RSS Bot Posted April 17, 2017 Share Posted April 17, 2017 There are few games that had as large of an impact on my childhood as the Phantasy Star series. My Sega Master System-owning neighbor had the original game, and it came into my possession when he sold me all of his games after he acquired a Genesis. I and my friends spent way too much time with Phantasy Star. I even made a complete set of dungeon maps, which I still have to this day. Later on, that same neighbor got Phantasy Star III, which I ended up purchasing from him as well. I still have that copy of PS3. Recently, I dug out my long neglected trove of Genesis games and decided to start playing them again. The backup-battery had died in PS3, so I had it replaced at a local store and got to business. Generations of Doom When I was a kid, Phantasy Star III was unquestionably awesome. My friends and I played it constantly, powered along by the excellent official strategy guide (sadly, I don't have that guide anymore). It was a quite a shock to me when I discovered that the world at large thought that PS3 wasn't all that great of a game. Phantasy Star II, rightfully considered a classic by just about everybody, was the last game in the series to find its way into my hands. If I had played PS2 in-sequence I might have realized just how underwhelming its sequel was. I ran through it again just prior to my PS3 replay and was surprised by how well it held up. Would that magic continue into the next game? The legends of the past shape our lives... Phantasy Star III's big gimmick is that the game is experienced through three generations of characters. You start the game playing as Prince Rhys of Landen, and at the conclusion of his quest you will have a choice of two women to marry. Each bride leads to a different son. This process repeats after the second generation, leading to four different characters for the final generation. Each of these four has his own ending, all of which are actually pretty lame. Rhys' quest is actually pretty fun. It's pretty well fleshed-out, you get to do lots of interesting things, and the characters are generally interesting. I think it's probably the best part of the game, which is a good thing since it's the only part you'll play every time through. After this, things get a little shaky. ...and those of our children Nial and Ayn, the second generation heroes, face completely different quests in largely different areas. These two sections are actually pretty decent, but Ayn's is far more interesting. The biggest problem with this section of the game is that Nial and Ayn have no real personality or development. We get to see Rhys have his bride kidnapped at his wedding and lose his temper, which isn't much, but at least you kind of feel for the guy. All we know about Nial and Ayn is that Rhys told them to go do something, and they should take Mieu and Wren with them. Not terribly compelling stuff, although Ayn's quest features a lot of callbacks to Rhys' adventure, which adds a little magic that Nial's journey lacks. The struggle that almost destroyed our world In generation three, the wheels come off. The four heroes, Adan, Aron, Sean, and Crys, basically have the exact same quest. The starting conditions and party compositions are a little different, but not terribly so. The biggest difference is that Nial's children, Adan and Aron, get a bit of a head start due to things that Nial accomplished on his adventure. I guess that makes Nial the better dad. The third generation quest consists of locating all of the transformation modules for your Wren cyborg and using them to acquire "the five legendary weapons." You will then use these weapons to fight an ancient evil and save your world. Two of the five weapons fall into your hands for free, since two of your characters will come wielding them. The other three are not difficult to obtain, but one of them always bothered me. Siren's Shot, a powerful gun carried by the ancient cyborg Siren, is found in a place called Sage Isle, which also happens to be the first place you need to go after collecting the five weapons. Siren himself is hanging out there, and he passes his weapon to you before he dies. What makes this encounter really strange is that a treasure chest nearby, practically on the same screen, contains another very powerful gun. Why is this gun here when the most powerful gun in the game lies just down the hallway? I always suspected that there was supposed to be more to this part of the game, perhaps a showdown with Siren to collect his weapon. He's the main antagonist of Ayn's quest, and it would have been fitting to fight him again. Other oddities like this plague the third generation. Another glaring example is the city of Mystoke, which hides a critical item in its castle. Nial acquires this item during his quest and passes it on to his children, but if his sons return to Mystoke the people still greet him as if he were the one who would finally retrieve the item. Lazy programming, or did Sega just run out of time and budget? While playing the game again, I couldn't help but be reminded of Might and Magic IX. MM9 was rushed out the door by a failing 3DO and ended up a complete mess. There is a city in the game, shown as a large and important place on the included map, that ends being a collection of three or four shacks with a throng of people standing about, most of them speaking to you about places in a city that doesn't exist. The developers never had time to build this city, and just dumped the people in a field with their dialogue unchanged. I've played MM9 several times now, and it fools me every time. It starts out OK, but there's a certain point where everything changes and it all falls apart. Phantasy Star III now feels like that to me. There are still a few things I really like about PS3. The graphics are really excellent, although the monster animations are simply awful. People harp on this all the time, and justifiably so. The first two games had great monster animations, so I'm not sure what happened here. The soundtrack is also fantastic. I particularly like the main world theme, which adds a new instrument every time you gain a party member. When Rhys begins his quest alone, it's a pretty simple and haunting tune. As he gains allies, it becomes a sort of rollicking battle march. Great stuff. I also love how fast the battles are. It's fashionable now to look down upon the random encounters that filled the games of old, but I think that what made those work is that fights were generally very fast. A typical PS3 battle takes fewer than ten seconds. Modern games, with their load times and ornate battle animations, just can't keep pace and random encounters drag the game down. Disc-based games can get this right, Shining the Holy Ark on the Sega Saturn is an example, but it's fairly rare. The magic system is also quite interesting. There are 16 spells (or "techniques" as they're called in-game, I'm not going to get into the deep Phantasy Star lore behind this) and the spells are divided into four groups of four. Characters know groups of spells, and will never learn new ones. As they level up, the individual spells get stronger, and you can alter the strength of individual spells within a group by visiting a special store and paying a trivial fee. One problem with this system is that the only worthwhile spells are the ones in the healing group. I barely even know what the other 12 spells do, because they're basically worthless. In fact, you can gauge the difficulty of each third-generation party by counting the number of party members with access to the healing group. Another issue is that there are no "wizard" type characters in the game, which gives you little reason to explore the non-healing spells. Each character's weapon is far more effective than any of the spells they have access to, there's just no point. The Phantasy Star III world is incredibly compelling, for all its shortcomings. There's a whole lot of history that's referred to but never really explored in-game, and I would love to someday make my own game that fleshed it out. This recent playthrough has made me sad for what this game could have been. I'll probably still play it, since it's part of one of my favorite series of games, but it just doesn't have the magic for me that it used to. http://atariage.com/forums/blog/681/entry-13801-ruminations-on-phantasy-star-iii/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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