Well I beat Phantasy Star (the first game) over the weekend. Didn't really keep track of time (and this game came out before most games kept track of that) but I'd say it was probably about 15-20 hours long (most of that was grinding because this whole game series is pretty difficult). It was actually pretty satisfying to beat though. It's definitely no Final Fantasy, with inferior battle design, music, story, and graphics and yet there's a certain charm to the game. I think part of it is the challenge because my first experience with the first installment of the series was me spending 3 minutes talking to everyone in both starting area towns, and then on the overworld in the immediate area around the beginning of the game stepping into one square of forest and being immediately two-hit by winged eyeballs. Yea, I'm not joking when I say this is a pretty tough series that completely craps all over the unprepared. So yea I tried again, died in a similar unfortunate manner about 20 minutes later and making very little progress in the plot and so I decided to go to the walkthroughs. Yea I know some people frown upon them but honestly if not for them I'd still probably be about halfway through the game at this point. Either way it seems not only do you need to immediately purchase better equipment (as I suspected), but you actually need to move up a full 2 tiers of equipment right off the bat to have a real chance of exploring the first dungeon without too many problems. This second tier equipment is also pretty expensive, but as it turns out being well equipped is just as important, if not more important than actually leveling up in this game. In general if you managed to get the money it takes to purchase most of the equipment from the nearby towns you'll probably be at the right level anyways but still, that's a little over an hour of grinding before I even explore the first dungeon of the game (and it doesn't even have a boss so arguably it's not a real dungeon).
So you're probably wondering why I like this game despite all the stuff I've said about it so far. Well I actually don't mind the challenge so much since in general I usually found Final Fantasy games to be too easy since all you had to do was grind for maybe 20 minutes between dungeons and you'd be good to go for pretty much the whole game, at least in earlier versions. Even in the later versions though (FF5-FF7) where you had to spend more time grinding to level up jobs/espers/materia to gain more skills that's still generous on the game's part since those extra little things made those game exponentially easier if you bothered with them (especially in FF6, where teaching at least one person Ultima or getting Sabin's final deathblow basically makes you auto win the game because they're so overpowered). Little things like this don't exist in the world of Phantasy Star, and so it's a much more challenging task to complete. Then again Final Fantasy games always had a pretty solid story to them (and in later games sometimes even downright amazing storylines), Phantasy Star does have a story but it honestly just cannot compete with them in the quality department. I guess maybe the challenge in Phantasy Star was to distract from the lack of story because otherwise the game would just be over and you'd forget about ever playing it within a couple weeks. Final Fantasy on the other hand seems to have tried to avoid being too hard, probably to show off it's story so that people are encouraged to continue on to find out what happens next.
There is another thing I enjoy about Phantasy Star in that the first game in the series did something that I'd never experienced before, which is first person dungeon crawling. I've never played a game that's used this before, and honestly there's just something about the style that I find pretty attractive because unlike with a top down system where you are seeing the layout of the dungeons before your character actually moves to that location, with the first person you can only see what's in front of you and so knowing the layout of dungeons is more of a memory task than just a cakewalk. To my knowledge this first person experience is only in the first game, since all dungeons in the second game have been top down so far (and I'm pretty far into the second game. I'm on Dezolis after probably 30 hours of gameplay, which is already a lot longer than early Final Fantasy games usually take to beat). But yea the whole first person thing really makes the game unique among the other RPG's I've played. That's not to say the game doesn't use top down perspective, since it's used for the overworld maps and town maps, but all the dungeons, caves, and towers are in that first person perspective which gives the illusion of 3d.
Keep in mind I'm calling this game hard even when the game literally lets you save pretty much anywhere (including in dungeons). Just be careful where you use it as you could screw yourself if you save with low health and magic in a dungeon and end up trapping yourself. Asides from that if there's one thing I'll say for those who do get to the final dungeon of this game, it's to conserve magic and be as quick as possible through it because the final boss is honestly the hardest boss fight I've faced in an RPG since Zeromus in FF4 (granted there was much less raging and death montages, but you kind of have to be a bit lucky to beat him unless you really level up a lot, I was around level 24 when I beat him and it only took 2 tries over about 10 minutes compared to the 4+ tries and 50 minutes with Zeromus). Definitely buy as many healing items as possible for it because you'll need them.
So yea, if you've got a weekend to spare and nothing better to do, go play some Phantasy Star and take yourself back to a time when video games were 2d and people still went to arcades to play Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. A time before I was even born to be honest and yet for some reason these games still feel like a part of my childhood (but that's mostly cause I played a few older arcade and Genesis titles growing up when they got released for computers).
But yea for those wondering, Phantasy Star 2 is by far the hardest game in the series so far. All I can say is fuck robots, they're by far the worst things to fight in this game so far, as they should be. It's not just the introduction of robots halfway through the game though, but the fact that enemies seem to scale up a level every time you beat a dungeon for most of this game. The original Phantasy Star did have scaling but it was more gradual in my opinion, and most of the enemies in the final dungeon had been used elsewhere before so you knew what to expect and how best to deal with it. In addition you'll really need healing items in Phantasy Star 2. You can get through most of the first game without having to rely on any if you've leveled up enough (asides from the final dungeons), but you'll need your restoratives for pretty much all the dungeons in Phantasy Star 2 asides from maybe the first few. Basically from the research lab onwards you're gonna want to have around 3 healing items on each character to conserve magic. This is especially true when the robots come into play as you'll now actually have to use magic on a fairly regular basis since only guns and magic will do any reasonable amount of damage to robots (their defense reduces your attacks with melee weapons by anything between 50-75% depending on the robot). So yea, robots are terrible annoyances and their presence alone makes Phantasy Star 2 the harder game hands down.
One final thing, I'm currently on the ghost ship in Legend of Dragoon. Working on grinding my level 3 additions up to max while the game gives me free grinding opportunities (only need them on Rose and Albert now). Dart also got his fifth addition and 4th dragoon level on this ship so I'll be grinding that addition up too. Addition grinding at least gives me something to do while trying to solve that damn chest mini game (which I don't even really care about the items up for grabs but it gives me something to do while grinding). An auto addition item might be nice but honestly that would take away the feeling of accomplishment whenever you manage to successfully pull off an addition (and I've just gotteng the hang of Albert's third addition so that'll be finished soon). Suppose I should also mention the finale for Zelda should be up on Friday night so look forward to that.
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