overdrive's Phantasy Star IV review

A real fun game! Like you, I didn't actually play it till years after it came out, but it holds up well! I can't say the same for its prequels, none of which I finished.

Better graphics and gameplay, the comic book cutscenes, well-written characters, portrait art on the dialogue--everything was a big step up from the previous games! Raja the spirited priest might've been my favorite.

Plus...owl people!

Yeah, it was a really fun game. In the world of JRPGs, it's kind of a rare breed in that it's one of the games that could have benefited from a bit of expansion. Most could benefit from having a lot of fat getting cut out, but this one could have been enlarged a bit (5 or so hours) and been improved by that. Give Zio a bit more of a presence, maybe add a bit more to Lashiac since he was brought back from the first game...a few things like that. Maybe make a couple of those guild quests more interesting. You have the really cool one featuring Wren that has its own dungeon and a couple others that have tiny dungeons attached to them...and a few time-wasters where you need to buy a specific item from a store as part of a glorified fetch quest.

But even if it's not perfect, it's very upper-tier in the genre. And I find I have more fun nowadays playing these older RPGs (at least the good ones) than I do with newer ones.