Phantasy Star Complete Classic Series Retrospective | Phantasy Month Super-cut

Space Century 342. The planet of Palma. Scum, you do not sniff around in Lasik's affairs. Learn this lesson well.

Lasik is leading our world to destruction. I tried to discover his plans, but I could not do much by myself. I have heard of a man with great strength named Odin. Maybe the two of you can stop Lasik.

And with that, you're off, having your backstory delivered by these huge anime-inspired portraits. And you almost never saw cutscenes like that. The manual gives you a bit more. A new religion that came from another galaxy. With our Christian cross? Hmm, I wonder if this detail will ever come back into the series.

The Dead have risen. Robocops are ruthlessly hunting down anyone who opposes Lasik. The worst of all, the taxes are too damn high.

The original Fantasy Star is one of the granddaddies of the JRPG. Takes a great deal from Dragon Warrior, just as much from Wizardry, arguably even more from Star Wars. Wars with a little dash of Studio Ghibli. Then Sabras, Cabaris, Severus, Bass. We got a video game.

What sets Fantasy Star apart from Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, Wizardry is that it's a world not designed to be traversed, rather one to be unraveled. Let me show you what I mean. Here is the entire world map of Dragon Warrior. A critical path run might look something like this. Most of the actual game is grinding to make your numbers higher, traveling to your next destination. There are a couple of secrets, but for the most part, you're only really gated by how strong your character is.

Fantasy Star is nothing like that. As soon as you're first in control of Alice, well, you're gonna be weak as hell, so you really can't go anywhere yet. But after you're over that initial hump, you have access to three towns, two different caves, two towns that you can visibly see on the world map but aren't yet able to go to, and a dungeon with a locked door that you can't do anything about yet. If you wanted to map out a Fantasy Star playthrough, there would be so much crisscrossing that attempting to draw one would just make the map an illegible mess. All that I just listed within a one-minute commute from your starting position.

Fantasy Star's world is so much more dense than other RPGs of its era. It takes cues from Zelda as much as it does from Dragon Warrior. Where the experience is mostly made up of attempting to untangle this web of a game world. It's not as cut and dry what you're supposed to be doing at any given moment.

Fantasy Star 1, I would categorize as a treasure hunter simulator. So much of this game is spent looking for weapons, items, trinkets that you may or may not even need. Its loop will go something like: you talk to NPC A, who might mention a certain object exists. Maybe they'll also tell you what it does, but won't tell you where or how or any other details about it. NPC B might tell you that they know something cool is buried on some island somewhere, but they won't say what island or where or on what planet. Then, when you're out adventuring, NPC C on a whole other planet will tell you about this secluded island in the middle of nowhere that once, 50 years ago, some guy went there, but nobody's ever gone back. Incredibly basic example, but the pattern holds. And all these treasure hunts are worthwhile too. It's always end-game equipment, or a vehicle, or some other item that you don't know how you were living without.

When the game starts, you're in this sci-fi utopian area where everything seems fine. You're told Lasik is leading your world to destruction, but by the looks of it here, is he? Your hometown looks like it's doing well. It's elevated off the ground for some reason, and there's this cool conveyor belt going directly to the spaceport where, free of charge, Brandon, you have a passport. A space shuttle will take you to another planet.

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It's incredibly open-ended and non-linear. After gaining your own means of travel, you can almost go anywhere. Only when you begin on twirling these knots do you realize that the further off the beaten path you travel, the more dire the world's situation becomes. Before long, you're in burnt-out Hoovervilles where bums beg you for spare cans of cola, and mayors of towns will ask you to donate Meseta.

There are three planets: Motavia, which is too hot; Deseris, which is too cold; and Palma, which is just right. Palma is basically cut into equal halves: the civilized world and its savage underbelly. Motavia has one town where the governor lives, the capital of this whole civilization, apparently, but the rest of the planet is a [ __ ] with one town even held hostage by a deadly gas field surrounding it. Then we have Deseris, which is so far-flung there's not even commercial passenger travel to it. You can only go there if you have your own spaceship. There are only two towns on the whole planet: one with Palmanions, essentially stand-ins for humans, but not quite the same as we may or may not learn in two, and the other with native Desorians, this weird race of tall, bluish-green guys. Deseris plays out like one gargantuan, planet-sized dungeon, a series of connecting caves, not unlike Death Mountain in Zelda 2.

Fantasy Star 1 is also a first-person dungeon crawler, using these first-person passages. Sometimes they're transitions between two areas. Sometimes they're single-floor mazes with exactly one treasure chest and nothing else to find. Sometimes they're multi-level complex labyrinths which will drive you [ __ ] crazy and have nasty pitfall traps right before the actual way you're supposed to go.

Here's a confession: I didn't look up any maps, but I didn't exactly make my own either. This isn't a real Fantasy Star cartridge, and I played through its re-release on Switch, Sega Ages. Fantasy Star. Fantastic. It gives you your party's status on the top right and an auto-filling map on the bottom. The auto-map, useful as it is, kind of ruins the game. And not just because it's inauthentic, by putting the graph paper out of the hands of a potential player, it spoils secrets. When you're walking ordinarily, you can't see anything on the walls unless you physically turn to face them. And Fantasy Star has a nasty habit of hiding doors leading to chests with a thousand Meseta, or a burger, or I don't know, the [ __ ] final boss. On Sega Ages Fantasy Star, if you just look at the map, it'll always tell you where secrets are. Is that cheating? Yeah, maybe. Do I care? Yeah, a little.

They included an easy mode as well, but here's why I don't believe it's necessary. Fantasy Star is balanced around its non-linearity. You're forced to grind immediately when you turn on the game for the first time, but after that, 80% of the world's random encounters are about the same degree of difficulty. Goldie, up until the final dungeon, you're dealing with low mid-game types. And by the way, the actual fights themselves are skewed incredibly in the player's favor. Both you and opposing monsters have incredibly small damage outputs relative to your max HP. You're never going to get one-shotted, or two-shotted, or even three-shotted, no matter how far behind you get on equipment upgrades. Battles are more of an endurance than they are anything else. So you can always be prepared. Carrying enough burgers always guarantees a victory. Your demise, most of the time, will be because you ran out of magic points and healing items, so you had no way to recover. You don't die from cheap ambushes like in so many other older JRPGs. In Dragon Warrior, if you cross the wrong bridge, you'll find out real fast. But in Fantasy Star, you can go pretty much anywhere and not need to worry about getting crapped on too hard by the local wildlife.

Some abilities are overpowered as all hell, like Magic Wall. You can win entire boss fights up until the end game just by casting it and becoming effectively immune to all damage. You can only run into one type of enemy at once, but most of the time they're not alone, as indicated by these numbers in the top right. It's a little annoying that you can't manually select which enemies you're attacking. Instead, the game just picks a random target, but you get used to it. It's the complete opposite of Final Fantasy 1, where you need to be hyper-specific as to who you're targeting. And if forced to pick my poison, I would choose random targets over ineffective strikes without fail. I love that at all times you can see how much HP enemies have remaining. Even Lasik himself becomes a little less scary when you realize he only has 238 hit points. Hell, that's barely more than I have. The real final boss, which was foreshadowed super early on, they take away its HP count, and it is effectively unnerving. I doubt he is any more than 300, but 300 is 300. And no number could be anything. It can even be 300. You know how much I've always wanted one of those.

You kill Lasik, go to the governor's mansion, only to find that he's nowhere to be found. In his place, one final dungeon and a dark spirit. Once vanquished, Alice is crowned the new Queen of the Algo Star System. In my final playtime, it came in at 19 hours, 32 minutes. Thank you.

Is this the greatest title screen in RPG history? Visually, it's abstract enough for you to read into it whatever you want, but it uses elements from the mythos of Fantasy Star. Three planets: one small and cold, another taken over by this technological terror, then a beautiful green one, which we don't even get to see. The primary colors we see at this point: black background, two blue, and one striking green spear. Then these monochrome orangish-red women invade with this elegant-looking fade. I love how the women are mirrored, but not exactly, because symmetry is boring. The one on our left looks almost angry, raised eyebrows, or outstretched arm facing downwards, like she's ready to smite that green planet. Her twin, calmer, doing more of a presenting gesture. She's saying, "Here is Fantasy Star 2." Then the gold, regal-looking text. We never see these women. Are they goddesses? Are they Mother Brain? Do they represent duality? How Mother Brain generously allowed for life to advance, for civilization to flourish on this desert rock? We have the giver and the destroyer, and they're the same person, mirrored, facing each other.

All of the music shows off Fantasy Star 2's unique sound font. No other game sounds like Fantasy Star 2. This image, and it may sound hyperbolic or downright stupid for me to say, but this image, this title screen, is the greatest enduring legacy of Fantasy Star 2. It's art inspired by what this game got so right.

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There's a certain amount of humanity which is lost whenever an abstraction of technology makes people more obsolete. Fantasy Star 2 is a game about the negative impact of the soul when we over-rely, when everything is handed to us, and there's never a reason to learn anything. Like how very few people hunt for their own food or make their own clothes. Now, in the future, when the magic computer boxes are capable of cultivating all life, what then? What does it mean to be a person? And more importantly, what happens if it suddenly stops working, or is actively working against you?

Previously, in the original Fantasy Star, we saw the dawn of the Space Age and the beginning stages of colonization in these new worlds. It is a thousand years later now. As an aside, why is it always a thousand years? Ten thousand years? That's an unfathomable amount of time. If this were set 100 years later, honestly, I believe its points would land better, but I digress. In those thousand years, the world has become more sci-fi and less fantasy, more uniform. Everything is taken care of by Mother Brain. Nobody knows where she came from, or who or what she is, but she's been here and taken care of us for as long as anyone can remember. It's a bleak natural world progression. In those 1000 years, Desawis, which was once untapped wilderness, is now a giant literal hole. Seriously, the planet has a giant hole in it from being over-mined, and you need to traverse this scaffolding over it whenever you want to travel from one town to another.

In the first game, Laconian, or Lakota, or whatever the raw material was called, was worth a million times its weight in gold. All the end-game armor was made of it. A pot you had was worth a billion Mesetas. Between the two games, we used Dezawis as a Laconian factory, and now in two, it's so worthless that people don't even live there anymore. The equipment it's made of sucks, and a pot made of the stuff isn't worth anything close to 10, 10 billion anymore. We [ __ ] up this planet so bad. The air is toxic, and all the Palmanions left, leaving the native Desorians to fend for themselves. We even left an entire race of talking cats behind. Which brings up the question: do we, as Palmanions, stand-ins for humans, essentially, do we need Mother Brain? If Desawis, aka total climatic ruin, is the natural result of humanity, if what happened to this planet is the natural outgrowth of human tendencies, then maybe we do need an orangish-red goddess to guide us on the right and proper path.

Motavia is unrecognizable, completely terraformed, but it worked. For generations, nobody was hungry, there were no wars, there were no bums begging you for cans of cola. We don't know what happens at the end of Fantasy Star 2. The destruction of Mother Brain essentially leaves all three planets [ __ ]. Palma doesn't even exist anymore. Desawis has that toxic gas and the mining crisis, and Motavia's lush green terraformed landscape will surely revert back to its primal, much drier state. It doesn't matter who wins this fight at the end. The apocalypse is already here. This is when the game ends, but it's when the story is just being written.

All of this is told minimally, of course. Fantasy Star 2 isn't exactly what I would call plot or story-heavy, because within its walls, not much happens. But it is thematically heavy, and impressively, the way everything comes across is somewhat cohesive. It doesn't beat you over the head with cutscenes or texts. It kind of just lets you discover what happened to the world through NPC dialogue, or some things aren't even spelled out. Like the whole mining thing on Desos, that's just a connection that you're supposed to make by playing the first game and then seeing what happened to it in the second. Everywhere you turn, you're confronted with mankind's folly, this or how out of control automation of society has gotten. That outside of towns in this game are are some of the most lifeless areas you'll ever see. The world is min-max. You're either in the thick of it, or you're in a city.

All of this is wonderful, but I have some bad news. Fantasy Star 2 is the kind of game stereotypes are born from, negative stereotypes. It's much less often guarded than the original. The wrap on old JRPGs is that they're super grind-heavy, that they're slow slogs, that they're confusing, that they're easy to get stuck in, easy to get lost in, opaquely designed. There are random encounters every few steps, and overall, the negative stereotype with JRPGs is that essentially they're a couple of hours of game stretched out into like a 30-hour experience. When you actually go back and play said old RPGs, in many cases, in most cases, I'll even say a lot of those are myths. Fantasy Star 2, however, is guilty on all counts. The original Fantasy Star manages to feel years ahead of its time by not falling into any of those pitfalls, I'd argue. But two is exactly what a pessimist, what a hater would expect from a JRPG from the '80s. It is approaching as grind-heavy as something like The Seventh Saga. It is much more grind-heavy than any of the early Dragon Warrior or Final Fantasy games.

With that being said, on the opposite end, I feel like some people judge Fantasy Star 2 too harshly because it'll get grouped in and compared with the wrong kinds of games. Like I've seen this game get compared straight up to Chrono Trigger, when in reality, Fantasy Star 2 is older than the Super Nintendo and came out in between Final Fantasy 2 and 3. Those are its peers, not later-era Super Nintendo games. There was so much innovation and so many strides made by each game that came out in the meantime. Hell, it came out before the original Final Fantasy in America.

There's kind of a dichotomy in how this game is viewed depending on how old you are. If you were around and actively playing RPGs back when Fantasy Star 2 came out, it's most likely a legend of the genre, an untouchable classic, one of the best games on the Sega Genesis. Or if you're younger and you're viewing these games in retrospect, you'll see this clunky, grind-heavy, brutally unintuitive game, then label it overrated, or it'll say that it didn't age well. There's merit to both of these viewpoints, and in my opinion, borrows a little from column A, a little from column B. I can appreciate it for its awesome title screen, for it being a game from 1989 with a message, for it being an early Genesis showpiece. The whole "Genesis does what Nintendon't" campaign, in this case, it was true. The only RPG on that thing in America that was out when Fantasy Star 2 came out was the original Dragon Warrior. You couldn't do anything like Fantasy Star 2 on Nintendo at the same time.

I will happily and readily acknowledge that Fantasy Star 2 has a dirty little secret: Fantasy Star 2 is a royal pain in the ass to play, and it doesn't hold up. Not even a little. Not even if I grade this on a curve for being older than every game in my every SNES RPG series. Fantasy Star 2 is not fun. It's an ordeal. Don't get me wrong, I still like the game, but it is almost nothing to do with the actual nuts and bolts that it's built on. Allow me to explain. Structurally, this game is essentially divided into thirds. The first act is you and your merry band of travelers, mostly linearly, going from one town to another on Motavia or Moda. This section of the game is classic JRPG. You need to grind your your ass off every time you get to a new town or dungeon because you won't be strong enough to do anything. You'll also come across roadblocks which require you to clear dungeons to pass. Your main objective here is basically to get to the next town and to keep going until you discover the source of the bio-monsters and get to the point where Nay dies.

The next third, how do I put this lightly, is [ __ ] terrible and only exists to pad the game out. You spend the whole game up to this point exploring this planet, solving somewhat of a mystery, all culminating in the surprise death of a beloved character. You'll spend the last third exploring a whole other world, culminating with the excellent and frustrating fight against Dark Force and Mother Brain. But this middle third is about sliding key cards into dams, re-treversing a planet you've already explored. It's as if the game just halts. It's as if the story completely stops and waits for you while you do these menial tasks that really somebody else should be doing.

If I were rewriting Fantasy Star 2, I would have stuck all of the damn stuff right at the beginning. Use that as our call to action. The Nay first bio-monsters and climate control stuff can all be there too, but these dams should have been what gets Rolf out of bed from that dream. So as you're going through Motavia the first time, you're also activating these dams. I would also give your quest a sense of urgency because all you really get is motivation. As it stands, it's "go find out why there are so many monsters lately," which would go on to become a huge trope, but I guess this game can get a pass on account of it being from 1989 and inventing the trope.

The way new party members join is bizarre too. Instead of naturally joining when appropriate, like in most every other game, here, every time you make it to a new town, if you go back to your house, someone will knock on the door and ask to join your team. Who the [ __ ] are these people? It's not like we ever learn anything about any of them yet, anyway. Wink, wink, wink, wink, wink. I could look past the awkward pacing, the odd way characters join, the grinding, how the middle third of the entire game is pointless roadblock quests. I could look past not knowing what any of the spells do because they have non-descript names, so you always need to have the manual next to you, or in my case, if you just have the box game with no manual, then constantly have a browser tab open with all the spells on it. I would be able to look past this and still call Fantasy Star 2 one of the greatest RPGs of the '80s because its title screen and its theming are awesome, in their years ahead of their time. But, but, this is the biggest but of all time. Fantasy Star 2's dungeons are the most malicious [ __ ] ever, to a comical degree, to the point where it's fun to imagine some sick [ __ ] working at Sega with a sheet of graph paper, moon organically laughing as they're filling it out.

For starters, no more first-person. That's gone, bye-bye. And in its place is, for a lack of a better term, dumb nonsense. Yeah, that sounds about right. Don't you love RPG dungeons that are basically the Monty Hall door problem 20 times in a row, where you walk in, there are three non-marked holes for you to choose which one to fall into, and they just repeat that a shitload of time? You know what? No, I'm not gonna move. I'm not gonna let this go. We're gonna do a Game Maker's Toolkit boss keys episode on one of these stupid dungeons. Here it is. Hi, I'm Jason Graves, and welcome to my new show, "The Shitty Dungeons of Fantasy Star 2." Today, we have the Akudo Dungeon. It's in the last third of the game, and it is pure evil. Don't believe me? Well, check this out. Walking in, we're presented with four options: three holes to fall into, or a set of stairs. The stairs lead down six levels, eventually leading to a huge empty room, a dead end. This is our one-way back up the dungeon when we [ __ ] up. Inevitably, later holes one, two, and three each lead to three holes of their own to choose from. None of them overlap. So, two layers deep, we're already essentially picking between nine different options with no information. Let's follow one and guess. [ __ ] what? All three of these holes lead to three more holes each. If you follow two, it's the same story. If you follow three, it's the same story. Still three floors in, none of this overlaps, so there are 27 unique paths. Three floors into this place, three floors in, and we're basically just picking one of 27 doors. Things from here get a little less or more complicated, depending on how you look at it. Of the 27 unique paths through three floors, on the fourth floor, those are then funneled into 11 segments, each with three choices in all of them to jump down. You with me so far? If I diagram this whole thing out, we've gone from three choices to 9 to 27 to 33. There are 33 paths through this dungeon so far. On the fifth floor lays two different McGuffins you absolutely need to progress through the game: the Nay Slasher and the Nay Shot. You need both. So even if you are the luckiest man alive, you're still required to go through this dungeon at least twice. If you're given 33 choices, 33. How many of said choices do you think will lead to one of those two items? You want to guess? I'll give you a few seconds.

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Okay, ready? To lead to the Nay Shot, which is more than I expected, honestly. And one, I repeat, one in 33 paths lead to the [ __ ] Nay Sword. One in 33. That's roughly 3%. They're asking you to jump down unmarked random holes with a 3% chance of ending up where you need to go. Great idea for a dungeon. Just bravo, whoever came up with this one. Great [ __ ] design. You go through a whole late-game dungeon with random encounters up the ass, walking, crawling slower than molasses because you move so damn slow in Fantasy Star 2, with only a 3% chance of actually getting to the end of the dungeon, actually going where you need to go. And it's not as if the dead ends cut off early. You still have to go through the rest of the area until you hit the bottom and that giant empty room. And when you inevitably [ __ ] up, you need to climb the stairs all the way back up to the top, only to be gifted with another chance of just rolling the die again. Oh yeah, and 3% is less of a chance than rolling one on a 20-sided die. By the way, there is a damn good reason the American release came bundled with its own strategy guide. Oh, what's that? They purposefully didn't label or any of the holes lead in the [ __ ] strategy guide. There's even a hint saying, "Quote, we suggest you number the pitfalls." Obviously, I picked the worst example to illustrate, but most of the dungeons after the first third are hack [ __ ] made for no other purpose than to frustrate whoever's playing. Honorable mentions go to the Green Dam, the Naval Tower, and Climate Control for pissing me off almost as much.

Dark Force is also one of the worst boss fights you could possibly design. His gimmick is that he'll make your party members depressed, and when depressed, they don't listen to you, and there's nothing you can do about it. There's no item, there's no spell that clears the status, there's no preventive armor or anything you can wear either. At the end of every round, there's about a one in five chance that it'll go away, but it's the worst kind of random, pure random. There's no guarantee that your party members will ever regain their senses. The whole fight is an RNG fest, boiling down to how often your party will actually be able to move. Sometimes you just won't stand a chance because your whole party is depressed and nobody will do anything while Dark Force hammers you into oblivion. Thematically, Fantasy Star 2 is incredibly cool, a game exploring what it means to be human, culminating in a fight where your own worst enemy is yourself.

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They saved the best for last, and I'll always respect the game which does that. And I'm not talking about Mother Brain, even though that is cool with four arms like the goddesses on the title screen. Combined, Dark Force is a Fantasy Star 2 microcosm. Cool in concept, questionable in design. To conclude, Fantasy Star 2 is what you might call a flawed classic. It's frustrating, but it has a certain appeal. It was the first RPG many Americans ever played, but at the same time, it's not exactly beginner-friendly. I'll leave us by saying that it's more fun to remember to reminisce about than it is to play.

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So, you're playing through Fantasy Star 2, and it's got these eight party members, right? So, while you're playing through the game, you might be wondering to yourself, "Who the hell are all of these people?" Because all you really get in-game is when they first join, they have this little monologue explaining who they are, why they want to join your party, and then there's also a bio you can view in the menus for each character. But other than that, once they join your party, they never speak again. You never get anything else on their character. So you're essentially just playing with eight people that you have no idea who they are.

So, in an attempt to flesh out the characters from Fantasy Star 2, between 1990 and 1991, Sega released eight, one for each party member, eight different text adventures. For it wasn't the Sega Channel, it was basically Japan's equivalent of the Sega Channel where you could download games. They were, they released eight text-based downloadable games. And when I say text-based, I mean text-based. They mean text-based. Going in, I kind of expected these to be a little bit like Snatcher, like the whole game would be centered around text prompts, but it would have plenty of animations and visuals to go along with said text prompts. But no, these are text adventures. This is the main interface which you're going to be looking at most of the time. All you really get is a character portrait, and once in a while, in the upper left, maybe you'll get another portrait of like an enemy you're fighting, but that's about it. These are bare-bones, purely tell, don't show types of experiences. I theorize they did this to keep data sizes really small because they had to broadcast these games over download services in a pre-internet world. The game said to be compact enough that you were able to download them in a reasonable amount of time in 1990. So I think the heavily text-based approach was an attempt to keep file sizes down, or maybe it was just easier to develop these. Who knows?

So, doing something like this presents a unique set of challenges for me because there's no real visuals to show you while I'm reviewing the game. I mean, I could just have the basic text screen up the whole time, but that's a little boring. So I'm gonna treat this like a little book review. I've got videos of my playthroughs of all of the text adventures on my tablet here, and I'm just gonna read some excerpts, make some comments. This is going to be a looser, more, um, awkward look at these things, I guess.

So, the first thing that really grinds my gears is that the fan translation kept the Japanese names. Like, here we have Eustis, or wait, no, there's no 't'. E-U-S-I-S, which was apparently the Japanese name for Rolf. And I'm gonna say that universally across the boards, I believe we got the better names. So, these are all prequels, and for most of these characters, we really don't know a whole lot about their past. These chronicle their journeys up until the point where Fantasy Star 2 begins. So, for Eustis, or Eustis, or Rolf, I'm gonna be using the American names for this. The only thing we really get is, if you read his bio, it says that A) he lost his parents at a very young age, and B) he's an agent for the government. Those are basically the only things we know about the guy going into this. And the text adventure starts us off right away by leaning into this: "By age 11, Rolf was being raised in an orphanage, having lost both his parents to an accident the year prior. His talent at sports and excellent grades were widely regarded, and he was hailed throughout Paseo as a prodigy in the art of the sword. That intoxicating fame led to an overabundance of pride, and he grew hotly hot-hotty."

So, this is our main gameplay loop. We're presented with the name of the place we're in, and then a description of the place we're in, and then we're given options to move, look, take, use, or drop. Move is pretty self-explanatory. You hit it, and you're able to move to another room. Look is kind of like pressing A. It's the context-sensitive option. Like, if there's a person in the room you want to talk to, you'll look at them, and then you'll talk to them. If there's an object in the room you just want to see, then you hit look to look at it. You can look at the surrounding area, which sometimes reveals more details or objects that were not shown to you at first. Look is going to be the option you use the most. We've also got take, which a lot of times is needless because you automatically pick up most of the items you need. Like, if somebody hands you an item, you don't need to use the take option, you just automatically get it. Also got use, self-explanatory, use an item, and drop, which I never really had to use. I guess that's if you have too many items. Because all of these have inventory limits, if you have too many items, you need to discard one, then drop is good. Most of the time, you only need to use an item one time. So, like, if you already used a key, chances are you're not going to need the same key again. But sometimes you do. So, a lot of times it's safe to drop that key, unless it's not safe to drop a key. You can always re-pick up items that you drop, so it's never a permanent loss.

So, we're in this orphanage. Rolf is the best fencer that we know of. He's a child prodigy fencer. So, there's a guy named Dick and a girl named Shelley. And I think it's a law that if you're in a situation like this, that both male characters need to be in love with the girl. I'm not sure why, but both you and Dick are. So, Dick tells you to bring this love note to her, and you just kind of steal it. You just pawn it off as your own. Like, you hand the love note to Shelly, and she's like, "Oh, Rolf, I had no idea you felt this way." And then you just don't correct her for some reason. That's like the first thing you do in this game. It's like you're trying to make Rolf feel like an [ __ ]. "A charming beauty, Shelly stared back at him intently. The feelings of love between them were just beginning to awaken." Why do we never see Shelly in Fantasy Star 2? She's just discarded. Like, who cares? So it couldn't have awakened that much, I suppose.

So, we meet up with Dick, and he says, "I hear a superb fencer has been coming to the sword gym. Even you might not be a match for him," Dick said. And that is just unacceptable for our boy Rolf. There can't be a better fencer in the world than him. I'm the best. I'm the child prodigy. I mean, this guy at the sword gym is an adult man, and you would kind of expect to lose to him, but whatever. The only problem is the guard won't let you leave the orphanage. So, after some light puzzle-solving to sneak out, you go to the sword gym and you meet this awesome fencer named O'Connor. I guess he's Irish. I'm getting a little ahead of myself, though, because before you go to the sword gym, you're free to roam around the city. And there's one thing I want to comment on: you can go to the airport, and it says, "This airport services flights between Paseo on one end and Uzo Island or Scicon on the other." Uzo Island? You mean that dungeon in Fantasy Star 2, that uninhabited island that's just a big ass maze with some like trees at the top? There's commercial passenger travel there? Okay. I mean, that's not in Fantasy Star 2. They disabled that by the time the game happens.

So, we go to the sword gym, we fight O'Connor, and it's a forced loss. You're not supposed to win. I don't believe you can win this fight. And what happens next is the dumbest [ __ ] I have ever read in my life: "Unable to bear the shame, Rolf dashed out of the gym, his swords still tightly held in his grasp. 'I've lost my self-confidence. How could I go on like this?'" Remember, this is a child losing a fencing duel to a full-grown man. "It may be possible to reach O'Connor's level of skill through practice. I'll never get anywhere by moping. Training is the only path left now." So, now Rolf has this newfound sense of desire to get stronger. So he's gonna hit the gym. He's gonna go back to the sword training place harder than ever. He's gonna come at O'Connor every day until he can beat him. Is the logical thing to do? But let's, let's see what, let's see what Rolf's big idea is. What's what he's gonna do? What's he gonna do? "Uzo Island would be a good spot for you to go. It's uninhabited, but there is no better place for training than a solitary island." First things first, if you want to get better at like any discipline, being in solitary confinement is pretty much the worst idea. Like, if you want to get better at any discipline, like, oh, you're in sharpens iron, you don't go off by yourself and just like swing swords at the air. Or, I guess, in the logic of an RPG, you go to Uzo Island and you level grind on the random encounters there. So, I guess, in a way, in a roundabout way, this kind of makes sense. His stupid plan to go into solitary confinement on an uninhabited island. So you go to the airport, board a plane to Uzo Island, and then eight years later, you live on this island for eight years. Jesus [ __ ] Christ, that's insane. You get a pretty Keno portrait change, though.

So, eight years have passed. You go back to the orphanage, only to find that the exact same people that you knew from before are still there. Dick is still there, the same director, the same guard, and Shelley. You remember Shelley? The girl has been kidnapped. Isn't she like an adult now, or close to it? And it turns out the person who kidnapped her was O'Connor. So you go, you track down O'Connor, and you fight him for the honor of this girl, I guess, that you liked eight years ago but haven't seen. I don't know. I still can't get over the fact that everybody at the orphanage was the exact same after eight years. That's incredibly dumb. So you fight O'Connor, and holy [ __ ], I rolled two sixes on the final boss.

[Music]

So, that's right. I forgot to mention that all of the combat in this game is accomplished through dice rolls. So, there's a huge random element to that, and if you die, you need to restart the entire text adventure over from the beginning. There's no saving, there's no checkpoints. So, if you're gonna play through these, I would recommend save states. Anyway, I kick O'Connor's ass, and then the huge revelation happens. It turns out you were Truman Show the whole time. All of this was a setup. It turns out that O'Connor was actually the president of Motavia, and he was looking for new agents to join his special government agency. And he heard that at this orphanage, there was a kick-ass swordsman, but he was a [ __ ] and he needed to learn humility. So he went to the orphanage, kicked your ass, or I guess you went to the sword gym nearby the orphanage. Well, anyway, you fight, he kicks your ass, and then it was all a part of his plan for you to go off and train in solitary confinement for eight years. This is an eight-year-long con just to get you to join his government force. And of course, heaven, just all of this piled on top of you, you're like, "Oh yeah, you'll give me a job in the government? Sure, I'll take that job." That's the most batshit insane backstory for somebody to become a government agent that you could possibly think of. Like, wow. I mean, it's been over a week since I played this, and I'm still in shock of how that played out.

Which brings us to Nay's Adventure. What we get in Fantasy Star 2 is: "Nay stared at me for a moment. I remember when we first met, she looked at me in just the same way. That was seven months ago, because she was the product of a mixture of human cells and those of a bio-monster. She was an outcast from society. You were still small when we first met, but now you can take care of yourself. I'm going on a dangerous journey, too dangerous for you. I worry about you like you were my sister." Then she forces herself to go with you, and the events of Fantasy Star 2 happen. Her pointy, cat-like ears gave her a strange appearance, but her mind was that of an ordinary young girl. Still, most people hated the bio-monster blood that flowed through her veins. Even the joy of being part of a loving family had been snatched away from her in mere moments. It had happened about half a year ago. They had been all alone since her birth until a kind, middle-aged couple found and raised her. One fateful day, a violent mob assaulted their happy family and chased Nay with torches and set her adoptive parents' house on fire. Trapped by the flames, the husband and wife had Nay escape through a dust chute. When she finally emerged from the sewers and made it above ground, Nay saw her home being consumed by a raging inferno in the distance. That was the day her endless solitude began. She had no home to return to anymore, no one awaiting her arrival."

Which, Jesus [ __ ] Christ, that's before the text adventure even starts. That's just backstory. And I think that was kind of a miscalculation on Sega's part because that's the most interesting thing to happen to her, and it just happens in an intro blurb before you even start playing. Most of her chapter consists of pretty much just wandering around randomly, stumbling across people that are either nice or not so nice to you. We know where she's going to end up. She's going to end up at Rolf's house somehow. But all of the heavy action already happened. I would have had the dramatic escape from the house, the burning of the house. That would have been what I based the text adventure around.

So, of the random people that we come across that are nice to us, we come across Rudo, and he gives us a silver bullet. There's also a child, a kid, who is pretty much the only other person who's nice to you in your first pass through around this game. There's also this old man who freaks the hell out when he sees you. "An elderly man is seated behind a desk, clearly a disciple of science. He is wearing a white lab coat, steeped in the scent of pharmaceuticals. The man's eyes widened when he noticed Nay, who had silently crept up behind him. He withdrew an old notebook from a drawer and began pursuing it on the desk, repeatedly comparing its contents with Nay's appearance. 'No, can't be. Impossible. This isn't the one I've been searching for. It should be younger and more like a cat. Those ears.' He closed his eyes and started muttering to himself as he pondered this turn of events." And anything you do, you can't interact with him anymore. He just kind of is shell-shocked to see you, and you can't get any more of a response out of him.

So, you keep wandering around. You'll trade the silver bullet for a weapon. "These claws used by the legendary warrior Meow," you know, from the first game. It's a cute little Easter egg. Then you come across the hunter who killed your parents and burned your house down, and he's still out for blood. So you run away from him, only to find a man with a fencing trophy. Oh, it's Rolf. We've found Rolf. So, I guess now he's gonna go with us, and we're gonna fight the Hunter and end her chapter. Only, no, that doesn't happen. At least not right away. Here's a pretty cute part: we go underground, we go into the sewer, and it mentions that the depths are "pitch black, yet Nay can still see down there because she's half cat." There's also another moment where you're outside of a house, and you can hear the conversation happening inside the house. So, it's like they gave Nay a couple of clear cat-like abilities, and that's very cool. She also grows during the chapter. Nay's things that she's a bio-monster, she's like half cat, and cats age faster than humans. So, throughout Fantasy Star 2, she gains levels faster than all the other characters. And in this, just during the course of the game, over the course of the game's events, she ages enough that her portrait actually changes, and that's very cool.

So, the game doesn't progress until you actually listen in on this conversation. It's a conversation between that Hunter and the old man that was shell-shocked to see you earlier. It turns out that the old man is actually the guy who bioengineered you, but it's kind of like a Frankenstein, Frankenstein's monster situation where he becomes disgusted by his creation, that he just kind of lets it escape, and he lets these two other scientists adopt you. But that's not enough. He begins to regret his creation so much that he hires this bounty hunter to have you killed. Now, the bounty hunter is getting pissed off that he can't actually like track you down. You're too like nimble, you keep escaping his advances. So he basically just kills the old man so he doesn't have to do the bounty anymore. He just takes the money he was going to give him anyway. It all comes to a head when you confront the Hunter, and right.

When it looks like you're [ __ ], when it looks like the hunter is gonna finish you off, Rolf comes in to save the day and he basically adopts you. For the first time since that incident half a year ago, she could believe in other people. They had regained a trusting heart. Never again would she have to try to fall asleep terrified within the shadows cast by boulders. "Rolf, no matter what happens, I will always be at your side." "Oh, isn't that just swell?"

Next, we have Rudo's story, and he really doesn't say anything specific in his intro monologue. "I'm sorry to intrude, but I have heard that Rolf and Nay are trying to solve the mystery of the bio-monsters. I am a professional bio-monster hunter. I have little talents except that I am good with a gun." So that's basically nothing to go on. But then, if you read his bio, he mentions that he had a wife and child, which were killed by bio-monsters. So through his bio, he actually ends up having one of the most concrete backstories to go off of in these text adventures. Pretty much what happens, what they say happens in his bio, that he has a wife and child and they are killed by bio-monsters. That's basically all that happens in his text adventure. You start out and you're at work, then you hear that your hometown got attacked by bio-monsters, so you go back only to find that your wife and child have died. Unfortunately, they've been attacked by a bio-monster. So, so you spend the whole rest of the chapter tracking down this bio-monster and then in the end, killing him. And plot-wise, that's all that happens in Rolf's chapter. It's not like Pulp Fiction where even though Nay met Rolf in her chapter, you never meet Nay in, uh, this one. So these text adventures don't all happen at the exact same time. They, um, they don't overlap ever. Even if you meet another character from Fantasy Star 2, which happens a few times in here, it's always at a different moment. None of these plot lines intersect, which would have been really cool if they did, but unfortunately, they don't.

Through playing all of these text adventures, I found that they did a pretty good job of making it so it's not too cryptic as to where you couldn't solve it. Like, you still need to think, you still need to like use all your objects with like anything you could logically think of to progress. Basically, I'm saying that it's not too cryptic that you can't figure these out, but it's cryptic enough that it's still fun. Lone inception of Rudo's chapter here, because throughout all of this, I only had to consult a guide two times, and both of those occasions were in this chapter. There's this one bit where you come across a waterfall, and anyone who's ever seen a waterfall in a video game knows that there's probably something behind that waterfall. So I was trying to go behind it or like do something to get it so that the waterfall would like, I don't know, manifest a new path. And the solution is to take your shotgun and just shoot the waterfall, and that opens up the cave behind it. That's very stupid, and why would I think to do that? There's also another part where you come across a door, which they make clear that you need a jewel, a very specific and rare jewel to open. And I couldn't for the life of me find this jewel. And it turns out that the jewel is all the way back where you start. You basically, it's like one screen away from where you start the chapter, and you're supposed to know when you get like a ball of string and a stick that you can use that to go fishing in the pond in like one of the first screens. And this is like late in the chapter. The door is the last thing in the chapter, so you're all the way at the end, and you need to backtrack all the way to the beginning just so you can go fishing. And even like if that wasn't cryptic enough, you need to then know to use your knife on the fish to cut it open because the jewel is inside the fish. But other than like those two moments, I think they do a good job of making it like not too cryptic.

The culprit ends up being this drill mole that you shoot a shitload of times with your shotgun, and then he dies. The drill mole let out a deathly wail as it fell. Rudo continued blasting the monster with his weapon long after it was dead. He shot at the corpse until it disintegrated, but that didn't bring back his wife and child.

Next up, we have Ann, or Amy, as she's known in Fantasy Star 2, and she doesn't say a whole lot in her intro cutscene. "I am Dr. Amy Sage. I heard that you are seeking to solve the mystery of the bio-monsters. I will be glad to assist you, though I am not much of a fighter, but I can heal wounds." So, yeah, almost nothing to go off of. Amy's chapter is cool because you spend a lot of your time healing people rather than fighting. A lot of these, you'll come across like a random stray dog that you need to fight or something stupid like that, or just like a little bio-monster that they'll mix it up. Usually, there's like three or four fights a chapter. Amy still has, I think, one or two fights, but the main thing you're doing is healing people. Like, the premise is you're at work at the hospital, then you receive word that this elementary school was attacked by bio-monsters, so it's your job to go to the school and help these kids out. But a lot of her chapter ends up being busy work because in order to get to the elementary school, there's a bridge, but the bridge is out, so you need to find another way to cross the river. So you need to go on this trading sequence where eventually you'll get a raft, but the raft has a hole in it, so you need to get glue, then you use glue on the hole in the raft to fix it, but then you need an ore. So you find a stick, then you take the stick to the wood shop, but the wood shop guy wants more money than you have to make it into an ore. So you need to find a way to make money. Then you find a nail puller in your house that you like barter to like get money or something. It's, it's this really weird and convoluted trading sequence just so you can cross the river to get to the school. And even once you get to the school, you still aren't done and you're still not like helping the kids because it turns out that the bio-monster is still in the school. And some random guy just shouts out, "Hey, hey, you can't beat the bio-monster unless you have the silver ring." Then your quest for the rest of the text adventure is just to find this silver ring. But you come across random people that you'll need to like use an antidote on them, and they'll like give you an item that you need for the trading sequence in return. You use a trimate to heal like a wounded dude who's just like laying on the side of the road, um, just [ __ ]. Like that. And when you get to the final encounter with this monster, even though you're the one who found the silver ring, you're still not the one who ends up fighting him. It's this guy named Heinz that you meet, who's like another doctor, he's like another healer boy, but he's a guy, so he's stronger. So even though I'm pretty sure Amy did a decent job of holding her own in my party when I played through Fantasy Star 2, she wasn't like a worthless fighter, but no, no, no, she, she can't be the one who fights the final boss. No. I mean, as much as I kid, it's actually pretty cool that they invert what you would expect for the final encounter in this chapter. Instead of, um, you know, directly fighting, you're just, it's your job basically to just heal Heinz every turn. It's like he attacks the monster, and then you heal him, and then he attacks the monster again, and then you heal him. Cool. It has you playing another role in the party because the rest of them, you're, you're a fighter, and all the rest of these text adventures, you don't really do anything else. They had one idea, they had the idea that they're gonna make you a healer, and they did a decent, they did a pretty good job.

After that is Huey, or Hugh. "I am Hugh Thompson, a biologist. I came when I heard about your quest. I value all life, including bio-monsters. I am willing to fight to defend weaker life forms, though perhaps my knowledge will be of help to you." Now, I didn't use Huey at all when I was playing through Fantasy Star 2, so he's basically like a completely brand new character to me. So his is like a B horror movie. You're on a college campus, and there's a bio-monster on the loose, and it's your job to go and track down the bio-monster and get rid of him. Huey has a girlfriend named Rita, who is apparently so gorgeous that, quote, "Who knows how many boys at this school are captivated by her beauty." So good for you, Huey. Huey took the "Pence Nez," a novelty item, fake plastic spectacles that clip to the nose. They might be useful as a disguise. So there's this bit in this chapter where you put that on to like act as a disguise to get into an area, and they missed an opportunity to not draw stupid little glasses on his porch right there. The monster ends up being this giant plant that feeds on electricity, and rather than doing direct combat with it, you'll always lose if you try and do that. They're more like puzzle fights. You fight it twice, and the first time the solution is to use your ID card, which was, um, described earlier as sharp enough to use as a weapon. You're supposed to use that to sever the monster's vines, so it just like scurries away after that. Then the second time you fight it, it goes to the local power plant. You're supposed to crank up the electricity, crank up the wattage, the power so much that the monster explodes. Which is a really cool idea because the, the fights are more like solving puzzles than they are just like rolling dice. Like in all the rest of the chapters, this has got to be the dumbest puzzle that I accidentally solved throughout all of the chapters. I did not need a guide, but I felt it felt unearned when I figured out what you're supposed to do. So you're cranking the switch right to up the power, then the lever breaks, and uh oh, what are you supposed to do with the broken lever? So my items right now, I've got an ID card, a key, a mop, a shotgun, and a shampoo bottle, or just this shampoo. Which one of these items do you think would be effective in solving this situation? I probably just spoiled it by saying shampoo bottle instead of just shampoo, but that's what it was. You're supposed to use the shampoo on the lever. Why? Okay, that was just a case of me just trying everything with everything. I didn't expect it to actually work, but that's the solution. You use the bottle, it's like the new lever, and you pull it, and then the electricity gets so strong that the monster explodes, and you live happily ever after.

It really doesn't tie into much of anything with Fantasy Star 2. It's kind of a complete non-sequitur. In fact, I feel like I don't hardly know anything else about this character after having played this. It was cute, don't get me wrong, that tracking down this bio-monster, like just going through the, the rooms of the school, and I like that the, the fight wasn't a dice roll, it was, you know, a puzzle-solving one. But I don't know, this chapter was pretty disposable. I'm not, if I ever play through Fantasy Star 2 again, I'm not gonna use this character because of his chapter in the text adventures. His was pretty short too. Up until this point, each adventure has been about an hour, an hour and a half, or the longest one total, I think, was about an hour 40. But his was only 37 minutes long. So, yeah, I mean, it was easy too because you don't have to rely on dice rolls as much. Yeah, I don't know, very strange chapter.

Next, we have Amia, or Anna. And she says, "In the original game, I am known as Guardian. Although most hunters are good, some have gone bad. I track them down. My job is to hunt evil hunters, but I can hunt anything. I dislike guns, but give me a weapon with a blade, and I am deadly." Okay, so that's basically nothing. I'm a badass chick, that's all that says. Her chapter is arguably the most simple, except for maybe Rolf's. His was pretty simple. So you're Anna the Bounty Hunter, and you go out to this village to bring in a, a hacker who they just name Hack. Being an enthusiastic and gifted hunter, Anna had already claimed 15 bounties by the time she arrived in this remote region. This is another chapter where not much happens plot-wise. Basically, you just chase Hack around for a while until you both fall into a sand pit, and then you and Hack need to work together to get out of the sand pit. By sand pit, I guess I mean like those giant wormholes in Fantasy Star 1. That's what I'm imagining when they say sand pit, because there's no visuals. So now, with newfound respect, you and Hack learn that you're not so different, and you really shouldn't bring him in because you have a heart of gold, la la la. Oh, and because it's a guy and a girl, this happens. Hack gazes at Anna as if he could read her thoughts. Hack used his strength to move the boulder. He embraced Anna gently, pressing his lips to hers. So they kiss, and then Anna lets him go. "Of course, after that. Goodbye, Hack. I hope we can meet again someday. Maybe then our feelings for each other..." Oh, that was it. That was the whole thought. Anna returned to her jet buggy and sent a report to the agents. "Capture of Motavian Hack unsuccessful." And then you never see him again in the actual game. [ __ ] [ __ ].

Next, we have Kinds, or Kane, as he's known in-game. And he's another character that I didn't use at all when I was playing through Fantasy Star 2. So this is another completely new character to me. Basically, and he has, without a doubt, the strangest introductory soliloquy in Fantasy Star 2. "Yup, I done heard you going out after them badons. I can help you. I ain't much for them slimy critters, but if any machines or robots get in your way, I can bust 'em up real good." With a noticeable accent, his bio says that he's actually not very good at fixing things, which is pretty funny because it actually plays into his chapter. Because the first thing you do, this is how the chapter basically starts. The first real event is you walk down to a bar, get into a knife fight with a random guy there, then the bartender says, "Hey, you Kane, since you, uh, got into a knife fight in my bar, now you need to fix the air conditioning. I know you're good with machines, so my air conditioning's out. Go over there and fix the air conditioning." So you do. Then, as soon as you leave, actually, let me read exactly what it says. "The building exploded behind me just after I left. By the time I turned around, all that remained of the bar was the entrance and the smoke billowing out of it." You just killed an entire crowded bar full of people. Jesus [ __ ] Christ. So you spend most of the rest of the chapter running away from the Robo Cops coming after you because you just blew up a [ __ ] bar. You also come across a group of thugs that are plotting to destroy Mother Brain, which this was before, I guess that was cool because that's what you'd do in Fantasy Star 2, that's what you end up doing, but it's painted as like a bad thing, and you're trying to stop them. In this, there's also a side plot about this girl named Sue. This is like, kind of a romance going on there, who of course we never see in Fantasy Star 2. So it's like, you and this girl Sue running away from Robo Cops until eventually you, um, no, I mean, I guess nothing really gets resolved at the end. I mean, you're still running away from Robo Cops, you just board a plane to leave the planet. Yeah, what happened to Sue? Most of this chapter, there's a part where you get kidnapped and tied up, and then perspective actually shifts to her. You play as her for like a good third of this chapter, trying to find a way to get you out of captivity. And then she's just not in the game. Very weird that they would invent another character that you would, uh, would play such an integral part in Kane's story, but we never hear mentioned again.

Well, anyway, the last character you meet in Fantasy Star 2, the coolest character in Fantasy Star 2, also gets the coolest chapter of the Fantasy Star 2 text adventure saga, because sure, AKA Shika, as she's known in, is awesome. Okay, so the premise is, there's the Oppa Oppa. I don't remember if it was a statue or a painting, but anyway, you're trying to steal the ship from Fantasy Zone, which is at an art gallery in this skyscraper across the street. The whole thing takes place basically in this skyscraper, and it's really hard to like have a mental map of this place. Um, a lot of these chapters so far haven't been that complex because there's no in-game map and it's all text, so there's no like, you know, visual landmarks or anything. You just need to like remember what room is where. And this was the one that I had the hardest time with because it's really easy for me to get mixed up what floor contained what, and there are different elevators on different, like, the same floor will have multiple elevators that lead to different places. So like, you can be on like the fifth floor, but if you like took a different elevator to get to the fifth floor, there would be a different set of rooms. So really, this is all just like Metal Gear Solid, the text adventures. It's really cool. You're like evading guards. Um, there's a bit where you get like climbing gear and you gotta like climb on the ceiling to like avoid getting detected by some like people. So you uncover a plot by like a rival team that they're also trying to steal the Oppa, but you're in like a stealing duel with these other people to see who can get the statue first, or maybe it was a painting. I don't, I don't know. Here's the visual, whatever, right here. It's either a state, they actually show you at the end what it is. So here it is. It also involves a part of you disguising yourself in like a bunny outfit, so I guess it gets points for that too. So eventually you get the statue, stash it away in your outfit, pull the fire alarm, and escape with the commotion. Another heist, well done. The next day, the Motavian Times printed the following story: "Eli Osicle's Masterpiece Stolen. The two suspects are in custody, but the painting has not yet been recovered." As a painting, not a statue. And that was the Fantasy Star 2 text adventures. What did I think? If it weren't for, um, having to do, making myself like do it for the videos, honestly, I probably would have just played one or two and then called it quits. I wasn't like super engaged. I don't think reading like pure text adventures is makes for great gameplay, especially in current year. But if you're a huge Fantasy Star fan, then I don't know, check them out. They're interesting. They're not, uh, total losses. They are, um, much more bare bones than I expected before going in, but they're not like poorly designed. They're a pretty user-friendly. You can get through most of them without a guide. I recommend using save states though, because of the random chance with the dice rolls in combat. But as I said, the only one I needed, um, a guide for was Rudo's chapter, and they're each, they're pretty short. They're each only about an hour, so like, what do you, what have you got to lose? If you're a big Fantasy Star fan, then sure, play the text adventures.

Fantasy Star 3 has a reputation for being the worst title in the classic series, the black sheep, whatever you want to call it. In recent years, it has found some fans and even become somewhat of a cult classic in the eyes of a few. Before playing it for this, I expected to zag against the popular opinion because I had played through a good chunk of Fantasy Star 3 in the past and remembered thinking that it wasn't that bad. Now, after finishing it with an asterisk, which I'll explain later, playing this immediately after one and two, my overall takeaway is that if anything, Fantasy Star 3 does not get enough [ __ ]. Articles like this, representing it as ambitious yet flawed, are commonplace, and it feels like whenever this game comes up in conversation, that's where the discourse heads. I don't even agree with that assessment. That's far too kind. It's dreadful. Even when you take into account this being from 1990, even when everybody already admits that this is the worst Fantasy Star game, it goes beyond just being an underwhelming title in an otherwise well-respected series, and it's not because it was too ambitious. If anything, the game barely tries. It's this bare minimum, half-assed attempt at an RPG, and it's not because it doesn't fit into the timeline or overall stories of the series very well. It doesn't, but that's so far down the list of problems that it doesn't even register with me. It's not saved by its concept or art or world-building nearly as much as two was either. Cutting to the chase, I have very little nice to say about Fantasy Star 3. So I guess that's where I'll begin. I'll start with the positives. At the highest level, if you take 20 steps back from the game itself, look at it through a pair of binoculars as a design document, it's a fundamentally fantastic idea for an RPG. Its central gimmick is this branching path system. There's four ways to get to the end, and it's determined by who you choose to marry. This is where the subtitle "Generations of Doom" comes from. You play through a few typical RPG scenarios as a character, then you're given the choice of two different brides. You pick one, and then the game flashes forward about 20 years, and you play as their kid. Then it happens again with the son character, and you end up finishing the game as the grandson of who you started with. That sounds awesome, right? If you haven't played it and I'm just selling you on the concept of a game that sounds like a pretty good hook, it'll incentivize multiple playthroughs, it opens up possibilities to see the same world through different perspectives, you could explore Butterfly Effect-like consequences that your early actions have later on. There's essentially seven different protagonists, meaning you could have each one of them represent a different play style and personality. Think like The Seventh Saga, how each of your starting characters was a different archetype from an RPG. It could do something like that. There is an untapped ocean of possibilities here. Based on how I started this and my tone, do you think that they explore any of these or do anything interesting at all with this concept, for that matter? Um, take a wild guess before I even get into the weeds. Fundamental flaw number one: Fantasy Star 3 only has two save slots. Four branching paths and only two save slots. My plan going in was to use both save slots simultaneously through two generations, then branching off for the third and knocking out two of the final scenarios at once, then to restart and do the other half of the family tree. Well, I got halfway. I finished two scenarios, then I restarted, replayed the first generation, and made it a little bit into the second. But the way the second generation started on the other side of the family tree made me realize that I was so disillusioned with the whole thing that I didn't even want to bother with the rest of the game. I'm fairly confident I've seen everything I need to see. If that makes me a fraud, if the good half of Fantasy Star 3 was the half that I skipped, then I'm sorry. It's not that I'm not willing to go the extra mile, it's that I'm not willing to do it for this game. But we're not there yet. This part is supposed to be about the positives, and we're gonna keep it positive. Let's go over the other thing that I liked. When you first booted up, there's this initial jolt of the game not being sci-fi at all. What sets this series apart from Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy was it being the futuristic, high-tech alternative to those series. But here, in three, you begin the game in this poor fantasy-styled imitation. And that's fantasy with an F, not a pH. It's traditionally medieval. Which, if you think about it, actually kind of makes sense after the ending of two. Remember how the world was basically screwed because they destroyed all of their natural resources and then became too reliant on an evil supercomputer to control their lives? It's a video game adaptation of that saying about World War II, you know, I don't know, with what weapons World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. It's like they're continuing on with that whole concept. It's medieval setting is a testament to how humanity finds a way to survive. We're not at full strength. In fact, we've reverted technologically quite a bit, but we're still here. And the first time you access one of these transportation bridges to see this technological, obviously man-made passage, this is a real, "Oh [ __ ]" moment, suggesting that perhaps there's more going on than we realize. This isn't just a medieval world, it's built on the foundation of ancient technology. Perhaps that whole trope.

Then the reveal of this secret ancient technology leaves much to be desired. The twist about halfway through is that you're on a giant spaceship full of people from Palma who evacuated the planet before it got blown up in two. It has now been one thousand years. Again, why is it always 1,000 years? That's too many years. And the truth about your society has been lost. It's like WALL-E, but instead of everybody becoming morbidly obese and allowing technology to take over their lives to the extent that they forget about what it means to be human, that's more like the theme of the last game. For some reason, on this spaceship, everybody just reverts back to medieval, non-technological ways of life. Why? You're on a [ __ ] spaceship. That doesn't really make any sense. It's not like they would have unlearned how the technology works. And one would think that in the world of Fantasy Star, that this self-sufficient spaceship they find themselves on would be A) the safest and most prosperous society in this post-Mother Brain Algo system, and B) a huge destination for everyone stuck on the dying Motavia. The way they tell you this information is also laughable. See this line of NPCs? They're just in the middle of some town. Let's call this Exposition Row. One by one, you just talk to them, and a little bit more of this cutscene plays. I just think that it's incredibly funny that instead of one character with some build-up telling you the history of the world, it's a group of old men hanging out in the center of some random town. And the way a story bits are portrayed, you in this game are the laziest [ __ ]. This row of old men NPCs is pretty much the only noteworthy thing that happens because most of the time, character on character dialogue is on this ugly baby blue screen. The game doesn't have that many of these dialogue moments, but every time they happen, it's always the same screen. And for that matter, every time you get married at the end of a generation, they reuse the same wedding screen. It's like they made it black and white so they wouldn't have to recolor everybody's hair. This whole game just reeks of cut corners and I'm gonna say it, a lack of ambition. But wasn't I talking about things that I liked? I guess that was hidden in there somewhere. Yeah, it was the initial jump you get when seeing this screen. That's the positive. Then you realize that they reuse this aesthetic for half the dungeons in the game, including the final one, and it becomes much less cool. But you can't take away the first time you stumble in here, that's a real memorable moment.

The last nice thing I can say about Fantasy Star 3 is kind of a backhanded compliment. It's that the game is incredibly easy. Two at times devolved into level grinding. The video game that's about, about half of what you do, but not here. If you can stomach it, Fantasy Star 3 is something you can beat with minimal to no grinding whatsoever. I never felt the need to keep up with equipment, just whatever I found in chests seemed to be fairly good enough. When I'd get to a new town, I might buy a new weapon or two, but I wasn't about to grind and stick around to get all the equipment. Five party members seems like overkill for everything from random enemies to boss fights. It seems like just pure numbers overwhelm them. I never really felt like I was in serious danger from random encounters, and there's only a few boss fights, and they all have laughably low HP. I failed to talk much about the combat in my two videos, so let's rectify that here because they use incredibly similar systems. You hit attack and two, or the wind-up sign in three. Three's weird. It doesn't use text for the menus, just these symbols. It'll initiate an auto-battle where all your party members attack. Physical attacking is everybody's default unless you tell the game before the round starts to have them do something else. It defaults to auto-battle and then relies on the player to make specific adjustments here and there. It's kind of cutting edge and saves time from having to individually select everyone's attack. Battles go really quick in these games as a result, especially here in three where nine times out of ten you don't even need to worry about doing anything other than attacking.

Those sadistic dungeon designs from two have been replaced by some of the most simplistic corn mazes imaginable. Fantasy Star 3 has some of the most basic dungeon designs I've ever seen. The caves are like real-life caves in that they're not interesting at all. They don't feel like designed areas. They're like one giant tunnel. There's no discernible rhyme or reason, they're just big empty spaces you need to traverse. Then, to contrast that, there's these sci-fi areas, which I mentioned earlier, which blatantly plagiarized the Denny's kids menu. They're simple mazes. Even the final dungeon is just a one-screen, unremarkable, uninspired, wired, unchallenging, just snail maze. I know in two I complained about them being over-designed and downright maniacal sometimes, but there has to be some kind of balance between the back of the Lucky Charms box you get here and whatever quantum physics two expected you to learn. The most creative dungeon in the entirety of Fantasy Star 3 is the one where you enter through these fountains, or each fountain leads to a different entry point, and that's it. That's the whole gimmick, a dungeon with more than one place you can enter. Even then, it looks as simple as this. It's just another generic maze. Every tiny advancement you make in two, you feel like you earned. Like the game is pitted against you succeeding. Two almost feels like there's a very unhappy man living inside your Sega, rooting at every step for you to not succeed. Three is so easy, so bland, that you don't even have to pay attention. Just auto-battle your way through everything. Just mindlessly wander through every dungeon. All the NPCs speak like four-year-olds too, so it's not engaging to read either. The interiors of each town are much more spread out with either the same or less content than they did in two. Your characters move at about the same speed in both games, but it feels so much slower here in three because everything is so spread out. You can also go into buildings, unlike last time, but it's mostly pointless. Most of them have upstairs areas, but 19 out of 20 times they'll be completely empty, so there's no point. With the other 1 in 20 occasions, just having an NPC which says stupid [ __ ] like, "Satellite." It's nothing more than a tall tale. Wow, thanks, lady. I mean, maybe I would get it if you were to put like the actual helpful hints up here, but like, just a bog standard NPC that does the minimum of world-building. Like this dialogue is supposed to say, "There's a satellite." "No, you're crazy." "There's no such thing as that." And of course, there is, but you know, the people are in disbelief. It does the job, but this box is like the bare minimum of what they had to do to get that point across. It's so [ __ ] lame. Every town, no matter the location, no matter the climate, looks exactly the same. It's always the same buildings, the same grass. Sometimes there's a fountain or two sprinkled in, but that's it. Even here in the snow, look, look at this. See this town? Yeah, even in the snow, it looks exactly like everywhere else.

So much of this game is structured around arbitrary gatekeeping. You know, find this MacGuffin which magically allows you to enter this cave. Two had a fair amount of this too, but they're explained in more natural and creative ways. For example, maybe you need to trade with some native Motavians for a vehicle to cross the water to get to the next part of the game, or maybe you need to blow up this wall with dynamite, or traverse this mining hole dungeon to get literally anywhere on Desos. In three, to get from area to area, it's always a cave, and a disembodied text box just flat out tells you that you can't enter the cave without some jewel in your inventory. That sucks. That's the laziest freaking thing they could have come up with. Put a locked door on the cave and tell me that I need to find a key. It would still be the same lazy design at its core, but it would at least make a little monochrome of sense.

This game's claim to fame, the branching paths, hardly change anything from what I can tell. Sure, you start in different locations and have a different character sprite, but that's basically it. The game does have four endings, but they're all 90% the same, with the only difference being where the spaceship you live on ends up. And one you meet another spaceship, and in another, you end up finding Earth, which I guess is a nice little loop and callback to two. But no matter who you pick, you end up with the same party members, going through the same dungeons, and the same events happen, even if they don't make sense. Watch the Mr. Gentleman video if you want specific examples of that, because I can't be bothered to care about this game's plot enough to do a [ __ ] takedown of it. Your first marriage is essentially picking a side before the game starts. An amnesiac woman washes ashore in your kingdom, so naturally, you're so smitten by her that you're gonna marry her. But it turns out she's actually the princess to this demon race of people, so they steal her back. And then at the end of the first generation, you're given a choice to either marry into the demon family or stick to your own kind. I probably said it like five times already, but the branching paths are a neat idea, but when they boil down to you exploring the exact same areas no matter which path you take, only with shuffled starting and ending locations, like, what's the point? It doesn't do anything with the concept of passing of time or the different bloodlines affecting how the story plays out. You're always going to end the game by opening a treasure chest and defeating this cartoon villain bastardization of Dark Force. I wish that they did more with the whole multiple main characters angle. Each chapter is basically the same thing. Sure, each character will learn different magic techniques depending on which path you go down, but magic kind of sucks in this game, so your main character is always going to end up relying mostly on physical attacks anyway. Look at, I don't know, Dragon Quest 4, which came out two months before Fantasy Star 3, by the way. That's a game with five distinct chapters, and each one of them mixes up your party's composition, leading to drastically different styles. You're forced to adapt to. On top of that, each chapter also tells a completely different type of story, and they're all structurally different from a design standpoint too. Fantasy Star 3 is essentially divided into seven chapters, but they're all the exact same generic JRPG [ __ ]. Your second and third party members are the exact same in every generation, no matter what you do. In every path, you're still walking around a mostly empty overworld, going through these planned dungeons, visiting the same copy-and-pasted towns, fighting battles which aren't challenging, and the color of your hair doesn't change any of that. And for a game that is supposed to take place over 40 plus years, nothing seems to change at all in the game world. Towns never ever change over time. None of them, not even a little. There's no bit where something is under construction and then after the time jump, it's done. There's no kid that you meet in the first generation that grows up to be a well-respected man or the mayor or something. How can you have a game that takes place over the course of half a century where nothing ever changes in the world around you? And why is it that only the main characters seem to age? It's actually kind of hilarious how they handled NPCs from generation to generation as well. I've noticed what they'll do is that say, in generation one, you'll go to a town and there'll be five NPCs just out and about, and you can talk to them as events in the game render what they say irrelevant. Instead of Fantasy Star 3 replacing their dialogue with something that makes sense, they just get rid of the NPC. Take this town for example. If you visit in generation one, you'll find these guys walking around in the field back here, but if you come back later in any other generation, they're gone. They're just straight up gone. The only NPC you can find walking around the town anymore is the one that just says, "Welcome to my village." In generation 2, one of your party members and actually a spouse choice is a woman named Layla. You recruit her in this temple that's hidden in a river. If you didn't pick her at the end of the chapter to marry, then you can actually go back to the same temple in generation 3 and you can actually re-recruit her again, and she looks exactly the same 20 years later.

The overall story arc is supposed to be that there are these two warring factions which eventually realize that Dark Force is the real enemy, so they team up to defeat it. You remember Dark Force, right? He was the final boss and one, after taking over the mayor's spirits. He was the second to final boss in two, and one of my favorite parts of the whole game because he's not as much an enemy as it is a manifestation of all the evil that resides within yourself. Fantasy Star 2 was a game about humanity's excesses naturally leading to the destruction of everything, and Dark Force was this concept that would worm itself into your heart, preying on the darkness that lies within. My point being that Dark Force in the first two games isn't portrayed as a literal being that's scheming against you, ooh, behind the scenes. He's like a puppet master making everybody do evil things. He's more of an intangible force which manifests itself whenever there's a great evil. Not so in three. You open up a treasure chest, and he has this goofy ass monologue: "I am Dark Force, Master of Death! Your sorrow, anger, and pain are my strength! Observe my might and despair of life, fools!" And then you fight him like any other enemy in the game. He's not even very difficult. Wasn't it much more impactful when Dark Force actually did use your character's sorrow, anger, and pain as his strength instead of just saying it like it is here? There's no mind games. All Dark Force does is just attack. Sure, in two it was a complete RNG fest, but that feeling of helplessness you had in that game got across the emotion of what Dark Force is supposed to be so much better. Dark Force used to be this ambivalent spiritual thing. It's like you're conquering some unstoppable, ungraspable presence. You're overcoming pure evil, like the idea of being evil. Here, you're just beating down another bad guy, another one to add to the pile. A disappointing finale to a disappointing game.

You know, Fantasy Star 3 is kind of a junky piece of garbage, but then again, so was two. But you don't see the same kind of world-building or inspired artwork and theming with this one. It's like you're getting everything shitty about playing an old 80s JRPG with none of what makes some of them great. Consider the big three original JRPG series: Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, and Fantasy Star. Both Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, through their first three entries, got inarguably better as they went along. You can see the evolution from one game to the other to the other. Fantasy Star tried to reinvent the wheel all three times, so it didn't evolve in nearly the same way. They killed it the first time, and you could still make an argument for Fantasy Star 2 being better than both Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest's second entries. But as those series began to round into form, as they were figuring out what they were, Fantasy Star just keeps wandering further and further away from what made it great. The core issue with Fantasy Star 3 is that it commits the primary cardinal sin that any piece of media can make: it's boring. You can say a plethora of negative things about two, more in fact than three. You can point to more concrete examples of iffy game design, I guess, in two than you could in three, because that game had ambition. This one doesn't. Two felt like it was designed by an evil scientist conducting psychological experiments. It's a pain in the ass to play, but it's also clearly a cohesive and inspired vision. Through the haze of old JRPG slime, you gaze at Fantasy Star 2 and you see a game with heart and a soul. Three gives off minimum wage, "I don't give a [ __ ] about my job" energy. It does the bare minimum with its concepts at every turn. It doesn't meaningfully utilize its concept in any interesting ways. It doesn't seem to understand or care about building upon the world established in the first two games. It was made by an entirely different team from the first two games, and it shows because they failed not only at crafting a compelling sequel, but they failed to make a compelling standalone adventure too. I hate this game. Didn't expect to say it going in, but I do. There is nothing here worth seeing, not one thing. People might drop Fantasy Star 1 because they don't like first-person dungeon crawling or because they got stuck and they can't figure out what to do next. They might drop Fantasy Star 2 because you need to constantly grind and that gets annoying fast. But they'll drop three because they're flat out bored. You see almost everything the game is ever going to offer in the first couple of hours, and if you already know the twist, which if you're watching this video and made it this far, well, I already told it to you, and you probably knew it going in anyway, a twist that doesn't even make much sense, then the game's thing else. Not only is it the worst Fantasy Star, it's a bad game overall. Like, it's down there with some of the worst Super Nintendo games I've played. Many people have said something to the effect that Fantasy Star 3 was ambitious but flawed, and that's where the overall reputation stands today. I don't expect to change it, but it's a hard disagree on my part. Having a good concept for a game and then just completely refusing to get out of bed, just refusing to do anything with your idea, does that make?

You an ambitious game is that all you need? You just need an idea that, if handled differently, could have been a good game. I would give that label more to a game which misplaces its effort into the wrong direction, something you can tell that they spent so much time, love, and attention on, but the end product just doesn't quite work. On the Sega Genesis, something like Comic Zone. That's an ambitious but flawed Genesis game. If you want an RPG example, let's say Live A Live. That's something I would call ambitious but flawed. But there is more love, care, heart, and soul poured into any one chapter of Life Alive than the entirety of Fantasy Star 3 combined.

Fantasy Star Adventure is Sega repurposing their text adventures format to a standalone retail release. Yes, unfortunately, "Adventure" in the title refers to text adventure, with one notable difference: this one is more visual. Maybe a little ironic that the Genesis text games each only contained four or five images each, whereas this Game Gear one has a unique image representing every screen. This is just a singular text adventure released on a Game Gear cartridge. Nothing more, nothing less. The "talk" option is new. Before, you would just have to look at whoever you wanted to speak to, but other than that, the gameplay is identical. It's not longer or more complex than any of those. My playthrough was only an hour and 16 minutes, and if I were a kid in Japan in 1991, I would be woefully disappointed by this. Hell, I'm an adult in 2023 and I'm still mildly disappointed.

They already did every main character from two, so who's this new one about? Someone from three? Maybe one? Well, if you answered a bunch of original characters completely made up for this game that we will never see or hear referenced ever again, well, I owe you a Mountain Dew, because that's exactly what this is. They give us a starting year, and that puts it around the same time as Fantasy Star 2, and you can see similar art assets. I would say it's most visually similar to two, but it's so self-contained that it really doesn't matter when this takes place. And this really has no reason to be a Fantasy Star game aside from it containing a few Fantasy Star things, such as the teleport station or a magic cap. It is almost nothing to do with the rest of the series.

The plot follows a scientist who creates a device that will double the abilities and strength of a human. That might have come in handy and you know, any of the actual games, but it just acts as a plot device here. The machine and scientist get kidnapped. His sister gives you the news, and it's up to you to break into this rival scientist's compound to get the machine back and rescue your friend. There are some decent puzzles, like when you need to short circuit an electric fence by pouring soda onto its control panel, or the time you need to use a tree branch as a ladder to climb into a ventilation shaft. Then later, when you find a rope, you need to replace the tree branch with the rope so you can reuse the tree branch somewhere else. That stood out to me because I can't recall many instances at all in the other text adventures where you needed to reuse items in multiple places.

On your way to the compound, you meet this man with a beard who gives you a radio to contact him if you ever get into trouble. This game was made before cell phones, so it's funny to imagine this sci-fi super high-tech society using walkie-talkies, but I guess this does have precedence in two, you know, with the VISA phone. Since you can't have a gun on the mantle piece in a play without it firing, eventually you get captured by this guy. I don't like the way he's looking at me. He takes away all of your items except for, conveniently, the radio. So you use it. Then perspective shifts to that bearded guy. He gets an ID card, goes undercover in the compound, and then gives the ID card to your own character. While he's undercover, you learn that this new scientist can't figure out how to operate the power doubling machine. So back is yourself. You would find the scientist, ask him how to use the machine, and he tells you that his sister from early, remember, his sister is actually an Android that he built, and this magic stone that's powering her is the only thing that will get the machine to work. So you leave, get the stone, come back, use the machine to make yourself double strength, beat up the creepy guy, but then the rival scientist uses the machine himself. Only instead of doubling his strength, it transforms him into a giant monster. Oh no. Then you fight the monster and win. Oh yeah, and that's Fantasy Star Adventure. If you enjoyed the original text games but wished that they could have a little less to do with the actual Fantasy Star series, then boy howdy, is this the game for you. For what it is, it's okay, but unless you're a Fantasy Star super fan, and hell, even if you are, I would say Adventure is entirely skippable.

Long ago, the evil Cablon ravaged the Coptto planet, one light year distant from the Algo star system. So the first thing the game tells us is that Gaiden doesn't take place in Algo, AKA, it doesn't really matter to the overall canon of the series. Fantasy Star, the series as a whole, is unique in that its setting is as much of a main character as any of the actual people. They put a lot of effort into characterizing the settings, even to the point where three treats its location as a major plot reveal. Gaiden, the term, means Side Story, story, and right away, they're reinforcing that notion. This new planet was quote, "discovered by Alice and named Alice Land." You remember the main character from the first game. So apparently, after being named the queen of Algo, she just kind of left for some reason and founded this new society somewhere else. They say it's the year 813, and the original took place in the 300s, so it's been about 500 years since that game. You play as these two kids or young adults or whatever, who, in an overly long cut scene, find the furious action gamer beat up on the side of the road by some bandits. Overly long for what this game ends up being, anyway, because it's just a traditional, no gimmicks, no fancy storytelling, no frills whatsoever, bare-bones JRPG. Fantasy Star Gaiden is fully transparent. What you get in the first 15 minutes is what you're going to get for the rest of the game. It's very Dragon Warrior 1. The spells aren't quite as blunt as "hurt" and "hurt more," but "bash" comes pretty close. You're going to be traveling along, going from town to town, grinding every time you get to a new one to upgrade your equipment. You have multiple party members, unlike Dragon Warrior, but combat is still the most basic a turn-based system could possibly be. It's a small, simple JRPG. If you play the original Dragon Warrior every so often for fun, and I'm talking the NES or Famicom versions, not the remasters that increase EXP and gold drop rates, if you replay the OG of the JRPG every couple of years, then Fantasy Star Gaiden is a similar experience.

I almost died on my first encounter. The game gives you all these starting items, but it doesn't automatically equip them. I guess that's a convenience this game does not have. That the original Dragon Warrior did. You also buy spells from a store, like in Final Fantasy, as opposed to learning them on level up, which means that you even need to be able to read a Japanese manual, scan, or trial and error which ones you actually want. You could also just be like me and buy whatever sounds like it might be useful. I ended the game with a small handful of spells, just kind of finding a couple that worked and sticking with them, because more spells means you need more money, and needing more money means more grinding, and this is already one of the most grind-heavy games that anyone could choose to play. Hardcore Gaming 101 claimed that "progressing through PS Gaiden requires more grinding than in literally every other RPG released in the 90s." A strong claim, and in terms of percentages, as in percent of the total game spent grinding, Fantasy Star Gaiden might have a case. If this were rebalanced to where you'll always be naturally strong enough to survive by just doing fights as they come, this would be a one-hour game, maybe even less. My final time came in at almost 10. So that's a lopsided grinding to content ratio, I'd say. As baby's first RPG, maybe it's a little too reliant on grinding, but I can imagine being in 1992, having a Game Gear and not a Game Boy or Lynx, and in that situation, it wouldn't be terrible. Gaiden is the kind of thing you can whip out, grind for five or ten minutes in between the cracks of your life, such as waiting on the school bus or riding a Japanese mass transit train. It's low stakes, you never really need to think about what you're doing, so as a mindless time waster, you could do worse. The encounter rate is incredible. I'm talking every step, sometimes it gives something like Shin Megami Tensei 1 some stiff competition, but at least you're safe in towns.

Here, Fantasy Star Gaiden is a microscopic JRPG. Its only overworld is 63 tiles at its widest and 62 long at its tallest. Yes, I counted, and that's walkable space, not counting the border mountain tiles. There are only seven, or maybe six and a half depending on how you count, towns, eight dungeons, seven of which are only one floor and smaller than any of the ones in three, and only four of which, I believe, are mandatory to finishing the game. Hell, I didn't even go into two of them. You speak to people like in Fantasy Star 1 by just walking into them, and their dialogue is incredibly literal. The fan translation probably wasn't dealing with Shakespeare, but I would have liked to have seen a little personality, or at least not have made the hints so direct. I try to go into this mess of white pixels, and this guy says, "I can't allow you into the ancient ruins. By the way, my weakness is Uzo." And what a bizarre thing to say. Here's a little life advice: don't go blurting out your weaknesses to whoever asks. Uzo is an item, a beverage of the alcoholic variety, I would assume, that you can buy in a nearby town. So obviously, that's what the game is trying to get you to do, but it's no Fantasy Star 1, which would carrot on a stick lead you to where you need to go. This game just flat out tells you, "Buy this man this drink." It's cute how you enter towns from different locations on the world map. You show up inside them from different entrances. Two towns become conjoined after you dry out a river separating them, which is genuinely cool. There's way more town variety than in Fantasy Star 3, and this game also has more save slots. Okay, okay, I'm not gonna disparage three anymore, because am I kid-gloving this review of Gaiden? Yeah. If this game were called Fantasy Star 3 and were on the Genesis, of course I would be ripping it to shreds, but it's not and wasn't. It's a simple little grind RPG on the Game Gear, one that wasn't even important enough to get released over here. This changes my expectations quite a bit.

You know that Human Resources meme? I'm that woman right now. Gaiden is entirely skippable, but the first 10 seconds of the game is an admittance of that. It's not trying to be anything more than it is. There's nothing misleading in Gaiden. There are a few quirks which leads me to believe that they didn't think much of this game through, though. For example, you begin the game with this light pendant which illuminates every cave, but you can still buy torches for some reason. You know, consumables which do the exact same thing, whereas this pendant you start with lasts the entire game, it has unlimited uses, and you never are forced to like give it up or anything. Actually, now that I think about it, why even have lighting mechanics if they're simply going to give you the permanent solution from the onset? It feels redundant. Your heal spells don't scale with any kind of magic stat, they just recover a fixed amount of HP, and the first one you buy, the regular heal, only recovers five, which is worthless even at level one. Another strange thing is that when you're at a lower level than the game intends you to be at, the largest barrier to you doing harm to the enemies isn't your attack or defense, it's your accuracy. Say the game wants you to be at level 10, but you're only at 9. Instead of being able to [ __ ] your way through fights slightly underleveled, you will just miss every single time. At a certain point, your accuracy will hit this invisible threshold, and it's like the game is now finally allowing you to fight the new monsters, because before you don't even stand a chance. You can't do anything because the game just won't let you hit them, and that's not just for physical attacks, magic misses too. It's like the game is forcing you to grind, and it's even more important than it would already be. There's no cheese methods to beat enemies because you can't hit them. When you acquire new party members, which happens a few times, they start so underleveled, without exception, meaning that they're always absolutely worthless because even with the best equipment you could possibly give them, they just don't hit anything. Even Alice, you know, the [ __ ] protagonist from the first game that you wake up from a cryogenic sleep, you'd think she would be a pretty decent party member, but no, she's worthless unless you want to spend way more time than is already necessary grinding her up, which Lord knows I didn't.

My final Dragon Warrior 1 parallels that. Eventually, fighting random encounters becomes too resource intensive for it to be worth it, so I started running away. And thankfully, Gaiden is generous with this. I'd say four out of five times, fleeing works. Fighting the final boss, and oh, looks like I beat him. No, not like this. Ha, sucker. Cablon's HP is full again. Wow, what an [ __ ]. He'll just keep doing that if you let him. So what are you supposed to do? The walkthrough on Fantasy Star Cave doesn't seem to know. I did not manage to kill him by now. Maybe if you managed to do so, let me know. I'll try to beat him, but if you are quicker than me, keep me informed. Okay, Fantasy Star Cave, here's what you're supposed to do. Get your fortune told, pick the most expensive option, then she gives you a pendant, the Cura. Use that on him, and he won't be able to heal anymore. Kick his ass, and wow, you have brought us peace. "I wonder, is it ever really safe?" "Don't worry about it, dear. This planet should be secure now. However, a greater evil is awakening. Oh, Alec, watch over Mina. I love you, Mina. Someday we'll have a long talk. Meanwhile, I must try to save the Algo system from this new menace." And credits. Wait, credits? That's it? Hold on, hold on. What the [ __ ] was she on about? A long talk about what? What is this new evil supposed to be? I know it's not Fantasy Star 4 or 3 or 2 or 1 or the text adventures or just Adventure. So I guess Alice had some off-screen adventures after all.

Fantasy Star 4 is the best Fantasy Star game. You have to search pretty hard to find anyone who thinks otherwise. Maybe some prefer Online, but as far as the classic series goes, this is it. This is the Fantasy Star game. It's untouchable, and for obvious reasons, across the board, in every conceivable, measurable aspect. Its presentation has been upgraded, modernized even. Think of the other Fantasy Stars as these black and white 1930s moving pictures, where four makes that quantum leap into one of those many modern-feeling classics from the 70s that are just as easy to watch and relevant today as they were 50 years ago. You gotta be in a certain mood to play the other Fantasy Stars. You're your expectations need to adjust so you're okay with being bombarded with old game clunk. Four, on the other hand, is so friendly. It's the kind of game you can sit anybody in front of, regardless of their disposition to old JRPGs, and they'll easily be able to get through and enjoy it. This is a beautiful video game, one of the best looking on the Genesis. Great pixel art will always look pristine, and coming off three, the towns actually look like towns now. Houses have fully decorated interiors, just things that you would normally take for granted that the previous entries didn't necessarily have are all present here. Your walking speed is much faster. The quality of life improvements are staggering, especially when you've just played all of these games back to back to back. It felt good playing through Fantasy Star 4. It felt like a virtual vacation.

They also upped their storytelling techniques. Gone are the days of bluish-green screens with two character portraits facing each other, of being informed of major plot events in non-descript blue text boxes. Four's comic book-styled cutscenes are incredible. They're unique to this game, and they get over the emotions they're attempting to convey incredibly well. These giant character portraits and detailed facial animations go such a long way. It doesn't rely as much on subtle world details. Fantasy Star 4 is much more overt and direct. Don't get me wrong, there are still plenty of non-obvious story details hidden within its gameplay mechanics and other observable details. It makes great use of the techniques pioneered by Final Fantasy 4 just a few years prior, where your character's stats and power levels get across a great deal by themselves. Your Chaz, and the game begins with you not in control of your own party. You're being literally led around by this older female mentor figure named Alice, who is so badass she can walk right through NPCs if she feels like it. Spelled differently from the protagonist from the first game, you know you're supposed to be identifying, self-inserting yourself as Chaz, because the first thing you see is the tried and true "wake up, you lazy bum" trope. Normally, it's your mom, think Dragon Quest 3 or Pokemon or Chrono Trigger or RPG Maker Super Dante 2 Mountain Dew Edition, but here it's your business partner, Alice. You're both hunters. She's considered the best hunter, as many NPCs throughout the game will let you know. So you go in your little early game adventures, and it's kind of like having a crush on a girl that's two grades above you in school, and that while you're hanging out, she's clearly the one in control, but you're still trying to impress her so she knows that you belong. I mean, after all, Alice is only a couple levels above me. This could happen. Then, about 40 minutes into the game, you meet Roon, and he's like when that friend invites her older male friend over that she's clearly interested in, you're 13, she's 15, now that it's this other guy who's 17 and has a car. Like, how the [ __ ] are you gonna compete with that? The answer is, you're not, because Roon is level [ __ ] 17, and I'm only four. She's the one with the buff spells propping your ass up in boss battles, but slowly over time, you'll catch up and even surpass Alice. And when Roon joins later in the game, he's not even any stronger than you anymore. It makes you feel good. Instead of your levels just going up in a vacuum, there's character benchmarks. You're able to compare yourself to them along the way. It's all very good textbook stuff. I recommend watching this video by Yaz Minsky, which is 34 minutes of examining this exact topic in much greater detail. He comes at this game from a completely different perspective than me, and it's fascinating to watch somebody view this era of gaming as something so old and decrepit that he would need to preface his takes as much as he does. You'll understand what I mean if you watch the video. It's very well done, and I'll link it below.

There are a few things that are so forward-thinking that you would never expect them in a 16-bit RPG. For example, party talk is unheard of. You know, the option in the menu where you can listen to your party members speak amongst themselves. I have reviewed dozens of RPGs from this era, and this is the only game I've played with anything like that. There's also a completely optional job board at the Hunter's Guild, which only has eight quests, but at least that's something. And it might not sound like much, but while commonplace and even somewhat expected now, was another thing that was completely unheard of in 1993. There are also a huge amount of interactions hidden behind inspecting objects. Examine everything. Nine out of 10 times, nothing special will happen, but those times when it does make the whole process worth it. For example, examining the doctor's fiancee's wardrobe, or anything really in Alice's and Chaz's house. Yeah, they live together. That's strange. Fantasy Star 4 takes place in a world where the Game Gear exists, apparently. I wonder if maybe Fantasy Star Gaiden and Adventure exist in this universe too. Maybe that's what those games were supposed to be. They're in-universe Fantasy Star video games. Those are what the children of the Algo star system play. The whole story exists in the shadow of the older games. Motavia is post-apocalypse from two, however, Desolis seems to have mostly recovered from the mining crisis and the traditional thousand years in between titles. Oh, and this is the last chance I'm going to be able to bring this up, so I might as well. In this game, and in a few others, it's Desolis with an L instead of Desos, like I've been saying every time. And sometimes Motavia is shortened to just Moda, and character names aren't always consistent either. I've just been kind of saying whichever term I like the most. In reality, these are likely localization inconsistencies from game to game, but I like to imagine it's just the language of these people evolving. It has been a thousand years, after all, and we sure as [ __ ] wouldn't be able to understand English-speaking people from 1023. So Desolis adding an L doesn't bother me all that much, and I like the name Desolis more than Desolis, so Noel when I say it. Anyway, Alice is worshiped as an ancient hero, and all the past parties who saved the world get their due. The people of Fantasy Star 4 are incredibly history-conscious, the exact opposite of the populace from three. I do applaud this game for working three into its canon because it would have been easy to just write that off as nothing, as something that this other team made, so it doesn't count, but they didn't do that. You make your way through this dungeon, which is a direct reference to the scaffolding metallic areas from three, then you find that you've actually been walking through the spaceship from three, which crash-landed here. Poetical stating that everything that happened in that game doesn't matter because they all died in a horrible spaceship crash anyway, except for Ren. He's that transforming Android who's in your party for 95% of three. It's as if four is saying, "Here's the one and only cool thing from the last game. Take him and enjoy." He doesn't transform anymore, but I appreciate the gesture. You fight this rogue AI called Daughter, as in Daughter Brain, get it? It's a solid joke, and this game can be funny at times. Four is a more lighthearted, gentler Fantasy Star. There's little to no grinding. And remember how I complained about both Fantasy Star 2 and 3's dungeons for different reasons? In four, they're simple but not as brain-dead as three. They're more like what you'd expect from a typical Final Fantasy or any other JRPG. The whole game is dense, too. My playthrough is only 22 hours and 14 minutes, but there's quite a bit jammed into that space. It's also blazingly fast and maintains that pace through the whole game. There's no noticeable sticking points. And normally, I would mean all this as a compliment, but in the case of Fantasy Star 4, it's a little too fast, and as a result, I don't think it comes together cleanly. I spoke about this phenomenon in my Lufia 2 video, and I think Fantasy Star 4 is a similar issue. You'll hear about your next objective that's supposedly incredibly far away, then you walk for 20 seconds on the world map, and you're already there. You'll hear about this super dangerous cave, which is so dangerous that nobody ever comes out alive, and you go in, and it's just a simple maze with two branching paths, not even very long ones, and they both lead to treasure chests. Events can feel inconsequential. So many things happen so close together with little to no time for any of it to really sit in. In fairness, the first half of the game, I feel, is much stronger than the second. They do a fantastic job of building up this world-beating villain in Zeo. He blackmails the university president, which is what turns into your call to action at the start of the story. He turns an entire village to stone, sort of a callback to when you fight Medusa in the first game. He has a cult and a church dedicated to worshiping the very ground he stands on. And to top it all off, he even kills off Alice, which is genuinely a well-done and heartbreaking scene. See, she doesn't die right away, and the game makes you think that you're going off to find a cure before finally twisting the knife and having her die while sick in bed. But then, a couple hours later, you get your revenge by killing off Zeo permanently. That's it. He doesn't come back. There's no fake finish to the fight, he doesn't escape, there's no bait and switch. You just go through this dungeon, go up to him, and kill him, and he's gone. This is only 10 hours into the game, and the story has already reached its natural conclusion. The big bad guy you want to defeat is already gone. So the game needs to then start all the way from scratch to create villains for you to care about, and naturally, you're simply not going to. At least, you're not going to care nearly as much about the guy they just spent 10 hours building up. Fantasy Star 4 eventually devolves into Chaz becoming the IT manager, troubleshooting what's wrong with the Algo system. They thought killing Zeo would fix everything, but it didn't. So you go to this control satellite, but that doesn't fix anything either. So you go to Desolis, which is having issues of its own. So you go to their weather control station, tinker with that, and it doesn't fix anything. So you just continue chasing these problems throughout the whole game, and it just keeps going. It's the characters continuously guessing what might be wrong, then trying out their plan, and having it not fix the issue. And every single time we go through this cycle, it's like we're back to square one, and the game has to build something up from scratch again. You don't feel anything near the same level of accomplishment you did in two. For example, that game builds up to one event. The original, as well, Lasik kills your brother in the opening cut scene, and you spend the whole game building up to your eventual confrontation with him. The first two games build up to one event, it happens, it's awesome, and then the game ends. It's a simple rising action, then a little bit of falling action, and then it ends. But four peaks way too early. Its plot diagram is like, goes straight up, and then it dives straight down, and it just kind of waves around for the rest of the game. It tries and fails to build itself up again multiple times after to this initial peak, but it just can't get itself going. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed Fantasy Star 4 from a gameplay perspective, but it's at this point where I stopped giving a solitary [ __ ] about anything that happened in the story. And my settled thoughts on this game go against the grain a little bit. If you view this as a standalone entity, it's excellent. Obviously, if you're going to play one Fantasy Star game, this is it. But at the same time, as a conclusion to Fantasy Star, it falls a little flat. Sure, it has plenty of Fantasy Star things, more than I could possibly count. Almost every key item is a reference to one of the past games, and it's immaculately crafted, but its plot is so unfocused, way too much for my liking. They bring back Lasik, remember the main antagonist from the first game, for about two hours before deciding to move on. Then, in the end, it's all Dark Force again. He's back. And it turns out the reason Dark Force keeps returning is because there's this invisible fourth planet in the Algo system, which you can only see if you're holding this McGuffin. And on that planet are five rings that the party has to wear while they're killing Dark Force. Then, and only then, if you're wearing the rings, will Dark Force be prevented from reincarnating. I can't put it any other way. That's stupid. That's really stupid. In fact, that was their big idea to end Fantasy Star. That it's terrible. And the ending stinks too. Everyone just kind of realizes that their job is done and goes their separate ways. They don't celebrate. There's no sense of camaraderie. "Hooray, we just saved the world." "Okay, I guess that's it." "See you guys at the reunion in 10 years." "Yeah, okay, bye-bye." Fantasy Star 4 is a game which kills its only dragon a third of the way in, then is constantly inventing new ones to slay out of thin air. Its character work is miles above anything we've seen from any of the other games, and it's better than almost every JRPG that existed at this time, but I just wish they had better things to do. And this game didn't branch out nearly as much as two. There are no four text adventures. What you get in this specific cartridge is all that there is.

If you're a regular viewer, or hell, if you've only watched a Fantasy Month, then you know that I like to do these [ __ ] high school English class plot and theme analysis type things from time to time. But four didn't really give me any ammo to do that. The end of this game, and thus the end of Fantasy Month, left me feeling a little empty. With RPGs, or any narrative-based game, or really any story, no matter how it's told, in order to be considered great in my eyes, you can't just crap the bed with the ending. You really need to stick that landing to graduate from being just a pretty good game into one of the best of all time. Fantasy Star 4 is as good a game can get with a bad ending. For some, the ending means very little, but for me, that's the largest lasting opinion. I really enjoyed playing this game in the moment. While I was playing Fantasy Star 4, I was thinking that this game was awesome. It's a delight while you're playing it, but when it came time for me to sit down and reflect on what I had just experienced, it didn't hit me in nearly the same way. In fact, the longer I think about this game, the worse my opinion of it gets. I didn't set out when I was thinking of Fantasy Month, or even just going into this review, having previously made the other six, or hell, even after finishing the game, I didn't expect to be saying any of this. It was only when I sat down to write this video that I came to these conclusions. I didn't expect to be saying any of this, but alas, here I am. To contrast, Fantasy Star 2 was a chore. While I was playing that game, my opinion wasn't very high. It's incredibly annoying, and my review isn't all that positive, but the more it simmers, the more I think about Fantasy Star 2, the warmer I become to it. I've put that game over more on the subsequent videos than I did in my initial review, and it's for this very reason. Even though far less happens, and it is a much less flashy presentation, even though it's a grind fest and it's not always very fun, two is going to stay with me longer. I'll remember more about two than I will four. This was a great and influential series that Sega ran into the ground, then attempted to give a proper send-off here with four, and it only kind of half succeeded. My final conclusion is that while Fantasy Star 4 is undoubtedly the best game in the series, Fantasy Star 2 is my favorite. And that's all I have on the whole Fantasy Star series. Shout out to you, the viewer, for making it this far. Shout out to William Robert Lee. Shout out to all the rest of the patrons. That was Fantasy Month, and remember, never trust anyone who needs a haircut. Goodbye.