I first played Phantasy Star 2 when I was seven years old. We had received a Mega Drive / Genesis for Christmas three years earlier, but my older brother was really the game maniac in our household. I only played a little, and I was never very serious about it.
I spent most of my time reading, and to me gaming was just a little side distraction that I'd engage in when we had friends over, or when my brother needed a second player for a two-player game. It was fun, but nothing that would keep me from my books for extended periods of time.
The year we got Phantasy Star 2, that began to change. In hindsight, it was the first RPG I ever played. Though I didn't even know what an 'RPG' was back then. All I knew was that it had a
story.
Not a 'Robotnik has kidnapped all the cute little animals and turned them into robots. Go save them!' story, but a
real story. Instead of being warped independent of my control from one stage to the next, I was marching about a sprawling world as I saw fit, investigating, talking to 'real' people, and, eventually, saving the world. Instead of being a mysterious blue hedgehog with no personality besides an obvious dose of
attitude, I was in control of a group of heroes struggling to survive in a world that was, even by the standards of today's games, rather bleak and hopeless. And instead of receiving no reward for overcoming the obstacles that stood in my way except another 100 points being added to an entirely meaningless number in the corner of the screen, I was able to watch my characters develop, grow, and eventually overcome challenges far beyond the simple scope with which their adventure had started.
I got totally absorbed, and ended up loving it far more than my brother ever did.
I think that was the first year he had ever had to fight for control of the console. Of course it still wasn't enough to keep me away from reading for
too long. At most I'd play for an hour or two a day, and I can't exactly say I felt the same connection with the pixelated people on screen that I did with some of the characters I had read about, characters that were more or less real to me. Still, it was the first game that I really took an interest in. Anyone from school that I tried to show the game to thought it was boring.
Even now, I find people online with similar sentiments. People who hate watching things unfold that they're not a part of, and believe storytelling doesn't have much of a place in gaming. I don't look down on that view, and I've learned to appreciate more 'game'-ish games as I've gotten older, especially as story-driven presentation has begun to spread to genres far beyond its roots in adventure games and RPGs.
Still, for me the things that many people find 'boring' about RPGs were exactly the things that drew me both to them, and to gaming in general.
I still respect Phantasy Star 2, and regard it as having had quite a large influence on the future development of Japanese RPGs as a whole. It was one of the first games to seriously force the player to contend with death, killing off one of its playable characters halfway through, with no sugar-coating and no means of revival. It was one of the first games to offer an ending where very little was wrapped up, and where the player was left to draw their own rather upsetting conclusions about the fate of the friends they had accompanied through twenty hours of game time. And it was one of the first games to truly shun the AD&D RPG mould, offering a planet-spanning adventure full of spaceships, guns, and technologically advanced cities.
Yet for all these firsts, Phantasy Star 2 has aged badly.
Really badly.
I see it in many ways as a prototype for what the genre was later to become, and am thus reluctant to recommend it today to anyone who has experienced any game that is a more full realisation of the clear potential it held. As much as I love it for nostalgic reasons, even
I find it damn near unplayable at times by today's standards.
Perhaps that is why, even though it wasn't my first RPG, Shining Force 2 remains possibly the most important to me. For it was the first truly polished RPG I played, and the first game I can ever remember being
obsessed with. We got it for Christmas three years after I played Phantasy Star 2, when I was ten years old. And both my older brother and I were instantly hooked. The strategy battles were incredibly fun, the bright, colourful visuals were
beautiful at the time, and, perhaps most importantly to me, the narrative was extremely prominent and constantly driving forward, and the characters were charming and very individual: a stark contrast to the sparse script and almost silent cast of PS2.
Of course nowadays I realise that SF2's story is really pretty cliched, and there is very little outside of its (still!) fantastic gameplay that sets it aside from so many other 16-bit RPGs. But at the time, I became completely intwined with its world and characters, and simply never wanted to let go. My older brother played it once through, loved it, and then more or less forgot about it. But I played it over, and over, and
over, finding everything, and eventually memorising almost every line. I fell head over heels for Cameela, the cheeky, sweet-but-cruel greater devil, and became extremely angry when she was killed on the very point of her redemption. I burst into tears when Oddler, the gentle blind boy you had travelled with, turned out to be one of your greatest foes, and I turned off the game, refusing to play for nearly two weeks. I was actually
afraid of Zeon, the game's final boss, and had to build up the courage to fight him just as I imagined my game counterparts would be doing. And although the game ended with the protagonist kissing the princess, a cliche that I had grown very tired of by that age, I still found myself filled with an overwhelming happiness as I watched the credits roll, and listened to the awesome fanfare that accompanied it.
In short, Shining Force 2 was the first game that I loved as much as my favourite books. It was the first game I played with moments that would make me cry, the first where I found myself daydreaming away into its world, and the first that would sometimes frustrate me so much that I wanted to drop it into our garden pond (as I once did with an exceptionally upsetting book). I suppose it was the first game that proved to me that games could provide me with everything I got from reading; that games could be just as worthy of my time as books.
For better or for worse, Shining Force 2 had a huge impact on me. It is, to this day, one of only a few games I've played that have gone beyond being simply games to me.
And, as silly as it might be, I can think of very little that served to shape my childhood more.
Wanna play?
Originally Posted by Evans
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