and this is seen particularly clearly in the dungeon layouts. These dungeons can get huge and complicated, and cry out for some graph paper and a pencil. But the problem is that due to the fact that all of the walls look the same, it can get really hard to figure out where you are, particularly if you happen to fall down a trap to a lower floor. This is complicated due to the fact that the only landmarks that exist in the dungeons are treasure chests, doors, and stairs, and the treasure chests completely disappear after you claim them, leaving only empty space in their wake. I resorted to pre-rendered maps I found online, and regret nothing. Navigating these dungeons would be nigh upon impossible without it, especially when you have three dimensional reasoning as poor as mine. I normally advocate for playing a game without a guide, at least the first time, referencing one only if you get stuck, but this game necessitates a guide, and maps.
Speaking of a guide, the maps aren't the only reason why you'll need one. The map is huge, clues are sparse, and frankly, some of the objectives are so bizarre as to be ludicrous. Here are just a few examples. You'll figure out throughout the game that you need a Laconian Sword, Shield, Axe, and Pot to defeat Lassic, but the game tells you nothing (that I could tell) about where to find the Sword or Shield, and nothing about where to reacquire the Pot following your trade of it for a cat (this is a real plot point in the game). You'll have to use an item on a tree out in the middle of nowhere, which is only accessible through a secret entrance unlocked by digging through the ice with an extremely expensive item that has no description. None of the items have any descriptions, and feature abbreviated names that leave their function entirely unclear. If you show your roadpass throughout the game, guards will let you through, but there's one spot in the game that will have you thrown in jail if you show your roadpass to a guard, and if you lack the item, spell, or magic points necessary to escape the dungeon and unwittingly save inside it, you're seriously trapped forever. Once you get to the top of the penultimate dungeon, you'll be presented with a beautiful view of the sky with no other prompt. Silly person, you were supposed to use a prism to reveal the Lassic's stealthy lair, and then also feed some nuts to your cat to make him sprout wings and ride him up to the castle! How did I not figure that out organically??? What's more, in the final dungeon, the end boss is hidden behind a secret wall. This is one of those games that, like the American release of Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, I think may be impossible to beat purely on your own. There were definitely a lot of call-ins to the Sega tip line, if they had such a thing, back in the late '80s for this game. If you did manage it, kudos to you, my insane friend.
Combat is basic by modern standards, but perfectly fine by 1987 standards. I enjoyed the grindy nature of battling and leveling, but it did seem like the experience needed to level up were way too high. Character development is more similar to Dragon Quest than Final Fantasy, in that your character is pretty much predetermined before the game, with no role playing elements in the characters besides equipment choice.
I didn't listen to the music much, to be honest. What I did listen to was perfectly solid, but well under the high bar set by Uematsu in Final Fantasy. But there are no complaints to be had here, either.
All in all, this game is a gloriously ambitious stab at greatness, with an astonishing number of rough edges in story telling and progression. If you like old school RPGs, get a guide and play this one. You'll really be impressed. If the genre's conventions grate on you (and who could blame you?) but you want to try out a game in the series, I'd skip this one and try out Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium, not based on personal experience, but simply based on the reputation of the game itself. I really enjoyed Phantasy Star, but it's definitely not for everyone. I'll give it an 8.0/10.
Up next on handheld is a revisiting of a game I largely cheated through in college, so I'm going to give it another try since I enjoyed Phantasy Star so much.
-TRO
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