Phantasy Star is a series whose name has always floated around in the background of gaming history for me, yet was something I never engaged with directly. I knew it was significant without really knowing why. However, I watched Jeremy Parish’s Segaiden episode where he covers the original Phantasy Star. That’s where I learned that it’s basically the first JRPG to focus completely on defined characters and an established narrative (as opposed to customizable characters and an emphasis on player choice), and that it features the first female protagonist in the genre. Knowing this and seeing the Sega Ages remaster on sale, I decided to give it a try.

Unlike many RPGs of the time, Phantasy Star includes a science fiction aspect alongside the more standard swords and sorcery. The heroine is Alis Landale, a girl who sets out to avenge her dead brother after he’s killed by the oppressive forces of Emperor Lassic. Her adventures take her across planets, where she encounters allies who join Alis on her quest.

The game is gorgeous even today, and while I don’t have a firm tack on the general aesthetics of the Sega Master System, the graphics blow its contemporaries on the NES out of the water. The faux-3D of the dungeons, the excellent music, the look and feel of the environments (especially from planet to planet), and the detailed enemy sprites all contribute to an immersive experience. Little hints or story points that crop up at the beginning don’t pay off until much later, making figuring out various mysteries very rewarding. It’s no wonder that Phantasy Star is generally regarded as one of the best titles of the Master System. 

Phantasy Star is very much of its time, and it reminds me of a conversation I saw on social media recently. A younger person was trying out older Pokémon games (pre–Black and White), and they were puzzled by the fact that “important NPCs” weren’t always obvious. They questioned the need to arbitrarily talk to literally everyone in the game, but others pointed out that this is what RPGs used to be like. You were expected to approach the game as an explorer and check out every nook and cranny to find hints on how to move forward. In the context of Phantasy Star, I did feel stymied by this at times despite my familiarity with this type of gameplay, like when I couldn’t remember the names of individual random towns, making backtracking much more tedious.

The Sega Ages version comes with a mode that has a few quality-of-life changes: fewer enemies, faster leveling, more gold earned per battle, faster walk speed, and auto-drawn maps. I felt two ways about this, as I often don’t like having extra hand holding for older games, but what ultimately tilted me in favor of the Sega Ages version were the maps. If I were playing this back in the day, I would have to bust out the graph paper and make them myself, and that is something I don’t enjoy. The faster leveling also helped speed up the game and allowed me to fit it into my schedule, but I definitely think I was overleveled for most of the game in a way that allowed me to accomplish things I wouldn’t have otherwise. As a result, I’m not sure I necessarily got an entirely authentic Phantasy Star experience, even if I enjoyed the game.

From what I understand, the Phantasy Star franchise only got more elaborate and complex over time. This first game acts as an introduction to the ideas and feel that would help define Sega RPGs as a whole, but I do think it’s fun as a standalone title. It also took me back to my younger days, almost like I was experiencing an alternate timeline of how my taste in games could have gone if a few circumstances had changed. Perhaps I would have been the world’s biggest Phantasy Star fan, talking about how I never tried any Final Fantasy games.