52 IN 52: Phantasy Star IV cleared

[swordianmaster]

This game was a large part of my teenage years.

Or rather, the first 1/4th to 1/3rd of it was. For various reasons (most notably, the fact that early Genesis emulators hard crashed any time they needed to load certain sprites, which was a problem when those sprites were random enemies) I had never gone all the way through it. Over the last few days, I decided to change that.

What I found was several things.

Firstly, more than any game short of Final Fantasy, this game feels like someone's D&D campaign with how it's paced. The plot clearly signposts itself as it goes along, leaving an easy enough trail of breadcrumbs to follow (aside from a few swerves) and while the whole thing flows (more or less), it ends up feeling sort of disjointed and "HERE IS NEXT PLOT, GO TO PLOT". Everything wraps up neat and tidy with everyone living Happy Lives Now That Evil Is Gone. That's not bad, but it was definitely something that stuck out to me during the ending sequence.

Secondly, this game leans on a lot of oldschool RPG sensibilities that I have entirely grown out of and tired of. Inability to save in dungeons in particular is frustrating, given that PS4 tends to have a really high random encounter rate and the dungeons tend to be pretty labyrinthine, with a lot of wide, twisty corridors with equal chances of having treasure chests, the way forward, or ~NOTHING AT ALL~. Everything becomes a battle of attrition, and through most of the game I ended up "staging" dungeons, like you would an expedition - go a little ways in, escape and heal up, go a little deeper, repeat. Still, that's kind of a tedious way to play.

Thirdly, your final dungeon is in Giygas-O-Vision with a thin, pixel-wide flashing white border indicating your walkway. It gave me a headache and guaranteed that I couldn't beat the game with my wife in the room since I'm pretty sure that would trigger her seizures, holy shit. Why would you do that? Who thought that was a good idea.

Honestly, the entire back quarter of the game - everything from the Air Castle on - was a giant mess, I felt, but that could just be me not really "getting" older RPG design choices. Air Castle in particular is the size of three dungeons, with no opportunity to save and only a single place to recharge your health/magic, with not one, but two pretty difficult bosses before you're done. Then you've got The Tower Of Pulsating Meats, then a cakewalk dungeon with SURPRISE ASSHOLE BOSS at the end, then a stopover at Magical Crystal Land to get your ultimate gear, and a dive into Seizure Hell for the final boss. Random encounters stopped being interesting and started getting frustrating, the dungeons got way too twisty and convoluted, and even the writing seemed to fall apart.

Fourthly, I want to take whoever decided to name the techniques (aka spells) in the Phantasy Star series and punch them in the face. It was only from rote memorization with Phantasy Star Online that I remembered that SHIFT(a) was Attack Up and DEBAN(d) was Defense Up, and RES(ta) was the healing line. For the most part you could kind of trace the logic back to what the spell does (FOI/WAT/THU are fire/water/thunder, RIMPA removes your paralysis, etc) but what the hell does SANER mean and why does it make me faster? What the fuck is BROSE? Isn't WARLA a type of fish, and TANDLE a computer? Why HINAS and RYUKA when the FF series had done more with fewer characters (surprise, it's EXIT and WARP)? Ugh.

Finally, this game made me very, very mad that the Phantasy Star Online series only took the humans, human-like androids, and cat-elf people for its races. Give me my beefy anthro furby dudes, Sega.

All in all, not bad, but definitely hasn't aged well for me.

Which means the next step is obviously to take an even older JRPG I've never beaten and try to endure that.

Comments

[kjorteo]

See, this is why I wish the DS remake of Final Fantasy III had been a little less faithful to the original re: save points and such. FF3 is great, the Neo Demiforce translation of it was among my favorite games of all time at the time, but that's because emulator savestates exist. When your literal last chance to save in the entire game is on the world map tile right outside a tower, and from there you have to climb the tower which is a long dungeon with the second-hardest random encounters in the main game, fight a boss, fight another boss that's a scripted hopeless battle loss with a long lending-you-their-power cutscene and a rematch, then instant warp to another semi-long dungeon with the hardest random encounters in the main game and five more bosses... let's just say I'm very glad I happened to beat the endboss on my first try because there would not have been a second.

This also reminds me why I eventually realized I love, have always loved, and will always love the Dragon Warrior series but actually kind of hate Dragon Quest, because... well, because later generations and improved graphics mean advanced technology to make them MORE AKIRA TORIYAMA THAN EVER BEFORE but also because they fostered this goofy localization style that made spells similarly hard to distinguish and were an open fuck-you to anyone who had at one point ever tried to take these games seriously. The "transform into a dragon and breathe fire on all enemies" spell went from the logical enough BeDragon to Puff! and that has to be some sort of crime.

Okay and also a dash of Breath of Fire 1's approach to naming things (If you're not equipped with a GuruCT then using a B.Stn will suffice) which is also a game I played the first third of in my youth but how it actually ended was more of an as-an-adult surprise.

[swordianmaster]

I wiped on the final boss of PS4 and almost resorted to using savestates (since the PS3 genesis collection allows it, and all). The dungeon wasn't really bad design-wise - maybe six screens, each with one "correct" and one "incorrect" path, but the fact the whole thing was in this undulating rainbow clusterfuck and the actual walkway was a rapidly flashing series of squares was... unpleasant.

Seriously, who the fuck thought that was a good idea.

I wiped on the midboss of the Air Castle and did use savestates because cheese and crackers that dungeon is entirely unreasonable.

Regarding Dragon Quest, the thing that baffles me about that game's translation is... well. Let's just look at the list of elements in DQ8, shall we?

Frizz (Fire magic)
Sizz (Also fire magic, different from Frizz)
Bang (explosive magic, not fire-based)
Woosh (wind magic)
Crack (ice magic)
Zap (lightning magic)
Flame (somehow different than Frizz and Sizz)
Ice (somehow different than Crack)

I think the later Dragon Quest localizations fell in love with the letter z.

zzzzzz.

[kjorteo]

Later Dragon Quest games fell in love with wacky spell names. Why have boring old Fire/Firaga or Thunder/Thundaga when you can have Frizz/Kafrizz/Woosh/Zing/whatever else sounds like Monty Python's Silly Party election results skit.

And then they still want me to feel pathos when a kindly old father figure is tragically killed off by the bad guy even though everyone looks so Toriyama it physically hurts, the spells are a Looney Tunes sound effect reel, and the girl who's here to avenge the tragic and senseless murder of her beloved brother can paralyze enemies by rubbing her gigantic boobs against them.

Edit: And also the village this all happened in is full of graduates of the Dagger of Amon Ra School of Ridiculous Accents.

[swordianmaster]

In fairness, the boob rubbing is basically the Dragon Quest equivalent of FF having a guy named Cid.

It's in every game and is a running joke, it's just that the joke is more raunchy and less funny. And the earlier translators either censored it out because come on, seriously, or they translated it painfully accurately. Puff, puff.

[xyzzysqrl]

This is firmly on my "To Replay" list, but then so is Phantasy Star 2 and I'm wary of starting that.

Lately I've been thinking a lot, looking at games like Ultima IV and whatnot, about whether I have a "cutoff year" that I just can't handle going before. Like whether I'll just get exhausted trying to deal with the demands of a game from 198X or whatever.

I'm not sure I do, but I am pretty sure yours is somewhere around 1996-ish perhaps.

[swordianmaster]

It varies from genre to genre. Platformers I can go back into the 80s, but RPGs that are older than, I'd say Chrono Trigger or Earthbound is my hard cutoff point? Like, I still struggle with Earthbound, but that's not because of any way that Earthbound follows the rules.

Which is weird, because fundamentally, Etrian Odyssey doesn't really do anything different from, say, Wizardry or Shining in the Darkness? And yet, I find it mildly more palatable.

[kjorteo]

For point-and-clicks, I go by the rule of "Does it have Sierra-style 'oops you forgot to pick up the thing way back in chapter 2 and now the game is unwinnable' points? If so then fuck you." For Etrian/Grimrock/Wizardry/etc. dungeon crawls, I generally draw the line at fake/illusionary walls. (There's a special place in Hell for Dungeon Master's combination of hiding stuff behind completely normal-looking walls that are actually illusions you should just walk right on through, and the party taking damage if you walk into a real wall.)

I really should think about what the deal-breaker would be for other genres, since I go more by substance than by year, it would seem.