The first Phantasy Star on the Sega Master System was a surprise to me. Maybe it's a feeling I had that because it was the oldest one in the series on an earlier console it would be bad? It's dated in many ways but bad? Not even close. Impressive art, music and technical feats on the system made it a really fun little game. The second Phantasy Star title is equally a surprise to me but literally in the polar opposite direction. I assumed because it was on the megadrive it and a sequel it would be an improvement on everything laid before it.

I was wrong.

I actually kind of actively hate this game and I just didn't expect that going in. The story starts with an interesting premise. Set 1000 years after Phantasy Star the Algol star system is ruled by a super computer called Mother Brain that has made every decision for it's residents. Controlling everything to make their lives easy but when something goes wrong they are not equipped to deal with it. As an agent of the governor you are chosen to find out the cause behind a new wave of monsters appearing due to Mother Brain not taking action. I like the idea a lot of people becoming too dependent to act on their own though the game never feels like that in the actual world.

The 80s/90s anime sci-fi visual design is still quite striking. Characters have mixture of, knives, boomerangs, magic, laser swords and plasma pistols in a mixture of high fantasy and sci-fi. It's a great blend the game works well cohesively with the character designs of shoulder pads and big hair dos with obvious Star Wars influences. Whilst I like the art and atmosphere I did find it actually less impressive from a technical standpoint than it's predecessor. The dungeons losing their first person view into the more traditional top down exploration with that was disappointing though, but that's the least of the dungeons problems.

They. Are. Terrible.

Initially they aren't too bad but as the game progressed further and further my drive to continue lessened with my progress. Each dungeon is a giant sprawling maze filled with warp points zooming you from floor to floor. It's full of unrewarding dead ends and twists with no in game map to help you navigate the labyrinthine nightmares. It's no wonder on release the game came with a guide book with a walkthrough and maps, they knew. I followed an online walkthrough in the end because I couldn't see myself brute forcing through without one. At one point the guide describes a new dungeon you come to as: "The first floor has no less than 69 chutes leading up to the next floor (No, I'm not kidding. There really are 69 chutes. Stop laughing.)" and many later are even worse. In an interview in 1993 whilst promoting Phantasy Star IV the game designer Kotaro Hayashida discusses Phantasy Star II and when asked about the dungeons he is translated as stating:

"Another issue was related to the dungeons, which were created by a new employee. Because he was new, he put a ton of effort into the maps and kind of overdid it… the game became more about the complex dungeons than anything else. I think you really see that on the Dezolis dungeons. They were really well done, and when Chieko Aoki saw them she didn’t want all the new employee’s work to be for naught, so we ended up using those maps… albeit with some mixed feelings. They contributed to the latter half of the game being unbalanced"

I agree with this though think Phantasy Star II being generally unbalanced from the get go. Due to the huge twisting warping bland looking dungeons and encounters every two steps the amount of combat in the game is kind of staggering. The amount of experience you get from them though is pitiful to the point that grinding and battling over and over just to gain one level up that does little towards improving your overall strength made the experience of playing extremely tedious. (Fans have created a double money, double experience hack due to this) I was even using fast forward playing this on the Playstation 4 Megadrive collection so god only knows how it would have felt at the original speed. To compound matters the games combat feels slightly unwieldly but to it's credit also a little ahead of it's time in some ways. There is a button to fight where the party will just auto combat each turn. In between you can manually select orders to the team to make them use spells, items or defend but it means going through extra menu steps each time unnecessarily. The menus generally feel kind of poorly implemented and equipping items, giving them to each other or using healing spells outside of battle was irritating every time. Despite all of this I did continue on as I wanted to see all the game had to offer only to reach an ending that actually made me think all the effort flat wasn't worth it.

In the same interview mentioned above on shupcompilations they discuss the game originally being made on the Master System then changed and ported in an extremely short amount of time. It sounds like it was a miracle and hard work the game came out at all to which I respect them greatly. I'm glad I finally finished the first RPG released on the Sega Megadrive and such a pillar of gaming history I was missing. It doesn't change my opinion though that Phantasy Star II is actually pretty poorly designed and not actually very fun to play.

As a Sega fan, retro gaming fan and RPG fan, this hurt to write. Half a star for the art design though, especially the cover art. Hitoshi Yoneda's work is stunning.

+ I like the story premise.
+ The ingame art design and promotional artwork is wonderful with a blend of high fantast and tech heavy sci-fi.

- It has possible the worst dungeons of the nearly 150 JRPGs I have played. Extremely tedious. Every one made me want to quit.
- It's a huge grind but feels unrewarding with it.
- Story is generally unsatisfying.

absolutely hates women and denies them any personhood at all but simultaneously tries to be a critique of impotent men who hate women and deny them their personhood

IT FAILS REAL BAD!!!

A real shame because some of the satoshi kon-esque psychological imagery can be fun and the puzzle gamplay is devious and interesting.

The transphobic stuff is just repulsive and sad. The fact that this game was branded as some dark and cerebral adult drama that analyzes relationship dynamics is a pathetic joke. There's less nuance here than a Two and a Half Men episode.

The songs are genuinely good here, especially the frog reggaeton/Shaggy rapper’s song, so much so that I’m not going to mention Daffy slamming his penith in the car door or Batman watching his parents die even once in this whole review. Also this cartoon dog rapper and his talking flower girlfriend is probably the most I’ve ever cared in my life about a straight dude trying to get out of the friendzone

Probably not ever going to play it for real though, the YouTube video I watched was an hour and change long and it included all the times the guy lost. He even said in the comments shit like “😭 I’m on an emulator and the lag is impossible 😭😭😭 if you don’t like it I’d like to see you try it 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭.”

Panzer Dragoon Orta is another one of those games I mostly remember hearing about in magazines. It received a lot of praise at the time, but being as it was an Xbox exclusive, it was forever out of reach like other well-regarded classics of that generation, like Jet Set Radio Future and Blinx the Time Sweeper. You have no idea how much I longed to play Azurik: Rise of Perathia, there was a whole universe of games just beyond my grasp!

Unlike JSRF and its own predecessors, Orta is actually fairly accessible today thanks to the Xbox marketplace, and used copies are still reasonably priced. I've been thinking of grabbing one as recent delistings has inverted my prior (psychotic) belief that I need digital backups of all my physical games. Gotta cover all my bases, I need to be able to play this grungy-ass port of the PC version of Panzer Dragoon whenever I'd like, that's important.

In any case, it's nice that I finally got to check this game off my list after 20+ years of thinking "I really should play Panzer Dragoon Orta," and I'm happy that it lived up to years of continued hype. Orta feels like a culmination of Panzer Dragoon's narrative and mechanical ideas, borrowing from all three previous games in one way or another to create what I think is the most fully realized entry in the series.

Obviously, Orta models itself after the on-rails entries rather than continuing down the turn-based RPG path laid out by Saga. That's not to say it jettisons all of that game's identity, of course. Orta is similarly narrative heavy and makes good on Saga's world building and storyline by focusing on Azel and (presumably) Edge's daughter. Look, it's a little hard to say, Azel just downloaded some DNA and I'm not about to check the file properties on that. Orta also borrows from Saga's positional combat in a way that feels very naturalistic, so much so that I had to question if it was present in Zwei.

Speaking of Zwei, the dragon yet again has the ability to grow over time, but no longer does so based on end-of-level scores. Rather, it changes shape in real-time when enough power-ups are collected in a given form to advance it to the next stage of its evolution. This feels like a natural progression from Zwei, and though the effect might seem quaint today, that level of skeletal deformation and changes to texture mapping is one of Orta's most impressive features. Being able to swap between different attack types also adds a layer of depth, and the deeper into the game you progress, the more rapidly you'll find yourself flicking between forms in order to manage different enemy types. Though I found this a bit overwhelming initially, once you find the right flow and develop an eye for what enemy types you need to counter, it feels pretty good.

Unfortunately, I live in an imperfect, shitty, fucked up world where a sequel to Saga and the overall health of the franchise was solely dependent on how well Orta performed. Since then, we've gotten a remake of the first game that released 18 years after Sega put the series on ice, and people tore it apart for reasons I still can't quite wrap my head around. I think it's safe to say the book is closed on Panzer Dragoon, and that's a shame, but I do think Orta is a good note to go out on. There's no cliffhanger ending here to weigh down on me, though Orta's story is left open, and the gameplay is so tight and refined that I'm not left with a sense that they needed one more game to get things right.

Sometimes you just gotta be grateful for the Panzer Dragoons you got.

When you're four years old, you're the biggest dumbass on the planet. You're a big stupid poo poo head. Any other idiot could walk up and pretend to pull a quarter out of your ear, and you'll be amazed and stop cleaning your ears out of fear of losing anymore quarters coming out of them.

When we came home with Sonic & Knuckles, I was astonished at this supposed new abra kapocus-hocus kadabra bullshit that has warped time and space to allow Knuckles to appear in Sonic 2. Woah, what are you doing Knucklehead, this is Sonic's game!! Not no more! The dumbass wheels in my dumbass kid brain started turning, then they started hitting the thick mud that made up the majority of my head and began digging up dumbass ideas that only a child with no concept of how things work would think of. I could make Knuckles appear in Sonic 2, clearly that means I could make Sonic characters appear in other games too! Alright Sonic, we're playing some goddamned football! Then what do you know, I get greeted with "NO WAY!" on the TV screen and become dumbfounded and insulted.

What do you mean you don't wanna play Joe Montana Football?!? What are you? An idiot?! I thought you were cool Sonic! I'm tired of my best friend stabbing me in the back. You think I'm playing? Sonic, I'm not playing. I'm gonna rip your head off. You're supposed to be my friend!

Flying Battery Zone solos the entire Mario franchise.