Welcome to Gaia! ::

Normally I wouldn't make a topic about such a vague idea, but, I figured Gaia needs some PS-lovin', and that you fine folks would appreciate having someone talking.

My Phantasy Star experience is a...troubled one, I suppose you could say. Until the new millenium, I'd only seen or played Phantasy Star 3. Now, I know the fandom is full of people who love that game and will defend it to death for some daffy reason, but all in all it's a magnificent failure of a game.

I lucked out, then, when my wife (then friend) got me to play and finish Phantasy Star 4, a much better game that, while somewhat linear compared to other titles, is a freaking masterpiece. So, that game defined the series for me for a few years.

Unfortunately, she's also one of the few who'll defend PS3, so I ended up finally finishing the darn game some time this year, and it still lived up to my expectations: I wanted a lot of time back, and I wanted to crash the Alisa 3 into the nearest planetoid with the hopes that Mieu would Regrant herself and Wren out of that mess and into a better game.

Afterwards, I embarked on an epic re-plowthrough of PS4 to reacquaint myself with it. I still love it. Woah man, do I ever. Then, my wife and I decided to tackle PS1: I'd never progressed beyond the passport, and she had stopped at the Air Castle. Frankly, I was impressed. The plot was bare, certainly, but for a jRPG of it's time it was still quite impressive and the characters had some actual motivation. And in a technical sense it was quite lovely, except for the "Let's make a tunnel to the governor's mansion so that we can have the shortcake event happen, but oh, crap, we're out of space so it'd have to be part of the final dungeon. Hmm, just remove monsters from that floor and completely forget that the final dungeon theme is playing in such a useless area" thing that bothers me for some reason.

Inhale, Reiyu. Stop with the run-ons.

At any rate, we finished PS1, and it was a wonderful little game.

Now, I just have to do PS2. And I can't bring myself to do so. I know from experience that the game is a million times better than PS3, and since I managed to finish THAT atrocity of a game, surely PS2 should be easy for me. But I just don't want to. The "screen won't scroll until Rolf has walked off of it seven times" dungeon exploration, coupled with labyrinthine, maze-like, seven hundred staircase/hole/elevator dungeons themselves make for a really tedious game, which doesn't go well with the sheer amount of grinding called for in early RPGs of the like.

Granted, I already know the whole of the plot, so...am I really missing all that much by not playing it? It's a good game, truly, just really hard to sit down and enjoy.

I'm done rambling now, I think. I'm curious as to what people will make of my blabberings. I should also note that I'm a PSU player that skipped PSO (and is sick of hearing about it) to complete my PS profile.

I guess the only gameplay that really stands out is :

The ability to level Nei to a high enough level where she can kill Neifirst on her own, instead her falling then the rest of the party avenging her. You get somewhat different dialog and bragging rights. wink

Getting Shir to steal from stores. ninja mrgreen

A rather challenging Dark Force. gonk

If you're worried about getting lost, I have seen scans of the guide book around (which has all the maps, but be warned there's a few instances where the levels are shown out of order, boxes are shown that don't exist, and there's some name typos concerning Anna/Amy due to their names being opposite between the Jap and Eng versions.) My cart (a former rental) had pencil lines drawn on the maps to show you the way to go, so that made it even easier. xd