Just discovered your Substack. Looks interesting!

This game was my intro to the Phantasy Star games, and the only one I played until a few years ago (when I gave 2 and 4 a whirl but ultimately didn't get very far). A friend picked this up used for maybe $5-10 for his Genesis, years after its release. Looking back, it must have been late 1994 or early 1995.

We had already played a lot of Final Fantasy 4 and 6. But we were told this was Sega's answer to Final Fantasy, and we had high expectations. Naturally, this game seemed like a tremendous step back in a lot of ways, we were really disappointed. Not to come here just to bash on games that you enjoyed! But thought I'd share the experience.

I think we still would have been highly disappointed with Phantasy Star 2 if we played it that late. 4 would have been interesting to us, but we were burned by this series and didn't have any more interest in it.

I think old-school RPGs -- whether Japanese or Western, console or PC -- are a genre that's especially hard to get into if you weren't there at the time, unless you just have a very specific personality that can appreciate them without nostalgia. The QoL and presentation of RPGs was improving rapidly over the course of the decade of the 1990s. Games on the wrong side of those improvements are dated in a way that maybe even a typical Atari 2600 game is not.

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