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The Black Sheep of the Phantasy Star Series
Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom is one of the most unfairly lambasted games on the Sega Genesis. It was originally released on April 21st, 1990 in Japan, then later localized for North America and released here in the Summer of 1991 after a very long wait for fans of the series. It was the first Phantasy Star game to be developed without any major involvement by Yuji Naka or Rieko Kodama, who were both busy with other projects. Instead of waiting, Sega decided to hand it off to new leads, who produced a different kind of Phantasy Star game.
It is of my opinion that fans of the first two games were so quickly thrown off by it's different setting (medieval instead of sci-fi) that they didn't give PSIII much of a chance to begin with. Often, people will write about it being completely disconnected from it's peers that it presents you with one fact: they didn't play this game for very long at all. I won't go into a lot of detail about this so that I might spare some plot details to uncover on your own.
My first experience with the game came from a rental store in early 1992. I bought it for $10 a handful of months after it's release and took it home. By that time, I was a hardcore console RPG junkie. I had played every RPG released for the Genesis, Master System, or the NES that I could get ahold of. I had seen PSIII in magazines before and was looking into my first hands-on experience with the series.
I then proceeded to play the game for the next few weeks and enjoyed it the whole time. There ya go, fellows. Living proof that playing Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom for the Sega Genesis is not guaranteed to give you AIDs, kill your parents and pets, or provide Chevy Chase with a new talk show that will fail within five weeks. Oops. Perhaps I can't prove that it didn't cause the last accussed crime, but I digress.
The first thing anyone mentions when writing about PSIII is the diverging plot lines. Eventually, as you make progress through the game, you are given an option of potential mates. This affects the offspring that you get to play as. Ah, you say -- this is where the whole "generations" thing comes into play. Right you are, Watson! Ultimately, this provides you with four different endings for the game, as well as other effects on the game world.
The battle system in the game is... much different from the other games in the series. When it's time to input commands for your party, the cursor defaults to an option where your party auto-attacks for one round. It's fitting, as you will be selecting it the overwhelming majority of the time. Techniques play a very diminished role in comparison to the other Phantasy Star games.
You can still select individual commands for your party members or even set the entire battle to auto-attack if you wish. Most random battles will be a joke, so the ease of not going through 4-5 individual selections is actually welcome. It's only when you confront the major encounters that you have to employ any serious strategy.
One of the most unique aspects of Phantasy Star III is it's music. If I were a proper music critique, perhaps I could explain to you how it makes me feel or what's particularly interesting about it to me. Unfortunately, I do not possess the knowledge to do so. I don't think I've ever heard any other Genesis games producing some of the sounds you hear in PSIII's compositions.
Phantasy Star III's biggest flaw, in my book, is it's somewhat weak presentation and translation. The graphics weren't very impressive compared to other releases at the time. The cutscenes were few and far between. The script is very basic. Sometimes, there are few clues as to what you should be doing next. When held up to it's predecessors and other games released at the time (Final Fantasy IV, for example), PSIII is just not on the same level.
So there you have it, my hastily thrown together defense for a game that the world seems to loathe. Granted, there are some things that bug me when I go back and play PSIII today, nearly 20 years later. However, I think the fact is that the game really isn't as terrible as most people say it is. It just isn't as polished as PSIV, as big as PSII, or as groundbreaking as the original Phantasy Star... and that's okay. A lot of games don't measure up to the other entries in this phenomenal RPG series that graced consoles that needed them.
tl;dr
Phantasy Star III is often struck down by jackasses who never gave it a chance in the first place. Wether you enjoyed the other games in the series or not, it's worth a look because it's a very cheap, decent RPG for the Sega Genesis, a platform that has very few. |
-Chakan, January 2010
Screenshots
Videos
External Links
The Complete Guide to Phantasy Star III
This is pretty much the lone worthwhile PSIII fansite worth visiting, with lots of information and media. If you're interested in learning more about the game, this should be your next stop.
Phantasy Star III @ Wikipedia
The Wikipedia entry for PSIII. All of the core data you need.
Phantasy Star III @ GameFAQs
Walkthroughs, cheats, etc.
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