Phantasy Star is a series that I’ve not had the greatest time with on this collection. It’s never been truly awful (although 2 came close…) but it’s been consistently underwhelming compared to the quality of the first game. 2 was grindy and lacking in meaningful story or character development, with twisty, frustrating dungeons full of tedious dead ends. 3 was unpolished and felt a little rushed – it never really utilised it’s core concept very well, and it was a but mindless, and easy. And so, I wasn’t super excited to get stuck into the 4th game, despite many people telling me that it’s not only the best in the series, but one of the best RPGs of it’s era, able to stand toe-to-toe with the competition on Super Nintendo. But it was next on the list, so I gave the game the benefit of a doubt, and jumped in. Hopefully the positive opinions were right on this one.
The first thing I noticed in the game was an improved focus on story. We meet Chaz and Alys, our heroes, and are introduced to their occupation as hunters, fighters who help people by solving problems and defeating monsters. We get introduced to the quest they’re currently on to investigate a university basement full of monsters, and get an insight into their characters. In the first 3 minutes of the game we learn more about Alys and Chaz than we learned about almost the entire part of 2 and 3 in 20-40 hours. The cutscenes play out with comic book style pop up pictures and they look pretty great for the system. The graphics in gameplay aren’t quite as impressive, but it’s still a step up from what came before and it’s appreciated.
The improved story continues throughout – we get introduced to our various characters with enough time for them to develop a motive for joining us, and these are often called back instead of promptly forgotten like in PS2 and PS3. If there’s one thing the game gets right compared to it’s predecessors, it’s this. The game includes some emotional moments and some surprises, even some callbacks to earlier games, including the black sheep of Phantasy Star 3.
Gameplay wise, there’s so new battle mechanics, although the core principles are generally the same. However, the new mechanics are interesting – aswell as the usual techs which use TP to cast (aka magic) each character also now has skills, battle abilities which can be used a limited number of times between healing at inns. These often offer more powerful battle abilities or character specific healing or support abilities and become your main tool for boss battles. As you level up, you get more and more uses, and later in the game you will use these way more than spells. You can also set up auto-battle macros, which can be utilised to instantly cast a set of skills without having to manually input them – you can set up 8 of these to save time in bosses, although you’ll sometimes get irritated resetting them when your party swaps out. Casting certain spells in combination one after another can also combine them into a single powerful spell, but this mechanic was not used much by me – I found that it was normally easier to use skills, as the combo spells could be disrupted if an enemy moved between them, often resulting in a handful of weaker abilities being used instead.
I had a great time playing through Phantasy Star 4, and compared to it’s predecessors it’s a big step up. The story is much improved and feels more crucial to the experience now, and the gameplay is more interesting and involved too. Some characters felt a little over or under powered (Gryz for example was useless…) but it never felt too problematic. Dungeon designs weren’t super exciting but they also weren’t packed with dead ends like 2 or super short like 3, and the game was not overly grindy. It also manages to nicely tie up some of the story elements from the previous 3 games to make the series feel more unified. So overall, I agree with a lot of people’s thoughts that Phantasy Star 4 is a pretty great game, and potentially the best in the series (I still think PS1 might be the more impressive entry for it’s time, but 4 has definitely aged better.
What I don’t agree with though, is that this game rivals the best the SNES has to offer. Apologies if you think otherwise, but I think this opinion is delusional. Phantasy Star 4 is a solid game with improvements to plot, gameplay, graphics and music, but compared to the stuff Squaresoft was putting out at the time, it’s still feels outdated. Even a game like Final Fantasy V, which is often regarded as quite weak storywise, has, I feel, more developed characters and more frequently steers the plot, whilst also having a much more interesting and in-depth battle system, and much superior graphics and sound for gameplay (if not cutscenes). Phantasy Star 4 is good, but it feels like a game that’s finally caught up to what it’s predecessors should have been – and in the meantime, it’s competition has long surpassed that.
Phantasy Star 4 is a game I enjoyed, and I’d recommend it to people to play. However, it can be a bit pricy these days, and if you’re going to spend that money on an old RPG, there’s plenty I’d recommend first. If you’ve played the likes of Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy already though, and want another great RPG to fill your time with, you could do a lot worse than this.
