Sega Ages: Phantasy Star (Switch) review "Possibly the best preservation of a classic RPG."

Retrogaming is more nuanced today that it was in the 90s and 2000s. Not content to simply collect or emulate a game, the focus is on accuracy whether through original hardware more accurate emulation, or FPGA solutions like MiSTer. But with an older game, what exactly is accuracy?

In 1981, Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord came with graph paper. It’s manual explained the class system and purpose of each spell, and these physical items were just as much a part of the experience as a keyboard. Players tend to not realize how burdensome games were before specific quality of life features because they didn’t know better and while mapping was part of the experience, frustration because you had to map was not. So which experience is more authentic: mapping the game as originally intended with frustration that would have been unfounded in 1981 or playing with an automapping enhancement that let’s a modern player not view the map as a burden?

By 1987, Japanese RPGs were just emerging from the primordial Wizardry goop and developing their own identity. A year after Dragon Quest made the RPG something entirely Japanese, Phantasy Star is one of the major foundation titles that defined how Japanese RPGs would look, sound, and play for the next decade. One of the largest cartridges ever produced at the time, Phantasy Star is a massive and carefully crafted game with ideas that still feel innovative. It was localized for North America two years before Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy. For two years, it was the Western world’s window into fascinating phenomena that was happening in Japan, as Wizardry and Ultima inspired a new kind of game. It is unfortunate that Phantasy Star had the unlucky fate of being on a less popular platform.

While the Sega Mark III and Master System enjoyed limited success in Japan and the international market (in regions Nintendo didn’t have a strong presence), it was virtually unknown in the United States. Several million copies of Dragon Warrior were in circulation by the end of the NES’s life, but such was not the case with Phantasy Star. You, like most everyone else, probably did not play Phantasy Star in 1987. Most of us come back to it after discovering the series through its better known Genesis sequels or the modestly successful MMO.

This puts Phantasy Star–and efforts to preserve its important legacy–in an odd place. How do you preserve an experience that few people had in its original form, and in a way that does not distract from the quality of the game itself? Phantasy Star has many qualities in common with Wizardry–the player is effectively required to make maps, the manual needs to be handy for item descriptions, and the sparse hints from NPCs are mysterious as they are oddly translated. The few players in 1987 would have looked right through those things as if they were glass to see the beautiful game behind them.

How can we, today, feel the experience of playing a game from 1987 when it is no longer 1987?

Preserving and remaking classic games is not new, and there have been many different approaches. Phantasy Star’s contemporaries suffer similar problems and were treated to remakes. Final Fantasy: Dawn of Souls on Gameboy Advance (a port of a remake for Wonderswan Color) and Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster do not aspire to be accurate to the original game; they aspire to make the original game inviting to players that discovered the series later. They are entirely different games in terms of graphics and gameplay, and very different experiences. Dragon Quest II (released close to Phantasy Star) received similar treatment with a remake on Gameboy Color (a port of a remake for Super Famicom). Straight, emulated re-releases RPGs from this era are uncommon, and that’s probably because they have so many mechanics modern audiences do not understand. They aspire to evoke nostalgia for future games in the series rather than the past. They are remakes of shadows burned onto the screen of Plato’s CRT.

The Sega Ages version of Phantasy Star takes a unique approach to this problem. Rather than remaking the game and re-designining it in the process, M2 has focused on preservation. This is first and foremost an accurate, well-emulated version of Phantasy Star for modern platforms. The emulation is arguably as flawless as emulation can get, with speed, timing, input, and color that would be indistinguishable were it not the display and controller differences.

Even in display, the Ages version tries hard to recreate the experience, with filters to simulate the smooth, blurry glow of a CRT display. Turning on this filter feels odd at first, but proves what the owners of retrogaming hardware already know–that “pixel art” didn’t exist before LCD displays. The artwork of Phantasy Star (and other RPGs of the day) was designed with the assumption that pixels would blend together like stars too close together in the sky, smoothing the image and creating something otherworldly. Features like this show that M2 not only sought to accurately emulate Phantasy Star on a technical level–it is also emulated at the experience level. You might not be holding a Master System controller or sitting on an ugly couch in a wood panel-clad basement, but this is about as close to the 1987 ur-experience that a modern display can manage.

That still leaves us with our original problem–how can we appreciate a game that has decades of design shifts following in its wake. Using first-person, mapless and unfair dungeon presentations, highly frequent random encounters and poor combat rewards overseen by a malevolent RNG god is difficult to enjoy today as we’ve peeled those elements away from RPGs. This is why all re-issues of Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, and other foundational Japanese RPGs from this era are re-makes, not faithful emulations.

M2’s solution is two fold. For knowledge and elements that would have been available to players outside of the game (such as item descriptions that appeared in the user manual or maps that the player would have been expected to create), the game provides an overlay with that information available–the original game is not actually modified. If you want to know what a “Transfer” does, you press the + button and read the description from a well-designed info sheet, the modern equivalent of opening a manual. An automap is provided on screen while in dungeons, simulating the slow, tedious, plodding work a player would need to perform (though this does have the effect of allowing the player to anticipate traps and find hidden doors that are otherwise not visible). These features can be turned off for those looking to re-create the frustrating a bit more accurately.

For issues of balance and fairness, M2 provides a modified version of the game (the “Ages” version) with a reduced encounter rate and more significant encounter rewards. This brings Phantasy Star closer to modern tastes in regards to the amount and value of combat, and also decreases the wear on player resources (health and magic points) so that they can roam further from safe areas without needing frequent return trips. It makes the game easier, but–like modernizing the spelling in an Elizabethan play–it reduces a barrier to entry created by the passage of time rather than developer intent.

The player is also given the option for which sound chip to use. The Sega Mark III had an optional FM synthesizer module that was built into the Japanese Master System but not the international version. The FM chip used in the Japanese Master System is close to the one used in the MegaDrive and has a similar flavor as contemporary arcade cabinets. In contrast, the PSG chip in the international Master System has its own style that is evocative and nostalgic, with an alien and sci-fi quality to it. While Tokuhiko Uwabo’s compositions are identical between both versions, they each have compelling merits and thankfully players can (and should) freely switch between both versions.

Even today, Phantasy Star is a technical masterpiece. The Master System’s vibrant color palette accentuates Phantasy Star’s animated enemy sprites and encounter backgrounds. Enemies swing swords as waves lap onto sandy beaches. Even today, 2D games seem to lack these sorts of details. Anime-inspired cut-scenes make key story moments memorable long before the idea of an FMV in an RPG. Programmed by Yuki Naka (the guy who made “blast processing” possible), Phantasy Star is still a marvel to behold decades later. The overlay of sprites in first person dungeons creates a smooth movement effect rarely seen in 2D dungeon crawlers even today. There is a timelessness to Rieko Kodama’s artwork here that makes Phantasy Star feel unique as it is impressive.

Phantasy Star features some of the best looking first-person dungeons and combat encounters of its era.

It wasn’t just in technology where Phantasy Star innovated. More than 30 years later, Alis still stands as one of the best female protagonists in a game. Her story of revenge is empowering in a way most games dare not try. Alis is strong, intentional, and balanced. She wears armor that actually provides protection, she can use a sword, and yet stands on the cover undeniably a woman. While its contemporaries leaned in on saving the prototypical damsel in distress, Alis defies those conventions and Phantasy Star is a better game for it.

Not just for its protagonist but for all the unique ideas thrown into Phantasy Star, it is no surprise that about half the staff on the development team were women. It’s a sign that staff were assembled by talent and given creative freedom to create the game they wanted, not simply to one-up Dragon Quest and it’s clones. Crammed into a massive 4 megabit cartridge, Phantasy Star was one of the largest games ever produced when it was released and filled with all sorts of crazy ideas, like interplanetary space travel and multiple vehicles (including a flying cat), and the freedom to complete some objectives in different orders. Dragon Quest II and Final Fantasy might have had massive worlds, but Phantasy Star had massive worlds–and they are actually interesting.

Cut-scenes and science-fiction vehicles give Phantasy Star a distinct feel from its contemporaries.

Where Phantasy Star lacks is in its combat. The fixed party is memorable, but the level-restricted growth and lack of interesting combat choices is not. Even the most difficult encounters are dull battles of attrition. This is balanced by combat’s relative brevity and the diversity in opponents and environments. Around the midpoint of the game, the player can tackle a few objectives in different orders, giving a sense of choice not felt in combat. The focus of Phantasy Star is not in the grind but in the world building that it excels at. Dungeons feel purposeful and every corner of the map seems to have something interesting. With so many key items that have a genuine gameplay use, Phantasy Star invites the player to explore every corner of its diverse biomes. Don’t let that 7 seconds you had to fight a skeleton sour you too much–at least you didn’t sit and wath your party waste turns attacking an enemy that was already dead.

All of these strengths may not be apparent if you are to play the game on original hardware. It is no longer 1987 and what was considered an appropriate and interesting encounter rate is now excessive. I would not have honestly finished Phantasy Star were it not for the Ages series. It preserves what makes Phantasy Star a great experience while making optional (but not outright eliminating) the parts that would have pushed me away.

The Sega Ages series and M2 as a developer have emerged as the standard bearers of preserving classic games, and Phantasy Star is among their best efforts. It takes one of the most innovative Japanese RPG titles and makes it accessible and palatable to modern audiences without mutating it into something wholly different. This is as close to the 1987 experience as technology allows, while still reducing the barriers and frustrations that would inhibit players from enjoying an otherwise classic.

There’s more here than just meticulous preservation though. Phantasy Star is a strong game on its own merits. Its unique setting in a genre dominated by high fantasy, its daring anime-inspired style, and its technical prowess are no less impressive with the passage of time (and female protagonists that actually wear clothes are still pervertedly rare). Phantasy Star is simply a good, well designed game, despite mechanical shifts in the genre since. We cannot unlearn the decades of RPGs that that came after it, nor can the average player re-create the hardware loadout of 1987, but the Ages version of Phantasy Star is about as close as we’ll get.

Community review by dagoss (December 13, 2021) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.