JRPG Journey 2024: Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium (February)

January’s game: Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes

Winter bonus game: Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei

We’ve arrived, folks: Phantasy Star is the first JRPG series with four or more entries that I’ve fully completed. Well, there are the Phantasy Star Adventure games, which aren’t RPGs and thus don’t register on my radar, as well as Phantasy Star Gaiden, which I have played but won’t cover on Medium—but we can effectively ignore those. (Trust me, there’s not much to say about Gaiden.) And of course, there’s the Phantasy Star Online titles, which are spinoffs unrelated to the long-dormant main series. That’s right, we haven’t received a new core entry since Phantasy Star IV, this month’s stop on my JRPG Journey.

And what an entry it is. First off, at the very least the first two games in the series are must-plays to get the most out of the story here. Fortunately they’re both short enough—and fun enough—that there’s no reason for a JRPG enthusiast to skip them. (Phantasy Star III takes place long after IV and has no connection to its plot.) Phantasy Star IV acts a direct sequel to II, set another thousand years in the future, and finishes off the story about as well as I could hope for. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Right off the bat, improvements abound in PSIV, despite it also running on the Genesis like II and III both. Cutscenes now take on a manga-style presentation with hand-drawn panels, giving this sci-fi adventure way more personality than before. There’s a “talk” feature reminiscent of Dragon Quest’s party chat, albeit in a limited form here aimed more at helping the player remember where to head next as opposed to providing a ton of personality. That’s alright—it’s still years ahead of most other JRPGs in terms of convenience. Another cool addition that stands out immediately is the variety in flavor text when investigating shelves. Rather than getting one or two generic text boxes every time; Phantasy Star IV delivers a surprisingly large amount of bespoke flakes of added charm, whether in describing the contents of cabinets or bookshelves or wardrobes you probably shouldn’t be snooping through. This may sound like a silly, small thing to praise, but I can’t think of any other JRPGs from the 16-bit era that put this much effort into immersion. Cute, clear sprites and large menu portraits brilliantly convey the bold, retro-futuristic character designs, the best in the series so far. On top of that, during conversations with NPCs any of your party members might react to conversations purely to show more of their personality, not just to advance the plot, another rarity for early- to mid-90s JRPGs. (Shoutout to Raja—more on him later.)

Within the first few hours, a smattering of other quality of life features stand out. Various overworld and dungeon areas features parallax scrolling for an added touch of realism, and there’s almost always something moving on screen, yet more evidence Sega squeezed all the power they could out of the Genesis to craft this final fantastic entry. You can reorder your party and change who leads when walking around, a feature I think should be standard in all party-based RPGs. No more wasting time healing at hospitals since inns revive dead characters. Again, a standard feature for JRPGs nowadays, but props to Phantasy Star for introducing it earlier than most of the competition. Animated battle backgrounds return, too, thankfully, with more sparkle and bang than ever, and in general Phantasy Star IV offers a noticeable if modest visual improvement over its predecessors.

And that, dear reader, is where I begin to feel conflicted. Growing up reading internet forums, as one child of the 90s does, I was sold on the idea that Phantasy Star IV was the only game truly worth playing in the series, a true classic that stands out a shining beacon of quality among earlier titles that can’t compare. Simply put: that’s not the case. Look, this fourth entry introduces a ton of cool shit, but ultimately, it’s not that big of a leap over Phantasy Star III or even II when it comes to visuals, music, or even gameplay.

Take the soundtrack, for example: PSIV’s is longer than ever—approaching two hours—with tons of variety in composition, but the problem lies in the Genesis’s sound hardware. After playing the previous two games, it doesn’t feel like I’m hearing anything new here, even though the tunes are different. Every song has that inescapable tinny, warm, Genesis-y quality that fits better with simpler, shorter games. When trying to compete with the best of the SNES, the Genesis just doesn’t hack it, sound-wise. It’s worth mentioning the compositions are as good as ever, possibly the best in the series, though I prefer both II and III’s more for their overall tightness and relative simplicity.

Phantasy Star IV serves up more of the series’s signature turn-based combat where you stare at your party’s behinds, barely changed from III. Aside from struggling to remember what all the kooky spell names do, I got right into the groove of the grind, breezing through this game’s well-paced battles—no more encounters every two steps a la PS II/III. A key addition, however, one well ahead of its time, easily pushes this entry past the “best combat in the series” threshold: macros. Just like in Lunar: Silver Star Harmony (check out my retrospective from JRPG Journey 2022), you can assign up to eight different macros, or sets of actions for each party member to take, then choose a macro to automatically execute those actions for a battle turn rather than selecting than manually. While nothing more than a pure time saver, saving time solves my biggest problem with this series and most older JRPGs: while mashing A to get through random battles is often the smartest strategy, it gets tiring. I welcome anything to speed up the process. That said, Phantasy Star IV’s random encounters cede few opportunities to be so lazy. Instead, you’re all but forced to make optimal use of multi-target attacks and spells, though the game is generous enough to give your mages plenty of TP for both damage and healing. PSIV puts the days of having to leave a dungeon partway through, just to trek back to town and rest up, in the past.

Bosses in particular demand the use of party buffs, a change I appreciate for bringing some strategy to the series’s otherwise rote combat, but there’s still not much variety. Have someone use Saner to raise agility, throw in a couple of defense buffs like Barrier, then go to town. This strat works on even the toughest enemies, regardless of who’s in your party. And while macros are handy, I rarely used any other than a basic “everybody attack” setup for much of the game. That’s because, aside from wanting to conserve TP out of an overabundance of caution, your party make-up changes frequently over the adventure, forcing you to reconfigure your macros each time this happens. This being a fast-paced game and my play sessions being rather long, I often opted to choose commands the old-fashioned way. Speaking of which, I’m apparently so old-fashioned I didn’t notice this game’s got combination attacks, yet another ahead-of-its-time idea that feels undercooked. These happen automatically when you select the right spells or skills, yet I don’t recall seeing a single one. Oh well, I had fun watching compilations of them on YouTube.

Phantasy Star IV offers a satisfying conclusion to the saga, despite taking place long before Phantasy Star III. As mentioned, PSIII’s story, while enjoyable in its own right, doesn’t play into what’s going on here. (Oddly, you do fight Dark Force once again in that game, despite him also being IV’s final boss, but we don’t need to talk about that.) A thousand years after the heroes of Phantasy Star II saved the Algol system from destruction at the hands of the evil entity known as Dark Force, we follow a young hunter’s apprentice, Chaz, training under a full-fledged hunter named Alys. It’s unclear if she’s related to the Alys from Phantasy Star I, but it’s a fun reference either way, and that’s not where the tie-ins stop. Longtime fans will recognize Chaz and Alys’s home world as Motavia, the desert planet from the first game, which got a green makeover via terraforming systems in PSII; however, these have since failed, turning the planet back into a desert. Forget character development; that’s setting development, over the course of a series, no less.

Chaz and Alys’s first assignment is to deal with a monster outbreak in the basement of a local academy, after which they learn from the principal that the monsters actually came from a place called Birth Valley, where the ruins of an ancient civilization had recently been found. Scientists flouting safety for their own selfish pursuits? Say it ain’t so! Worse, they encountered a mysterious villain named Zio, who warned the researches to stay away from Birth Valley. Naturally, that’s where our hunters head next, along with Han, an apprentice at the academy. Their journey takes them initially through a few small towns, where they help the townsfolk in Dragon Quest-like fashion, including saving a village that was turned to stone. They also meet Rune, a mage and future full-time party member who’s made it his mission to take down Zio, as well as Gryz, a native Motavian with some serious tanking capability and an even bigger bone to pick with Zio. Phantasy Star IV changes up the way parties work once again: now, members come and go throughout the story, with Chaz as the only constant. Near the end of the game, the party solidifies into four set characters, but you get to choose one more to accompany you into the final dungeons. To this day that’s a fairly uncommon way of handling parties, and it works well in keeping the combat feeling fresh, since your options change every few hours. However, the obvious choice has got to be Raja, a powerful healer you meet late in the game, who helps free up time for your other characters to cast buffs and debuffs.

But back to the story: our heroes reach Birth Valley to discover it’s a bio-plant filled with ancient, high-tech equipment. Within they find an elf-eared girl named Rika, who explains the a thousand year-old civilization used this plant and others like it for bioengineering — these are the climate, soil, and ecology systems from the second game! What’s more, the one at Birth Valley is still operational. Rika claims there’s other such facilities around the planet, and though they’re still functioning too, they’re only running at a level that sustains basic existence. The party learns from an AI called Seed that the system is running beyond its control, causing the monster problem, and if left unchecked will eventually destroy the planet. They decide the best thing to do is shut down the system rather than letting it run amok. Rika joins the party, urging them to rescue the control android Demi, who can shut down the power supply to these systems. Unfortunately, she’s being held by Zio, who at this point is holed up in his castle, plotting new ways to torment the citizens of the world.

I won’t go point-by-point through the plot, but it’s a true world-hopping adventure, once again taking you to multiple planets, space stations, and more. Even better, fancy rocketship travel sequences return after their depressing absence in PSIII—score one for presentation. Old nemeses from past games make their returns, including Lassic from the first game and yet another incarnation of Dark Force, as well as—spoiler alert—Lutz, a party member from Phantasy Star I, who plays a key role in the lore-shaking reveals leading up to the final conflict. I won’t spoil those revelations here, but know that PSIV offers the a well fleshed-out and satisfying conclusion to the saga that, for once, leaves fewer questions than it answers. That is how to end a series.

For the first time, sidequests make an appearance in the form of hunts for the aptly named Hunter’s Guild on Motavia. Now, these aren’t the same kind of hunts as in games like Final Fantasy XII or XV; they’re more akin to what we think of as generic sidequests today, such as “go to this town and speak to this person” or “clear this optional dungeon”. Keep in mind Phantasy Star IV came out in 1993, before the concept of sidequests as desirable additional content for JRPGs had solidified itself in the industry. In one respect, I give PSIV props for its forward-thinking quest design, but the implementation of this idea lacks forethought. Only one hunt is available up until just before the party leaves Motavia for story reasons. Then, you’ll spend a large chunk of the game—well over a third—off-planet, with no real reason to re-visit Motavia. Thus most players will likely forget hunts even exist until much later in the game, at which point a slew of them unlock, turning what should have been occasional sidequests that break up the story beats into one long side-track, if the players chooses to take them on.

Vehicles like the Ice Digger from Phantasy Star I return, though they play a smaller role here, only used to reach a few new areas or, near the end of the game, to zip across the map like a madman. That’s fine, though, since they turn battles into overpowered feasts of destruction where the party rains down hell on foes from behind the safety of ancient steel. It’s like a mini-reward for all the grinding you’ve put in up until that point, and believe me, Phantasy Star IV requires lots of grinding. Strategy will get you far, yet not far enough to overcome the massive spikes in enemy power and levels before several of the game’s key dungeons. That’s par for the course for RPGs from 1993 and is one reason I love these old games, but given how much praise PSIV gets today, many players might go in expecting a more modern feel—I certainly did. But no, Phantasy Star IV offers old-school JRPG goodness through and through. For those with the right expectations, it more than hits home.

Thank you for reading this month’s edition of JRPG Journey. Join me next time, when I’ll be covering the birth of one of the most beloved series in the genre: Tales of Phantasia.