Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium

Second best game on the Genesis. Fast pace, looks wonderful and has a great comic book/anime aesthetic that works well with the series.

Best Phantasy Star and one of my favourite RPGs. My ultimate dream game will always be a Phantasy Star V continuation from Sega that modernizes the series, but alas, they seem content on just pumping out endless variations of Phantasy Star Online.

Fastest JRPG ever, every battle takes like a couple of seconds. Even Genesis RPGs had blast processing

Yeah, no question this is the best of the original series. Just about every possible aspect is head and shoulders above any of the preceding three games, though I found that since the difficulty is also a lot lower the combat didn't seem to be as interesting, either. Not that it's a huge dropoff or anything, and combat is fast-paced and pretty enough to be plenty entertaining anyway. The macro system in particular is one that I absolutely love in theory, but I never really ran into a spot where the difficulty ramped up enough to motivate using it much; it really just wound up being a convenient way to command everyone to attack at once. Still though, stellar RPG, with special mention to the story presentation and the cutscenes; I'm honestly kind of mad this comic-style aesthetic hasn't seen use elsewhere, because it added loads of depth to the cutscenes which plenty of other 2D games could benefit from.

was loving it profoundly but got stuck agaisnt Lashiec. need to come back to it