This is the first time I play a Phantasy Star game and I am pleasantly surprised with how good this was. For a game released in 1987, the same year as Dragon Quest II and Final Fantasy, this game does a lot of things right. There are 3 overworld maps to explore, each with their own style and musical theme, there is no weird impossible-to-guess-cryptic puzzles to solve in order to progress through the story (there's always an NPC somewhere giving you info on what to do), I thought it was really impressive graphically, with how detailed each monster was and how they all had an attack animation (!!!), and there was a ton of tracks for an 8-bit JRPG of the time, with multiple battle, dungeon, village and overworld themes.

Of course the added features of the Sega Ages (what a funny name) remaster drastically improved the experience I could have had if I played the original. I thought the game was a bit easy with the new pacing caused by the better rewards, but the absolute game changer was the dungeon map. My god, I could have NEVER played the original if it wasn't for that. The 1st person view coupled with the fact that every dungeons look the same make it an absolute necessity to draw the map yourself, and I don't really consider that fun. Maybe it was a bit much to spoil traps in advance though.

One thing the remaster couldn't fix though was the battle system. Spells are basically useless, making fights extremely limited and completely stakeless. Also I can't say I'm a big fan of the whole science fantasy setting, I felt like it went too much into the fantasy side of things.

If you've bought TotK on the e-shop, you should have enough gold coins to get this game for free like I did. If you like or if you want to get into old-school JRPGs, this is a really good entry for you, and if not, try it out! It's only a few bucks anyway.

PS. Also out of curiosity I tried opening the web manual included in this and it didn't work? is it just me? why must everything be online nowadays that's ridiculous?

Game's good.

But I prefered BotW overall. Apart from the weapon fusion mechanic which actually makes the low weapon durability make sense, I don't think any of the new additions improve the formula of the previous game whatsoever.

Combat is still extremely boring, the focus on skydiving makes the exploration way less interesting as you can just go to the nearest tower or sky island from your destination and fortnite jump to it, all sky islands look the same and most of them even offer the same "challenge", caves are extremely generic and uninteresting for the most part, there's more enemies sure but because they're all evenly distributed throughout the map it still feels extremely repetitive (I have no idea why they don't just make some monsters unique to their regions like they did for the desert), the new nuts and bolt mechanic is of course a miraculous technical achievement but I never felt like using it except when the game forced me to do so, shrines are still way to short and uninteresting (my god why was there so many "fight the robots naked" ones I hated those) and I thought the temples were way less challenging than the beasts in BotW (they all had sick designs though).

It's also extremely strange how they seemingly scrapped any mention of the previous game's plotpoint, like the ancient sheikah technology, the champions and the defeat of 100 years ago, and replaced it with more or less the same thing but different, now the ancient zonai technology, the sages and the defeat of 10,000 years ago. It's like they rebooted BotW even though it's a direct sequel, how bizarre.

I still had a lot of fun with it and I was even extremely surprised how "new" the map felt. It's like they made the perfect amount of change to it without straight up remaking a new map... though they kind of did with the depth which I thought was extremely cool to explore, as it also actually offers interesting reward for exploration in the form of nostalgic armor sets and weapons from the previous games in the series.

Overall, I think TotK is a good sequel to BotW but doesn't actually bring any meaningful change to it. Despite how much critically acclaimed BotW was, it still had flaws and I wish they focused on fixing those and polishing what they had instead of bringing new content to the table for the sake of having more content.