The Chaos Shrine: [9/1000] Phantasy Star 2

Platform: Sega Mega Drive/Genesis

Release date: March 21, 1989

Developer: Sega

Publisher: Sega

Genre: RPG

Battle System: Turn-based

Difficulty: Hard

Setting: Sci-Fi

What comes after Final Fantasy 1? Right - 2! Phantasy Star 2! But seriously, I just have a bunch of already beaten games so I want to add them here. This game is special to me, it's the first jrpg I ever played and one that got me in genre. I still have cartridge from my childhood and it's very hilarious. It was almost impossible to find original mega drive games in my country so I and all other kids had bootlegs back then. My bootleg cart has Phantasy Star Online boxart, screenshots on back of the box were taken from PS1, description is from PS3, sticker on cart itself is screenshot of PS4 title screen and the game inside is PS2. This HAS to be intentional. Of course since it's a bootleg cart, there is no battery and thus no saving, because of that I haven't got far and now I finally completed it.

But I heard about this game long before I got the cart. I still have a book with a ton of cheats and guides for different sega games and Phantasy Star 2 has a guide here. I always read this guide thinking "how is game even exist and how it even plays?" because all games I played at that time were "run to the right, shoot things, kill boss - you win!" and here's the game with a huge world and epic storyline. Years later with available internet I found out that this guide was completely stolen from gamefaqs where I found this exact walkthrough but in English.

As for the game itself, it's brutally hard. You have to grind a lot to get through it but thanks to the power of emulation I can turn on fast forward to get through battles faster. But it's hard not for battles alone, dungeons here are huge, with multiple floors and a ton of stairs, forcing you to go from floor to floor to find required item/watch event. Battle system here is quite interesting (at least for it's time): once you press "fight" characters start doing their action until you stop battle with a press of a button and give them new orders. I was quite disappointed with number of bosses here, there's only 3 of them, 2 of which is in the last dungeon. But hey, that means you can use all your TP in dungeons instead of saving it for boss. Story was very dark for it's time (and I think it's still is). You're encounter a scene where a guy shoots his own daughter mistaking her for other person and, finding out what he did, shoots himself. And that's only in beginning! Other than story it's science fiction setting stood from FF and DQ.

Overall I really like Phantasy Star 2 but it's mostly nostalgia. Nowadays this game is too hard and grindy. Would I play through it again? Original - probably not, maybe a remake on Playstation 2.

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