Through the course of our relationship and into the married years, my husband and I are constantly showing each other our hobbies and interests. My husband tried to teach me to crochet and to drive a stick shift (neither of which went all that well, unfortunately, still working on it), and I show him all of my weird little fixations. His first introduction to Phantasy Star as a whole was actually PSO2, but it... didn't go over well between his lack of gaming experience, terrible computer at the time, and the supernatural ability to break computer software if you leave him unattended for so much as a second. Later on I showed him PSO1, and he loved that, but that will be the subject of a different entry.
This entry is the first in, pesumably, a series documenting how my husband goes through Phantasy Star 1 for the Sega Master System, using the Sega Ages release of the game on the Nintendo Switch. I proposed the idea to him recently, after watching the currently ongoing series of streams by Charii5 where he's playing every single Legend of Zelda game. In the description of the first stream, it said he was doing it because his wife had been a fan of Zelda since forever but he had never touched it. So I proposed that he could do something similar with Phantasy Star, since I own most of the series already (Excluding the PSP games, Nova, and obviously the mobile game). He agreed. Now, just to make this very clear for this series: When I said he had little gaming experience, I mean before our relationship, he had only ever played Minecraft and a slew of shitty mobile games you'd see in ads.
To prepare him, I gave him my own notebook, which I took notes in for my own playthrough of the game. He rejected using my notes, and opened the notebook to a blank page, though, I should say, he has yet to write in it. He also requested a map of Palma very shortly after starting, which I printed out for him for ease of access. Then, we sat down next to each other on the couch and started the game.
I am slightly ashamed to admit I started this off being very backseat-y, but I tried to pull off as soon as I realized and only chimed in when asked for advice after a point. The initial minutes of gameplay went exactly how you think someone who has never played a turn-based RPG before would go. They went around bumping into people before I told him he had to approach the characters from the south to talk to them. He managed to intuit that he could go into the warehouse in town and explored all of it, but somehow did not think to go into any other building, so I did tell him that he could and should, as to prevent the game from simply not progressing. His exploration of Camineet did get him the Laconium pot, which is good.
Then he left town. I told him to beware of the forest tiles, which he at first interpreted as "don't leave the walls around town" which was how I knew I had overstepped a bit, and tried to correct from here on. As he paced around, I reminded him that someone in town told him about Scion to the East. He admitted he had already forgotten that, and then made his way there, and found the Secrets shop listing. This gave him just the direction he needed to really start playing the game. This, of course, means fighting 2 Sworms and then healing, rinse and repeat for a bit.
SO far, he's gotten as far as getting Myau and Odin, with minimal extra direction from me. Sometime in the near future I'll hopefully have an update for a part 2. But until then...