52 IN 52: Phantasy Star IV cleared

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.