The Making of Phantasy Star IV

Like many video games in the early 1990s, entries in the Phantasy Star series were previewed in magazines before their release in Japan. The article below was scanned to promote awareness of Phantasy Star IV's history and development.

This is a long article, featuring almost two full pages of text. Instead of typing it, like the shorter preview articles, we present these scans for your enjoyment. Be warned, these images are large (200+ KB each) and may take a while to load.

• Page 1 of the article
• Page 2 of the article

As this article is a preview of Phantasy Star IV, there are some inaccuracies. Fortunately, the number of those is quite small. The biggest is Leila (Alys) being described as controllable for the entire game - but then, perhaps she was at that point.

One interesting tidbit is the names given for some characters. It seems that a few of the names changed before the game's Japan and English releases. Saei became Fal (Rika), Fuaru became Thray (Rune), and a few others may have changed also. Alys (Leila), Wren (Fouren), Hahn (Han), and Chaz (Rudy) are also named. The article describes an additional unnamed character that sounds like Kyra, but the other characters aren't mentioned.

Since the artwork of Rika on the first page did not turn out well in the scan, a better version from a second scan is here, as well.