I feel like with II and III, Sega were trying to reinvent the wheel and add a lot of weird mechanics and plotpoints to set the Phantasy Star series apart from all the other JRPGs on the market. It's funny, then, that IV returns to the style of the first game to present a standard yet solid experience, and in doing so eclipses those two games with flying colors. Combat's fun and comprehensive, dungeons are well designed, the story and characters are all well written and memorable, and the graphics are outstanding, especially the character portraits and cutscenes. It's no Dragon Quest V or Chrono Trigger, but the fact that I can even compare it to such great games is a lot more than I can say about the prior two entries in the series.