First review of the new year, may as well make it a Phantasy Star.
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Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium
Developer: Sega Enterprises
Release Date: 1993 (JP) 1995 (NA)
Platform: Sega Genesis
Genre: RPG
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Phantasy Star IV is the fourth and final entry in the classic Phantasy Star tetralogy. Originally one of two Phantasy Star games being developed at the same time, it became the de facto Phantasy Star IV after the RPG intended for the Sega CD, Phantasy Star IV: The Return of Alis was scrapped due to the poor performance of the Sega CD at home and abroad. During its own development, The End of the Millennium underwent other revisions, such as going from a 12 megabit cartridge all the ay up to a 24-megabit cartridge, making it one of the largest on the system. Phantasy Star IV saw its release near the end of the Genesis's life cycle in both countries- the Genesis was never an especially popular console in Japan, and was only localized for English release some one and a half years later. The game was released to enormous critical acclaim, being one of the most praised games not only on its home platform, but also garnering intense praise when it was re-released on Virtual Console and elsewhere.
The game's story itself is something of a direct sequel to Phantasy Star II- and in keeping with Rolf's usual heroic mode, his last good deed did not go unpunished. The destruction of the Mother Brain computer system caused a massive breakdown in the various systems that sustained Algolian civilization. The sudden, apocalyptic collapse of all the systems that made survival possible for the great majority of the people of the Algo system, combined with the destruction of the planet Palma, meant, in the end, that 90% of the system's population was lost as a result of Mother Brain's attempt to destroy the people of Algo and Rolf's struggle to thwart it. As the centuries passed, the people of Algo began to recover their civilization, but even that was being threatened by new outbreaks of monsters, which were resisted by an organization of Hunters. Now, one thousand years have passed since the collapse, and now veteran hunter Alys Brangwin is about to take her junior partner, Chaz Ashley along for his first real job at the Motavia academy.
The gameplay follows the same general mode as Phantasy Star II, though the game no longer requires you to interrupt combat to give commands, and instead automatically allows you to enter new commands each round. The game also allows you to set up a number of macros in order to automatically execute a set of favored actions rather than have to re-enter each command individually. Combat is turn-based with a third-person perspective, and characters can act with defending, attacking, item use, techniques, and a new form of special actions called Skills, which are used to represent more exotic or idiosyncratic maneuvers used by the various playable characters. While techniques have fixed costs that draw from a common pool, Skills each have their own individual number of uses, meaning the use of one Skill does not deplete the uses of the others. Perhaps one of the rarities that this game possesses are instant-death and status-inflicting techniques that actually work on a somewhat reliable basis. The game also has a number of hidden combination attacks that can involve anywhere from two to all five of your party members.
The handling of characters is somewhat different as well- for starters, this is the first and only game in the series where there is a common inventory pool, though the total inventory space still is not much greater than the combined inventory space of the previous game. The largest change is that androids now actually operate by separate rules from more biological adventurers, as they have different healing requirements and even different resistances and weaknesses. The adventurers themselves tend towards being strong generalists, and the game's specialists being extremely good at what they do. The reward structure has also been greatly overhauled since previous games. The sometimes (and for Phantasy Star II, replace "sometimes" with "almost always") onerous grinding has been reduced to a far more manageable level, ironically making a far more suitable game to have a customizable party in than the Phantasy Star game that actually had one. The game has other quality-of-game features that were removed from previous games, such as the ability to save anywhere but dungeons, as well as new ones, such as a greatly increased walking speed that makes even the larger dungeons at the very least tolerable to navigate. The most curious feature is the Talk command, which is rarely used even in contemporary RPGs- its purpose is to bring the player up to date on recent plot beats and the party's current objective, useful after long beaks.
Despite having more capable party members, the game's difficulty still has something of an old-school sting. Defensive buffs are mandatory for all practical purposes when facing most of the game's bosses, and mass-healing skills and techniques are rare and costly, respectively. There is no way to restore technique points outside of a single skill possessed by a single character in the game, and later on, certain normal enemies throw around instant-kill abilities a bit freely. Certain normal enemies are also capable of performing combination attacks, and even combining together to form sometimes vastly more powerful monsters. Any normal attack from a boss will almost certainly be a critical hit as well, as the game's critical damage formula takes into account the difference between the attacker's level and the level of the defender. As the game isn't nearly as exploitable as other, contemporary RPGs, boss and enemy challenges cannot be easily circumvented through unintended gaps in the game design, thanks to the game's solid design. The most well-known glitch actually isn't- the stat reduction at the extremely high levels was intended as an an anti-grinding feature, and even the average player will not need to reach anywhere near those levels in order to finish the game. The new reward structure combined with the lack of breakability plus the challenges posed to the player mean the Phantasy Star IV is one of the best RPGs of ts era on the design level.
It is perhaps unfortunate that the main story of Phantasy Star IV doesn't quite have the ambition of Phantasy Star II and III. However, that ambition was directed elsewhere, as it is the first game in the series to actually attempt to develop its characters, to one degree or another, since Squaresoft popularized storytelling through character interaction in RPGs a couple of years earlier in Final Fantasy IV. the game also includes a far more cosmopolitan cast than previous games in he series, surpassed in its variety perhaps only by the Breath of Fire and Shining Force games. Apart from dialogue that establishes archetypes, the characterization is also carried out in subtler ways. The only person who freaks out about an emergency landing is someone who has no knowledge or experience with space travel. The Dezolisians treat Raja as though he is the actual leader of your party rather than the actual main character. The archetypes that the game chooses to use are often handled better here than they are in other games: Chaz may appear to be the typical hot-blooded hero, but unlike others of his ilk, he is neither socially oblivious nor does he lack the faculties to put two and two together.
And yes, Lutz was always a jerk.
The story's presentation projects an air that things have broken down in a fundamental way, almost to the reality level- things that were commonplace to the player in previous game are now the province of speculation, rumor, and even outright legend, and Phantasy Star's long arc of history means that this game is one of the few RPGs where the ancient, advanced civilization whose ruins one explores in the game was actually explored when it was whole in the previous games. The presence of doomsday cults and the dire predictions of scientists lend credence to the idea that doom was only barely averted, and even now civilization may still only be living on borrowed time. This is expressed in more subtle touches associated with the game mechanics- this is the only game in the classic series, and possibly the franchise itself, where it is impossible for the player to buy gun-type weapons, for example. It is a game that is intensely aware of its own history, and the expected call-backs to previous games are present, due to this game's billing as the finale of the classic series.
The game cartridge has four times the capacity of the previous two games in the series, and it's fairly obvious that all of it was used. Monster and character design and animation is once again superb, with some of the character animations built on the already good animations of Phantasy Star II, and once again a single monster may have different animations for different kinds of attacks or abilities. The environment design is also very good- on Motavia, almost all of the external signs of the old world have been destroyed by the ravages of Motavia's natural climate reasserting itself. On Dezolis, the only remains of the Skure mining complex is the massive excavation crater. The game continues with the Phantasy Star tradition of lavish encounter backgrounds, with some unique ones for certain bosses (though in some cases, the bosses are so imposingly massive as to practically be the background). The music is of generally high quality, but a couple of the dungeon themes introduced in the very late game are disappointing at perhaps the most inappropriate time of the game for such themes to be so- Phantasy Star II's Noah is still the best final dungeon theme in the classic series. The game presents key story moments in manga-style sequential panel-based cutscenes, allowing the designers to also display the full design of each character without also having to resort to space-costly animation.
Phantasy Star IV would be well worth playing even on its own merits, but it is a worthy conclusion to the classic series. It is one of the best-designed of the 16-bit era RPGs in its mechanics, has an excellent story presentation, and overall is probably one of the absolute top RPGs of its gaming generation.
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Normally I have screenshots here, but I did a full video playthrough of the game. Findable here.