Phantasy Star 2 is our AI nightmare..... 

How did I miss this? lol

My favorite RPG of all time. The bundled strategy guide circumvented most of the frustrating elements.

Holy shit, Nice HCG bit in the beginning! Including the SMOKE 😂.

Hey man, Johnny would’ve at least had a real Phantasy Star 1 cart 😂

Killer stuff, it was nice hearing your opinion on this game. "Flawed classic" really hits the nail on the head.

I love the themes, art style, and music. After Nei dies, it’s just depressing. I played it as an adult. It was painful. To me, hell would be me being alone in a room with a Sega Genesis, unable to stop playing this game.

If you play PSII raw-- that is to say make your own maps, rough out monster stats for yourself, and rely only on NPCs to direct you-- you'll have a much richer experience. Restrict yourself to just the pack-in map and the regular instruction book, the way a Japanese kid would have had it c. 1989. Figuring out where to go and finding all the treasure become challenges equal to the monsters. That's how I played PSII, roughly an hour or so a day, over the entire year of sixth grade. Most days of 1992 I would play PSII, then go play something else when I was "done" with it for the day. But I kept coming back every day and filling up my notebook. It was a marathon, not a sprint, much like vanilla WoW was c. 2006. If instead you use the guidebook you will know exactly where to go and where the best treasure is. At that point, stats will be the only thing holding you back, and of course you'll come to resent the grind. You yourself reduced the game to just grinding at that point, what did you expect?

I never saw that giver/destroyer theme until you brought it up.

PS 2 is the kind of game I’m glad I played because it had really big and interesting ideas and a mature plot relative to most rpgs of the time. That said, I remember the big moments and totally forgot the mushy middle portion and sprawling dungeons that, on a replay, would just be frustrating.

Happy gamer at the beginning LOL

Actually, if you looked close in the strategy guide, you could find out where the holes would place you. So if you planned your route carefully, it didn't feel random. But frequently, you would forget the path upon the first random encounter. But that also basically means your only chance of playing this game without going insane is to use the guide.

Pipes...pipes everywhere.

Amazing video as always bud. That clang on the bass slap is something else. Slap a da bass.

I love your review style. Perfect balance of humor and serious review.

Well made video man. I enjoyed your philosophy, cadence of speech, and humor! Looking forward to your next vid, got my bell notification on for ya now.

The music in this game is amazing. I played 1 and 2 when they first came out. I found them both to be impossible.. mapping dungeons in them was insane. I finally beat 1 on switch (Sega ages) it was great fun. I got to the 3rd dam in 2 and put it down, although it sounds amazing and has cool enemies and gameplay the dungeons are incredibly tedious. I breesed through 3 and 4 however. I will go back to 2 because I want to beat it, just to say I beat a game that tormented me in my childhood.

If a game is padding itself out with a needlessly harsh dungeon layout I will unashamedly look up an online walkthrough. Its either that or bin the game. Strangely, it doesn't reduce my enjoyment and I have fond recent memories of playing through this on a Sega Collection disc. But yeah, playing this before the dawn of internet walkthroughs would be infuriating in parts.

I really wish there were more sci-fi jrpgs like the original Phantasy Star games. The only other series I can think of is star ocean

It was a beast of a game and when it first came out, it was like no other. The chick that stole stuff when the wing blew was the best.

PS2 reminds me a lot of the film the Jazz singer. Just as the jazz singer was that bridge between the silent era and the talkies, PS2 is kinda the bridge between the old "wtf am I supposed to do" era of RPGs like Dragon quest and the Ultima series and the 16 bit narrative focused RPGs like Chrono trigger, Phantasy star 4 and final fantasy 6. Issue is no one ever watched the Jazz singer (for some glaringly obvious reason) as people generally don't play Phantasy star 2. They still didn't know what they were doing just yet and their ambitions were higher then they could do at the time. Also, supposedly the game was a literal development nightmare hell. The team had finished about 70 to 80% of the game for master system before the higher ups told them to scrap it all and develop the game for the Genesis and their deadline stayed exactly the same. It's was crunch time beyond crunch time, one guy had a heart attack and one lady was still programming in the maternity ward, cause she was 9 months pregnant.

Episooooooooode... LUL great HCG parody! I thought you were referencing him in the first Phantasy Star vid with the table/sitting on the ground

Bandana Johnny was the shit ! Much better than the shill we got now a days " and all of that"

thank you for doing the phantasy star series!! my #1 series of all time. followed by the Shining Series (another great idea for a video series!)

Sega was ALWAYS ahead of the curve. Other companies benefited greatly from Sega taking all the risks first. That's why in retrospect you look at games, systems, accessories, etc. that Sega's always looks "old." It's because they released all their stuff first.

Quality shit. I just you a month ago and enjoy your stuff, reminds me of the old homies. Keep it up.

Well, well, well. After all these years my avatar becomes somewhat relevant.

I love this game but in order to make it anywhere I had to grind like hell

holy shit. this was the game my mom played on the wii when i was growing up. good video!

I love the dungeons so much! As a fan of science fiction and RPGs, I love everything with Phantasy Star II, and that certainly also includes the truly amazing dungeons with their great variety. I wish so hard that I will find other games with equally maze-like dungeons to get lost in, but such games seem very rare. So far, I really haven't found anything quite like the PSII dungeons. They feel so unique. I would be so grateful for any advice on other games with similarly wonderful dungeons. I have my square grid paper ready.

Subscribed!! Great practical review! Pioneer RPGs like this threw in a whole new level of complication. EGM rated it the hardest game of the year in 1990 but stated “ditch the tip book”; making it nearly impossible to beat in an internet-free society. Grade 9 - this game kicked my ass and put me through hell. Grade 12 - I rented Phantasy Star 4 and beat it within a week. Now…I’ve heard that the PS2 version allows you to resurrect Nei under certain circumstances. Can you confirm?

Wow, he reeeeealy hated that Ikuto dungeon, lol. Great breakdown of the themes of the game. I remember sort of getting that idea when I first played it as a kid, life is good and comfortable, but at what price? Maybe part of it is just my love for the game when it originally came out, but I didn't find it quite as grindy artificially difficult as described. I played through it a few years ago and found it to still stand up pretty well. But even that recent playthrough was probably done with some nostalgia glasses. Great vid.

I'll defend this game to my grave since it's on my Mt. Rushmore. The thing that hooked me right away was the way combat looks...so much cooler than the standard RPG combat of the age where your guy just waves a sword in the air and the enemy blinks a few times to hit you back. The combat animation is smooth, too...even smoother than PSIV, which seems jerkier and more rushed by comparison. I'm OK with the grinding...with all the characters, techniques, and items that double as techniques, it's a good time to develop and refine combat strategies before tackling the dungeons. Plus, if you grind in the right areas, you don't have to do it as much. In the beginning, grind in the entrance to Tower of Nido. Once you get to Zema, walk to Kueri and grind there. Basically, do it as far ahead as you can. Faster results, and a better challenge...every fight is life or death instead of a boring slog. Never had a major issue with the dungeons (which have amazing ambiance and music)...I get more disoriented and turned around in modern, first-person RPGs. But then, I do still have the strategy guide that came with the game, with all of its detailed maps. Without that, I'd be right there with you on the dungeon complexity. It's a very demanding game, no doubt. You can't zip through it, or even clear two dungeons in one sitting. But if you're a freak who loves the mechanics, setting, and mood as much as I do, it's a good thing that you spend a lot of time in each place rather than a drawback. Accomplishments feel better to me because you earn the hell out of them.

There's a fight that you're supposed to lose just before you go to Dezo. However, I played with a Game Genie, and did not lose that fight. By not losing the fight, I didn't go to Dezo and couldn't progress the game. Also, I saved after the fight and became soft locked. I was pretty salty when I realized what happened.

I always loved the music in Phantasy Star II. I have a lot of nostalgia for this one. The music in this reminds me a lot of the music in Space Harrier II. Same composer? Same music engine? Hmm.

I personally didn’t mind the grind because I grew up on these types of games. I could careless if gamers today hate this style 🤷🏾‍♂️

just beat it for the first time recently. had a lot of ups and downs with it but overall, it was a blast

Having played Fantasy Star II around the time it came out, I gotta say you are spot on in terms of my memories of the game. I credit it for getting me into JRPGs earlier than most Americans. I gotta disagree about the dungeons though. The difficulty of the dungeons was part of the appeal, at least at the time. It was a time when you were expected to play with a pen and paper, and some of my most fond gaming memories are playing with my little brother and my best friend Sean. One of us playing and the other taking notes and mapping out the dungeons. Sure they suggested you map out the dungeons in Dragon Warrior and Final Famtasy, but it wasn’t really necessary like it was in FS2. All that being said, I have not gone back and played through the game as an adult, and I have no intentions to. I know it could never live up to my memories.

Thanks for the video, I enjoyed it! I played this game on the weekend after it hit shelves in the US. I have been playing rpgs and platformers since the 80's. I didn't find the difficulty to be extreme on anything back then, thats just the way it was. Nowadays people who pretend to be gamers complain about the difficulty of older games. I prefer to be an 80's kid, because todays games are designed to make idiots feel intelligent.

I remember playing this game a lot as a kid. Me and my grandpa played it so much and got stuck on it so much that my grandpa ended up buying that little hint book for it and he even marked in it about all of those long huge mazes and dungeons. lol I still have that book to this day. :)

Johnny, is that you, sir? Are you....okay? Sir...?

PS2 already imagined the risks of a Powerful AI.

Talk about years in the thousands being hard to grasp as a being who'll be lucky to live a century. I got into Warhammer 40,000 this year. Not only is it set so unfathomably far in the future, the setting is a bleak, grim, utterly hopeless and conflict-driven mess that has essentially ground on for 10,000 years prior to the events of the game. Many lore-significant characters have survived since the pivotal event known as the Horus Heresy, which has its own spinoff wargame affectionately referred to as "30K." Even that all began several millenia after mankind went through a golden age of space travel, galactic colonization, and an interstellar apocalypse due to a disastrous AI uprising. It's fascinating, but also incredibly hard to imagine really living in it. That's not a bad thing, but your comments made me think aboit it.

I tried to play this game in my late-30s after going back and playing Phantasy Star I. I was a Nintendo guy, so I never played it. The dungeons man! They were so samey and it they were so tedious to navigate. The new party members joining was the straw that broke the camel's back. I don't use guides unless I am completely stumped and this game just wore me out!

Dude this video is funny as hell. I’ve been watching a bunch of Phantasy Star stuff recently and this showed up in my feed. I was getting excited to play PS2 until I saw this lol. But I’ve heard the Sega Mini 2 version is quite a bit easier. Anyway thank you for the info and the laughs. Big Ups!

You hit everything on the head. I still love this game but I'm not sure I ever want to revisit it due to dungeons even though I STILL have my hand drawn maps that are 20 years old because this was before the internet lol

Also for a game that requires a ton of grinding to beat it, if you grind too much and reach level 99, it resets the stats to level 1. It resets and will not let you level up anymore.

every RPG has filler to pad the game out usually, heck even Final fantasy's were guilty of padding them with mini games to drag out the timer basically, my biggest gripe with PS2 here was the slow animations some of the enemies had that took 6 seconds each to complete roughly

I learned one thing about Phantasy Star 1 and 2. GRIND! Grind, grind, grind! And grind. At with least PS 1 you just have four characters and they level up faster when you have the entire party. PS 2 was more involved. You DO need to get one female character (Shur?) up to level ten so you can get (steal LOL) the recorder. It lets you save anywhere.

Two distinct thoughts: 1: Holy crap so much of this game is a bummer.. like, in game 2: top tier waifus, if only they had character

Getting this game.

Thanks for the video. I agree with just about everything in this vdieo.

Having played this for myself with the guidebook, its difficult to explain, but it was an experience, something I would recommend all fans of JRPGs play, despite its flaws. I really like it, almost moreso than FF4, which is my favorite RPG.

And i thought infinity in Breath of Fire 2 was nonsense holy shit that end game dungeon in this game might be one of the worst dungeons I have seen

0:30 Man! People WISH that many "M class" celestial bodies clustered together!

I only picked up the game as a rental around the time of PSX because I remember my best friend getting it with his Genesis. After Nei died, which we kinda saw coming given what seemed like unusually fast levelling (now that I am playing it on Switch, I'm not sure how I saw it that way... I guess she levels with fewer points but her combat skills are relatively awful) oh boy. Thankfully where I rented (I think my local library) provided the hint book and manual. This is truly a fair assessment of the game from it's time; I truly am fond of the opening screen and I remember that one or more dungeons were printed mirrored in the hint book making it "extra fun" while , you know, accidentally grinding. I think they padded the game because the first game was around $50 on release and this was $80-100 so they HAD to give you something that would be a significant time investment.

Just the ost makes it worth loving this game. Also, isn't grinding what you didn't want to be taken from 7th Saga, something that made it great to begin with? Phantasy Star 2 came with a map booklet that you need to use. The party knew the layout of the dungeons that's why you use the maps yourself. It was fun to write notes into the maps, where chutes go. A great experience.

If they ever remake Phantasy Star 1 and 2, it should be done in the form of a first person dungeon crawler. Sega cam hand it off to their Etrian Odyssey/Persona Q/Shin Megami Tensei Strange Journey teams.

the gmtk bit is on point lmao

Can't wait for you to roast 3

I never played much of the first game because i started with a Mega Drive. But nonetheless this game still awed me like nothing before.

What is the beginning a reference to?

Wait, do I use the magic cap or the mogic cap?

I grew up playing and watching a neighborhood friend beat this game on his Genesis, using the included hint book with maps of course. It really was the best stuff available at the time, but by today’s standards we see it through nostalgia glasses, giving a pass to the unforgiving encounter rate and confusing map layouts. This game also took Genesis sound chip to new heights and proved its melodic and harmonic mettle. It’s still worth a full playthrough for RPG gamers of any era.

The dungeons were the result of a rushjob. Sega had a deadline. Same deal with the backgrounds in the battles. Shining in The Darkness got 3D dungeons though, so it was totally possible on the Genesis.

I tried to finish the video... I really did... But I couldn't just sit here and watch this man slander the greatest JRPG ever to grace mankind.

a bit too harsh on your review, I strongly disagree with you about the dungeons, and IMO Dragon Warrior was way more grind heavy and much much slower to progress through...

Nice

Great video. I grew up playing IV first and honestly I've never enjoyed the other games. II has an amazing premise, i don't even think any current scifi games have such amazing world building. But man...the sluggishness of this game. "Blast processing" eh?

I always assumed the two women at the start were mother brain.

The two women represent Nei and the First.

Phantasy Star 2 was designed by a AI on what it thinks jrpg is to antagonize us meatsuits.

The encounter rate is ridiculous.

I had played through PSII back in 1993? I think? I recently replayed it (with a ROM hack that increased the walking speed, and readjusted exp and money, because ain't nobody got time to play base PSII these days). It was simultaneously better and worse then I remember. I still think well of the soundtrack, and I do like a lot of the concepts in the game (I do want to play the side stories in the near future). Glad I have a recent replay for the perspective. I will never play this game again, though.

Still my second favorite Phantasy Star. The original needs a remaster or remake for PlayStation 4 or 5

I tried really hard to like this one, and I did finish it. I found it too painful to go back to though. I came to the PS series late, in the early 2000s, so I might feel differently had I played this back when I was a kid. I cut many older JRPGs a lot of slack...

i got into the series with Phantasy Star Online for the dreamcast, went back to play the original PS and was playing PS2, i didnt really enjoy them but i appreciate them for what they were at the time. games prob took a long time to make, esp with such constraints, they did the best they could and in order to keep people playing, the content is ridiculously stretched out. not a game I would replay, ill tell u that. but a game i wanted to experience

Omg i laughted so hard.

Here is a video idea, Explain how this game can be remade today. There's so much Loroe and history to work with In this game.

Wow. I've been grinding the shit out of Nei. Thanks for the spoiler. No sarcasm. On to Phantasy Star 3

Can't believe I finished this game once. Had a detailed manual and a lot of time. Would definitely quit nowadays.

Could use a QOL hack! If ever a game needed one…I gave up 3/4 of the way through. It just became too tedious, as much as I had enjoyed a lot of it. PS4 was such a better experience for someone who got into jrpgs later than childhood. I think the only jrpg we had growing up was Dragon Warrior until Pokémon came out and it turned me off for decades.

What made you like 2 more than 4?

I would love to see a modern remake that fixes all the awful things about this game. Even with mods/hacks I just can't bring myself to get through this game nowadays lol edit: I ended up powering through it with the help of maps/guides. It was more fun that way.

You can use some of the nei equipment to clear the depression status. I forget which but you're supposed to clear it. Its a pretty rough game though. That's what happens when you have 2 months to start from scratch and develop a new game based on the one you were working on, but for entirely new unfamiliar hardware, and you hadn't even had time to hammer out the details on the original console yet. This game did not have any QA or bugtesting done apart from just the programmers testing that it functioned at all while coding it... again... because sega told them to start over two months before release on the new console and didn't give them an extension. (this is why it looks like its using a master system grapics palette actually.... it is.)

Agree on all counts. I can respect this for helping to pioneer the 16-bit console RPG and for being a standout at the time of its release in North America specifically. But it was already outclassed at the time of its Japanese release by Dragon Quest III and Final Fantasy and truly isn't much fun at all compared to them.

A future jason is going to realise..that ..even ps4 is a ...better..game to play..its this one..with all its dungeonal flaws..lack of character depth ..and generic backrounds..thats his favorite of the series..which was awesome to hear from someone else..its the dark overtones..the grown concepts and over all theme of ps2 that makes it what it is..while 4 is more clean and shiny..its the dirt and grit that makes ps2 unforgettable

Say no to the great reset

You need to go back to smoking in videos, if you wanna look cool, smoke 🚬 😎

I tried so hard to play this game but I just gave up eventually. I kept thinking I would get sucked in at some point but everything you stated I was doing. The spell list, the grinds before you do anything, the random characters at first. It was just feeling like a slog. I was like "but it's a classic what's wrong with me". Maybe it's not me after all

PS2 reminds me of System Shock 1: great setting and plot, terrible gameplay.

The real question is, is it worse than Lord of the Ring?

I really wanted to like this game, but actually hated it by the end. The ending is bs btw.

We will live long enough that PS3 will be considered a better game than PS2. This will be a *shit world.*

Phantasy Star 2, more like Phantasy Star Poo. XD

I love the intro of course. But buddy you're way off base here. PS2 is a masterpiece game. And it sucks

100% agree. This game disrespects the genre.

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-6A5yY8hIYmo.htmlfeature=shared I just wanted to leave that as it says everything I could about 2, but better. So many mistakes were made, but someone had to be the first to make them. Top down dungeons were being invented. You "solved" dungeons back then, and random encounters were not a chore but the puzzle that needed to be solved in the surviving of it. The look and the methods of story telling were non existant over here. The ending was kind of a wow moment. The brutality of the dungeons was seen the same as the difficulty and lore rewards that dark souls is now. Maybe just barely survivable on your 8th try. You also currently live in a pie shop that is also a cake shop that is also a cake shop that is a pie shop. Back when you would see half of a dessert in your entire lifetime, running around the block for each additional crumb of it was a rewarding privilege. No internet, rare scraps of anime, and scifi was uncommon but a damned good thought high. How different each character was from each other, and how the developer made those choices was enough to provoke the imagination. Those dungeons were overly punishing to the explorer, and no sugar coating that. They just didn't have the artistry devloped to apply to that axis of gaming yet. If one guy did, the guy making games one company over didn't because he never played guy #1's game because it didn't exist yet.

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