I've spent a lot of time describing the story and what I've done in the game, but I feel like I haven't said anything about the game itself. There are basically four or five different screens in the game, a field or world view, a town view (both of which are seen from a top down perspective), the dungeon view, battle view, and a menu view. The battle and menu are very similar, as is the view used when speaking to NPCs; the last three are all a first-person perspective, with commands on the left side and quick character stats along the bottom. Dungeons have a 3D effect when moving through them, which is noted as the most technically impressive part of the game along with the enemy animations for each attack.
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| Not impressed? You should see it action. |
Like most games of this time there's no tutorial; a player during this era is lucky to get any kind of back story in the game itself before given control. Here we get some reason for going out to explore, and a short term goal, but no explanation on what the menu options are used for. This is all explained in the manual to a point; however, a lot is left to player to discover through trial and error.
An example is the talk command, which isn't used to talk to people in town; it's used to try to talk to enemies in battle (the option is only available in battle). However, this command is useful so infrequently that I had completely forgotten about it during my fight with Dr. Mad where it might have actually worked. Even with that in mind at the time, I probably would not have used it because it takes up the entire party's turn for that round. There are spells that Myau and Noah get to communicate with a wider variety of enemies (Chat and Tele respectively), but they also take a full turn away from everyone. With no way to recover MP in the field, I'm not about to use these spells loosely.
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| Ooo~! New spell! Tele... port? |
Most random encounters will end by mashing the button to select attack. Spells are limited (so far only 2 damage spells and two defense spells), and with few magic points to cast them I find it best to save them all for healing or boss fights. Each character has a set number of MP, and each spells takes a certain amount. That amount isn't displayed anywhere though, so how do we know how much a spell costs? Cast it, and then write it down.
I've run across this before in other games. Trial and error is the norm, and back in the day I would play following these steps: save, try something, and reload if I didn't like it. It's how these games trained me to play. This brings me to a point about learning a game because as players we need to put real world logic aside, and re-learn how things work using the game's logic. Reading about it in the manual is one way (not that much fun), a tutorial that explains it all is another (tiny bit more fun than a manual, or boring if we already know), and trial and error (fun or frustrating) is the fallback. The problem is game developers expected players to have the manual, which wasn't always the case.
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| I've always wanted a Laser Sled! |
A good example of game logic is determining if a sword in the shop is better than the axe I have in my hand. In most simple games one can assume that the more expensive item is better. However, to truly know, we'd need to buy it and try it. This goes for items that have no (or a confusing) description in the shop as well. What does it do? Let's buy it and see. Why do the actions save, buy, try, reload seem like a reasonable solution for designers of this time? I can only think of two reasons: increasing time spent in the game (spent all your money on an item that you don't need, go grind more money), or an attempt to infuse a sense of mystery and discovery. Either way, lingering questions are left unanswered.
In Phantasy Star, it follows the logic that more expensive things have a higher attack or defense, and this is confirmed if we check character stats when equipping each weapon and armor. The abbreviations can make this difficult when I'm looking at the type of thing an item is, but it mostly works. However, there's only way to tell who can use a piece of equipment, try to equip it. A perfect example is a Glove in the weapon shop. Who can use this? I'm not entirely sure, and the only way to find out is for me to buy it and see. Possibly it's a studded glove for Odin to attack with, or replaces his shield, or maybe it's for Noah, or it's an item I need for a later quest, or... who knows. At 3000 mesetas, it's not exactly an easy buy at this point without knowing more.
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| Just one? |
It's inevitable that games are a learning experience. There's ultimately no way around this; I don't believe there should be one. The experience is what makes the game fun, and the game showing that we've learned something is positive reinforcement that our actions are correct. Making uninformed decisions is not fun for me, and trial & error aspects of games aren't much better. As a player, I look forward to decisions where I know the expected outcome; even if it's a rogue-like game where every item is random each time, I'd like to know there's a possibility that I'm holding a scroll of character death or invulnerability. Text is at a premium with older games, so I understand how descriptions get truncated, but with random NPCs telling me useless facts, I'm less forgiving when spells don't list the MP cost or equipment use is left up to the imagination. I guess it comes down to if the decision has risks (will set me back in some way) I'd like to know what the risk is, and the rewards.