Call me Vee....Captain Vee.....

It's been about thirty years give or take since I had encountered that ghastly damn fiddler crab. I trudged and shuffled my way through hill tops, chemical plants, casinos, and even oil spills to find all those sparkly gemstones competing in those half pipe challenges. The challenges themselves were quite a treat back in those days. They're a tad fumbly bumbly visiting them now, and the bombs are quite dastardly placed. I wouldn't expect any less from that egg-ish bastard, but that crab took everything from me. My time, my money, my gems, as well as my leg. That crabominable nincompoop took it off when I tried to jump on him, I don't know how he hit me, but he did. Underhanded he was, that's why as of this paragraph I have gone off on my expedition to track down that bloody wanker. I'm gonna get him back for what he did, I will have my revenge...

Been about a weeks worth of travel on the range, we stopped at the casino as a resting stop after my fox companion nearly got tetanus from a Grounder jumping out of the wall in those ruins earlier. Crafty bunch they are, constantly talking about buckets of chicken for some reason too. After I lost all of my rings diving headfirst into an oversized slot machine, we continued onward through the caves dodging those damn lightning bugs. We were getting closer though, closer to his habitat. I could smell the fumes of discarded fossil fuel, past this ocean, we will be within his lair. It's a shame no one has yet to do something about all this oil, I wonder if it's the seahorses keeping the cleaning crews at bay...their cheesy poof spitball can knock an echidna on their arse.

After a couple hours we finally made it, the fabled Metropolis Zone, often mistakenly known as "Genocide City" by some goers. Sounds like something owned by a blonde arms dealing supervillain living in a Nimitz-class supercarrier. My foxy companion was nearly knocked off the lug nut elevator that we were using by an exploding starfish, that's how I knew we were even closer. The music was awfully catchy for such a dangerous area, no idea where it was coming from. I can only assume that crab was behind it. We searched high and low for what seemed like hours.......perhaps even days....but then, it happened. I spotted him. Perched up on the ledge like he was last time, the crustaceous criminal.

Shellcracker. Shellcracker.....

There's no mistaking it, I could never forget such a smarmy little fucker. You could get an entire team of astrophysicists and mathematicians to construct a diagram of when and how this damn crab's hitboxes function, but they still wouldn't be able to figure it out. Baffled beyond recognition at the thievery of which this arthropod operates, science couldn't possibly understand it. I couldn't either, but I had to get it. My revenge. I cannot allow him to continue his antics, who knows how many countless others he has stolen from. How many lives ruined. All by this fiddling fiddler's debauchery and scandalous behavior. I ushered my kitsune cohort to hand me my spear...and I could see Shellcracker's eyes narrow, he knew it was me....I have come for him....only one will leave this area alive. The hunt is on....

My heart was racing, the adrenaline was pumping, the memories of our last encounter rushed back to haunt me. I took my trusty spear and clutched it in my dominant hand, I readied my aim at my arch nemesis. Shellcracker did nothing but sneer at me in confidence, his gigantic claw was ready to lunge at me any second now. I was at a disadvantage, but I was determined, determined to crack his shell. We glared at each other for eons, waiting for one of us to make the first move. Birds flew out of the trees that had somehow grown in this factory, and I suddenly saw his pincer rush toward me. My life flashed before my eyes, and I jumped skywards out of the way for my dear life. In the air, it felt like time had frozen. I could see him below me, now was my chance. I threw my damned spear as hard as I could, straight for his mug. I couldn't even see straight, after only a second I heard a loud "POOF" afterwards. After landing, I took a quick glance back at the enemy, a thick cloud of smoke where he once was. It was done, my revenge is complete. Shellcracker....has been cracked.....

After the smoke cleared however, a rabbit hobbled out of the wreckage of what was once a sinister shellfish. They looked at me for a few seconds, with an odd look that unsettled me. They seemed thankful, thankful that I had defeated them... something I was unprepared for. The rabbit ran off without a care, leaving me there with an almost empty feel. I got my revenge...a selfish act for sure, one that I knew made me no better than the crab, but... was it truly as selfish as that shellfish? I wonder how I would've felt if I had not seen that rabbit afterwards. I took a ponder to this during our return trip home. Riding the gondola down the skies of Hill Top, I remembered all those moments from our last adventure. The journey through the Chemical Plant outracing that vile blue jelly, exploring those aquatic ruins nearly getting my face taken off by an arrow... it's quite odd. My eyes became heavy as I stared off into the sunset, tears were felt running down my cheeks as I looked again at my new keepsake that was his claw. I spoke to him.

"Thank you for the memories, old chum."

Heard this was dropping today via some videos people keep linking me on Discord. I'm not entirely sure what Capcom is doing randomly dropping a game for my IBM piece of shit, but we'll take a looksie at their latest attempt and only hope it's better than Trojan or Street Fighter. I'm still paying off the hospital bills from breaking my hands playing the latter's torturous pressure-sensitive button layout.

The idea of a "Mega Man" feels like someone who should be a giant among their peers, instead we have a little guy who shoots tennis balls. Adorable. In the meantime, the villain of our story who goes by the name of "Dr. Wily" apparently hangs out in some government-funded army base that requires a toll of some kind to get in. I respect this Mega Person for at the very least taking the fight to corrupt institutes looking to take advantage of their citizens, even if he's still apparently pro-toll booths. Unfortunately, he seems to be having a lot of trouble dealing with Dr. Wily's rogues gallery of wild animals and loosened indoor plumbing. Apparently all it takes to stop Capcom's latest attempt at a lovable character is to simply hire an army of possums to roam about a bathroom in need of maintenance, because Dr. Right was in fact wrong over forgoing the idea of "bendable knees", allowing their weaponized tennis balls to uselessly fly right over some friendly dumpster diving marsupials.

It's not quite as funny as Trojan, but at least it's more playable than Street Fighter even if it lacks the silly attempt at voice acting while the person was eating toffee.

The future's not exactly looking bright for this upstart Capcom company, I like that they're giving struggling programmers a chance with one-person games like this, but it's lookin' pretty bleak I think.

I cut my RPG teeth on Shining Force and FF4 - relatively forgiving entry points into the genre - but I had older schoolmates and relatives who would regale me with tales of the brutally uncompromising RPGs of their day. Phantasy Star is the quintessential high-friction RPG/dungeon crawling experience and is everything I expected from it for better and worse.

The limited inventory space, low MP totals and labyrinthe levels mean that progress was impossible without drawing my own maps, several 'test runs' through a dungeon, plenty of grinding, and a good deal of luck. This made dungeon crawling an extremely tense experience - fumbling around dark corridors and gradually getting my bearings while not knowing when the next encounter will be and whether I have enough resources to get to the end or need to escape to try another day - it adds a layer of decision making that is generally absent from the more forgiving RPGs of later years. But it's the 'luck' part that kind of gets on my nerves here - the heavily-randomized damage and booby-trapped chests can really screw a run over, and the lack of a way to target specific enemies or a rudimentary front/back row system means that there is very little strategy or tactics that goes into battles either. In other words, luck is maximized, tactics is minimized, and the only skill that the game really tests the player in (besides patience) is judgment on when to press on or retreat.

Engaging with it on its own terms though, there are plenty of merits to Phantasy Star, the strong female lead being the most obvious. The quasi-3D dungeons are mighty impressive, and the large enemy sprites (each with their own attack animation!) made me forget I was playing a Master System game! The fact that it didn't have to contend with Nintendo's infamous censors is obvious: some enemy sprites are delightfully horrifying, and the game pulls no punches about what happens when you run out of HP - you're not knocked out, you can't "fight no longer", you're dead.

From a gameplay perspective, Phantasy Star is great with exploration, giving the player a steady supply of hints of where they could go next, and unlike many other games where all but one option will lead you to getting annihilated by the random encounters, PS actually encourages nonlinear exploration by having several dungeons your party can handle at any time! And while I suspect it's more by coincidence than design, the difficulty curve is so much smoother than Phantasy Star 2's.

Perhaps its greatest achievement is its legacy - Phantasy Star is not only the birthplace of a great tetralogy, but from what I can tell it's also the first console RPG to be released in the West. Its success was arguably instrumental in early installments of FF and DQ getting Western releases, and for that I am grateful.

TL;DR - equal parts archaic relic and venerable classic, this is worth playing if you have any interest in games from that era. I'd recommend an updated port though, unless you have the patience of a saint.