Phantasy Star II

"A solid game for it's time, if you can look past it's slight mistakes."

Well, this game certainly manages to break many clichés.
Phantasy Star 2 may be one of the first RPG's that doesn't take place in a medieval setting.

THE STORY

You play as Rolf (whom you can rename at the beginning), an agent in Mota(via)'s capital city, Paseo.
Mota being one of three planets in the Algo Solar System, the others being Dezo(lis) and Palm (Parma), all three planets are being constantly monitored by the super computer, Mother Brain.

Anyway, Rolf has been asked by his commander to investigate the Biosystems Laboratory, because that building seems to be the source of a strange new outbreak of Biohazard monsters, or Biomonsters for short.
The commander suspects Mother Brain is malfunctioning, and causing the trouble.
Taking your companion Nei along for the trip, (whom is part Biomonster herself) you're off to the Biosystems Lab.
Or not, seeing the bridge is blocked by a man who robs people of their money to pay his daughter's ransom.
So you find her daughter.
Or not, seeing the door won't open unless you own dynamite.

And so this game falls into a chain of events that all ''conveniently'' lock into eachother, making for gameplay that will often leave you thinking ''Wow! That corpse has a key to all the locked containers who just happen to contain the dynamite I need!'', or ''Just as I need to go to that island, I can get myself a Jet Scooter!''.

Aside from the massive cheesiness of the interlocking events, the story is actually quite good, and at the end, there's even a valuable lesson to be learned to us.
I won't spoil the ending, but I'll just say that us, as humankind, play a very large role in this game.

GAMEPLAY

A futuristic setting makes for refreshing gameplay, and ''Laser Knife'', ''Carbon Vest'' and ''Fire Slasher'' make a nice refuge from the obligatory ''Long Sword'', ''Chain Mail'' and the overall plain ''Shield'' other games are so full of.
The Jet Scooter and the Space ship substitute for the obligatory boats and airships, and a lot of doors in dungeons open with a nice Star Trek-ish ''Whzz''.

Overworld moving is done in a nice colorful area, with relaxing music that won't annoy easily.
There's 2 large planets to explore, each with their own melodies and themes.
Mazes are huge and expanded, so you might get lost easily if you don't draw a map, or don't own the actual game with comes with an overworld map, and a book full of maps of the dungeons.

The battle system is somewhat dull and tedious to the more roughened gamers, but for people new to this genre it offers a nice clear battle system with no excessive menus and trinkets.

The enemies are quite nice looking, and there's A LOT of them, ranging from biologically altered frogs, bees and wasps, to the catpeople, dog-bats, living trees and amoebas, to mechanical R2D2 and C3PO clones, ending up with decomposing bunnies, three-eyed monkeys, and zombies.
Due to limited space on the cartridge, you'll find there's usually ''three enemies of one species/series''.
(Which you and I know means, recolor-a-gogo!)

The magic (or, as they call it, ''Technique'') system is also quite original, using many unique spells, like Brose, (which randomly insta-kills any Robot enemy), Sak, (which sacrifices your life to heal everyone else), and Musik (a ''password'' spell you'll need to open a certain door).
And of course the all-powerful Megid (A.K.A. Megido in later games), which uses HP of you and your team mates to deal massive explosion damage to enemies.
Spectacular.

Moving from town to towns has also been made ridiculously easy. For a slight fee of 60 meseta, you get teleported to any town you've already been to.

Unlike many Final Fantasy games, that get you ''wounded'' and ''KO'' when your HP drops to 0, in Phantasy Star 2, you're DEAD. Totally out there.
However...If you visit any town and head to the Clone Labs, your fallen character will be cloned.
The Clone Labs building is run by some woman that looks like the worst between Heidi, Bozo the Clown and Kefka, but haunts with nice creepy music that fit the overall shadyness of this business.

SOUND

Sound FX is a definite minus point.
Some sounds are decent, but the majority of the sound is simply horrible.
And then especially the enemy attacks.
The only ones that are decent and fit it's setting are the opening of some metallic doors, the healing ''whoosh'', and the sound effect you hear when someone is brought back to life.

MUSIC

Unlike most people will tell you, the music actually DOES fit the setting, having a nice relaxing overworld theme, multiple suspense building dungeon songs, heavy adrenaline pumping battle music (which I admit you WILL get tired of after a while) and the boss battle theme...simply rocks.

CHARACTERS

Yes, a nice array of manga-styled characters, each with their own strengths, weaknesses, and personal favorite weapons.
Rolf can use almost anything, Nei uses clawed gloves, (the wussy translators called them ''steel bars'', but the attack animation clearly shows we're dealing with a claw here) Rudolf uses the big guns, Amy and Hugh prefer medicinal weapons, (scalpel, tranquilizer gun) Anna uses the boomerang blades called ''Slashers'', and Kain and Shir both prefer daggers, knives, and the occasional light-weight gun.

With the wide array of weapons available, the game tries to encourage you to switch team members a lot for any available circumstance.
However, Rolf is already a default, Nei automatically comes with you as well for the first half of the game, and one would be a fool not to include Rudolf in any team combination, because of his sheer brute strength and versatility in weapons.
You'll find yourself leaving out characters like Hugh and Anna quickly because of this.

OVERALL

Even with it's obvious flaws and cheesiness, you should try it out, because I'm not sugarcoating it when I say this is a solid title with a well thought out story, which set grounds for quite a few more sequels in it's path.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/12/02, Updated 09/12/02