This review is modified from how it originally appeared on my Backlogged.

As someone who genuinely loves Japanese Role-Playing games, there are an awful lot that I haven't played. For every Final Fantasy and Trails/Kiseki game that I've played religiously, there are a dozen Phantasy Stars, Shin Megami Tenseis, and Tales ofs that have passed me by. I am dedicating time to playing some of those games.

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Phantasy Star for the Sega Master System

Phantasy Star for the Sega Master System is fundamentally a difficult game to review.

To put it honestly? The game - when measured as just a video game where you put in time and expect enjoyment - sucks. Barely any of it has aged well; it's grindy and obtuse like most RPGs from those days were. And I played it with a romhack that gave all sorts of extras like increased money and decreased encounter rate. I genuinely applaud anyone who can get through the game without that stuff.

"But Meixie, it's an old game. Surely you're not going to judge it too harshly?"

But even when if I were to think about it from the perspective of someone who was alive in 1987 (and I am), it kind of….sucks. The dungeons - the headlining feature, really - were awful. I don't even mean the fact that they all are just palette swaps of each other or that there wasn't any seeming design intent behind their layouts or anything interesting in the spelunking.

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You'll be seeing this screen, or one like it a lot. The automap and character status panel on the right are not in the version I played.

The dungeons suck in the way that they're long and complex for no other reason than to be….long and complex. They suck in the way that it's disheartening to fight your way through four dragons and an orc to get to the chest to find….$20 (never mind that you made 10x that in the fights to get there) or a sword from the starting city (why in God's Christian minecraft server is there a sword from the starting city in one of the last dungeons in the game?!). They suck in the way that a great majority of the chests - especially in the last third of the game - are just empty.

"So, just give it 1 star and stop babbling already?" I can hear you say,

But that's just it, Phantom Interlocuter - I can't. Because despite five paragraphs of whining, I loved the game and I'm hoping that as I continue to ramble I'll figure out why.

  • Was it the soundtrack that was filled with absolute bangers for the hardware my god (she says, actively listening to the dungeon theme as she types this)?
  • Was it the fact that the game has a female hero and she's not - as would happen throughout most of the rest of the 90s excepting Metroid - playing the fuckin healer?
  • Was it because it was one of those games where you could feel the creator's urge to make something unique and incredible and never before seen no matter how weird and hard to love the end result was?
  • Was it the way it neatly mixes science fiction and fantasy to create a setting that feels unique and fresh despite the system's limitations?
  • Was it the fact that one of your allies is a magic-using talking catsquirrelfoxthing that is absolutely adorable?
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His name is Myau.

Maybe I like it because – as I finish out my fourth decade on this blighted earth, constantly having to remember to harden my heart so as to not be bowled over reading about the latest manmade horror that real-life villains are unleashing – it makes me happy to know that I can still, unrepentantly, find charm and joy in something as janky, as weird, as hard-to-love, and as poorly-aged as Phantasy Star for the Sega Master System.

At its simplest, despite all the jank and the fact that I had to turn every single modifier to max in order to not hate every second playing the game, it's the sort of game that I know that if I had played it when I was 10 years old, I would have absolutely fallen head over heels for it with an unabashed love that would drown out the hesitant, qualified, caveat-ridden love I express for it now.

I think that that's it: reaching back through the decades to think about how Little Meixie would react to playing this game, imagining her smiling face in the light of the CRT, I am convinced that it would be the kind of thing that she would build her entire personality around.

A game that does that is easy to love, but hard to quantify with a star rating.