Thoughts on Phantasy Star II

[dmlou]

While this is mostly going to be on Phantasy Star II, just the nature of my thoughts here means I'll also be discussing Phantasy Star IV and the Final Fantasy series, somewhat. It will also delve into my history with all the Phantasy Star games and console gaming in general.

Comments

[the_ironhorse]

Hehe. I love your childhood reasoning for the anime hair colors. I probably would have come to similar conclusions or just not questioned it at all

[the_ironhorse]

Apologies if I've shared this opinion before somewhere else. I kind of remember talking about PS1 somewhere else, but can't remember if it was an email, LJ, or who I shared it with.

[the_ironhorse]

Heh, it would appear that that would have been on my very own LJ, almost a year ago. Took me a while to remember that and dig up the post where I had mentioned it. Man, my memory is not what it used to be... Also, I must sound like a broken record because my comments regarding PS1 were nearly the same a year ago.

[dmlou]

Oh yeah... I may do PS1 next. The emulators are a lot better now, so I won't have to deal with some of the painful sound I did the last time I tried to play it. As far as grinding, I think I found a good way to deal with it -- do it while doing something else. The days where my TV is tied up purely to play a game are over. Now I can do the grindy bits while watching something on TV or doing whatever else. By the way, the "grindy" bits to me are things like just level building for the sake of level building -- not exploring some crazy complex dungeon.

[ludomancer]

When I was playing through the JP compilation of PS1-4, I noticed some interesting differences.

PS1 and PS4 are mostly intact.

NA PS2 is "hardcore" because of some subtle programming changes in the combat system. In the JP version, monsters actually miss their basic attacks (esp. against Shir and Anna) and player Techniques scale with level/stats. For some reason the Luck and Mental scores in NA version were reduced to decoration.

NA PS3 has large amounts of dialogue removed. The basic flow of the game is intact, but the NA conversations are abbreviated which eliminates things like how Rhys and Lena were betrothed as children, etc. Kind of a shame.

All 4 games change the character names quite a bit. -\o_O/-

[dmlou]

Interesting. I had no idea they didn't scale Techniques in the NA version of PS2. Personally, I thought the "hardcore" nature of it was purely do to level grinding and the insanely complex dungeons. I had no idea they doctored the programming so that your Mental and Luck were effectively useless

[the_ironhorse]

Hehe. The Muppet connection is pretty funny. I also thought that was an odd choice of name for the main character as well when I started playing it.