Phantasy Star

The Good
The story and graphics are just beautiful. It´s deep, but doesn´t complicate anything too far. It´s a good RPG to start on, if you´ve never tried the genre before. With diligence you see how your characters improve and how you find all kinds of places and gadgets to help you defeat the evil and save the world. Three different worlds to travel and a party of four very different characters makes this excellent. Top that off with different means of transport in the game!

The Bad
It is very easy to die and lose in the initial part of the game, struggling to defeat random enemies in the fields. Some clues are less obvious, some locations can be difficult to find.

The Bottom Line
A wonderful colorful cute RPG. The line drawing and text rendering of speech is just perfect. Try this and you´ll fall in love. The sequels departed a lot from the original colour and feel, unfortunately, but then, they were on faster machines. An 8 bit rpg that truly showed what the Sega system could do. worth it.

The Good
I really liked the simplicity of the game. Really, modern JRPG's are great and all, but there's something to be said about a game as simple as Phantasy Star. You go out, kill stuff, go up in levels, rinse repeat. You also do down dungeons to get some good loot.

Really, that's pretty much all there is to Phantasy Star, and I loved it. That's why I played the game, and I got what I wanted out of it. To enjoy Phantasy Star, you need to know exactly why you're playing it. You're playing it to sit back, fight, and fight some more.

The graphics look great for a game this old. The colors are vibrant, and the scrolling in the dungeons is impressive. But not all is great with the graphics..

The Bad
Phantasy Star is old, and with age comes a lot of problems.

The graphics look great, but they're all static. There's barely any animations in the characters. All of the NPC's look like pieces of cardboard. They don't move their bodies, and they don't move their feet, hands or heads like NPC's do in other RPGs of the era. It gives the game a very..unlively look.

The story is barely there and that's a GREAT thing considering how bad the translation is.

Oh and, the ending really sucks.

Finally but not least, I personally feel that this game has some of the worst music of any RPG I've ever played. Only a few of the themes stand out, and they don't stand out because they're good, rather they do because everything else is so bad. The soundtrack just doesn't stand up to other RPGs of its time like Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior or the Ultima series. Really, it's that atrocious.

Of course, there's the extreme simplicity of the whole thing. This is NOT a game for modern gamers. Like I said earlier, there's barely a story, there is a LOT of random roaming, a lot of fighting. But then again, you shouldn't be expecting a storyline of epic proportions from a game made in the 80's.

The Bottom Line
In the end, all of the problems in Phantasy Star stem from its considerable age­. In 1987, this game would have been absolutely top notch. Even though I liked my experience with the game, it's far too simple a game for me to give it a high rating. It's really clunky and I feel is inferior to a lot of RPGs out at the time. I think Final Fantasy is better, Dragon Warrior I might not be better, but I feel it's more fun, and obviously there's Ultima IV and V, the latter being the best game of the bunch.

But really, if you like old school RPGs and don't need any modern fancy stuff to keep you interested, give this game a try.

The Good
In the days when the Nintendo Entertainment System was king, Sega released a little game called Phantasy Star, which blew away everything else that came near it.

There's a lot to like about this game. It starts out with highly detailed cut scenes focusing on a young girl named Alis, who swears to bring justice to Nero's death. From this point, the game introduces lush, well-animated landscapes, a remarkable soundtrack, and the biggest technical marvel of them all....

The dungeons.

No 8-Bit game ever came close to emulating the smoothly animated and scrolling dungeons found in Phantasy Star. In fact, several 16-Bit games had trouble touching the graphics found here. The result was nothing short of impressive.

It would be a crime not to mention the graphics and sound in further detail. The planets, towns and dungeons offered a rich, haunting soundtrack full of moody themes and poppy, upbeat music in an unforgettable soundtrack.

The graphics were lush and colorful, with lots of animation in the planet, and even in the battle scenes, where the numerous monsters each had their own animations, as did the attacks from the heroes. There was very little repetitive anything to be found in the graphics.

The game also had an interesting, generally well-written story about revenge, deception, mystery, heroism, sorcery, space travel.... It felt very "Star Wars" in its approach of mixing swords and magic with hovercrafts and laser guns. And even the characters had their own identities. Gone were the generic "fighter" and "wizard" characters. The team of Alis, Odin, Noah, and Myau all had personalities and individual abilities. They may be generic by today's standards. But back in the time it was released, this was something special.

The Bad
There were a few minor complaints. Mapping was a must, as some of these dungeons were as confusing as they could be. A few careless spins could mean wandering the hallways and fighting monsters for quite some time. Map making for the game was almost mandatory.

Some of the Japanese to English translations were a little questionable. It would have helped to have run this through just a little more in some places, but you got the gist of the conversation regardless.

And a word to the unwary: Be careful how you answer those "Yes/No" questions. A wrong answer can lead to a lot of backtracking.

The Bottom Line
As much as I enjoyed series such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior, the true gem in the Sega Master System crown was Phantasy Star. It's a fantastic game, untouched by other 8-Bit (and some 16-Bit) games in the RPG genre. Even now.

The game offered great graphics, sounds and plot that surpassed most games of the time. It's a shame that every SMS game wasn't this remarkable. Otherwise, they could have been a much stronger contender against Nintendo. The series, however, still survives in its 16-Bit sequels and current online versions today.

Any Sega fan, old-school gamer, or RPG enthusiast owes it to themself to play this game. It's a remarkable benchmark in console gaming history.

Highest possible recommendation.