Just how rushed was Phantasy Star 3's dev cycle? Well, at one point in the game an old sage gives you directions towards the next destination in your quest, but he gives you the wrong directions due to an error in the script. The devs could have gone into the game's code to fix the dialogue... but that would take too much time, so they simply added a paragraph to the instruction manual saying "one of the sages on Sage's Isle seems to have gone a bit senile! He says this thing but actually means that other thing.

Few games make me as sad as Phantasy Star 3 does; its blend of sheer potential and shoddy execution oozes out of every pore. On the one hand, it's impossible to exaggerate just how comically slow your walk cycle is, and - combined with the random encounter rate - how unplayable this game is on original hardware. The second town is just over two screens away from the first, and I dropped the game before even reaching it because young Prince Rhys walked like a zombie with testicular torsion. On the other hand, with the aid of fast-forward, this most recent playthrough means that I've actually completed all four available story paths! PS3 has one of my favorite plot reveals in all of gaming and one of my favorite settings as well; while the skimpy script barely does it justice, it did just enough to keep me soldiering on through the tedious grind.

Even the game's music is full of poorly-executed great ideas (at least the few tracks that I heard without fast-forward). There are some very decent tracks here like the opening theme and wedding theme that are just clumsily orchestrated, with the abundance of bells turning otherwise pleasant sections into a huge racket. There's the battle music which has three variations depending on whether you're winning or losing - which is a fantastic idea, but the three themes are very different and just kinda mash into each other with no transition, making it feel extremely jarring. The world map theme is one of the few standout tracks that doesn't do anything egregious, adding a new instrument for each character that joins your party and gradually metamorphosing from hopeful-and-slightly-bland to triumphant march.

Some people say that it's always better to remake a flawed game than a good one, and I always bring this game up as the one I most want to see remade. Its rushed dev cycle and hardware limitations turned what could have been an all-time classic into... well, this. It's an absolute mess and spends so much of its playtime being tedious and unengaging, and I'm probably in the minority by being charmed by the shadow of what this game is trying to be.

I'd actually recommend everyone give this a spin, but that would no doubt result in me receiving a few death threats, so go read an LP or something.