Volume 3: Phantasy Star
It’s been a rough month, folks. I haven’t mustered the time or energy to seek out, settle in with, and play enough of a new blobber to do it justice in the column. I had a work backlog to overcome, a layoff to deal with (fuckin’ love this games media “industry,” am I right), and honestly, most of my spare time went to Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth. You can see the fruits of that over at Beyond the Skybox. Digimon ain’t a DRPG, but the show must go on, as they say. So I figured we’d use the space this month to reminisce on something I’ve already played. A classic, an all-timer, and a weird slice of dungeon-crawling software that’s almost nothing like its sequels. Let’s talk about Phantasy Star.
Twenty-something years ago my favorite GameCube game wasn’t Metroid Prime or Super Smash Bros. Melee; it was Phantasy Star Online. I didn’t know anything about the series at the time, but that game was a huge adventure in a cool sci-fi world with bizarre character designs and loot systems the likes of which I hadn’t seen before. I wasn’t a PC dork, so I didn’t know what Diablo was at the time. Sorry. Anyway, it wouldn’t be until years later that I would finally look into what Phantasy Star was all about in a greater sense, and that first game ended up being a sort of unlocking mechanism for my DRPG appetite.
The funny part is Phantasy Star is, in a nutshell, a sci-fi, anime-flavored version of Dragon Quest. You play through the story with a growing party of defined characters, fight monsters out in the overworld in first-person battles, and have the luxury of things like inns and shops, among other “normal” RPG conventions. Sega was basically playing catch up, getting started on this game around when Dragon Quest II released, after noticing people (in Japan especially) were devouring these weird, nerdy-ass games about bonking monsters with sticks and watching numbers go up.
But there was one major difference between Phantasy Star and the likes of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy. The dungeons. While you still had an overworld you could explore in third-person and encounter monsters the familiar way, Phantasy Star also took an extra page from the Wizardry handbook its competition shied away from. In dungeons, you also had a first-person view as you investigated dark, walled mazes full of traps, enemies, small puzzles, and weirdos who gave you items or cryptic hints. And you might be able to guess what you didn’t have: that’s right — a map. If you wanted to get through these sections effectively, you had to draw them shits yourself, just like in those Wizardry games the sickos were importing.
In my younger years, I wasn’t really feeling the first-person dungeon-crawling style, especially when it came to wrapping my head around drawing my own maps. It’s an ADHD thing I won’t get into, but it’s still my worst enemy when it comes to DRPGs. So while I enjoyed Phantasy Star, I would eventually bounce off it because I simply didn’t have the patience for those dungeons. That’s in spite of how damn cool they are, because another thing Phantasy Star had over the competition was absurdly cool animations that you didn’t see on any other 8-bit console. I haven’t played much for the Master System, but Phantasy Star makes it look like a beast.
Many years and several DRPGs later, and a few Sega identity crises, the Sega Ages brand made its way to the Nintendo Switch. This wasn’t the first iteration of this brand, nor was it something that lasted longer than a few minutes before this historically bird-brained company was distracted by other shiny objects. But we did get a new port of Phantasy Star out of it, one with the perfect kinds of extra bells and whistles built in. Specifically, we’re talking maps for dungeons, a guide to the goofily-localized item and spell names, and a few other things that were perfect for smashing through the barrier keeping me from seeing this old school classic through. So I beat it, and it was awesome. I’m pretty sure I wrote about it once or twice for Prima Games, but I won’t bother looking it up because Gamurs doesn’t deserve the clicks. The end.
Until next time, dungeon delvers.
