
	Platform Genesis Genre Role-Playing Developer Sega Publisher Sega Released 1989
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Phantasy Star II

After a great deal of soul-searching on my part, it seems to me really impossible to adequately go into why Phantasy Star 2 is such an important piece of work without going into the nasty secrets of the game in detail…and ruining it for those unfamiliar with it. If you take the game strictly as just another role-playing title, I think it’s tedious, exasperating, repetitive, and numbing, designed to grind you down…but then, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? For your average game going on its 20^th anniversary, this wouldn’t be a big issue, but since I feel Phantasy Star 2 is something everyone needs to experience for themselves – and its enormous popularity guarantees that it’s going to be re-released sometime in the near future – it’s important that everyone who’s never finished the second Phantasy Star bail while they still have a chance. Nothing is held back.

Whither role-play? Originally, Dragon Quest was the first, in which you were essentially “you” – the lone, solitary hero – and everything: the music, the scenery, the one-on-one fighting – reinforced just how isolated you were in the world. Subsequent games, such as the first Final Fantasy, allowed you still to play “yourself”, but you – not to mention the enemy – were given companions (who in my experience generally became “your friends” in your day-to-day life, even though you controlled all of them). Still not enough? Then came Phantasy Star, which created the characters for you.

But it was this last that was the first true game of its type to be released in North America, meaning its sequel was being prepped for release right around the original Quest and Fantasy. Since Phantasy Star was arguably the best of these three “starter” games – which was no mean feat – that was not a big deal. The game actually made for an interesting experiment, though this might have been lost by its earlier American release: since 85% of the game was presented in a highly immersive first-person perspective, you still “became” the star attraction even if you couldn’t name your characters after people you knew (and thereby invest them with their personalities)…which brings us to Phantasy Star 2, which took the experiment in quite a different direction.

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What do you absolutely need to know before the game begins? The original game came out on the Master System, but Phantasy Star 2 was “upgraded”, one of the very first games for the new Sega Genesis; the release was exciting because the advanced technology of the new system would make the already vivid landscapes and characters from the first game that much more striking and

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detailed. Phantasy Star 2 begins as the predecessor ended: with a conversation of the ruler of the desert planet…so it feels like no time has really passed, but that’s only an illusion. The star cluster now relies upon a newly-developed, benevolent super-computer, the Mother Brain, which regulates the lives of the people. In particular, it’s noted and praised for drastically re-terraforming the landscape of the planets, and for creating new forms of biological life to live there. With this set-up establishing the connection between the two “processors” of the new Phantasy Star in mind, we can already get a good idea that Phantasy Star 2 is a game about itself.

Since most of the game, as with all early role-plays, takes place in the battle system, let’s start there. Without a doubt, the backdrop will catch your attention first. Phantasy Star created gorgeous full-screen panoramas that only happened to contain the monster “you” were fighting (there was a lot to look at besides the battle). Phantasy Star 2 instead gives you one of those blue-and-black “virtual reality” grids that became insanely popular in the early-mid 90s. Whether forest, river, mountain, tundra, moon or space station, it’s translated into the checkerboard. What’s more, although the confrontations are still head-on, it’s no longer a simple-matter of face-to-face; what you’re actually looking at are the backsides of your characters, looking at the monsters. When they move to strike, you watch “them” drag their weapon across the monster. And this hadn’t been done before (the “discrete sides” of Final Fantasy were different): traditionally, the screen would rumble when “you” were hit, the monster would flash when your attacks landed, and even the comfortably distinct sound effects (to distinguish between whose “turn” it was) contrived to make everything as immersive as possible.

But after you’ve finished wondering at how the battle system has been arranged, you’ll certainly notice your opponents. It would be difficult not to; while your party members stand as still as statues, the monsters throb with vitality. If you look closely enough, you can probably catch a few in the act of breathing or flexing their muscles. When we factor into account that, by the mid-90s, with the Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy series on their fifth and sixth installments, the bad guys were all still motionless drawings, that’s pretty important. Mother Brain/Genesis is quite literally giving life to the animals it manufactures.

Last, but not least, your guys will not take orders. You can command them with the usual fix-ins: attack, cast a spell, etc. – but can’t direct their attention to one specific monster. They attack whatever they feel like, and keep doing it turn after turn (always avoiding that one specific monster that will die, if struck, in one hit – but can still, and does, inflict full damage if left alone). The buttons on your controller work more as a whistle-blowing “time out” for you, the “referee” – in which the action will pause while you berate the characters for not doing what you asked, only so you can then watch them go back out and make the same mistakes all over again. These battles invariably boil down to essentially watching someone else playing your game for you.

And when you’re not fighting, you’ll be wandering lost in a dungeon…where it’s again important to pay attention to what the game is doing. Not one single dungeon in the game refrains from Phantasy Star 2’s unique concept of layering: a “ceiling” of some kind stands between you and the characters (and moves with them!), drastically impeding your ability to make out the contours of the building you’re in, and thus your ability to maneuver your fellows (usually conduits and girders, but can include “clouds/mist” outdoors or even bubbles on the ocean floor!). The effect is the same as that of the battle system: actively forcing you to think of yourself as a separate entity from the characters you “role-play” by putting a wall between you and them. Only the final dungeon is exempt from this, because you’re infiltrating the mainframe and…well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

The dungeons themselves don’t help at all, either. You can only marvel when you compare them to those in Phantasy Star 1; that game had exactly one wall texture that scrolled endlessly in (again) first-person. Since everything looks the same, getting lost and disoriented would seem to be par for the course – but the compact, if devious, “dungeon construction” was easily navigable (usually even if you accidentally got turned around), as well as – with the monsters emerging suddenly out of the dark in front of you – quite tense. Phantasy Star 2 has a bit more variety in its architectural design…but I don’t believe those old first-person dungeons had even a hundredth of the dead ends, false turns, and simply endless passageways which its sequel does. Fortunately the monsters don’t attack all that often; otherwise the experience of trudging through these might have become profoundly hellish. Nevertheless, a malignant design seems to be at work here (Fun fact: Dragon Quest 1 set the standard magic tree; first the main character learns a basic healing spell, then a basic attack spell, later learning spells like Outside (escape from a dungeon) and Return (warp back to home base). The first two spells Phantasy Star 2’s main character learns are “Outside” and “Return”…then he learns the basic heal spell. Boy, are you in for it!).

And one is: the Mother Brain/Genesis is in fact an “evil” computer, plotting and scheming to destroy the world it helped create, which does lead to some modest irony when the in-game characters are flabbergasted that their “creator” would want to destroy them. But that’s still only the tip of the iceberg, as far as they are concerned; the more interesting dilemma is to what extent they actually represent individuals. In the first Phantasy Star, and in fact virtually all other games of this type, companions need to be sought out, far afield, and somehow convinced that your cause is the same as theirs. Never happens here: periodically instead, someone will stop by at your house to introduce themselves and beg to join you on your journey. How they found out about what you were doing is left unexplained (just another example of the computer system’s absolute control over information), but the important thing is that these video-game characters are taking the first tentative steps of self-assertion.

Which is exactly what the Mother Brain doesn’t like. Phantasy Star 2 uses a looping structure, where the basic developments of the first half mirror those of the second half. One of your characters was created in one of the Bio-system labs to wreak destruction on the planet; not approving of the fate she was meant for, through sheer strength of will, she actually splits from herself and becomes a separate, distinct individual. Investigating the “mystery” of the planet’s destruction leads the two characters into a reunion, at which point they mutually annihilate one another. Following her death, the game system rewrites its own rules and will not allow you to revive her at one of the Clone Labs (the specious, laugh-out-loud explanation given suggests how desperate the computer system is). This marks the halfway-point.

The situation repeats at the darkly ambivalent ending: successfully dismantling the malevolent Mother Brain, the characters are shocked to uncover the system’s developers from “Earth” (or “Sega”, if you prefer) – they designed the Mother Brain to attain absolute control over the game characters’ world, and vengefully set upon the characters. What makes this so black is that – like the “layers” in the battle system and dungeons – the characters believe they have destroyed the system controlling their world but are, of course, still trapped in the grip of the real computer system. They’re denied any kind of freedom in their attempts to make a valiant “last stand”: the system praised for its ability to give “life” and motion to its organisms freezes and captures the heroes in still-life photographs just at the moment they raise their weapons against their makers. The liberating catharsis of an overt death would make them martyrs; instead they’re annihilated with absolute anonymity. Paradoxically, though, seeing their individual portraits, one by one, as with Nei earlier in the game, ennobles them for the player. Strictly speaking, these are not “characters.” They have no personality, no dialogue, no philosophy, no psychology. And yet despite all of the attempts of the game system to throw up barriers between yourself and the game characters, for that brief moment they almost disappear and you see something more than just a virtually constructed world before it fades to black (There’s also, if you like, the irony in Sega enlisting these characters to destroy the “Mother Brain” of their arch-rival Nintendo).

Is there then any hope left? Even the concluding image is ambiguous: earlier in the game a screen on your screen – those layers of separation again – showed the cataclysmic explosion vaporizing the planet Palma (before the final massacre, the programmers gloat over how they accomplished this). But then we close on the same planet, alive and un-vaporized. Is there then a crack in the absolute power of the game programmers? Or is this just another level of their control to put this thought in our heads so we don’t rise up against them? You make the call.

Brendan Lynch

(November 17, 2006)