Video Game Non-Review: Phantasy Star (Original Flava)

Once upon a time, many moons ago, there was a console called the Sega Master System. Alas, many people overlooked it in favor of something called a Nintendo, but the SMS had some pretty awesome games. In 1988, an RPG called "Phantasy Star" appeared, and lo! The world, it was rocked.

We start off in a town called Camineet on Palma, wherever those places may be. A young man has gone splat in front of what I promise are not Stormtroopers, as that is a different universe entirely.

"Whatever I did, it was a BAD idea."

This is Nero. He's going to be dead very soon. Before he kicks it, he tells his younger sister, Alis, that the king of their star system is evil and corrupt, and to go stop him from filling their world with evil and corruption. Learning from his own mistakes, he tells her to go find an ass-kicker named Odin, in the hopes that two of them will be harder to wipe out than his singular scrawny butt.

"Love me."

And here we have her. The serenely beautiful Alis Landale, who, with her spirit and determination, kicked off an epic series of video games. While the other children were playing with a duo of portly plumbers who jumped on and ate various mushrooms, little Jentastic actually had a decent role model on her television screen. In an age where most women in video games were relegated to the role of the demure healer or bouncing around the battlefield in little more than a string bikini, teenaged Alis got to save the world with some awesome swords and a pink dress that covered everything appropriately.

Okay, now that my little feminist rant is over with, we have some work to do. Namely, Alis has to find her teammates. Some exploration of the town leads to a warehouse with some meseta stashed in it and HOLY CRAP!!!

It's like I'm really there!

That's right, ladies and gentlemen. We have first-person dungeons. That are pretty complex and can lead to wandering in circles for hours. Not bad for 1988. Not bad at all.

Though Camineet is a pretty nice place, sweet Alis must eventually spread her wings and flip off the NotStormtroopers at the gates who tell her to stay put unless she wants to be mauled. Since she is mature and classy, she doesn't tell them to go fuck themselves, even though they just killed her brother, and she walks out onto the lush green plains of Palma.

It's dangerous beyond the hole in the wall.

Armed only with her brother's short sword, Alis ventures outside her home to try to find this Odin guy. The townsfolk had shared with her that he's from another town, Scion, so she merrily skips off to find him. But since this is a video game and we need to do stuff other than just walk around, danger lurks everywhere!

"Hello, Alis. My hit point/meseta ratio is quite good for this early stage of the game and you will want to kill an awful lot of me."

Alas, Odin is not in Scion, that fucker. Oh well, there are other things to do. We all know the drill for these types of games: kill things for money and experience, get stronger, buy cooler shit, and then figure out what to do next. After Alis spends some serious cash upgrading her equipment, she pesters a shopkeeper (who must have been the inspiration for the "you must ask me three times!" dude in the Austin Powers movies) and gets a roadpass that allows her to travel to the spaceport. Upon arriving on Motavia, the desert planet, she trades her pot (as in decorative vase, not mind-altering substance) for...

KITTY!!!!

Myau, a talking musk cat, doesn't waste any time and gets right to the point, thank goodness. He knows where Odin is, but that dumb shit went up against Medusa (?!) and was turned to stone. Myau has the antidote, but does NOT have opposable thumbs, so Alis grabs him and goes back to Palma to officially kick off her ass-saving career.

(And yes, Medusa really does appear later on, complete with mentions of Perseus and accurate methods of defeating her. How Greek mythology wound up in a futuristic star system, I'll never know, but hey! It's educational!)

"I went up against a giant powerful gorgon with little more than a cheap axe, my chisled good looks, and a companion who can't open a damn bottle. Derp."

Odin is appropriately thankful and humble and they get the hell out of the slimy cave. The cheap-ass iron equipment just isn't cutting it for them, so they wander around a bit, killing more things for meseta. Eventually, Odin can get a shiny new ceramic sword just like Alis (though she'll use it better) and he can stab things in the eye.

Eyes with wings, appropriately called Wing Eyes. Ew. Gross.

More stuff happens, but as I'm not going to summarize the entire game here, I'll skip the cake and the fucked-up nightmare and get right to the last of our cast of characters.

"What's under these robes? I'll never tell..."

Noah, the wizard, bitches Alis & Co. out for interrupting him (because he was SO busy living in the middle of a cave in the desert surrounded by spiders), but decides to join them after Alis waves a note from the governor of Motavia in his face. (One can only speculate as to the contents of the note. My interpretation: "Dear Noah: Stop fucking around in that cave and do something useful. And put on some pants while you're at it. Sincerely, The Governor")

Now that the party has been assembled, they need a better way to putter around Algol without the government's spaceships. They spring a scientist from prison (though he needs some convincing to leave his dingy cell...odd) so he can build them their own spaceship and then they go running all over Palma to find his pet robot so the robot can pilot said spaceship. Now it's possible to freely travel to all three planets in the system! Huzzah!

On second thought, parts of Dezoris look really creepy. Maybe we should have stayed home.

The spaceship helps things out tremendously, but there has to be better ways to cross both land and sea. Luckily, some digging around (sometimes in a pile of trash) gets us a landrover and a hovercraft. Win!

The sand lions in the desert will eat your fucking faces if you try to walk over them. Show them who's in charge by flattening them with your sweet ride.

Now, here is what makes this game truly one of the all-time greats, in my not-humble-at-all opinion: there's a whole lot of stuff to accomplish and you can do it in ANY order you want! (The manual even implies that you can beat the game without finding the four Laconian items, but...yeah, I wouldn't try that if I were you.) Do you want to finally seek revenge on Medusa, now that you're fully equipped with a Mirror Shield? Or do you want to go running through a morgue of zombies (ew) for some awesome armor? Maybe you want to go pay Noah's former teacher a visit and beat a better mantle out of him. It's entirely up to you!

The enemies are varied enough that the little amount of grinding necessary doesn't even feel like a chore. The two most expensive items in the game can take some time to buy (but hey, you can sell one for half its original price once you're done with it), but again, it doesn't feel like you're slogging through. And if you're the type to ignore the "Run" choice, if you fight every single enemy you encounter on your way to your various goals, you'll be in pretty good shape by the time you're done collecting all the goodies.

He'll never admit to it, but Odin definitely crapped his pants the first time he saw this guy.

Throughout Alis' adventures, the game does set up a lot for the future games (whether or not it was intentional, I don't know). We're briefly introduced to the native species of Motavia and Dezoris and while it is possible to have conversations with them, it's also possible to slaughter them for money and experience.

"In two thousand years, I will entertain you with terribly corny jokes and we shall be friends. But for now, get off my icy lawn before I shoot you in the head."

It's also interesting to note that for whatever reason, the green reptilian species lives on the ice planet and the blue furry species lives on the desert planet. Algol's got some curious evolutionary history on top of everything else.

"My heavy clothing keeps the sand out of my fur. But I'm not going to lie, I'm sweating to death underneath."

Once everything that needs doing has been done, it's time for the final showdown. I've tried hard not to include any spoilers in this post and I'm not going to start now. All I'll say is that the end of the game is quite a challenge, but that just makes it so much more rewarding when you're done.

It's a tower. On top of a hill. Surrounded by mountains and lava (not pictured). Clearly, this is going to be the setting for all sorts of epic badassery.

Okay, so I still can't write short summaries. Whatever, don't judge. But now that we have the basics out of the way, you might be wondering: why is this titled a "non-review"?

That's easy. I love this game so damn hard that I'll never say a bad word about it. I just can't be objective here. There are other games and series that I've loved, but at the risk of sounding overly cheesy, the original Phantasy Star will always have a special place in my heart. (Even though I have a cold, black heart of tar.)

Over 20 years later, everything about it still seems so magical. There are three huge worlds to explore, each so completely different, with vivid colors and pretty pictures and waves crashing on the beach that make you feel immersed in this fantasy (phantasy?) world. There's so much detail, from the sprites, to the portraits/cutscenes, to the different backgrounds depending on where you pull up the menu, it's incredible that the programmers got everything to fit on that one little cartridge.

As a snob with a music degree, my expert opinion is that the music in this game flat-out rocks. Again, it's amazing what they were able to accomplish and the limitations of the time are pushed as far as they can possibly go. From the heroic, inspiring overworld music on Palma, to Dezoris' more mellow, melancholy theme, it all wins in my book. The town music clearly tells you, "You are safe here" and the village music is appropriately quaint and charming. And from the music snob's point of view, the soundtrack really is quite complex, making good use of various time signatures, interesting key/mode changes, and so on.

I admit to having the attention span of a goldfish, and yet, I can (and have) happily replay this game over and over and over and over and over again. Part of it probably has to do with the aforementioned non-linear nature of the game: I don't think I've ever played through exactly the same way twice and it's something I really felt was missing from the other three games in the original series. (While I do enjoy PSIV very much and it probably ranks second on my "replayability" list for the series, I do completely understand the complaints that it's more like an interactive movie than a game.) Maybe because it's one of the games I grew up with (I didn't play the others until high school), but there's just something about it that's comforting in a way. Alis, the unlikely heroine, is going to save the world and nothing's ever going to stop her. She didn't stay at home and cry about everything that's wrong in her life, she went out and got shit done. We could all learn a lesson, I guess.

Oh, and just so we can call this an actual review:

EVERYTHING:

10 boobs. And then some.