The First Game in Sega’s Spectacular Phantasy Star Series

The first Phantasy Star game can be rather hard to get into. At the beginning of the game, you’ll need to grind for levels quite a bit before you can do much of anything. This was something I didn’t know when I first played it.

I knew about the Phantasy Star series on the Sega Genesis, and the fourth game was the first one I played. When I started collecting retro games, I bought two, three, and four, but didn’t know how to get the first game. No one I knew had the Sega Master System, and I didn’t know the system existed until the early 2000s.

The first time I played Phantasy Star was on the Game Boy Advance, and I hated it. It wasn’t until the late 2010s that I started collecting games again and found a copy of the game for the Master System. Thankfully, the internet explained what I was supposed to do, and I had a much better experience with the game.

TLDR: A Wonderful but Difficult Game to Get Into.

Narrative

Phantasy Star starts as a revenge tale where you’re trying to avenge the death of the main character’s brother. It turns into a quest to free a solar system from a tyrannical dictator who is being controlled by a darker force. As the series goes on, you’ll learn more about this, but for this game, we don’t get much more than that.

The game starts on the planet Palma. It is a lush and futuristic planet where the tyrannical ruler King Lassic lives. There are two other planets in the solar system, Motavia and Dezoris. You’ll visit them as you go through the game.

Some people are rebelling against King Lassic. Alis joins this rebellion after her brother is killed, and she swears to avenge his death. Throughout the game, she builds a party of adventurers who have their own motivations to defeat the king.

Once our heroes defeat King Lassic, they’re told to return to Motavia. There, they fight and defeat Dark Falz, who was responsible for turning Lassic evil. Once it is defeated, peace is restored to the solar system until the sequel.

I like the story quite a bit. I think it is much better than the stories in Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy. It also has a cool science fiction setting.

Gameplay

Phantasy Star is a turn-based RPG where you go on quests, collect key items, and have to find your companions. I like this concept of having to find your party members quite a bit because it is something different. If you’ve played any retro RPG, then much of what I’m going to say about this game will sound familiar. I enjoy this game for several reasons, including trying to find companions, the magic system, and having two healing items.

Going on quests to find your companions is something different from the other RPGs on the home console. Most of the time, you have your party right off the bat, and in this game, you need to find them. I loved this part of the game because it is so different from the other retro RPGs I’ve reviewed so far.

This game has a similar magic system to the Dragon Quest series, and was where the Final Fantasy series would eventually go. The characters that can use magic learn new spells throughout the game by gaining levels. They also have a pool of magic points that increase over time. It is much better than the first Final Fantasy game.

This is kind of an odd thing to talk about, but it is something I like about Phantasy Star. There are two healing items in this game: Soda and Hamburger. At least those are the names given to them by the translation team. Soda is the weaker of the two, so you have the comedic moment of buying a bunch of Hamburgers to keep your characters healthy throughout the game.

This ties into one of my two criticisms of the game. You have a small inventory, and everything gets tossed into it. All your healing items, equipment, and key items are in there, which makes navigating the interface annoying. Not to mention that your healing items don’t stack, so you’ll have way too many slots taken up by Hamburgers.

To try and get around this, Sega added a bank to the game, so you can drop off some things that you don’t need anymore. You can also sell off some vehicles that aren’t useful to you once you’ve reached the end of the game.

The dungeons and caves can be very confusing in this game. The reason for this is that they switch from an overhead view to a first-person perspective. It looks cool at first, but as you try to navigate them, things get more annoying than they need to be.

Overall, I like the gameplay in Phantasy Star quite a bit. It has some problems, especially at the beginning of the game, but it isn’t anything that would cause me to hate the game. I also like how the game evolves into a space-faring adventure, requiring you to pilot several vehicles, including a spaceship.

Visuals

This is the highlight of the game. Phantasy Star has wonderful graphics. They’re bright and colorful, the enemies and bosses are well detailed, and I love the cutscenes as they resemble comic book panels.

Phantasy Star shows off what the Master System could do as far as graphics. As much as I don’t like the 3D dungeons, they look very good and are quite different from anything you would’ve seen on the home console at the time. The rest of the graphics look great, and I love the mix of science fiction and Greek mythology.

The enemies and battle screens look great! They seem to have taken some inspiration from Dragon Quest as they are in a first-person view. The enemies have attack animations, the background looks great, and I love how the enemies look. They’re very creative and don’t look like the sprites in any other game.

The cutscenes add so much to this game’s story. It was something very unique for me to see when I looked at the other console RPGs. Phantasy Star was leaps and bounds ahead of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy. The comic book panel cutscenes look spectacular and are one of my favorite parts of not just this game, but the series as a whole.

I love the look and the setting of Phantasy Star. The graphics are so different from the other RPGs from this time, and the game shows off what was possible on the Master System. This is a beautiful game from the late 1980s.

Reviews at the Time

The game received great reviews in the few publications I could find. Sega owned some of them, so they understandably gave it perfect scores. Shocking, I know.

Computer and Video Games was the only review I could get ahold of. They gave the game an 89/100. The description they give is strange, as they call it a “sprawling arcade adventure with RPG overtones,” which is not what I would’ve called it.

Interestingly, most of the reviews I saw were from the early 1990s. This might sound a little odd, but they were from European magazines, and they probably got the game a little later. Overall, the reviewers seemed to love this game.

8.5/10. The way this game starts had an impact on this game’s score. If it had started faster and didn’t require so much grinding, this would’ve been better. Aside from that, I love everything about this game.  

Pros

• Beautiful Graphics
• Great Story
• Great Gameplay

Cons

• Too Difficult at the Beginning
• Small Inventory
• 3D Dungeons aren’t as cool as they should be

Conclusion

This isn’t the game I would tell you to start with if you want to get into the Phantasy Star series. The fourth game is more user friendly than this one. You can jump into any of the Phantasy Star games and not miss anything. Once you’ve gotten into the series, then come back to this one to see how far the series has come.

I love the science fiction setting in this series. While the Greek mythology stuff in this game is great, it would be abandoned in the sequels. This makes the first game stand out a bit.

The graphics and the story elevate this game. It looks wonderful, and I enjoy the story more than any of the other RPGs I’ve played and reviewed lately.

If you like this post, please check out my other reviews of retro RPGs, such as Dragon Quest or Thousand Arms.