Full disclosure, my 5 star rating for this is absolutely due to childhood nostalgia and a feels based rating, the game is obviously not without its problems. Though I have played it more than once during my adulthood, and it holds up reasonably well, especially for a Sega JRPG. We had slim pickins on the Genesis back then, and if this genre was your cup of tea, localized Jrpgs were rare. I'm pretty sure I played all three of them that made it to Canada.
PSIV was, for me, more than anything else a formative game. I distinctly remember the art style catching my eye as a child, with its 80s anime "cutscenes" something I had never really seen before. It definitely was the start of me noticing there were styles and genres I liked, and probably kicked off my interest in anime.
The story is pretty standard 80s jrpg fare, with a pretty cool "after the end" post future, buried tech, fantasy kind of setting, which is really helped by the soundtrack popping out of the iconic synthy bweoowwy genesis sound chip. Chaz and the gang are decent enough characters, not terribly complex but not paper thin either. Rune fucks. Canonically.
If the game suffers it's mostly in the localization, with the mega drive/genesis having limited memory space for English translations, hence the characters all having 4 letter names. The spells and abilities have very short or abbreviated names that require trial and error to figure out the functions of, unless you have the manual (which I did not).
The combo abilities are really cool (and predate Chrono Trigger by two years!) and the macro function is a helpful tool to speed up battles and ensure those combo abilities can be executed, but again, it takes some trial and error to figure out how it works if you're a dumb kid without the manual like me.
For the time, for the console, for the genre, Phantasy Star IV is probably the best offering you could find for that classic JRPG experience.
PSIV was, for me, more than anything else a formative game. I distinctly remember the art style catching my eye as a child, with its 80s anime "cutscenes" something I had never really seen before. It definitely was the start of me noticing there were styles and genres I liked, and probably kicked off my interest in anime.
The story is pretty standard 80s jrpg fare, with a pretty cool "after the end" post future, buried tech, fantasy kind of setting, which is really helped by the soundtrack popping out of the iconic synthy bweoowwy genesis sound chip. Chaz and the gang are decent enough characters, not terribly complex but not paper thin either. Rune fucks. Canonically.
If the game suffers it's mostly in the localization, with the mega drive/genesis having limited memory space for English translations, hence the characters all having 4 letter names. The spells and abilities have very short or abbreviated names that require trial and error to figure out the functions of, unless you have the manual (which I did not).
The combo abilities are really cool (and predate Chrono Trigger by two years!) and the macro function is a helpful tool to speed up battles and ensure those combo abilities can be executed, but again, it takes some trial and error to figure out how it works if you're a dumb kid without the manual like me.
For the time, for the console, for the genre, Phantasy Star IV is probably the best offering you could find for that classic JRPG experience.