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Why Everyone Hates It: By popular opinion, Phantasy Star is some old first person dungeon crawler whose main contribution to the world is spawning a third rate console Diablo clone with light sabers.
Legitimate Issues With the Game: As one of the two oldest console RPGs out there, Phantasy Star has a rather high degree of attrition in its combat, a somewhat dodgy translation, and while it is by no means a dungeon crawler, a fair deal of time is indeed spent mapping out 3D dungeons in first person.
Why I Like It Anyway: First off, I feel the need to point out once again that legitimately threatening random monsters and dungeons that encourage you to break out a pad of graph paper to be good things. More to the point though, Phantasy Star is the first proper example of a console RPG, with the rest of the industry taking roughly a decade to catch up to it in terms of scope and execution.
The original Phantasy Star was released, effectively, at the exact same as the original Dragon Quest/Warrior. The original DQ which featured a single character with severely limited abilities slogging around a C shaped continent with the only real restriction on your progress being the progressively tougher monsters that appear every 8 steps or so.
Phantasy Star meanwhile features a full party of characters, each with their own abilities and sidequests, a full proper wrap-around world map with multiple land masses, two other fully explorable planets one can access upon obtaining a spaceship, several vehicles allowing for the traversal of various sorts of terrain, the occasional plot advancing cutscene (with special high detail artwork, a notion that didn't spread to the rest of the genre until CDs became the preferred medium).
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Aside from being the first to establish more or less everything there is to like about console RPGs, Phantasy Star was exceptionally lavish with its visuals, particularly for the time. The screens scattered through this review don't do it justice, but combat takes place against rather surprisingly well rendered backdrops depending on the terrain, featuring full screen monsters, often with surprisingly elaborate attack animations (bearing in mind that even the Final Fantasy series had completely static enemies until switching over to polygonal graphics). If one can stand the stipple-shading required by the limited color palette of the 8-bit Sega Master System, the battle graphics hold up surprisingly well by modern standards, as does the music.
Let's take a moment now to address the most controversial aspect of the game. While most of the game makes use of the standard top-view, iconic interface found in most RPGs, upon entering any sort of dungeon/cave/tower, exploration begins with a first person perspective. For the most part, these areas are simple and straight-forward. One can easily explore them fully by using a simple rule of thumb, like always taking the leftmost branch of any intersection, hugging one wall all the way through. There are however, exceptions. Let's be blunt. There's a 10 floor dungeon with pit traps that drop you to lower floors. There are doors one can only see if they turn to face the wall next to them. There's even a dungeon whose overall shape is a bunch of concentric rings which thwarts the simple exploration tactic mentioned above. On top of all that, there are some really vicious monsters to be found, and you're eventually going to end up with a boss fight by the end (another concept which was not yet a standard until some years later). On the other hand, Phantasy Star is one of the few console RPGs to allow saving the game from anywhere, with 5 save slots, and features a reusable emergency exit item, so it isn't as bad as it could be.
In addition to some daunting exploration, information gathering is a surprisingly important part of the game. While most console RPGs will hit you over the head with your main goals, Phantasy Star will frequently yield vital information only when you go out of your way to talk to people and gather clues. At other times, such information can only be obtained from monsters. In yet another genre innovation (not to be copied until some point in the Shin Megami Tensei series), it is possible to communicate with certain monsters. Sometimes, this can only be done after a certain character has joined the party, other times the chat spell is required, and still others require the telepathy spell. Yes, that's two different spells whose only purpose is gathering information from monsters.
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Many people when discussing Phantasy Star like to bring up the topic of feminism, seeing as both the main character (Alis) and the person primarily responsible for the game's existence (Rieko Kodama) are female despite a huge male to female ratio in their respective fields. I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'd like to point out some of the strange parallels between the careers of Rieko Kodama and Shigeru Miyamoto. Both broke into the business as artists. Anyone who knows what they're talking about you will tell you they are the single best developers employed by their respective companies (Sega and Nintendo, the only two companies to support video game systems primarily through first party games), both essentially (though not technically) created the genres they are primarily known for working in (respectively, the Japanese style console RPG and the platformer), and honestly, neither gets enough recognition for what they've done. The significant difference of course is that Miyamoto gets a great deal of credit as is, while Kodama's name recognition is most likely getting a significant boost from this side track in a review on an obscure personal website.
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Why is this? Is it due to the relative popularity of platformers versus RPGs? Nintendo's generally being more successful than Sega? Well, those certainly help. The real issue is that Kodama's dev team (Sega devision AM7, later called Overworks for a few years before being merged with House of the Dead team AM1 to form Wow Entertainment) has an amazing knack for delivering amazing games to wherever there isn't an audience to play them. Let's review.
Phantasy Star- Released for the Sega Master System, a console most people aren't aware ever even existed, as it spent its life being so thoroughly slaughtered by the NES. Next came Phantasy Star 2 on the Genesis. Now, as we all know, the Genesis had an amazing release, kicked off by the popularity of standard console pack-in Sonic the Hedgehog. What many people forget though is that Sonic was not a launch title. The Genesis had a very rocky birth with an initial launch library that was not yet tapping into what the system was capable of. To put this into perspective, the initial flagship game was Altered Beast, a port of an arcade beat-em-up which could be completed without really paying attention in roughly 10 minutes. That was the Genesis for which PS2 was released. PS4 on the other hand was released well after the Genesis began its moment in the sun. Very well after. It was originally planned to be released on CD, either for the released-and-flailing Sega CD, or a launch title for a new platform (details are sketchy here as this was the period when Sega was in a bit of a hardware panic, discussing a good 4 potential platforms for new games in vague fashion). At the last minute, PS4 and all its impressive graphics were crammed onto a cart, which was released in very low quantities, as more or less the last Genesis game released, with essentially no advertisement, with a price tag of $100.
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Then, having satisfactorily bringing their pet series to a surprisingly definitive conclusion, the team was tapped to improve some of the works of other Sega dev teams, yielding the amazing Panzer Dragoon Saga and taking the reins of the Sakura Wars series (by all accounts a vast improvement). All of this was done on the Sega Saturn, generally regarded as Sega's biggest failure of all (although its lifespan was significantly longer in Japan). Next it was a return to original RPG development. Sega finally managed to get their act together, and gave the Dreamcast an astonishingly competent launch. For a moment, it seemed like they might have their first viable platform in years. Sadly, their reputation for failure was so profound at that time that the death of the Dreamcast became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and no one was paying particularly much attention when Skies of Arcadia was released (of course, Skies of Arcadia did receive a port... to the somewhat more viable Gamecube... by way of a third part developer who took some artistic license). After Sega finally gave up on the hardware game, the team was free to develop for someone else's hardware, and decided to create their next game, Valkyria Chronicles, for what looked to be the sure-thing system at the time, the PlayStation 3. This was, naturally, more or less immediately followed by Sony proceeding to do everything in their power to squander their position of dominance and shoot themselves repeatedly in the foot. Thanks to this string of bad luck, one of the best game developers in the world, rather than being a household name today, is spending most of her time on such prestigious projects as a remake of Altered Beast and clones of the Brain Age games.
You may have noticed in the above account that I skipped straight from Phantasy Star 2 to Phantasy Star 4. What about PS3? Shouldn't it have actually seen a release in the sweet spot of the Genesis era? Indeed it was, and in fact it seems to be the most well-known game to bear the name before that honor was taken by Phantasy Star Online. Unfortunately, PS3 is the red-headed bastard child of the Phantasy Star Family.
PS2 is a very direct sequel to the original Phantasy Star (albeit one set 1000 years later). While not nearly as impressive in scope or visuals (strange really given the hardware upgrade), it was also an RPG of considerable quality, notable for its surprisingly dark and original storyline, featuring both the first plot-driven death of a playable character in an RPG, and the event responsible for Phantasy Star 1 having 3 planets to travel to, while PS4 features two planets and a relatively new asteroid belt.
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Rather than have the original developer create a third game right away, the decision was made to let someone else (the leader of Sonic Team, another Sega subdivision whose best known game should be obvious) have a go at the series for its third outing. The resulting game (Phantasy Star 3 if you haven't been paying attention), while not bad per se was, to put it mildly, different. Shockingly short, essentially unconnected to the rest of the series (the big reveal halfway through is that the entire game secretly takes place within one of several massive escape ships fleeing from that whole planetary destruction bit in PS2), featuring some just plain odd mechanics (it's possible for fallen characters to cast revive on themselves for instance), and a jarring visual style with monsters ranging from giant naked guys with unicorn horns to free floating syringes and cybernetically enhanced flying green cornflakes. On the upside, it made an attempt at a significantly branching multigenerational plot. At two points in the game, one has a choice of two characters to marry, yielding a different genetic mix for the next segment's protagonist, and some significant effect on the plot. Ultimately, the effort falls a little short, really only shuffling the order of a few events and changing who knows which spells at the end of the game. Still, the attempt is admirable. Incidentally, if the premise of the game sounds familiar, Sonic Team recycled the notion of the escape ship setting, and the exact same stowaway final boss for Phantasy Star Online, and to the best of my knowledge the followup Phantasy Star Universe.
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Meanwhile (in that both 3 and 4 are set 1000 years after 2), Overworks (the team who created the first two games) created a proper sequel in Phantasy Star 4. It featured the copious usage of layered, comic panel style images popping up all over the screen during cutscenes (something of a compromise between the simple still image cutscenes of the earlier games and the fully animated scenes which may have come about had it stayed a disc based game), a return from the decidedly high-tech aesthetic of PS2 to the mostly fantasy with a smattering of space opera look of the original, with a dash of post-apocolyptic wasteland added in (again, the events of PS2 are rather dark). It also features an impressive macro system for setting up commonly used collections of combat actions, a surprisingly complex combo attack mechanic, a separate battle system and collection of enemies when combat occurs in a vehicle, and a plot that's simply jam paced with the sort of back-references and overarching notions that make it a sheer joy for anyone playing the series from the beginning, concluding in a surprisingly satisfying manner that leaves no real room for further sequels.
For those wishing to play the proper Phantasy Star trilogy (that is to say, 1 2 and 4), but without easy access to the expensive, limited quantity carts from long-dead hardware, a compilation of 1 2 and 3 was released for the Game Boy Advance, while more recently, 2 3 and most notably 4 became available by way of the Sega Genesis collection for the PlayStation 2 (along with every other notable Genesis game not starting with the word Shining or developed by Climax).
