First, nice pic here ! I've always love the Air Castle and even like an asteroid, it's a great place to visit and so fond memories about the first one !
Then, about Aeroprism and the Crystal...in the first one the prism was used to make appear the Air Castle and now no need for it as with all those asteroids, impossible not to locate it I presume ! Hard to miss
(Now Prism is used to make appear Rykros).
And the Crystal : maybe Lashiec has lost many of his powers during that time ? (even if he is still hard to beat !
)
And last but not least, about Alex Ossale !
I've read an explanation on a forum from the site smspower : here it is !
Today is my day for finding weird stuff. I just noticed..
Ossale Kohta, real name Kotaro Hayashida, has worked on plenty of early Sega games. He designed Alex Kidd.
He also wrote the scenario of Phantasy Star, including the sentence:
(Quote from the game :
Good! You are searching for Alex Ossale?)
Well, I figured out that the Alex Ossale character is probably an intentional mixup between his own nick-name and Alex Kidd.
And in my memories, I've aways seen about that explanation and the fact that it can be a private joke like Mikki and Sega games, like Thoul said before