Phantasy Star IV

Yes, instead of doing some sexy block pushing I'm playing a PSP port of a 17 year old Genesis game. That just happens sometimes. I'm also doing a puzzle which is completely non-electronic and is eating up gaming time. Though Chris discovered it today so it probably won't be a distraction for much longer.

So Phantasy Star IV remains one of my favorite RPGs ever, and once in a while I get the urge to replay it. Luckily it's only about 15-20 hours long so it's not as bad as wanting to play the 90-hour DQVIII. Here are some more of my favorite RPGs:

• Devil Survivor
• Disgaea
• Dragon Quest III, IV, VII, VIII
• Various even-numbered Final Fantasies
• Grandia II
• Lunar Silver Star Story
• Shadow Hearts Covenant
• Skies of Arcadia
• Star Ocean: The Second Story 
• Suikoden I,II,III
• Tales of Symphonia 

I tried to play Phantasy Star I once without much success. I got my Master System on clearance at some point after I had all the 16-bit systems and just couldn't deal with the old graphics and 3D dungeons. Not really into the whole graph paper thing. I did really like

In PSII, when a character dies you go see the Clone Clown, who gives
you an exact clone of the dead person. It's kind of creepy, really.

Phantasy Star II, although it was very hard. Just check out this map of the first dungeon. It's about 5x5 screens, so on the first floor you can't tell any of those things are dead ends until you walk all the way into them. And those U's and D's are teleporters, not stairs, with the distinction being you can't tell by looking at it if a teleporter is going to take you up or down a floor. The game came with a strategy guide with maps of everything except the final dungeon, and it was still hard getting around. PSII is also notable for having one of the first story-based character deaths in an RPG, long before the flower girl in pink got run through. I also liked Phantasy Star III, though it's definitely the least popular. I think the main thing is that it lost

Gamepro January 1992. Of course I had long
since picked up the strategy guide.

the continuity of PSI, II, and IV. The overall story of all the games is that in the Algo star system, every 1000 years the ultimate evil Dark Force shows up and some plucky heroes have to go defeat it. During PSII one of the planets explodes, and PSIII takes place on one of the colony ships that evacuated from it. I think it's a while into the game before you even learn that, and regardless it's just not the same. I liked the whole multiple generations with different stories and characters depending on who you chose to marry.

Anyway, I love Phantasy Star IV. Which is good, cuz the damn game cost $100 when it came out. Around that time, which was just before CD-based games picked up, RPGs for the SNES and Genesis were getting really expensive. I'm pretty sure Final Fantasy III was $80 at launch. Supposedly it was something about putting more memory on the cartridges.

Chaz missed his calling as survival-horror game protagonist

I think the main thing about PSIV is it took all the good parts of the previous games and put them together into a much faster paced game. Dungeons aren't too long and the encounter rate isn't bad, and there's a macro system for battle. There are spots for eight macros, where you choose a sequence of attacks for your party to do. For example, you can make a general attack macro where the multi-hit character will always go first. Then you can make some additional macros that start with one character using a big multi-hit spell and everyone else doing clean up to use for quickly getting through areas. The result is that

I do appreciate when the characters at least acknowledge that
they normally can heal any injury that doesn't occur during a cut-scene 

except in boss fights, it's rare to be giving orders individually during battle, which speeds things up considerably. Phantasy Star IV is also just a really nice end to the series. There are a number of pseudo-returning characters, with two of your party members being essentially descendants of earlier characters in PSII and another a copy of an android from PSIII. And they do a nice job wrapping up the story from all the previous games.