Retro Game of the Month December 2017: Phantasy Star IV (Genesis)

Siliconemelons

Siliconemelons

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I think the visuals on Genesis games is always something interesting from a technology and art perspective.

The Sega 16bit beat out the snes by a year or two - so it's like an odd mix of older style art direction but with more powerful ability mixed with random things that fully use the higher visual impact.

Sega games always imo did not look as... clean as SNES titles - this game has a lot of that - the "tall" sprites are good, yet very un-detailed at the same time.

Battles look good with attack animations meshing well with their static sprites etc.

The overworld again is this mix... the "general" stuff is sort of standard but then have some random outstanding elements.
 
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Szlia

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I'll start it sometime this week. I need to unearth my Megadrive and check if it works, but before doing that I need to make room for it.

On a side note, there are some Megradrive games that have the Genesis version on the cartridge (QuackShot for instance) and my Megadrive is modded with a switch to turn it into a Genesis. I doubt a text heavy RPG has both versions on the one cartridge, but I am curious to see if it has.
 
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Gavinmad

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Off the top of my head, Foi is fire, Wat is water, Tsu is holy, Zan is wind, Gra is lightning for offensive stuff spells. Res is ST heal, Sar is AoE heal, Rever is a res, but they don't work on a certain type of character (I'll avoid spoiling exact details on that one).

Fuck if I can remember all of the skills since they're unique to each character, but most of them are pretty obvious from the graphic. There are skill combos but they don't work very well outside of macros since they only trigger if the characters in the combo are next to each other in the turn order. Macros aren't the greatest thing in the world since iirc you can't program them in combat and you may want to do something other than what you have programmed into the macro for the characters not involved in the combo.
 
Melvin

Melvin

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Tanoomba said:
What did you end up deciding on?

I found some fan service in school book shelves:

...And was wondering if they did something similar in the Japanese version.
Click to expand...

The whole main story for PSIV could kind of be considered fan service for the first three Phantasy Star games, so the references to other Sega games seem pretty consistent with what the main story writer would do (as opposed to the references being added by an English translator). But there are also places where the English translation fails a little bit.

Apparently there's one monster sprite that was removed in the American version for fairly obvious reasons.

I've been looking for a fan translated Japanese rom a little bit the last couple days, but I haven't found one yet. :/
 
Tanoomba

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Melvin said:
But there are also places where the English translation fails a little bit.
Click to expand...
A lot of 8 bit and 16 bit RPGs have iffy translation, so I was actually quite impressed with how natural a lot of the dialogue in PSIV sounded. Still, it's understandable that a few lines don't carry the same meaning as they did in the original Japanese.

Localisation is a very tricky beast, so it's kind of interesting to have these historical remnants of a time when even AAA first party games included some awkward translation. Kotaku has a recurring piece where they compare Final Fantasy VII's original Japanese text with the English translation. I only watched the first couple, but it's pretty interesting.
 
Tanoomba

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Also... Wowza!

acacia2.png


I'm not terribly surprised this didn't make it into the American version.
 
Siliconemelons

Siliconemelons

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Ehh I was expecting nips on sprite for removal...but then yeah E...really... FF's have nude Barbie sprites, but then again they are not Es
 
Gavinmad

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Weren't no 6 year olds beating PSIV back then, not like you could just internet walkthrough your way through everything. PSIV was fucking hard.
 
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Ryanz

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Alright, gonna check this out. I've got the ROM loading up now. Hopefully I can knock it out before Friday when the new Path of Exile league starts, otherwise it's going to have to be put on the back burner.

While I'm commenting, I have a suggestion for the games we are voting on moving forward. Instead of just throwing away all the previous months games and listing new ones, why not take the top 3-5, or any game that got > a certain % of total votes and relist them for the next month and than fill in the rest with other games. This way we always have a solid list of top games to choose from. Just a suggestion, since I was sad to see previous games from last month that got a lot of votes disapear.
 
ronne

ronne

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The spell names are taking a lot of getting used to for sure. I have to check a spell list constantly every time I want to go cast something that isn't a basic ice/water/fire nuke.

There's some odd difficulty spikes here and there, mostly revolving around when it switches your party members. Some of the combinations of people it gives you at certain points are just awful and are completely lacking in magic damage, or they can't actually complete any of the combo moves etc.

I did figure out way later than I should have that some items have in battle use effects. Not even consumables, but stuff like the wooden cane will just cast the basic cure spell for free every time you use it etc.
 
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Lunis

Lunis

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PS 1 & 2 were remade for PS2 in japan called Phantasy Star Generations. They both have fan translations at romhacking.net.

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Rezz

Rezz

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Note about dual weapons vs. shield... the primary "problem" guy you would want using a shield is Hahn, because he has ass for HP/Defense. Every other character that can use a shield gets better types of armor and generally has higher hp, so you end up using that more often. For example, I don't think I ever use Chaz with a shield, even though he can totally use one. The two handed weapons also give him some token defense to make up for them, so it ends up favoring the heavier damage output most of the time. Hahn never really becomes a melee beast, so him losing 1/2 of crap DPS doesn't really matter as much.

For the rest, such as Rika, you want her hitting with both weapons as she tends to go first, and you can mitigate a lot of damage by having her double tap fools left and right before they get a turn.
 
ronne

ronne

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Having your mages dual wield shields is a real strategy later on once their TP pools get large enough that spamming spells isn't a big deal.
 
Ryanz

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I'm actually really enjoying this. Aside from not knowing wtf they were thinking with the spell/technique name's this is really scratching a good ole days final fantasy type itch. Also pushing A when there's nothing around your char and having to scroll through him saying "there's nothing of interest" for the umpteenth time is pretty aggravating too. Also having the game auto walking around unmovable objects when going in one direction instead of just making your character stop in place also is a bit weird but forgivable. Yea... other than all that the games really fun. Graphic's are great, cut scenes are pretty cool with a comic book block segments collage on the screen, combat is interesting and kind of challenging at times and has cool things like skill synergies between characters. I like it. Not sure I'm gonna finish the game in time, but I'll play it as much as I can.
 
Siliconemelons

Siliconemelons

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only at the "start" per normal RPG play book of plots, but... is this game about fighting against scientologists? hehe - just got to Zios castle/tower - accepted the sand worm job, got raped by sandworms, said screw it and progressed onward... save state walk-walk-save-walk--encounter, choose to do it or not, reset etc. etc. is hax - how this game chooses its RNG for encounters and enemy's is so all over the map you can sploit this - I can save state, take one step get 5 bad guy encounter, load state back, take the same step direction and not encounter and enemy for like 10...
 
pharmakos

pharmakos

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Xadion said:
only at the "start" per normal RPG play book of plots, but... is this game about fighting against scientologists? hehe - just got to Zios castle/tower - accepted the sand worm job, got raped by sandworms, said screw it and progressed onward... save state walk-walk-save-walk--encounter, choose to do it or not, reset etc. etc. is hax - how this game chooses its RNG for encounters and enemy's is so all over the map you can sploit this - I can save state, take one step get 5 bad guy encounter, load state back, take the same step direction and not encounter and enemy for like 10...
Click to expand...

cheater
 
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