Phantasy Star II

"Very enjoyable, buy if you have free time."

Ahh,Phantasy Star II, one of the greatest Genesis RPGs. Right up there with the Shining Force games, the Phantasy Star series were always great, if a bit tedious and boring at some points..

The game is about a government agent named Rolf, sent on a mission to discover why the Biosystems are malfunctioning and producing monsters(Biohazards). Immediately he is joined by Nei, a cat girl-thing. Along the way he'll meet many others, though this game has little character interaction, each character has their own distinct personality. What I found weird however, is that you meet every character than joins you in your house, usually after you visit a new town.

The gameplay is good, but you fight random encounters VERY often, which can often get difficult in the maze-like dungeons, so you better stock up on medicine. The game also requires you to level up, but leveling up is fun and isn't annoying and tedious like in most RPGS(DragonQuest). The battle system is what I love about this game, you assign each character a command, and they will perform this command until you tell them to stop, then you issue a new command. This makes battles very un-tedious, as fights can go on without you constantly have to punch in a command. The spells of these games have very odd names though. That may be hard to remember, for example ''Anti'' cures poison and ''Zan'' causes damage. Very strange. The dungeons are very mazelike, and you will get lost unless you are either a Dungeon Crawler buff, or have maps. Fortunately for you, the game comes with a hintbook and maps! Isn't that great? ^-^.

The graphics were excellent at this time, but the graphics suffer from one extreme flaw, PALETTE SWAPPING! Almost everything in this game is palette swapped! The dungeons, the monsters, the characters, the NPCS. Everything! The monsters also look somewhat silly, they are mostly based on animals. Some are monsters, but they look very bizarre(think a gas cloud with a mouth o_O).

The ''out-of-battle'' controls are nice, but pressing a whole different button just to talk gets kinda annoying, the battle system is kinda hard to learn, especially if you press the button which makes them stop for the moment and let you enter your commands.

There is very little replay value in this game, you might just want to play it once in a every great while once you beat it, there are no sidequests, no secrets.. Nothing! Nothing at all!

Good luck finding this game for rent, the game is kinda rare now, so just buy it, It can't be more than 10$. Go find this game and play it now! ^-^

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 07/13/02, Updated 07/13/02