RPG Jamboree: Phantasy Star (Master System)
Phantasy Star promises a setting that mixes fantasy and science fiction, the monsters and magic of one colliding with the space travel and technology of the other, and when the game begins it immediately puts the sci-fi forward. The player rides a conveyor belt to the spaceport guarded by robots to take off to another planet, but as the adventure continues and you’ve killed yet another vampire or manticore with your sword and shield, it dawns on you that the other planets are just ways of segmenting off a desert and tundra and the space tech has taken a considerable backseat to standard medieval fantasy elements. You can tell the player they’re using a laser shield to try and spice things up, but this role-playing game doesn’t quite keep up the genre mix as well as one might hope.
What little story there is to Phantasy Star focuses in on Alis after the death of her brother Nero. The three planets of the Algol System are ruled over by a despot called King Lassic, Nero’s investigation into the king leading to him being killed. For a bit, it might seem like King Lassic is deliberately trying to impede the developmental progress of the three planets he rules over, the player sometimes coming across villages he suppressed, leaving them with many ransacked and damaged buildings. However, some of these small villages can also be selling laser weaponry and Lassic himself employs more dragons and giants in loincloths in his dungeons than he does robots or alien races, so Phantasy Star is best thought of as a fantasy adventure with a touch of sci-fi. Alis is eventually joined on her quest by an alien cat named Myau, a warrior called Odin, and a mage named Noah, but there isn’t much too the individual characters or even many distinct story moments along the journey. You help a scientist make a starship at one point and Odin is first found turned to stone thanks to Medusa, but most of Phantasy Star is rather free form as you head out and explore the world without too much direct instruction. You’ll find the barrier to progress being the lack of certain spells or tools as well as enemies that are too strong to take on, but there aren’t many true events to form a plot around this quest to dethrone Lassic.
When Phantasy Star begins and all you have is an ill-equipped Alis, you can barely handle even a scorpion in battle, the early moments of the game requiring constant battles with the creatures outside of town to build up your levels and earn the game’s currency Mesetas so you can buy better gear. A free heal is at least close on hand, but this repetition gives a poor impression that is at least not indicative of the overall experience. If you want some of the good gear along the journey you may need to spend some time grinding out battles but there are also plenty of expected battles along the way to help your party of four grow and fill their coffers. The battle system is unfortunately plain though, and one issue early on when you don’t have the full group is the lack of control you have over it. When you randomly encounter an enemy in the world or a dungeon, only one creature will show up on screen. However, it might be representing a whole pack of them, some monster groups comprised of up to six foes despite showing only one. While you’ll use a menu to pick attacks in this turn-based RPG, you cannot select which of the members of a monster pack you attack, the decision left up to your party and they’re not always the best as choosing. An almost defeated monster might be left alive so it can keep hurting you or your strongest character might elect to hit the enemy with 1 health point left instead of wearing down a healthy one, but most battles will just involve choosing the standard attack option with the whole group and using a healing spell if necessary.
If you do venture into areas tougher than expected or you’re facing one of the game’s bosses you may want to whip out your spells, although even at max strength a lot of combat oriented spells cost a fair bit of magic power and the only way to replenish it is at healing places like the nurses in town. With many dungeons being lengthy labyrinths it further disincentivizes using magic where it’s not absolutely necessary, although you can buy healing items in bulk thankfully. Combat does feel like it’s lacking a lot of depth because of the stinginess when it comes to magic power and target picking sadly, and while the experience grinding fades the longer you play, you will likely have to make repeated trips back to town when your magic power runs out when you’re trying to push through longer or more isolated areas.
The exploration of the three worlds generally is fairly interesting, the player getting different vehicles and finding curious new places like Twintown where two cultures live in villages next to each other but one only gives true tips. Generally Phantasy Star also has a very good soundtrack that helps with times where you’re retreading ground or forging through more confusing areas, and I often found myself getting a jolt of pep when a new music track kicks in even if it is a familiar one. Unfortunately, Phantasy Star really starts to crumble with how it handles it dungeons. Shifting away from the top down view from regular navigation to instead first-person navigation of three-dimensional mazes, the dungeons of Phantasy Star are only really set apart by the colors of the identical bricks used to build their walls. Their shapes are certainly different, the halls winding more in harder locations and some have plenty of floors, but rarely do any of them feel much different besides their size and whatever monsters happen to show up in the random encounters. The monster pool isn’t too large either so you’ll probably see familiar faces, so while one dungeon commit deeply to having only zombies about, attempts at theming in other locations disappear into the haze of enemy groupings you’ve already encountered elsewhere.
As you walk around these mazes without a map you’ll find treasures and other details sometimes won’t even show up until you walk forward to make them suddenly appear, this complicating things since even if it looks like there’s a dead end ahead, that might actually hold something valuable. Some treasure chests are trapped and can deal significant damage, a fine enough gamble but this also applies to the treasure chest that drops after every battle. You’re only going to get Mesetas from the fight if you open it, but having it blow up and hurt the whole team can lead to some more of the repetitive backtracking and money is generally too important to ignore a chance at getting it. Some dungeons do include pit traps to fall in or false walls with few clues about their existence, but these only complicate navigation and potentially lead to longer periods spent in the mazes where all you can do is search every hallway and hope it leads to something of value. The maze size makes occasional backtracking more annoying as well, and all the aimless maze maneuvering will likely lead to enough fights that your party will grow in strength to the point not too many monsters will give you trouble. It makes for an unfortunate state for an already basic combat system, the game encouraging mostly plain attacks, the lack of direction makes frequent battle inevitable, and the return trips to restock mean more exposure to battle that makes you strong enough to handle later battles rather easily. It’s not like you’re being denied an exhilarating confrontation with a boss because of the way you grow in power though since at best you could fling a few spells before the group’s back to basic attacks without a plan besides outlasting the enemy.
THE VERDICT: A well-composed soundtrack accompanies some fine world traveling in Phantasy Star, but when it comes time to battle, this RPG grows repetitive fast and can’t quite recover from the hole dug by the dungeon design. Meandering through mazes leads to inevitable character growth that makes you too competent in fights that already had little room for strategy, and the restrictive approach to magic power regeneration further enforces repetition while discouraging adding anything exciting to a battle. You technically don’t need to grind in Phantasy Star too often to succeed since the same directionless nature of exploration that makes discoveries interesting also ensures you face enough constant battle you’ll be too strong for most of what you encounter.
And so, I give Phantasy Star for Sega Master System…
A TERRIBLE rating. Phantasy Star is at least a step above other older RPGs like Dragon Warrior and Shining in the Darkness where you grind for the right to grind more, but the battle system is still far too lean and battles far too common without anything interesting to balance them out. Navigating first-person mazes with no defining features holds no enjoyment and too rarely does the game try to do anything with the dungeons beyond make them longer or include tricks that in turn lengthen the time you spend in them. Greater theming, visual variety, landmarks, really anything should have been done besides leaving them as nearly identical corridors where only the coloration makes it clear you’re somewhere else. The places out in the world you find can be a bit interesting even if there’s not much story to latch onto, but the areas that comprise a good deal of time and action are hollow. Unsurprisingly, rereleases of Phantasy Star often include things like on-screen maps or the ability to speed the game up as an acknowledgement of the tedium inherent in the design, but things could be lightened up a lot more by allowing the player to embrace their magic. Alis learns a ROPE spell that can bind enemies for example, but you’ll probably always rather pick something like healing or high damage instead since magic power is at a premium. Not many enemies ask for anything but the direct approach as well, probably because if they did require clever magic use from the player you’d try and cast it and hit the wrong member of the pack anyway. A lot of design decisions likely stem from the technical capabilities of the Master System though so things like treasure chests not being visible in a maze until you stand right next to them probably can’t be fixed outside of remakes, but the original Phantasy Star could have still built around its dungeon design more with things like greater feasible attack options for the player or greater use of rarely seen ideas like how some mazes contain a character or two to find.
Phantasy Star will of course get lavished with praise for being an RPG trailblazer and while its gameplay fails to excite, it at least shot for the stars in some places. Later entries could build on ideas more and games in general would eventually learn that mazes should be interesting to navigate rather than just identical hallways, but the first Phantasy Star ends up being the kind of game best left to retire after its contribution to early game development. Future conveniences in rereleases make it feasible to more quickly clear this Master System title and the game already had a surprisingly flexible saving system that worked anywhere, but doing things faster doesn’t make interesting content suddenly spring out of this old school fantasy adventure.