Reclamation Project - Part 6: Perspective (Phantasy Star II)

I'm a sucker for ye olde JRPGs. There's something about playing a game in an old style with an expansive world and a cohesive story that tickles my whiskers in a way that very few games actually do. My younger self would take the sparse details of this world and expand it out into a fully-fleshed out experience, filling in all of the details that were missing.

Most of the nostalgia for Sega Genesis games comes from the sound. There's nothing quite like opening the game on a blippy, peaceful tune. The overworld music is catchy and full of pop, and the battle music takes you right out of whatever you're doing and dumps you into a desperate situation where you have to fight for your life. The game is brutally hard and full of grinding, and you will wind up dead multiple times if you're not overly careful.

One of the things that always stuck out like a sore thumb in this game is perspective. There are conventions that are put in place so that the player can get a sense of the world around them, and suspension of disbelief willing, they can enjoy a fun romp through a fantasy land very different from our own. 

It all kind of works together if you squint at it really hard, pretend that things have to be this way, and excuse everything because "video games". Most of the weird things about games that still continue to this day come down to technical limitations. There may be limited memory in the ROM for sprites, or the amount of time that you had to program an entire game in assembly could have been cut short.

Phantasy Star II was made in 2 1/2 months. That's amazing! Given the sheer amount of content in here, it's a testament to the developers that they managed to cram all of that into 771kb. The size of this blog post is larger than that... technology has progressed so far since then.

Let's take a look at some of the glaring flaws that the game has. The biggest thing that has always bothered me is the perspective in the game. I'm sure things ended up as they are due to the rushed timeline and technical limitations, and the game does hold to the conventions of the time... but the conventions themselves are jarring.

Overworld, inside town

Going from the outside of a town to the inside is... how do I put this? The character is the same size but the size of everything around them has changed. The characters themselves haven't changed, and in fact they are exceptionally tall for an RPG character. That makes the change from humongous trees to small trees all the more egregious.

Shops are so different they take on a separate visual style The characters are completely gone now and the way that the game is presented has changed. We now have a text box, an image of a character in some kind of building with bottles and shelving, and a basic UI for shopping. 

 

I can forgive this more than the others. Interacting with a shop is a different style of gameplay than adventuring or combat. It makes sense that the way you would interact is different than the usual. The absolute waste of space, on the other hand, is, well, wasteful.

 

Overworld, inside dungeon

Moving to the inside of a dungeon is worse. The hint of perspective is that the areas are large and expansive, but the rooms are empty and bland and I could have sworn there was a ton of monsters outside. The speed of the character is consistent from one screen to the other, which is okay, I guess. That's a remnant of how the character moves on all screens, not just inside.

The biggest offender in all of this? Randomized battles.

How big is anything? Exactly as big as it needs to be so that you can make out the details while still giving the player the sense that they are in the world... somewhere. It's a band-aid of a fudge that takes what little memory the systems has and makes it work.

 

Dungeons themselves have a different problem. With the complete lack of relative size to anything else and an inability to measure them, the only thing that actually matters is time. How much time are you spending in all fifteen dungeons? Around 90% of your 30 hour playtime.

 Courtesy of www.fantasyanime.com

The first dungeon has four floors. The only thing that differentiates which floor you're on is the rough layout, how many times you've went up or down a teleport pad, and what kind of monsters are there. The deeper you go, the more likely you are to find a nastier version of something that you just fought. Everything else is completely empty.

The most interesting dungeon in the game is the Biosystems Lab. This dungeon has container vats of unknown creatures, odd machinery, and hazardous glowing liquids in the basement. By the time you reach the bottom floor you've likely exhausted yourself to the point where you're running on empty, and if you haven't died three times in the dungeon then you're obviously grinding yourself to some worthwhile level where the experience starts running off rapidly.

The game does have some nice world building after this point, but as far as actual gameplay goes this is the peak. There are somewhat interesting things going on after this, but the dungeons get confusing, lazy, boring, and even more empty as time goes on. 

I've been playing the modernized mod of Phantasy Star II to see if a bit of tweaking could make the experience worthwhile. It has its ups and downs, and the multiple hours of grinding have been smoothed out and condensed into a much better path, but I'm afraid that it's going to run out of steam sooner or later. As much as I like this game, it has a bunch of flaws that can get in the way of fully enjoying the experience and...

...wait a minute. 

1. The experience is fun and memorable
2. The experience is fundamentally flawed in a way that is disappointing or maddening
3. The act of solving a problem with the experience itself is a worthwhile endeavor.

The criteria for wanting to make something is perfect here.

1. The music is fun, the world setting is great, the characters are interesting and varied, and the progression of RPGs is always fun. It might seem lazy in other games, but I do love how monsters are re-used here.
2. The entire game loses steam around a third of the way in. It gets repetitive, grindy, and the dungeons that make up a disproportionately high amount of content are empty. The planet of Dezo is just... empty and shallow.
3. One of my childhood dreams was to fix the perspective and make the gameplay more engaging.

You know what? We'll come back to this later. My mind is spinning with ideas and plans need to be made.