Phantasy Star III (Sega Genesis, Sega, 1990)

There are some video games that are known as black sheep. They have reputations for being unfairly hated on and that they were simply not given the proper time of day back in their release. This is not one of those games. As someone who has played this entire franchise to death, I have played Phantasy Star III more times than I should honestly admit to, and not for good reasons. I’m going to immediately preface this review by admitting that I detest this game, but I intend to review this game from a position of neutrality anyway (as much as it can be done). However, I don’t really think of this game as a black sheep. To me, a black sheep is a game unfairly passed judgment over for a variety of factors. One of those being different from other titles in its series. Being different isn’t a reason to hate something in of itself. However, to be vastly different and then to muck up any kind of execution leaves a nasty mark upon the player. It makes it hard to accept the game for what it is. At its core, Phantasy Star III is a very unique game. Not a good game, but a unique game. The very foundation of the game is predicated on the “generation system” and is without a doubt the most infamous thing about the game (which no doubt implies that nothing else about the game is worth remembering). The short and dirty version is that the game starts with a character who performs a personal quest of some kind and upon completing that quest the player is permitted the choice of allowing the protagonist of marrying one of two women. This affects the child of the protagonist, and in effect changes the nature of the game by altering the path the player takes. This forces a split into the “Second generation”, making two potential paths for the player. This same scenario is generated once more in the final generation, allowing for a maximum of four paths for the player to take part in. In theory, this sounds like a perfectly good idea. It would allow a non-linear experience and give alternate perceptions of how the world turns out based on the player’s choices making them feel like they are relevant and matter.

The problem with this though, is that the execution of this is entirely botched, rendering this effort worthless and I’d argue even hinders any potential enjoyment the game might otherwise have. You see, in Phantasy Star III, the choices that affect the generational paths have very little impact on the world at large. No matter the path that is chosen, the world feels largely unchanged, with nothing the player has done being anywhere close to being relevant. So where does that leave us? It leaves us with a system that encourages multiple playthroughs but completely lacks any incentive to actually replay the game anymore than once! To add even more insult to injury, this system hurts the overall structure of the game because it allows the designers the pretense of assuming that having more options suddenly justifies a less interesting game overall (which isn’t true, but its certainly obvious the designers had this in mind) which takes a huge hit upon the game. That’s the very first grievance Phantasy Star III inflicts upon the player, but its not even the most offensive thing about it by any stretch, nor is it the last mark upon its name. One thing that obviously contrasts Phantasy Star III from the rest of its brothers is the fact that PSIII is unable to work within the limitations of its hardware. Each of the previous games efficiently made use of what they had available to them. One of the recurring headlines with this entry though, is that Phantasy Star III consistently attempts to overreach the boundaries of what the Sega Genesis was clearly capable of. An obvious example is the game’s musical score. The Sega Genesis never had the highest quality sound hardware but it was more than capable of a fine job provided the people behind the soundtrack were competent enough to utilize it properly. Games produced late in the system’s lifespan prove this point. However, this game uses instruments that are poor at best and listenable at worst. Why is this the case? Well its quite clear that the game wanted to use a more orchestral type of soundtrack but the technology just wasn’t up to par at this point in time. It can be argued that PSIII was just trying to push the standards of video games, but it can also be debated that it was merely too early. Trying for such a thing probably forced the sound designer’s hands into using instruments that simply put, suck.  So where does this leave us? Is PSIII just ahead of the times or were the people behind it too pretentious to accept the standards of the era and to work within them? I’d argue its somewhere closer to the middle than either extreme. But it can’t be denied that the Genesis just wasn’t ready for such a project from a technical standpoint and the game suffered immensely for it. To illustrate my point, one only needs to listen to the theme that plays at the beginning of the game features a very annoying bell instrument that is insanely grating to the player. This kind of instrument plays very much through the entirety of the game’s soundtrack. Now, there are a few standout songs that are enjoyable in spite of the bad instruments used, but that’s based on the strength of the composition and not the sound quality used which is just flatout bad. But don’t just take my word for it, listen to the game’s ost for yourself!

Since we’ve already gone over the music of the game, let’s get back into the basic mechanics of the game itself. I’ve already gone over the generation system, but this time I’m referring more so towards the combat mechanics of the game. The game primarily uses the same engine as the previous game Phantasy Star II, but with a few alterations. This time around, we have a quadrant based system. Enemies can and will line up in formations based on quadrants. There really isn’t anything noteworthy or special done with this kind of quadrant system, but its definitely the only thing special about the game’s combat. Instead, attacking and the use of magic are the primary functions of combat. Attacking is simple in of itself, but how Phantasy Star III handles magic is a bit different compared to other rpgs. Magic spells are divided into four different classes (Healing, Time, Order, Melee) each serving a unique function in combat. Based on the level of the character, they will gain magical levels to make use of. The player can switch around and increase magical levels at the expense of lowering others. This is done in the various towns of the games in a specific shop in a grid-like design. Now, what’s wrong with this? Very few of the spells no matter what will do anything useful. Healing spells are the only ones consistently useful (and only half of them at that!). Melee spells specialize in direct damage but more often than not physical attacks are more efficient in actually doing damage to your enemies. Time and Order spells are used for more specialized effects but they too lack any kind of usefulness. If we take the pragmatic attitude, this leaves only healing spells being worth using with physical attacks being the only other useful option in battle. This in turn gets boring, very quickly. Combat devolves into a glorified game of “press confirm to win”. This isn’t interesting and in fact, is quite tedious. Now, what separates this from some of the other games in the series is difficulty. I’m not going to advocate for cheap difficulty in rpgs, but I do think some degree of difficulty is necessary to keep the game from turning into a procession. Phantasy Star III has very little of that except for a small portion in the beginning of the game, so whether or not the player will be victorious will never be in doubt. This is even worse in regards to how healing magic is applied. Two healing spells have the potential to fail because of the insistence on using the magic level as a basis for its accuracy. Since one of those healing spells is what cures poison (by far the most common and aggravating status ailment in the game because it prevents you from healing), this is a huge, huge flaw to take into consideration. I would wager nearly one-third of the game’s enemies are able to poison the player, and with the spell designed to heal this status is inaccurate and can fail more often than not, this adds to the level of aggravation in Phantasy Star 3’s dungeon crawling.

Now, if there’s anything at all that can save a game with audio quality issues and bland combat mechanics its a really good presentation. I don’t think great presentation negates the other flaws, but it can certainly help mask them. Unfortunately, Phantasy Star III also fails at this. There are a lot of things that go into presentation, but I’ll get to basic things like animation quality, art style, etc. Since I just got finished talking about combat mechanics, let’s talk about attack animations! To be blunt, they suck. In the previous game the animation quality was fantastic for the time, giving the impression that the artists actually gave a damn and showcased the power of the Genesis at the time. Doing that was important because it related to Phantasy Star II’s sci-fi themes. This time around, everything feels so dated. There are enemies with attack animations that not only feel lazy, but don’t make any sense at all. There’s a stone enemy whose animation for attacking is wiggling its ear at the player. If that doesn’t count as insanely bizarre, I don’t know what does. Its even worse that combat is presented from the first-person, whereas the previous game showcased combat from third-person perspective. This eliminates the need for doing any kind of animation for the player characters in combat even though the last game did this just fine! I view this as laziness on the developer’s part, even when a game released on a previous generation console was able to do even better animations than this game did!  This kind of laziness is obviously indicative of the quality of Phantasy Star III as a whole for other reasons too. But still, while the switch from third to first may seem like an irrelevant factor for most people, its very telling of the design philosophy of this game and just how half assed it is. But that’s not all that sucks when it comes to presentation. Let’s talk about the art style and the use of colors. I only briefly touched on this in the other PS reviews, but because I didn’t think it was really all that necessary. In the other PS games, the art style was colorful, playful and a delight to take in and absorb. Not so in this game. Phantasy Star III features a dull array of colors in which to use. Everything is boring and earthy, not lending to any of the strengths of the Sega Genesis or the Phantasy Star franchise. When combined with other various flaws, the art design is just dull beyond compare. Now, having good art design doesn’t save an otherwise bad video game, but it can help alleviate a lot of tedium associated with it because of the fact that the game is aesthetically pleasing to look at (Example: Final Fantasy VIII; the game is extremely flawed and tedious in places but I still enjoy the game based on its aesthetic direction alone). Despite the acknowledgement that Phantasy Star III has a flawed premise, boring battle mechanics, and terrible sound design it once AGAIN drops the ball in having a setting and art style that isn’t interesting to look at. It’s 0-4 as far as doing anything remotely close to “competent”.

Now, with all my bitching about the art style I think its important to note that Phantasy Star III does intend to attract a different type of setting than its predecessors and with that its to be expected that a different art style will be tried. The other three games are pure sci-fi/fantasy hybrids and Phantasy Star III takes its influences moreso from hardcore medieval fantasy. Taking influences from a different subject matter doesn’t automatically render a video game as trash, but what it does do is cause the audience to do a double take. Compare the sprite designs and art style of one game to another and its clear that one of these doesn’t match the others. And it shouldn’t, Phantasy Star III was mostly handled by a team that was for the most part working on their first ever video game. Only two people who had prior experience with the franchise were working on this game. So its honestly not that surprising that this game turned out so differently, and my disdain for this title doesn’t really come from it being different. Its a matter of execution. The fact that Phantasy Star III opts for a less sci-fi feel and a more tradition medieval setup is fine, but what isn’t fine is that the art style used is boring and doesn’t reflect the fantastical elements people usually associate with high-end fantasy. That’s the problem here. If there’s anything related to the art I can praise, its related directly to the character portraits themselves drawn by Toyo Ozaki. They’re rarely ever seen in-game (only during the menu) but the artist herself drew a number of portraits and other scenes outside of the context of the game and those are actually quite nice. The problem I have with this though is that none of these are even used in-game. Now, what I’m talking about has to do with what I consider very shoddy writing on Phantasy Star III’s behalf, which I’ll get into more of later. But for now just consider that this game’s writing is barebones, dull, lacks any sort of personality or wit or charm of its own. Now, look at the of Toyo Ozaki I was talking about earlier. Its the exact opposite! Its lovely, full of charm and wit and the kind of personality I would have loved to see within the game! The fact that this kind of content is deliberately omitted from the game pisses me off. There could have been interesting things like having a tone that isn’t boring or anything like that, but they had to be cut out for other things like a super unique generation system. Because being unique supersedes everything else like having actual production values or execution. Its a shame that Ozaki’s only contribution to the video game industry was this game, as I’m quite sure she could have done much more if she had chosen to do so.

With that settled, we can be safely assured that Phantasy Star III fails at presentation and production values. Let get on with another subject of the game, pacing. Pacing is an important thing for me, its why I think Phantasy Star IV is one of the greatest games ever – the brisk pace and flow of the game make it so much fun for me. Could Phantasy Star III possibly redeem itself with a game that at least flows well? Short answer: no. You see, in this game there are a number of design choices that deliberately impede any sense of gameplay flow that it might have normally. And we’re going to talk about them! First off is town design. Town design wasn’t something I touched on in the previous games I reviewed and because I felt it was unnecessary. They were competently designed beforehand, so there wasn’t anything to talk about other than “yeah, these are okay”. That’s not interesting. However, what is interesting is how Phantasy Star III manages to cock up a pretty simple concept. You see, towns are big in this game. Really big. Now, that might not sound like a bad thing to players used to games that are huge sandbox games, but jrpgs usually aren’t built with the same kind of attention to detail that sandbox games are and for a pretty good reason – they’re meant to be linear (in most cases) so that kind of design is unnecessary. But in this game, towns are unnecessarily huge and for why I don’t really know. There’s nothing to do in them. NPCs are spaced apart so much so there’s a lot of unused space in the towns, and I think that’s a bad thing. Having room to breathe and move around in is fine, but there is a line between breathing room and excess dead space. And the towns often resemble dead space more than any kind of efficient town design I’ve ever seen in an rpg. So instead of allowing the player to move from point A to point B efficiently, they are constantly impeded by the large spaces that a player has to travel from. Now, maybe the designers of the game were initially planning to have a lot more to do in the towns but those plans got scrapped at the last minute because deadlines are a thing. And you know what, that just might be the reason why, but I’m not buying that as an excuse.

What also makes the dead space issue in the towns and various castles infuriating is another issue – walking speed. Yes, the walking speed has been addressed many times by many other people before and I’m certainly not the first person to ever bitch about it. You walk really slow in this game. Well, technically its not that bad compared to previous games. In fact its right about the same. What makes the walking speed particularly noteworthy is the increased amount of space the player has to travel through to progress with the game. And its not just in the towns and castles, it also applies to the world map and the dungeons too! So whereas the prior games could get away with a slower speed because the size of their worlds was less, Phantasy Star III cannot because of the nature of how its world is designed. This is important because town design is a pretty simplistic thing. You place shops in the appropriate places, you add a few helpful NPCs and maybe a couple others that say something humorous. Then you arrange all of it in a neat, efficient pattern that doesn’t obfuscate the audience. This is a pretty difficult thing to fuck up, and yet Phantasy Star III manages to do so delightfully. Just when you thought this game had reached the bottom of the barrel, it went just a bit deeper. World map design is just as tedious as town design is (and for the same reasons!) and doesn’t really merit any paragraphs on talking about it. What does merit discussion though, is dungeon design. Now that’s an aspect of designing an rpg that’s much more difficult and a lot easier to fuck up than town design is. Good dungeon design relies on a lot of factors such as aesthetics, interesting and meaningful combat, possibly puzzles to work around, and layouts that are fresh and unique and don’t feel reused at all. This is critical, because an rpg with good dungeon design again flows so much better than one without it. With bad dungeon design, the game continues to drag on and on and on and getting through these feels like a chore. Now consider everything we know about Phantasy Star III up to this point and ask yourself “Do you think the designers put any kind of effort into ensuring that the dungeons weren’t stale snoozefests and maintained any kind of flow”? If you answered no, then you would be correct! There are a very small amount of varying dungeon designs, as the game opts to reuse many of the same ones time and time again. This results in dungeons that are tedious and dreary from an aesthetic viewpoint. Even sometimes the player has to backtrack through the same dungeon multiple times because of how the game is structured! This is really annoying, as very little changes upon the revisit but trudging through it is necessary for plot advancement.

(No Sega, seeing this same dungeon layout over and over again doesn’t ever get old)

I’ll cite one particular moment in the game as a particularly bad example of dungeon design and pacing and leave it at that. In the second generation, there’s a town called Divisia. Named so because the town is divided into two halves by the Castle. In order to progress from one side of the town to the other, the player is required to go through the Castle. Slightly tedious, but nothing to really bitch about, right? Well, in order to go through the Castle the player is required to progress within the dungeon. First off, I have to question why in the world the player has to do this? This dumb gimmick only gets in the way of the player, makes the gaming experience more infuriating and adds absolutely nothing positive to the game. What makes this gimmick even worse is that there is no way to circumvent this, as the passages surrounding the town on the world map are blocked out, forcing the player to go through Divisia the old fashioned way. And let’s not forget if a player is lost and isn’t quite sure of where to go to progress next and backtracks through Divisia multiple times to try and backtrace their steps to find their way. That means every time the player wants to go through Divisia, they have to go through the arduous, tedious dungeon that is Castle Divisia all over again. This is critical, because Phantasy Star III tends to be somewhat obtuse in terms of letting the player know how to progress further. It comes from a time where the player is expected to move about at their own pace and explore, and there’s nothing wrong with that particular ideology. The problem is when the design of the game is clearly made so as to limit and prohibit exploration and it punishes the player for exploring by making it as tedious as possible. That is a huge problem and underscores all the pacing issues that Phantasy Star III has. But there is a way that this problem very well could have been averted, but unfortunately it wasn’t because of incompetence. And that is a warping spell. Now technically, there is an item that allows the player to warp to a previous town. Unfortunately, once the second generation starts those items are no longer sold for no discernible reason (No really, I don’t get why you would punish the player by making backtracking that much harder on the player?). But if warping spells were available in Phantasy Star III, that wouldn’t be a problem. You see, in every other game in the series warping spells have been a mainstay in some form or another. They’ve never been exactly consistent in naming and how they work, but they’ve always existed in this series. So what we have is a precedent for having this kind of convenience, and a game that certainly could use and benefit from this convenience, but completely fails to implement them only to serve to the player’s frustration. This wouldn’t eliminate the vast majority of problems this game has, but it illustrates the kind of incompetence that this game is plagued by. So yeah, this game can’t handle pacing by any definition of the term.

Another thing I don’t like about this game is its programming. Sure, the game works in the most crude way imaginable. But there are numerous bugs and glitches that only serve to question how much effort was put into the game. The most infamous example is the escapipe glitch. Using an escapipe normally allows a player to escape from a dungeon but in this game using it in specific moments allows them to skip chunks of the game due to how event triggers are handled. Using an escapipe while being trapped in the opening dungeon lets the player warp out of it. Now, with the way the game is handled this locks the player out of progressing any further because the necessary event trigger to move on hasn’t been activated yet (and can’t be activated ever). Now, if this was because the designers forgot about this or didn’t know this existed that would be one thing. It wouldn’t be excusable, but it would be understandable. However, there are various NPCs whose dialogue changes specifically to mock you for activating the glitch which only indicates that the designers were well aware that it happened, but they opted to not fix it. If this doesn’t showcase how rushed this game was, I don’t know what will. This glitch isn’t limited to this one part of the game either! At the start of the 2nd generation, using an escapipe will cause Nial to be warped to the previous dungeon (in which case would be the final dungeon of the first generation) which you aren’t even supposed to have access to. Going through it gives you the chance to reactivate the old event triggers from the 1st generation that are still intact (Seriously, how did no one think to remove these after the generation was over?) and then push right into the third generation. But doing so can potentially screw you and lock you into an unwinnable game because of how plot items work (plot items present in inventory but never actually collected physically don’t work like they’re supposed to) so you can’t progress! Great programming Sega!

The worst bit of programming fluff that gets to me though is how item spells work. Having items that can cast spells is nothing new, neither to the Phantasy Star series or to jrpgs. But what is new is the ability to cast them in the goddamned menu. That’s right, you can use them in the menu at no cost to you! Does using them cause them to potentially break, preventing them from being spammable? Absolutely not! This means once you obtain an item that heals in battle you can use it endlessly in the menu with no penalty at all, making things that most rpgs depend on like resource management absolutely worthless. I’m convinced that this is a bug as no designer in their right mind would allow the player to circumvent all difficulty by doing this. It gets even worse in regards to dead characters. In combat, characters with 0 hp cannot cast spells as you would expect. That’s rational as it makes death something to worry about. If they could do something like that, it would cheapen death and leave the game with no challenge. However, dead characters can cast spells while in the menu! They can even revive themselves with the proper spell. I can’t think of any kind of defense for the kind of programming that allows something like this to fall through the eyes of the programmers. That’s just flatout lazy programming as far as I’m concerned.

With this we’ve covered most of the bases in regards to the design of Phantasy Star III. But one thing we haven’t touched is plot of the game. Now, I will state right now that I’m not going to dissect every single part of this game’s plot because its just that stupid. There’s no point in doing it. I will go over the parts that I think are the most relevant to the game’s core issues and I think are the most interesting despite their inane nature. Phantasy Star III opens with a rather vague intro dialogue noting the nature of the constant battle between Orakians and Layans with each of the leaders having been assumed dead, causing both sides to viciously hate one another. Now, because the game starts up mentioning this, you’d think that this would be incredibly relevant to the plot as a whole, right? And well, it kind of is but only on a very artificial level. Throughout the game, no actual big battles between the two sides are ever carried out, instead you get some half-assed drama using the issues between the two as a precursor to it. Which is really disappointing to say the least. Instead of using something like this that manages to be interesting, its kind of left to the wayside, only to be brought up again to drive the narrative back into mediocrity. Much like the entirety of Phantasy Star III, it is an interesting idea but due to shoddy execution nothing is ever made of it.

The game proper really begins in the first generation with the central protagonist, Rhys. Unlike most rpgs, this game starts off with a wedding. Points for originality I suppose. During the wedding, his bride is immediately kidnapped. Rhys loses it, ordering the military to go and find her. His father, being the only voice of reason commands him to cool down in the dungeons. While in the dungeons, something happens that I think is of critical importance to discuss. See, Rhys encounters someone named Lena who just pops up out of nowhere to release him. Later on, Lena joins the party but why she does anything related to him is never explained which is confusing. As it turns out, Lena is a childhood friend and was first arranged to be married to him until he dumped her for Maia! Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing in the english translation even comes close to even making a subtle hint about this. There’s some interesting motivation that could work behind this too, and would showcase the kind of selflessness it would take to help someone out that had already dumped you. But no, in the translation we received, this doesn’t happen and so we’re left confused and wondering why she helped us out at all. The next events in the game are revolved around building up a suitable five man party. Very shortly after leaving the starting town Rhys collects the androids Mieu and Wren (completely separate from the android of the same name from Phantasy Star IV of course). The Layan Lyle briefly joins (then leaves, and then rejoins) for the sake of saving his home people with Rhys’ assistance. Lena joins for real later on to ensure that the party can finally reach where Maia has been kidnapped. And that paragraph in of itself sums up the majority of what happens in the first generation: not a whole lot. There are some minor things but I don’t think they’re at all relevant. And that’s fine. This also means there’s nothing particularly offensive in regards to its own narrative that I find here. I suppose that’s better than the myriad of disappointments that the game has offered us thus far, so I suppose that’s something positive I can say about Phantasy Star III – that the plot of the first third of the game is relatively unoffensive. Now, if that’s the highest praise I can offer a game, then we have some serious issues.

In the final parts of the first generation, Rhys takes on the King of Cille (as it turns out at the last second Maia was a Layan the entire time, gasp!) and succeeds. This offers him the first marriage choice of the game. He can choose to marry his childhood friend Lena, or to actually be practical and choose the woman he slaved through this entire game up to this point to reclaim. Ultimately, the choice resides with the player but I don’t really feel like its a choice that matters all that much. Much of the praise surrounding this game lies within this ability to choose your bride and thus, father different children and choose your path. Once this choice has been made it can’t be taken back and the player is locked into their choice for the second generation. And true, the second generation paths are different enough to both be considered in the plot evaluation, but once those are gone through, the player is left with generation three where the paths don’t matter much at all so the choices are hollow at best. One more thing that bugs me about this game’s narrative is that there’s a potentially good underlying theme to Rhys’ choice of brides. Does he go with the childhood friend and princess to a neighboring kingdom, thus solidifying a relationship between the two? Or does Rhys follow his heart all the way to Maia, even if it means betraying his homeland and everything he knows about Orakian and Layan relationships. Essentially the dichotomy is the basis of duty vs. emotion. And it could have been a powerful one if the game ever bothered to take advantage of that, which it never does. The game just kind of meanders around, pushing you to make a choice but without ever making that choice seem important. This also could have pushed the Orakian vs. Layan theme of the game but it doesn’t, instead offering a stale slice of mediocrity in its stead. Like the rest of Phantasy Star III, it clearly has potential but fails to live up to it and instead expects the player to derive their enjoyment not from the quality of the game but the uniqueness of its ideas presented therein. That being said, if I had to choose a favorite generation, it would be the first one. Not because its particularly good (its not) but it screws up less often than two or three do, which I’ll get into very shortly.

Assuming Rhys chooses to take Lena as his wife, they will wed and will have Nial as their child. After a short scene control of the game will switch to Nial, leaving Rhys and Lena behind as NPCs. One interesting quirk is that while the other human characters will have left the party, the androids will stay with you no matter what generation it is. Unlike the first generation where a somewhat interesting setting was used to start the plot in motion (a wedding), the plot of generation two is started with the player being told that the homeland of Nial’s mother is being invaded by monsters. Since obviously a huge army can’t do the job, we have to do it ourselves! Shortly after leaving his kingdom, information surfaces that a man named Lune is behind this and he used to be a right hand man of Laya back when she was alive and kicking, for what its worth. Investigating through Castle Divisia finds out that Lune’s sister Alair has been kidnapped. After all, what could possibly be starting Lune’s rampage couldn’t possibly be his own sister being kidnapped by the people he was swore to destroy as Laya’s right hand man, right? That could never happen. Next up, the party investigates a cavern that houses a rebel resistance against Lune’s forces, leading them to the leader of the group, Ryan. A misunderstanding happens and Lune assumes that Nial is working with Ryan and his resistance. As it turns out, Lune and Alair were banished to the purple moon nearly one thousand years ago, locked themselves in stasis and haven’t revived until now to have a chance to get even with those filthy Orakians. No wonder he’s so pissed off! Some exploration later finds the party inside of a whirlpool that leads into a secluded area. Inside the area is a small temple. Inside that temple lies Laya’s sister, who just happens to have the same name as the original Laya. Whoever decided that was a good idea to have an important backstory character and a player character to have the same name just for the hell of it must have been fired shortly after everyone else realized how idiotic and unnecessarily confusing this must have been. This pretty much fills out the party for this path of the second generation, which is nice.

Next the party searches out Mystoke Castle and finds Laya’s pendant which somehow allows Laya’s incorporeal voice tells the party that Laya and Orakio eventually realized they were being deceived by some other force! This information would have been a lot more useful had it been presented before two different types of people shut themselves off from each other. Like you know, maybe Laya or Orakio telling their own people about how their stupid little war is pointless but you know the writers couldn’t be damned to write around that little detail so they probably just figured it would be the easiest way to forget about it. And it is, but its also the laziest way, considering the entire basis of the game’s plot would have been undone if the writers opted for the most logical method. With possession of Laya’s pendant means that the party can use the temples that have been placed all around the world but inaccessible to this point. That sounds nice and all but there’s a serious problem with that. We’re about halfway through the game and have been seeing these things littered all over the place and we just now get to use them. But the bigger problem is how they work. Palaces allow you to warp from one to another, but which palaces connect to which other palaces isn’t clear and is the polar opposite of consistent. There’s no logical flow that efficiently explains and gives a clear vision of where one will lead into another, requiring the player to work around the world map, finding out where each individual palace leads into another. Needless to say, this is quite tedious and not at all fun. Instead of fixing the problem by allowing the player to choose which palace (among those that have been visited already) this would cut down on the back-tracking necessary. Considering all the numerous issues this game has with dead space, slow walking speed and all, this would have been a huge boon to its credit but unfortunately it fails to do even this.

Using the pendant, the player can eventually make their way to Aerone and by proxy, the same moon that Lune hails from via a small spaceship. Its at this point that the player can see the “world” of Phantasy Star III is instead built of several mini-worlds out in the middle of space. More is revealed on that later on, but what matters is that we know for a fact that this isn’t the setting for the first two games. This establishes an extreme difference between this game’s setting and the previous ones in the series. Once on the moon proper, the group finally faces off against Lune, easily defeating him. Because the plot demands it, this causes Lune to come to his senses and recalls all of his previous forces he threw against you. Thus, Nial’s adventure has come to an end and so has this branch of generation two. Just like with the end of the first generation, a marriage branch opens up for the player to decide on between Alair and Laya, neither of which has any kind of emotional connection to Nial so this begs the question of why this option even exists in the first place? At least in the previous generation there was the pretense of saving Maia and the unstated purpose of Lena (who was the childhood friend even though that never gets mentioned in the English localization). Here, there’s nothing. It feels very hallow and empty and that’s what I primarily associate the tone of Phantasy Star III’s narrative with – emptiness.

Instead of moving on with the third generation, I’m going to dial things back a bit and return to the opposite branch of the second generation, assuming you marry Maia in the first branch. This time around, the Kingdom of Cille is being invaded by various robots that are killing the land. Its up to Ayn to figure out what’s going on with the robots and put a stop to it! One interesting trait both Nial and Ayn share is that they both have their mother’s hair color, a trait which continues even into the third generation protagonists. Just like the other generation two quest Ayn has access to both Mieu and Wren to help him out. The plot directs the player to the next immediate town. Once there, its discovered that the Kingdom as a whole is being burned down by the same robots they were having troubles with earlier. Now, there’s a problem I have with this, and its mostly due to laziness. We’re told that this horrible destruction has happened to Cille but all we see is an empty town and nothing else. No buildings destroyed, nothing altered. Just a ghost town. That’s horribly disappointing. I blame lazy design on Sega’s part, but it still very disappointing. We could have possibly forged an emotional connection with the game if we had seen the town Ayn grew up being burnt down, but the designers just couldn’t be bothered with those kind of details.

The plot takes the group to a cave in a desert where Ayn’s family have moved out to for safety. It turns out that Lyle was wounded in a recent battle and isn’t looking good as far as his recovery chances are concerned and his daughter is kidnapped. Since Ayn seems to be the only remotely competent fellow around its up to him to save the day I guess. This also brings up another point on my part (even though it really is a nitpick), is that only the father’s in this game have their portraits change into old age. The protagonist’s mother will always have the same portrait as before, even though their husbands have clearly aged. Its not a huge, pressing issue or anything but it is an inconsistency that does bother me to some degree. Now instead of a nitpick, here comes a legitimately pressing issue in Phantasy Star III. I’ve bitched about how much backtracking this game forces on you and this part of the game and this just might be the worst of it. In order to continue with the game you need to rescue Lyle’s daughter, Thea. Thea is located in a castle dungeon. That particular castle dungeon is inaccessible at first. In order to gain access to it, you need to go to a town on the other side of the world map in order to find one particular NPC to talk to who mentions the Castle gate being open. Then and only then will it be open to you. Then you get to walk all the way back across the world map to that same Castle and then you can finally enter the dungeon properly. Nevermind just being able to enter the Castle normally like a decent rpg, no this game has to make things complicated and difficult for its own sake. When you couple this design mistake along with the random encounters, boring combat mechanics, slow walking speed and dead space, this issue is incredibly frustrating to deal with. Any kind of flow that Phantasy Star III might have had under other circumstances is completely wiped away and I hate it because of that.

Once Thea is properly rescued, the party must once again backtrack to the desert cave to receive their thanks for their efforts. Next the plot directs the player to go into the same castle at the very beginning of the first generation to face off against Lena’s daughter in this generation. Now to let myself rant on a tangent, this is another issue I have with this game – places from previous generations don’t change at all even later on in the game. Every town you encountered in one generation is exactly the same in another, no matter what. You’d think with so many years separating the generations that things could be spruced up a bit, towns could have changed with different people, different layouts and maybe some new events to make things feel new. After all, we know in life nothing stays the same. But instead of taking advantage of one of the more unique parts of the gimmicky generation system, the designers opted to say “fuck that shit that makes too much sense” and copy pasted the exact same towns all over again. Laziness. I hate when so many parts of this game were begging to be done better than they were but once again lazy and rushed design killed any chance this game had to be good.

Getting back to the plot, the player takes on Sari (Lena’s daughter) in the middle of the castle dungeon. Upon defeating her we have the final party member for this part of generation two. What does this mean? We can finally prepare for even more backtracking! The plot demands that the player return to the same area where Thea was rescued before, which is a hell of a trip from where the player stands right now and there’s no way at all to make this trip any easier on the player. Remember when I said this game needed warping spells? This is clear proof of that right here. And yet the bright minds at Sega thought warping spells would be so useless for this part of the game that they cut off access to escapipes from the end of generation one onwards. Ugh. Once the player is at the designated point, the same dragon creature that stole Maia at the beginning of the game takes the player to the next part of the game that was previously inaccessible. The dragon is revealed to be a form of Lyle’s, and shortly after, he dies. I suppose its supposed to be a sad and poignant scene, Lyle sacrificing what little strength he had in order to ensure your success, but given the tone and nature of Phantasy Star III I just don’t feel anything towards it. The next castle dungeon takes the player to a secluded spaceship that takes the player to the Satellite moon, where what we already knew about Phantasy Star III is revealed. Namely, that the world of Phantasy Star III is a spaceship of its own. Now I don’t know about you, but I figured this out pretty early on in my initial playthrough of the game but maybe some other people didn’t figure it out. Still, I thought it was pretty obvious on my own and I didn’t think it needed to be explained. Once on the Satellite proper, the player once again engages in a dungeon. At the conclusion of the dungeon is the entity behind all the robots destroying Cille, Siren. Who happens to be robot as well. He has absolutely no backstory at all (then again, neither did Lune). Once defeated he disappears and that ends the second generation (apparently he recalled all his previous cronies after losing even though that was never stated!) Now the player once again has a marriage option open, between Sari and and Thea. This one I don’t mind so much as the other marriage option from the other generation because there is a little bit of thought behind it so far as the plot is concerned. Sari, like Lena before represents the duty his father failed to live up to. Thea represents the emotional connection between the two after losing Lyle. Duty vs. Heart, once again. Though it should be noted that Ayn and Thea are cousins making that decision a tad bit creepy. Most of the time the dialogue text for the marriage itself is pretty pedestrian, but I think this one exception should be brought up if Ayn chooses to marry Thea. Somehow, its mentioned that Lyle offers his blessings. From beyond the grave. I’m going to chalk this up to a massive fuck up on Sega’s localization department.

(I don’t think I need to explain why Siren’s sprite is horrifying)

At this point the player progresses to the third generation regardless of what marriage options they’ve selected so far. Between the four potential paths, the differences between them all are minimal at best. Where the player starts changes, but the goal is exactly the same no matter what. That’s something that’s really disappointing. There was a real opportunity to have four potentially different paths, to really mix things up so the player has a legitimate reason to play through the game four different times. Instead, its the same path, four times over again. The only reason to play through the game multiple times is to see the slightly different endings. That’s not reason enough to justify basing the entire game around a generational concept, thus bringing everything else around the game down as a result. What this creates is a sloppy game, because there’s no synergy around its core concept. The plot of the third generation relies mostly upon collecting various objects to allow the player to defeat the “real” evil of the game, Dark Force. Yes, Dark Force is somehow involved in this game, through a convoluted sequence of events that ultimately doesn’t make any coherent sense once you understand PS3’s plot. This much is learned after traveling to Skyhaven. By assembling the five weapons of ancient legend, the word of “power” can be learned and that is the key to releasing Orakio’s ancient Sword. One thing about this that I don’t like though is that the dialogue text is deliberately misleading. One of the areas mentioned for the player to search for the weapons is wrong. I don’t know if that’s a screwup, a typo or what but taken at face value that forces the player to make unnecessary amounts of backtracking. This is completely hand waved by the game’s manual by stating that this particular person has “gone senile” in the past few years. I think this is as solid as proof as anything else that showcases the laziness that went into this game since they knew this kind of mistake happened. But instead of trying to fix it, they throw a quick solution into the manual. This is LAZY. This game has done some pretty lazy things in terms of design, but this takes the cake as far as laziness is concerned. This is absolutely inexcusable by any measure and another strike against the game’s abysmal record.

Now, once the player pulls out Orakio’s Sword from where its located it becomes revealed to the player that Dark Force is released. The same Dark Force from Phantasy Star I and II. Now, I have to question very seriously why we just intentionally released this thing from its prison and for what gain, but this tidbit isn’t really explained that well within the game’s narrative. Once the Sword is acquired and the other legendary weapons are in hand the player then heads to get the word of power. With this word of power, the player needs to return to Skyhaven one final time to have their legendary weapons upgraded to “Nei” weapons (Obviously a reference towards the Nei weapons of Phantasy Star II, though the reference is hardly appropriate). This allows the player to finally access the final dungeon of the game and to end it once and for all. However, there’s one important thing to discuss before doing that. What that something is, is completely option to the game but integral to understanding anything that goes on in this game’s plot. It involves what little connection this game has to the previous Phantasy Star games, as little as that may be. You see, in a single optional town there exists a group of people who claim to be ancestors of the planet Palma which was blown to pieces in Phantasy Star II. How that is relevant to Phantasy Star III is soon revealed. Basically the people of Palma just happened to have telepathic powers and knew they were going to get blown up and built four hundred space ships to prepare for that. Now, as far as I recall in Phantasy Star II, there was absolutely little warning to Palma being blown up. It happened very quickly. I would expect the entire planet would have no more than a few hours to prepare for that impact assuming they knew they were going to get blown up the moment Mother Brain started the whole thing. This would be nearly impossible unless something really crazy was going on in Palma. Since this is never elaborated on or explained well in any capacity, I’m going to have to call bullshit on this. But regardless, PSIII claims that four hundred spaceships suddenly left Palma despite the impracticality of that. Now here comes the really stupid part. Despite being defeated by Rolf and his friends at the exact same time this is going on, Dark Force still manages to slowly take out each of these space ships one by one by means of infiltrating them. How Dark Force manages to do both at the same time is beyond me, but hey maybe he’s just a wizard.

By destroying these ships, this forced Laya and Orakio to hunt down Dark Force and seal him into Orakio’s Sword. This eventually formed the basis of the Layan and Orakian split, and then somehow both Orakio and Laya died but then completely neglected to tell anyone about this. Because this happened this transpired all the events that led up to Phantasy Star III. So, we could have avoided everything bad that’s happened so far, but didn’t because two other characters own stupidity. Before I stated that I considered this game’s plot largely inoffensive, which for the most part is true. But this is an exception. This one part here is an absolute affront to my intelligence. I can’t help but feel any condition in which the crisis could have been averted but isn’t due to stupidity is nothing more than a contrived set of circumstances. Where this gets worse is how the translation works. The English localization claims that the time difference between III and II was one thousand years. Thanks to the works of Rebecca Capowski we know that this is false and is actually two thousand years. Now, when you take into consideration how III and IV relate to each other (This means they take place roughly around the same time period) this really throws III’s order of events into question. Because of events in Phantasy Star IV (namely, the defeat of the Profound Darkness) makes anything that happens in this game very unlikely. Now this game was produced by nearly a different team than I, II or IV so I can attribute these differences due to that fact. But it doesn’t excuse the sloppy localization effort (No matter how you slice it, mixing up two thousand and one thousand years sounds like a major mistake on someone’s behalf) or inconsistencies caused by the plot. But that’s not even the worst part! The worst part is this is all optional. Because this is the only part of the plot that ties this game to the rest of the Phantasy Star series, its bad that this is optional. If this is missed then the player goes through the entire game unable to figure out how this game connects to the other Phantasy Star games (and the only connection it has is hardly a strong one). This is flatout bad design, as far as I’m concerned. Whoever decided to make this optional should have been fired, even if the material didn’t make much sense. Now, I’m not against optional material when it comes to backstory and world building, but critical plot details should never be optional under any circumstances.

With everything else settled, there’s nothing stopping the player from getting to the final dungeon. Now, if there’s one thing, ONE thing I can praise Phantasy Star III for is that it does build a nice bit of ambiance for its final dungeon. Its very unsettling, and sets the mood really well. There are people in the dungeon and they make it very clear that they hate you and that they are controlled by hatred. This is further illustrated by the penulatimate boss of the area, Rulakir. He is the brother of Orakio who happened to defect to Dark Force because of his own inner hatred. Its a legitimately good effect. Now, this would have been just fine if the game decided it cared about making legitimately good design decisions about twenty hours ago. Then we wouldn’t have a trainwreck of a game to drag our feet through. But I’ll give credit where credit is due, even if the dungeon recycles the same visual theme as Skyhaven. Rulakir provides a very pitiful defense as the party progresses onward to eventually face Dark Force in the very same setup as Phantasy Star II (he pops out of a chest in much the same fashion as that game, most likely trying to elicit a nostalgic response only ONE YEAR after it was released). This time though, I can’t praise Dark Force’s inclusion or how he looks. Unlike the previous game where he looked very threatening and almost something out of a Giger work, it looks very lame. I think he looks something more like a Saturday morning cartoon than a credible, out of this world force like it seemed like in the other games. Even though Dark Force’s inclusion in this game is clearly forced and unnecessary, the designers still can’t get it right in this game. I can’t say I’m surprised. All in all, a very disappointing final boss fight for an even more disappointing game.

(Compared to previous designs, Dark Force just looks goofy instead of intimidating)

Once Dark Force is defeated the player is prompted into one of the game’s four endings depending on which path the player took. Most of the endings aren’t all that special to be honest. Out of the four, only one of which I consider any importance to commentate about. And that would be Aron’s ending (is that a truncation of Aaron? I’m going to assume so). You see, Aron’s ending is the only one that ties in with any way to the rest of the series, but does so in a way that’s incredibly stupid. In the ending of Aron’s path, the main ship goes through a black hole and warps back in time one thousand years or so (I’m pretty sure going through a black hole doesn’t actually work this way and should probably kill you in a horrifying death but who said that Phantasy Star III didn’t favor its share of bad writing?) The ship is then greeted by planet earth. Now, what does this mean? Well, if you go back to the ending of Phantasy Star II, the earthmen had access to the supercomputer Mother Brain because of what they were taught by the people of Phantasy Star III. With this much in mind, we have essentially established that the setup for Phantasy Star II exists because of what happened in Phantasy Star III. III comes after II but is integral to setting up its own plot. But III can’t happen without II happening, which doesn’t work without III which doesn’t work without II. Can you see where I’m going with this? By making this ending, Phantasy Star III has undermined not only any sense of originality the previous game had, but it undermines its own gimmick, the main thing which is supposed to be the selling point of the game! Because of this ending, we can assume that if Aron’s path isn’t selected, then Phantasy Star II can’t happen because the events that led up to it never occurred. Because of this, Aron’s path is technically canon or at least the closest there will be to a canon ending to this game.  Having a canon ending undermines having a system where choices are supposed to be at the forefront of a player’s mind. You’ve essentially stated to the player “you must pick this path or else you are wrong”. And if you’re going to do that, you might as well make the game a linear experience because a linear experience wouldn’t’ suffer from the problems I’ve listed with this game’s generation system. But that’s not all! Because of what I stated above, we also have a predestination paradox, where neither game can occur without the other having existed previously. This is unresolvable no matter what happens. In terms of writing, this is inexcusable and takes what I considered a previously inoffensive plot to offensive levels.

The credits then flow and this godforsaken game is finally over. Overall, what do I think of it? If this long essay-like review hasn’t convinced you already, I hate this game. I don’t hate this game for being different like many would be quick to accuse me of, I hate it for being a spectacular failure in almost every way. If this game had achieved its goals while managing to be a different “black sheep” I would gladly accept it for what it was. Instead, I hate the game for what it is – a failure. And hate isn’t a word I use very often in reference to video games, but I think its very appropriate here. Phantasy Star III quite literally drags. It drags on the audience, it drags on their patience, it drags on their soul. It has no heart, no passion, and no desire to be anything other than a pathetic excuse for a video game. Once the initial difficulty of the game wanes down, the game becomes so easy that it becomes a procession of sorts. And at that point, one must ask themselves what is the point of playing the game? The outcome is inevitable. The player will eventually win as a means of attrition, it just depends how much fury and frustration come from their hands before it occurs. I can’t even bring myself to say that this game is an embarrassment to the series, but I honestly don’t think so. When I think of Phantasy Star, I think of the other titles instead of this game. This game is so removed from anything resembling familiarity to the Phantasy Star franchise that I can’t associate it with the series in good conscious.  I say there is no point in playing this game, so do yourselves a favor and play better games instead, like the other titles in this series.