History Lessons: Phantasy Star II

Other History Lessons posts can be found here. If you’re looking specifically for console games, those are here. This particular entry is also part of the Keeping Score series about games and their soundtracks. As always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

I’ve been looking forward to this one. The original Phantasy Star was the subject of my fourth ever post in this Console History series, before I expanded the scope and went back to add in a lot of games that released before it. But it remains one of my favorite discoveries. Sega’s first foray into the nascent console role-playing game genre, Phantasy Star is both a technical showcase for their Master System and a forward-thinking design that introduced many elements that would become genre standards. Its sequel, Phantasy Star II — which I vaguely remembered seeing once as a kid, at a friend’s house — is regarded as one of the most influential Japanese role-playing games ever made. And like its predecessor, it was a technical showcase, this time for the Sega Mega Drive (AKA Genesis), the first truly 16-bit console (NEC’s PC Engine/Turbografx-16 had 16-bit graphics, but an 8-bit CPU). In fact, Phantasy Star II was the sixth game ever released for the system in Japan, appearing on March 21, 1989, only about five months after the Mega Drive itself (and a mere four days after our last entry, Out Live, released on the PC Engine). It also came to the US about a year later, which means American players actually got it before Final Fantasy!

We’ve seen two Genesis games in this series so far, Hydlide 3: The Space Memories and Star Cruiser, but both are ports of earlier games on Japanese home computer systems, and the ports actually released after Phantasy Star II. Phantasy Star II is the first game on Console History that was designed for the system from the ground up, and it even boasted a 6 megabit cartridge, making it the largest console game ever made at the time of release. It’s wild that when this showed up in the US market, the only other console role-playing game players were likely to have seen was the original Dragon Quest.

I remembered exactly three things from the time I saw Phantasy Star II in action as a kid: a character who threw some sort of laser disc at enemies that cut through a whole group (this turns out to be Anna Zirski, who became one of my favorite characters), exploring some sort of hydroelectric plant (I now realize this was a dam), and the party getting captured by robots. All of this is indeed in the game, and it means my friend was about halfway through. Since I only remember seeing the game once, I thought my friend had rented it, but he says he owned it, and that must be true: getting halfway through this epic-length game is no mean feat! But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning.

If I’m honest, Phantasy Star II didn’t make a great first impression on me. After the slick production of Out Live, certain aspects of Phantasy Star II felt crude. Battles no longer have the beautiful, location-specific backdrops of the first game, instead opting for a sort of cyberspace-esque lighted grid. Taking damage in combat is indicated by flashing colors and blinking sprites, accompanied by surprisingly rudimentary sound effects, instead of the smooth animations in Out Live. The Mega Drive had a fancy new sound chip in the Yamaha YM2612, a simplified version of the chip used in Yamaha’s legendary DX7 synthesizer (I’ll have a lot more to say about this chip and Phantasy Star’s music at the end of this post), but it also has the exact same programmable sound generator (PSG) used in the older Master System, and much of the music heard at the start of the game makes heavy use of the PSG. That makes it sound a lot like the original Phantasy Star, instead of the fancy FM synthesis I was expecting. Even the next-generation graphics felt a little bland at first. The outdoor areas look crisp and colorful, but rather static; I missed the waves lapping against the shores in the original game.

But Phantasy Star II quickly won me over. Animations may be lacking during exploration, but in battle they’re plentiful. The original game’s enemies were animated when attacking, but here they’re animated even when idle, flapping their wings or flicking their tails or spinning their sensor lenses. They also have separate animations for attacks versus special moves: an ant-like creature might bite with its mandibles, or open its shell to spit some debilitating slime. The player’s party aren’t left out either. Characters are visible from an over-the-shoulder perspective during fights, and they’ll actually pop up in front of enemies to attack with swords, or fire guns. Or, indeed, to hurl a laser disc that slices through a whole group of enemies. No longer are fights limited to a single enemy type, you see, and each individual enemy is shown, instead of the single representative foe from the first game. But it’s still only possible to target a group, not a specific individual, so those group-killing laser discs are extra handy.

Phantasy Star is really cool outside of battle, too. From the start, it’s clear that its world is more fleshed out, its story more serious, than anything that’s come up in this series so far. Final Fantasy II might be the closest, with its prevalence of plot twists and story scenes. But while its party was technically made up of pre-set characters, they’re basically blank slates that players can develop any way they want. Phantasy Star II instead builds upon the more detailed characterization in the first game in the series, to offer the first player party that feels like what would become genre standard. Each of the eight characters has their own backstory, (simple) personality, and reasons for joining up. They also each have their own specialties and abilities, making each feel distinct in the game’s many battles. When I wrote about Final Fantasy II, I said that it displayed the narrative style that has become standard for Japanese-style role-playing games, nearly fully formed. Well, in Phantasy Star II it’s fully formed. There’s a cast of recurring characters like those in Ys I & II, plot twists and cutscenes like Final Fantasy II, and a story that outshines them both.

Mostly that’s because Phantasy Star II avoids falling back on a simple tale of good vs. evil, like so many other early role-playing games do. Set roughly 1000 years after the first game (984 years in the Japanese version, “more than 1000” in the US version), the game begins on the planet Mota. Called Motavia in the first game, it was an arid desert planet. But no longer! Under the guidance of the supercomputer called Mother Brain (no, not that Mother Brain), it’s been transformed into a verdant paradise, now the agricultural center of the entire Algo star system. Mother Brain created domed farms, built irrigation canals, constructed the Climatrol system to engineer the weather, and designed new lifeforms to create a stable ecosystem. Now the inhabitants want for nothing, and can live lives of idleness.

But things started to go wrong two years before the game begins. Some sort of error has caused the Biosystems Lab to produce dangerous biomonsters that are wreaking havoc. We have a male protagonist this time in Rolf, a government agent who is tasked with infiltrating the now-quite-dangerous Biosystems Lab to recover its Recorder and figure out what happened. He’s joined by his companion Nei, a young woman with animal-like features who he rescued from a mob several years ago. She’s grown rapidly from a child in just a few years (and pleasingly this is reflected during play, as she gains levels much faster than anyone else). I was a bit worried about her character at first, since she’s basically a catgirl and her design is mildly sexualized; I feared she would be cast as a weird mix of pet and love interest. Fortunately her character arc is more interesting than that, but I admit I was hoping to see another great female lead like Alis Landale from the first game. More women join later, though, and indeed the full roster is four men and four women.

The first game features a mix of sci-fi technology and fantasy elements, but Phantasy Star II is more firmly rooted in the sci-fi realm. Many characters do still use (high tech) swords and knives, but magic is replaced by “techniques”. One of the characters who joins the party is a biologist, whose expertise grants him many techniques that are useful when battling biomonsters. Another is a doctor, who heals allies with her knowledge and skill, rather than magic (OK, techniques basically function the same as magic, but still). Moreover, Mota is not the kind of place to harbor darkened caves and creepy dungeons that are inexplicably full of monsters. It’s an orderly world, and the recent biomonster outbreak has a clear origin. I was pleased to see that once my party figured out what was going on with the biomonsters and put a stop to it, the biomonsters indeed disappeared — but other story events meant my party had to tangle with enemy robots instead.

Don’t worry though, Phantasy Star II still has “dungeons”, they just take the form of high-tech facilities full of machinery and unknown dangers. These places are no longer first-person grid-based areas like they were in the first game, instead they’re presented in the same three-quarters view used when wandering through towns or the outdoor areas. But don’t fret. The dungeons in Phantasy Star II are not messing around. They’re absolutely huge, peppered with lifts heading to floors above and below. Three-dimensional labyrinths that took me many expeditions to sort through. When I played the first three Dragon Quest games, I commented on the evolution of their dungeon design, from simple small mazes to more complicated and thematic locations with puzzles involving dropping down from higher floors to access new areas below. Well, Phantasy Star II has more complex dungeons right from the start, and only builds from there. It doesn’t quite match Dragon Quest III in terms of variety — one laboratory can feel much like another control tower — but the satisfaction of exploring them is unmatched, except perhaps by the sublime Solomon Shrine in Ys II.

The dungeons look cool too. They feature the first example we’ve seen so far of parallax scrolling, showing metal piping sliding past along the ceiling above the party as they explore, which looks awesome. The large, vibrant artwork on the ground level masks the building blocks used to construct these places, making them seem more believable as actual locations. Their messes of machinery, metal walls and sliding doors don’t adhere to the type of logical layout a human designer would use, but are these facilities even meant for people? Or are they merely Mother Brain’s creations, to automate everything that keeps Mota a paradise?

The manual suggests drawing maps of these dungeons, but that’s much easier said than done. Without the simple grid-based design of the original game’s first-person dungeons, I was at a loss as to how to start drawing. Keeping track of all the lifts leading up and back down all over the place seemed impossible; I would be constantly making mapping errors until I was even more lost. So I went without. Years of experience exploring three-quarters perspective dungeons lent me a false confidence that I could keep track of it all in my head. Reader, I could not. Or rather, I could, but only after lots of retracing my steps by accident, across many forays and retreats back to town. Sometimes, even after completing my objective in a particular dungeon, I would still return just to make sure I’d tracked down all the treasure boxes. And sometimes I already had, and only found dead ends or loops back to earlier locations when checking paths I hadn’t trodden before.

Only after I finished the game did I learn that the US edition shipped with a big hint book in the box, including maps of every area. That certainly would have helped, but I kind of liked my slow explorations. It seemed in keeping with the intended pace of the game. The party do not dash around, they saunter sedately. The screen does not start scrolling until they’ve gotten near the edge, so it’s harder to see what’s ahead. The random battles are frequent. Phantasy Star II is a game meant to be savored, not rushed. Taking my time to thoroughly explore also meant I never needed to grind; I gained plenty of levels and money for (admittedly very expensive) gear upgrades as I ventured into dungeons again and again.

That was helpful, because players can only take four of the eight available characters with them at any given time. Anyone who’s not in the party won’t earn any experience or level up, and everyone joins at level one even if the other characters have advanced to higher levels already. That gave me a bit of decision paralysis early on, because I wasn’t sure which characters I was going to like. At level one, characters haven’t learned any techniques yet, so it’s hard to gauge how well they’ll work in the party without taking them along and leveling them up a bunch, which means leaving someone else behind… I admit I turned to the internet to see if people had favorites. But I shouldn’t have. It’s not hard to bring an underleveled character up to speed later in the game, and it’s actually cool to swap them in and out as needed.

I’ll give an example. One of the characters, Rudo (short for Rudolph Steiner) is an analogue to Odin from the first Phantasy Star, in that he’s a big guy with a lot of health who specializes in guns. Guns have a bit more variety this time around, but their most important property is the same: they always do roughly the same amount of damage, no matter how much defense an enemy has. Rolf could do a lot of damage to unarmored enemies with his blades, but a pittance against an enemy with tough skin. Rudo, however, would always do reliable damage. The problem is that for much of the game, guns simply don’t do that much damage. Eventually I started leaving Rudo at home, and bringing another character who had a bunch of techniques for fighting robots. Late in the game, when more powerful guns were available, I brought Rudo back and he became a great asset in the final encounters.

I gained confidence choosing characters as I learned the nuances of the battle system. Unlike other menu-based battles that have come up so far in Console History — like the Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy games — Phantasy Star II does not require players to choose commands for each character every round. Instead, orders can be assigned with the “strategy” option, and then when “fight” is selected the party will follow their orders round after round automatically unless players press a button to interrupt the battle and issue new commands. It’s as if the auto-battle command that I used so often in Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei is the default setting, except it’s not limited to simply attacking. But I had to be careful when telling characters to use techniques, lest I miss the interrupt and watch characters waste precious tech points using techniques again.

The tech points that power techniques are limited even at high levels, which is a little annoying. Phantasy Star II is not a game where technique-focused characters will be using their techniques every battle. Most battles will simply have every character attack, especially in the early game. In fact, I struggled with early fights until I realized that characters can equip a weapon in each hand (except for two-handed weapons, obviously). That’s right, you can equip two laser discs that slice through a whole group of enemies. Or, equip two shields to give someone absurd amounts of defense and have them soak up attacks as the party leader. That’s actually a surprisingly effective option for technique-focused characters who can’t use strong weapons, especially once the party finds powerful items that can be used in battle in lieu of attacking.

I had fun adjusting the party composition, strategizing for battles, and exploring the huge dungeons, but what really elevates Phantasy Star II is its story. It deals with surprisingly dark themes for its time. Before Rolf and his friends can even begin their investigation of the Biosystems Lab, they must work through a lengthy subplot highlighting just how tough things have gotten since the biomonster outbreak, that ends like a Shakespearean tragedy. Later, some truly momentous plot twists arrive. I was surprised to find that a certain infamous plot twist from one of the most critically acclaimed Japanese role-playing games of all time was actually done here, in Phantasy Star II, first. And it’s better justified in the narrative, too! The buildup to it is perhaps not as effective — characters in Phantasy Star II are basically silent once they’ve joined up, so there’s less character development — but it’s still a bold and memorable story moment.

The story keeps that level of quality throughout. It reflects a lot of themes from early cyberpunk fiction of the 1980s: the dangers of over-reliance on technology, the interactions between humans and artificial intelligence, questions of balance between people and their environment. Some of these resonated particularly strongly now, some 35 years after Phantasy Star II was released. We have tech companies pushing AI on us, which they’ve trained by feeding it countless works of art and writing without permission, as they try to replace human creativity with machine-generated slop. And unlike Phantasy Star II, where having an AI do everything means humans are free to be idle, in our ultra-capitalist world people who lose their jobs to AI will no longer have the means to eat.

I also latched onto themes of disconnection. In the first Phantasy Star, the people of Algo moved freely between their three worlds, at least until the despotic King Lassic intervened. A thousand years later, when Algo is a paradise, travel between the planets is rare. Travel at all is rare. There’s a teleporter network in the towns, so no one ever wanders the countryside anymore, and people are generally complacent and just hang around their homes, unaware of what’s going on elsewhere. Living in the aftermath of the (still ongoing!) COVID-19 pandemic, which led to lockdown and quarantine policies in much of the world, I resonated with the isolated populace on Mota. Phantasy Star II reminds us of the dangers of losing our sense of community and common goals.

My one complaint about the story in Phantasy Star II is that it’s become more linear, especially early in the game. I loved the open-ended exploration in the first Phantasy Star, as I searched for my next objective based on just a few cryptic clues. The opening of Phantasy Star II, however, simply has the party traveling to the next town or dungeon, for long enough that it was a genuine shock when I finally found myself without clear instructions on where to go next. There are still sections that require players to follow clues and work out what to do, but they’re less frequent, and a few parts boil down to slightly repetitive “go get stuff from some dungeons” tasks. Exploration is more open-ended later in the game, but it’s never as big of a focus as it was in the first game; the three driveable vehicles in Phantasy Star are reduced to just one in Phantasy Star II. The genre as a whole would shift towards fully linear stories in later years, and I saw the seeds of that here.

But that’s a minor problem, given how great the story is. The ending especially. It’s incredible. The party uncovers some sinister hints about what’s happening with Mother Brain over the course of the game, but the truth remains elusive until the very end, and it’s one of the coolest twists I’ve ever encountered. This leads to an ambiguous final scene, one I’m still thinking about. Contemporary games always ended in triumph, but in Phantasy Star II it’s less clear. I was left to ponder what it meant, to consider how things may have turned out for Algo, and for Rolf and his companions. A thought-provoking, bittersweet ending that shows games can be so much more than simple tales of heroism. There are two more games in the original Phantasy Star series, both for the Mega Drive/Genesis, that I’m now quite excited to play to see where they take the story next. I’ll be sure to write about them once my Console History timeline reaches them.

So yes, I highly recommend checking out Phantasy Star II if you’ve any interest in early Japanese role-playing games. It’s had a few ports and re-releases over the years, for example as part of the Phantasy Star Collection for the Sega Saturn in 1998 (and later for Game Boy Advance and PlayStation 2 in 2002 and 2008, respectively). It was remade as Phantasy Star Generation 2 for the PlayStation 2 in 2005, not only adding fancy graphics but making tweaks to the battle system and adding more character development and story details. More relevant for today’s players, however, will be the Sega Genesis Classics series which includes the game in its original form and is available for Windows and modern consoles. Or you could play via emulation, as I did, with the RetroArch frontend and Genesis Plus GX emulation core. However you choose to play, you’ll enjoy your stay in Algo.

The Score:

On a recent work trip to Japan, I found a four-CD collection of the music from the first four Phantasy Star Games. The original music, not some orchestral arrangement as one often finds these days. Released in 2008 to roughly coincide with the 20th anniversary of the first Phantasy Star, the collection is comprehensive, even including separate versions of the scores for the first two games. The first game, you see, could optionally take advantage of the FM Sound Unit add-on for Sega’s Master System in Japan, making it sound quite different. That version, as well as the original version using the Master System’s Programmable Sound Generator (PSG), are both included. In fact, I better talk about the difference between FM synthesis and PSG music before I get to the score from Phantasy Star II.

Since cartridges for these early games were too small to store audio, the consoles needed to generate the sound themselves using a sound chip. The simplest sound chips are PSGs, which have a few channels that can produce set waveforms. The PSG in Sega’s Master System had four channels, three of which use pulse waves and the fourth acting as a noise channel (typically used for percussion). The Mega Drive/Genesis includes the exact same sound chip, so it can imitate the sound of its predecessor. But, as I mentioned above, it also has a fancy new sound chip: the Yamaha YM2612, which is capable of FM synthesis. FM synthesis was being used in Japanese home computers and arcade games in the 1980s, but the Mega Drive was the first console to use it.

FM synthesis can create much more complex sounds than a PSG can, because it uses other waveforms as “operators” to modify the original waveform. Developed and patented back in 1967 by John Chowning at Stanford University, Yamaha licensed the technology in 1973 and continued to refine it. Their work culminated in the DX7 synthesizer in 1983, the first commercially successful digital synthesizer and one of the best-selling synthesizers of all time. Notoriously difficult to program, its preset patches were used in numerous pop hits throughout the 1980s, including 40% of the number one singles in the US in 1986. Its electric piano preset is particularly famous; you’ve likely heard it before.

The YM2612 is a stripped-down version of the sound chip used in the DX7. The DX7 can play 16 notes at once, each with six operators, whereas the YM2612 can only manage six channels (notes) with four operators each. Even so, its sound is similar, and it gave composers for Mega Drive games the freedom to create some truly memorable soundtracks. I was excited to hear Phantasy Star’s score as an early example.

Composed by Tokuhiko Uwabo, who also wrote the music for the first Phantasy Star, the soundtrack for Phantasy Star II consists of 22 tracks spanning nearly 40 minutes. Most tracks are brief, clocking in at under 2 minutes each, and that’s after being looped once and then faded out. There are two versions included: the original Japanese version which has much louder drums (one of the YM2612’s six channels can play samples instead of FM synthesis waveforms), and the overseas version which is what I heard when playing. There really is very little difference except for the drums, and I must say I like the quieter drums as they let me appreciate the other sounds and melodies in the tracks more. The inclusion of both versions brings the total number of tracks up to 44 with a total running time of an hour and fifteen minutes.

Perhaps because he had composed the original Phantasy Star soundtrack for the Master System, Uwabo makes heavy use of the PSG as well as the YM2612 here. Tracks like “Pleasure” and “Pressure” let the pulse waves of the PSG take the lead, acting as sonic callbacks to the first game. I like how “Pleasure” opens up with more of the YM2612 as it progresses, however, with timbres suggestive of a flute or solo violin taking over while something akin to a piano adds a rhythmic counterpart. The percussion is also generally much nicer than the simple noise channel blasts of the first game, with many tracks featuring full drum fills at the ends of bars. In stereo, too!

A standout for me when playing — and also when listening separately — is “Restration”, which plays while traveling through the countryside on Mota. This jaunty tune has a lovely chord progression led by a surprisingly authentic-sounding organ, while something similar to a vibraphone takes the lead melody. This bell-like tone is a signature sound of Yamaha’s digital FM synthesizers, and is something that earlier analog synthesizers struggled to produce. It sounds great here, and I happily hummed along with this tune whenever I traveled somewhere. The battle theme “Rise or Fall” is also heard often while playing, and inverts the progression from “Restration” to create a tense and exciting melody with a lot of harmony.

The music when exploring dungeons, like “Advanced”, “Secret Ways” and “Mystery”, is a bit calmer, but with a slightly ominous tone that offsets the bright and cheerful mood of “Restration” or the various tracks that play in towns. I appreciated how the music generally evolves over the course of the game, bringing more of that ominous and spooky feeling as the story moves into darker territory. Tracks like “Silent Zone” and “Violation”, which play after Rolf and his allies leave Mota and begin exploring elsewhere in Algo, have an undercurrent of sadness to them, while never fully abandoning the hopeful melodies of the earlier tracks. It’s no accident that the PSG features heavily early on; Uwabo begins where the first game left off, and takes players on a journey through Phantasy Star II’s more mature story, weaving in new sonic elements and more melancholy motifs as he goes. It’s great stuff, that grew on me just as the game itself did. I’ll be keeping the soundtrack in rotation in my collection, each track bringing back memories of exploring Algo with Rolf and his friends.

Whew, that was a long one! A 6 megabit post, indeed. If it got you excited for Console History to move into the 16-bit era, I must regretfully inform you that — in what is becoming a comically dependable trend — I must actually divert from our timeline once again to fill in a few games I missed. But they look cool! That’s why I’m going back to play them! So, stay tuned for those, and I promise we’ll be back to 1989 in no time.

Next on Console History: watch this space!