Certainly there were more notable games released in 1987 that could easily fill this space – Final Fantasy, Street Fighter, Pirates!...heck, even Mega Man debuted in 1987 – but few titles come close to attaining the elegance and artistic mastery that was Sega’s Phantasy Star.
Released for the Master System two days after the original Final Fantasy in Japan, Phantasy Star was Sega’s valiant attempt to create a story-driven RPG franchise of its own, following the immeasurable success of Enix’s Dragon Quest the previous year. Like Final Fantasy and the other Dragon Quest homages of its time, Phantasy Star involved fighting turn-based battles, leveling up, and buying newer and more powerful equipment to fight even harder turn-based battles and repeat the process over again.
The formula is nothing new, but it is in the presentation that Phantasy Star shines. Rather than force the same old medieval fantasy clichés down people’s throats, the game put players in a world where a dense forest inhabited by wild creatures sat comfortably next to a bustling city that housed a spaceport taking passengers to faraway planets. Warriors could find themselves battling magical creatures with a battle axe one minute, and blasting robots with a laser rifle the next. Kingdoms were still ruled by kings who wore crowns and sat in thrones, though the royal guard more resembled Storm Troopers than knights.
Not only was the world unconventional, the story broke the mould too. The hero of Phantasy Star was not a brave young man tasked with helping a king defend his kingdom for the sake of being a hero. No, this story was much more grounded. And in what is still sadly a rare occurrence in games, our hero was a young woman.
At the start of the game, Alis is the accidental witness to her older brother, Nero, being killed by soldiers representing a corrupt government official named Lassic for snooping around and learning too much. With his dying words, Nero hands Alis his sword and tells her that Lassic has gone mad and must be stopped, at any cost.
Though backstory in the game is somewhat limited, we get the feeling that Alis is not a particularly political woman. From what the game shows us, Alis doesn’t set out to save the world. She’s not here to be a hero. No, Alis sets out for vengeance. She means to kill the man who killed her brother, even if that man happens to be the most powerful person in the galaxy, and even if all she has is a cheap little sword she doesn’t know how to use yet. And she does this without being an anime cliché or a pouty-lipped sexpot, making her a stronger female videogame character than most even aspire to be.
What follows is the greatest game on the Master System, and what might be the most memorable RPG of the 8-bit era. Alis and the strange companions she meets on her quest journey through unique environments that range from a mad scientist’s lab to a cake shop hidden in a monster-filled cave to a port town dealing in stolen contraband. The intricately creatures they fight along the way are all gorgeously drawn in sprites that take up the majority of the screen and have unique animations. The dungeons they trek through are presented in a first-person perspective using a programming trick by eventual Sonic co-creator Yuji Naka that still looks pretty good today.
The game is not perfect. It requires more tedious grinding than even many of its contemporaries, the dungeons are mostly repetitive, and the game has a nasty way of throwing you into the wilderness without much of a clue of what to do next. But taken as a whole the game is a wonderful work of art worthy of study and reflection.
We don’t know if it’s out of some strange kind of respect or if the games just didn’t perform well enough, but Sega has been remarkably subdued in not milking the Phantasy Star franchise. Yes, Phantasy Star Online spawned more sequels and expansions than we care to remember, and indeed, the company had some often misguided spin-offs while the original series was still around, but there has been no attempt that we’re aware of to continue the saga past the original four games. We struggle to recall there even being rumours of a Phantasy Star V over the past eighteen years. The company seems hellbent on keeping the series contained just as it is, and there’s really nothing wrong with that.
