Phantasy Star II

This game is certainly one of the (if not THE) most punishingly difficult turn-based RPG I've ever played, and I needed a guide otherwise I would've never finished the thing. I really hate having to look up stuff in walkthroughs, but the dungeons are the most convoluted and complex I've ever seen, and even the very first one in the game made me feel like an utter rat in a maze. I would still recommend Phantasy Star 2 to hardcore fans of RPGs, because I consider it a huge improvement over PS1 in absolutely every way, and it easily has the most engrossing story I've seen from an 1980's video game.

Unfortunately it also has the worst interface I've ever seen; choosing actions in battle is just a pain. I still think think Phantasy Star 2 is a great game for its time though. Some of the boss battles are extremely challenging, and the Algol Solar System was a joy to explore. Again, this was made in the 80's, when there wasn't much precedent at all in the way of making a great RPG. So given this, I find Phantasy Star 2 to be a strong and original title that remains my favorite 80's RPG, for now. I can see why the Phantasy Star series is widely acknowledged as Sega's greatest early RPG franchise.

Phantasy Star II increased the sheer difficulty and abandoned the dungeon crawler format, but also enhanced the science fiction quotient, and dotted its story with surprisingly tragic moments a la Final Fantasy II.

Phantasy Star was one of the first JRPGs on the Sega and was sort of Sega's competition to Final Fantasy on NES, releasing only 2 days after Final Fantasy. Unlike Final Fantasy, Phantasy Star is set in a futuristic setting with Science Fiction influence, combined with the typical JRPG formula of 4 party members who take turns in combat and have magical abilities with different town hubs and an open World exploration. Phantasy Star II came just 2 years after and released a couple of months after Final Fantasy II, although Final Fantasy surpassed the Phantasy Star series in terms of popularity and sales, and in fact, they are still making Final Fantasy games and the series is still going strong while Phantasy Star is now a relic of the past and mostly forgotten and only occasionally will pop back up in the newest Sega Genesis compilation of classic Sega games. Phantasy Star II made improvements on the first game, but really has aged roughly.

I tried playing this in the Sega Genesis classics on Switch and I'm not lying when I say a good 80% of my playtime consisted of grinding and looking at maps to navigate confusing dungeons. Really the two biggest donwfalls of this game are the difficulty and dungeon design. Off the bat you are weak and most random encounters can be fatal and kill your party in just a matter of seconds. The game basically begs you to grind from the get go and if you don't you are pretty much screwed. You can run away from encounters like Final Fantasy but you mostly fail and are forced to fight. The combat is similar to final fantasy where you can put characters in modes to either attack, use magic, use items, or defend, and random encounters are similar too, as are equipping armor and exploration, actually this is pretty much a typical RPG in terms of design and gameplay. The boss fights in this game are brutal and there are really only 3 bosses in the entire game, there's a boss halfway through, then 2 bosses back to back at the end of the final dungeon. The final boss in this game is just hell, and really requires you to grind like crazy if you even want hope of beating it. On the version I played you could cheat and rewind the game, but I can't imagine how frustrating playing this back in the day must have been having to grind to likely max level to even stand a chance against this boss. I mean sure some of the Final Fantasy games were pretty difficult and even frustrating, particularly the first game and 5th game I remember being brutal in terms of difficulty and requiring grinding for their final bosses, but none of those FF games had the amount of grinding or difficulty that this game has.

The other issue is dungeon design. The dungeons in this game are designed like mazes and require you to use a guide so you know where you're going. Without a map you will pretty much be lost since dungeons have warp pads that take you to different floors and require you falling into specific holes into lower floors and without a map you will pretty much get lost and keep having your health chipped away by random encounters until you die, or you will be wandering around for hours until you get lucky and finally find the right path after hours of trying different combinations. I heard when this game first came out it had a guide and map that came with the game to help players navigate the confusion dungeons and this is just bad design. When I play an RPG, I want a dungeon that is fun to explore and rewards you for exploring but doesn't have nearly 100 branching paths with only 10 or so of those paths leading to anything worthwhile. You'll also need to grind money like crazy to get the best new armor and weapons when you reach new towns. The dungeons in this game are probably the worst designed I've seen in any RPG I've ever played. To make things worse, almost every dungeon in this game looks exactly the same.

Now there are some cool things, the story is somewhat minimal, but is kind of cool and I liked the whole futuristic sci-fi setting, which is pretty unique. I did like some of the characters in this and the music is also pretty solid, although not quite on par with Final Fantasy, I mean nobody can compose at the level of Uematsu. The enemy design was solid enough and didn't get super repetitive and the Overworld was simple enough and the game had 2 main Overworlds to explore, although the second Overworld was a bit annoying because you had to keep going through a maze-like spaceport to reach new towns. It also was probably the best JRPG on Sega at the time and it does deserve credit for pioneering the JRPG genre on Sega.

But really Phantasy Star II is a relic of the past that hasn't aged too well and isn't that fun to play. It's not terrible, but it just has some really poor design and is way too difficult and frustrating. I've played every Final Fantasy game through 10 and 12 and none of those games came close to the difficulty or frustration and poor dungeon design of this. It has a somewhat cool setting and atmosphere that kept me interested enough to tough it through to the end, but to tell the truth I'd rather play Final Fantasy I or even II over this and it really is almost unplayable without a guide.