Phantasy Star II

"Are Amy and Shir twins? What about Hugh and Kain?"

After Phantasy Star, by far the best 8-bit RPG ever released, achieved a respectable success, it wasn’t at all surprising news that Sega would give the game a sequel. The second game in the series came out for the Genesis, at the very beginning of the console’s life and, in technical terms, it stands as a transitory game, between the 8-bit and 16-bit generations of games. But, being released in 1989, the same year Dragon Warrior III was being released for the NES, it stood miles ahead of the competition, and not only in technical terms, even if would, after a while, become dated and be surpassed by other titles, including other Phantasy Star games.

In the game, you control Rolf, a young man who is sent to investigate the recent outbreak of monsters and environmental chaos that has been plaguing the planet of Mota (also known as Motavia). The hero departs for adventure with Nei, a mysterious girl who isn’t human and doesn’t know anything about her origin, a friend (actually a kind of adopted sister) of Rolf’s. During their quest to find the responsible for this instability, the two will join forces with other adventurers, each with their own objectives, travel to another planet and space station (a trademark of the series) and interact with now classic elements of the whole Phantasy Star universe. The story in itself isn’t really striking, although it is the first game to bring the death of a controllable character that I’m aware of. It also explores quite nicely the question of depending on technology too much. The ending is also quite good, managing to be really surprising, original and weird. Definitely the best moment of the whole game.

The cast of Phantasy Star II isn’t spectacularly deep if judged by today’s standards. But, for the time it was released, the characters were quite intense. Each had a particular reason to fight and a background story, which made them a whole lot more interesting than Dragon Warrior’s and Final Fantasy’s player-created characters. One of them, Nei, is actually an important part of the plot, instead of just defeating enemies in the name of justice and good. Even if the original Phantasy Star already used these elements, this whole thing is developed further in this sequel, with twice as many characters, giving the game so much more options in combat and group formations.

The setting of the game is this Phantasy Star universe, the Algo solar system, a mixture of futuristic and fantasy elements, but certainly heavier in the former. For people who have played the original game (or any other game in the series), there will be lost of references scattered to be found while playing this game. The society of this solar system is highly advanced and the whole planet of Mota has its environment controlled by a huge computer, Mother Brain. Differently from most futuristic settings in RPGs, the world isn’t dark and decaying, at least not apparently. The interesting thing about the setting is that, behind all the visible prosperity and advancement, there’s a huge cataclysm building up.

The gameplay is typical traditional RPG stuff. The characters gain experience and money from battles, they learn new abilities as they level up and so on. The battle engine is a little different from the usual: you plan a strategy for the characters and they do that repeatedly, until any button is pressed, when a new strategy can be made. Not a big change from what existed before, but it makes combats more automatic. The gameplay has a few problems, though: too much battling is needed to raise money for equipment, meaning the game requires lots and lots of patience and the lack of bosses (there are only three in the whole game) is a pretty disappointing factor as well. On the positive side, there is much more complexity than in other games of the time, with two worlds to be explored, a surprisingly deep story to delve into and so on.

As in most RPGs, there’s practically no challenge in the game that leveling up and buying better equipment can’t solve. However, Phantasy Star II was one of the last games to not tell the player what to do next all the time. Exploring the whole maps and talking to everyone is not really an option, it’s really required and crucial to complete this game. Most items are well-hidden and puzzles are more intricate than the ones we find in this sort of game today. Even the dungeons end up being much more confusing and complex than those of recent recent RPGs, giving players quite a hard time.

In terms of graphics, Phantasy Star II doesn’t impress today, but it was excellent for its time. Everything looks clear and bright and all elements are very easy to recognize. One of the greatest things about this game’s graphics are the characters, which little squares, but actually look like human beings! In combat, graphics are also pretty much excellent, in spite of no background, with animations for each enemy’s attack and for the characters’ different actions (attack, spells etc.) as well. The only real problem in the game’s visuals is that it becomes too repetitive too quickly. Too many monsters look the same only with different colors, dungeons are very repetitive (even if this aspect does add to the game’s challenge) and even two pairs of controllable characters only differ in colors. It does look like a good deal of laziness from the developers and the game certainly could have been much more interesting and diverse visually.

The sound in the game, however, is one of its weakest aspects. The soundtrack does contain some good tracks (like the battle theme and the town theme, among others), but, overall, it’s uninspired and, if not exactly annoying, doesn’t really offer anything of interest. The whole thing is made worse because of the terrible arrangements and sound quality of the music. Unfortunately, the sound effects fare even worse and will actually disturb many players. Everything, from attacks to the sound of the monsters dying, sounds terrible. Specially bad is the effect that plays when a characters uses the Musik tech (a spell in the game), which, in addition to sounding terrible is of an astounding bad taste. So, while it isn’t enough to spoil the fun of playing the game, the bad sound quality overall does take away from it.

Phantasy Star II isn’t the best game in the series and certainly not the most important or groundbreaking, but it did contain enough particular features and steps forward in relation to other similar games of the time to save its own spot in the history of console RPGs. Nowadays, the game may seem a little slow, quite unrefined in some aspects and too repetitive, but it will still be able to offer good gaming fun for the more patient and devoted players, and for fans of the series could be seen as an essential title. Anyway, Phantasy Star II still remains as an important play to understand the evolution of its genre and will probably remain like this for a long time.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 07/24/02, Updated 05/19/03