It's been a bit of time since I finished Phantasy Star 2, and a bit of time since my initial Review of the game, so, I thought to revisit the entry that introduced me to Phantasy Star now, with some time for my head to cool. I remember after finishing the game for the first time, I was just glad to have finally finished it. If you're not one of the three or four people who followed my entire Youtube journey with the game, you may not know, but I started playing the game while I was in my Sophmore year of High School, and did not finish it until multiple years after I dropped out of college. So yeah, my feelings about the game had a lot of time to build, and now I've given them time to cool off, and maybe for some of the memories to distort. So, this isn't exactly a review, just new thoughts about the game. ALso I still haven't touched the text adventures, so that isn't part of this.
One thing I didn't give enough praise to was the graphical design of the game. Compared to other games releasing at the time, and to Phantasy Star 1, Phantasy Star 2 has a rather clean and simple design to the UI, while still having some personality. I don't particularly like character based inventories, but it works okay here most of the time. Now, enemy design for this game also deserved more praise than I gave it. They had to remove the backgrounds to battles in order to make these detailed dudes happen, and luckily, the simple grid added to the very "terminal" style UI and added to the "future" feeling of the game overall.
Holy Details!
Unfortunately, while the visuals are great, the process of battling is less than exciting. It can be called revolutionary, because the auto battle system demonstrated here is basically the bread and butter of many free Gacha games today, but I don't think that's a good thing. due to the fact that dungeons are basically the boss fights of the game, along with very limited inventory space and huge expenses for equipment, using offensive techniques is somewhat discouraged. That TP could be used for healing, after all. The only exception is Anna, the hunter, who has no support techs (Also yeah technically Hugh and Kain, but are people really using those two?), but also her TP is very limited and her tech selection is fairly minimal. This means most fight will just be a slugging match with occasional stops for healing for a good chunk of the game, probably until you stat getting the battle items, which can cast techniques for free. Then you just start spamming those. Not exactly deep or strategic gameplay there. I do have to credit it for being boring enough that I wanted to stream it instead of just record it. Battles that play themselves sounded like a golden opportunity for chat interaction.
The writing of Phantasy Star 2 really does feel like a victim of its platform and being released so early for it. Being a somewhat early Mega Drive game, it had fairly little space to make the entire game fit, and Sega wanted the game to wow the crowds visually first and foremost, to establish the power of "blast processing" and the Mega Drive, so there was little choice but to use a somewhat bare narrative. In my dreams, I can see a remake of PSII where elements of the Text Adventures are incorporated. Unfortunately, Sega has never had particularly much interest in touching the single-player RPG side of Phantasy Star ever again.
Here's my review, btw: