For many years, my gaming history largely consisted of adventures on the SEGA Mega Drive and the Sony PlayStation, alongside a healthy sprinkle of early DOS and Windows 95 games. Although the systems I owned were new, a lot of the games I owned were second-hand purchases. Money did not come by easy, and my family didn’t show interest in acquiring anything newer until many years later.
It wasn’t until the late 2000s that I was introduced to the Phantasy Star series. SEGA makes a selection of their classic library accessible for each console, either through downloads or collection discs. Those were my gateway. I quickly learnt that whilst the games were connected to each other, they were set far apart in time and location. The fourth game felt the most accessible, and so I chose to start there.
You may be familiar with older RPGs using a save battery inside their cartridges, allowing you to keep a record of your journey for as long as the battery’s lifespan. These cartridges were expensive compared to their battery-free counterparts. I would have to guess there is likely a fairly good reason why console RPGs weren’t accessible to me until Final Fantasy came to discs. Regardless, I fell in love with Phantasy Star IV.
It was an experience I felt rivalled Final Fantasy’s 16-bit era. The cutscenes were an incredible sight to behold, with a manga-styled presentation that always kept me eager for more. The humour was always on-point, and the story kept me on the edge of my seat. It wasn’t flawless, but nothing is. It was so impressive to me that choosing to complain instead of praise felt like nitpicking.
I ended up finding a way to play the original Phantasy Star for the 8-bit SEGA Master System, starring Alis Landale. I wanted to see where it all started, and I wanted to see if it would connect with me better from the get-go than Phantasy Star II and III. To my surprise, I found the first entry to draw me in just as much as the fourth, and it became yet another game I would revisit frequently over the years.
Yuji Naka’s programming prowess resulted in an engaging 3D dungeon crawling experience. It may have lacked in graphical detail, but that mattered absolutely nothing to me given its context. It’s important to keep in mind it was a game released in 1987! People were exploring the dungeons of this science fiction world in first person and it ran smooth as butter. That counts for quite a bit!
I would later try completing Phantasy Star II and III. For all their flaws, I do heavily respect both games and appreciate their importance. Even though the circumstances of their development led to mixed execution, the concepts they introduced captivated me. Unfortunately, there came a point where I became too busy to see either game through, and their design structure demanded a level of attention I could not provide.
I eventually chose to compensate for this by watching other people play the games, as well as trawling through fansites to get a grasp on every bit of lore that I could. I would also dabble a bit with the Text Adventure games, though my memory of those remain fairly fuzzy. It was not terribly long ago, however, that I finally completed “Shilka’s Adventure” during a livestream, an experience I deeply enjoyed.
I became very attached to the original quadrilogy. I went so deep that I even played the Java port of the first game! How many people can say they did that? Alas, there was not much more on the horizon. Phantasy Star IV was created with the intention of being the grand finale. Though its developers had plans for a theoretical fifth entry, it remains the final Phantasy Star game to have any direct ties to the original setting and story.
To learn that an online game with no overt connection to what came before left me deeply uninterested. Everywhere I looked, people were talking about Phantasy Star Online 2. At the time, all I could think was, “That’s not my Phantasy Star. It has the same name, but it’s not the Phantasy Star I know.” It also lacked an official English release at the time, so the idea of learning to gain access to it wasn’t particularly enticing.
There were whispers of the first Phantasy Star Online, of course, but it was almost always drowned out by vague mentions of “playing on Japanese PSO2 servers” and little else. The extent of my knowledge was that it was an online game on the GameCube, and you could connect with Sonic Adventure 2 to get a Tails Chao for your Chao Garden, in case you were interested in raising a tiny digital creature.
Seeing as I never had a GameCube and little interest in raising Chao (much to the dismay of my Chao Garden loving friends), I barely paid PSO’s existence any mind. Besides, if the servers are down, then there’s no way of playing it, right? I couldn’t even engage with the thing, and nobody even talked about it in any of the spaces I occupied. Maybe I’d look into it more at some point, but I couldn’t play it… right?
Eventually, after many, many years, PSO2 finally made its English debut. It was sitting right there, just a click away. By this point, I had developed the mindset to give everything a chance, even if it was unfamiliar territory. I wanted to give everything a fair shake and meet things at their own level. I think that’s something that’s important to do, and it’s a mentality I now strongly adhere to.
I found myself deeply impressed by the character creator. For starters, I was blown away by just how many settings I could adjust. It was the kind of thing you would never see in Final Fantasy XIV, which to this day would probably blow up its own servers by accident if its developers dared to add a weight slider. The dilemma of technical debt didn’t seem to exist in PSO2 at all.
I made a character and hopped straight into the game. I played the little tutorial mission and really adored the play-feel. It hit me that I had been missing out on something that felt really good! Unfortunately, my experience went down the drain the moment I hit the lobby. I was getting hit left and right by several different game systems, menus and tutorials. It felt like it would never end.
Every single time the game was done teaching me one thing, another tutorial would crop up. Just talking to an NPC would sometimes hit me with a tutorial about something the NPC was completely unrelated to. I just wanted to play the game, but it felt like the equivalent of being demanded to do a 300-page assignment for homework before being allowed to go out and have fun.
I told myself, “I’ll come back to this tomorrow.” I never did, at least until the release of Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis, which was its own bag of worms. Years later, PSO2 veterans would tell me, “It wasn’t overwhelming back in the day.” Unfortunately, I was a new English player faced with catch-up. My friends didn’t play it, and I couldn’t make friends, and anyone I spoke to didn’t know the original series existed.
At some point down the road, I decided to find myself a Dreamcast and acquaint myself with its library. Fast forward to the end of 2024, and I once again perceived this thing called Phantasy Star Online. Right, okay. But it was an online game, right? The servers are gone. There’s no way I could still play it. Even if I could, setting it up is probably a hassle. Well, let’s try launching it anyway. What’s the harm? All it can do is tell me no.
Somehow, in all those years, not once was I privy to the fact Phantasy Star Online could be played entirely Phantasy Star Offline. At that point, I was all in. I can play it? So what if nobody’s there? I’m going in! I desperately wanted more Phantasy Star, and I was itching for something that felt simpler to me than the massive tidal wave that PSO2 felt like. Thank goodness for offline mode!
I very quickly got a grasp on its controls and became addicted. It just let me go in and do things immediately, and I had an absolute Grand Cross of a time (that reference is for the Phantasy Star fans). Small things like enemy targeting felt awkward at first, but it worked the way it needed to. I was also considerate of the fact this game needed to work globally on dial-up. A lot of the design details make sense in that context.
The soundtrack blew my mind. Still does. The amount of times I’ve listened to the boss tracks or Mother Earth of Dishonesty has to be off the charts. They’re incredibly masterful at conveying the right amount of information to you about the kind of place and situation you’re in. I still think a lot about how peaceful yet uncomfortable Forest 1 and 2 felt, as well the sound of the broken cassette tape in the final area.
Also, we have tiny friends called Mags? And they’re basically equippable Chao!?
For someone who felt deterred by the lack of connection to the original Phantasy Star games, I ended up pleasantly surprised by just how much of the spirit of those games was present. For example, in Phantasy Star 1, there’s an entire sequence where you need to speak with a governor, but you’ll only be able to have an audience with him if you bring him his favourite cake. What relevance does this have to PSO1?
Well, you see, in the original Phantasy Star, this required travelling all the way to the bottom of an incredibly out-of-the-way dungeon, braving all the terrors within it. In one tiny room, a man selling cake apologises for his shop being in a terribly inconvenient location. You buy the shortcake and haul yourself all the way back to the governor. Imagine my reaction when PSO1 had me do a quest to find sweet food for a woman immediately after unlocking a cave area. Could it be? Would they do it?
Oh, yes. They did it. Nothing held back. There I was, being made to do an absolutely mind-numbing trek through all of Cave 1, 2 and 3, only to be met with a cake shop at the very bottom. Good lord, it was terrible, but by the end of it all, the journey felt worth it. It was mean, but it was designed for a sucker like me that would immediately recognise the joke, and a little friction always helps forge stronger memories. I had a good chuckle, bought the cake, and delivered it to the quest-giver.
There’s all sorts of cute little callbacks like that in PSO1. I even appreciated the story being a sort of reversal of the first game. Instead of being the successful heroine saving the day, you’re just some random hunter following the trail of one! The more you went through the game, the more you’d come across her notes, and reading them gave me an inkling Red Ring Rico’s journey would not end as well as Alis Landale’s did. I wasn’t here to be the main character. I was here to pick up the main character’s pieces.
Even playing it single player, I found a lot of enjoyment from it. Sure, I imagine a lot of veterans will argue that “the true PSO experience is playing with others” and that playing it alone “is not really playing PSO”. Being honest, I don’t care about the “true” experience. My train of thought at the time was that I could always find a way online later when I wanted to. I just wanted to take things as they came, and what I found from offline mode, though a very basic experience, was something that felt surprisingly familiar.
I likened exploring the different maps to exploring the 3D dungeons in the first Phantasy Star. I was constantly checking my position on the map, making sure I’d covered every area, wondering if I’d missed anything crucial. I levelled slowly, but it felt like an event every single time. I also smiled a little when I did some reading online and discovered that one of the rarest items was the Psycho Wand, the signature weapon of a recurring character in the classic Phantasy Star games.
My experience with PSO reminded me of the arguments where people insist Final Fantasy XI and XIV should have been called Final Fantasy Online, because they were “different” and “lacked the soul and depth” of the single-player titles, only “superficially resembling Final Fantasy” and “undeserving of being numbered”. I don’t agree with that at all, but it reminded me of my feelings on all the games that followed Phantasy Star IV.
I raised a bit of an eyebrow originally because PSO seemed worlds apart from its source material, but I ultimately found “different” to be good and creatively interesting. At least as far as PSO1 goes (the rest I can’t speak for), I found it shared more in common with the games before it than I expected. With regard to the online Final Fantasy games, I also found their stories to be on level with the numbered titles and didn’t find them any less Final Fantasy than the rest. People argue about them as much as the others, anyway!
I came away from my first time beating Normal Mode of PSO1 with the sensation that even though it wasn’t a direct continuation, it still earned the name Phantasy Star. Is it Phantasy Star V? No, it’s absolutely not, and it wasn’t even trying to be. But despite that, it managed to at least somewhat fill the hole in my heart for one, and I think that speaks volumes. I ended up making an account on the Ephinea PC private server, and I’ve been grinding away on the Dreamcast version to beat Ultimate Mode as well.
Now, as for whether I’ll ever feel that way about the games after it is a different story. I recently gave PSO2 (and New Genesis now) another shake, and I simply do not believe it is reasonable to begin unpacking all of that in a post that is really about how I came to adore PSO1 as a staple in my gaming library. That said, I’ve heard many good things about the Phantasy Star Portable titles, and I recognise that Phantasy Star Universe and Phantasy Star 0 are games that exist. Someday!
Something else that appeals to me about playing PSO1 is something a bit more personal. Growing up, I didn’t have many friends, and I didn’t tend to share interests with the ones that were kind to me. This sort of thing is something I still struggle with to varying degrees to this day, but for somewhat different and more complex reasons than existed when I was much younger. But the point is, like many others, I tended to retreat into hobbies such as reading, writing, watching movies and playing video games.
I just know that, if the Dreamcast was a system that my family was aware existed and had gotten for the house, there is at least a fair possibility I might have been aware of Phantasy Star a lot earlier. Given the game has an offline mode, not being able to pay for a Hunter’s License to go online wouldn’t have even been a problem. Actually, I know for a fact that where I live, copies of the GameCube version had a sticker on it saying that, despite its name, it couldn’t be played online! I assume we had no GC servers.
Playing on PC through Ephinea gives me a chance to interact with other players and eventually experience more than the console content, and I have found there is a surprising amount of new players giving the game a try every now and then. Hooking my Dreamcast up and falsifying a dial-up connection gets me access to fun things like the online-only Sonic Adventure 2 crossover quest. It’s not like being around during the game’s official run is necessary for me to enjoy these things.
The thing is, I ultimately ended up getting into this game because I accidentally found out it could be played offline. It’s how I would have played it if it were known to me back then, and I know I have the personality to have pushed myself through all four of those difficulty levels the game had to offer on my own. No other players, no online quests, no shortcuts. It’s a large part of why I don’t mind just turning my brain off and doing an offline run while I listen to a podcast or something.
I might have missed out on getting to enjoy it as early as possible, but it doesn’t matter so much that the official servers are gone to me. This sort of solitary dungeon crawling and solo grind is exactly what I have done. I’m just finally getting around to it is all. And I’m just very glad to learn that, no matter what SEGA does or doesn’t do, both classic and online Phantasy Star still have active communities that love them.
[All thanks to my community. I appreciate the support during recent difficulties I experienced offline. Life may keep trying to stop me from engaging with my hobbies and goals, but I won’t throw in the towel for as long as I can help. Thanks for always being so patient and believing in me as much as I believe in you! If you enjoy listening to me ramble about video games or otherwise, consider supporting through Ko-fi!]
