Back in ancient times, most school years would end with me starting a new 16-bit RPG. By the time everyone in my party was at level 99 and knew Ultima, it would only be a couple of weeks until the next semester started. I stopped playing RPGs somewhere around the time I stopped having summer vacations.
Phantasy Star II is the very definition of a summer vacation RPG. It's long, difficult, and grindey. Your characters walk at a crippled snail's pace, the translated text makes little sense at times, and the battle sequences just might give you seizures.
Phantasy Star II is also one of my very favorite RPGs. I'll never be able to play it again in its original form, though.
Compared to modern RPGs (or even many other RPGs on the Sega Genesis), Phantasy Star II is a slothful dinosaur of a game, but it's still playable as long as you meet its prerequisites. You're going to need a lot of empty free time without regular work or obligations, endless amounts of patience, and maybe even a few personal problems to mull over as you settle in for consecutive hours of distractionless level grinding.
There's a lot to like in Phantasy Star II, and the series as a whole was way ahead of its time in many respects. The plot has an amazing amount of depth and subtlety for its era, the characters are unique and memorable, and the futuristic, flawed utopian setting stands in a class all its own in comparison to the faux-medieval Dungeons and Dragons crap you've come to expect from even the best of the RPG genre.
It's slow, though. Oh man, is it slow.
Way back when, Phantasy Star II had more than enough charm and intrigue to make you want to see it through over an otherwise boring three months of summer vacation. You'd be fully content to march your party back and forth across the overworld and fight monsters for hours upon hours. Days would be spent with your gaze settled at some point beyond the TV screen as you paid little attention to the sun outside rising and setting.
I can't do this anymore. The time of the summer vacation RPG has passed for me. As much as I enjoyed those days, Phantasy Star II is just too slow for me to play nowadays, especially in its original form. If only the Virtual Console had a fast-forward button, or they somehow hacked in the Sega Saturn Phantasy Star Collection's option to change your walking speed, I'd be all over this.
But no, Phantasy Star II on the Virtual Console is the same slow, crazily difficult experience it's always been, and its age shows now more than ever. I still like it a lot, though, and if you've got the patience to put up with its faults, you'll be rewarded with a great, twist-filled storyline and one of the more memorable RPG experiences of the 16-bit era.
Me, I'll wait on a remake.
Here's a video of the intro. Not shown: dozens of hours leveling up just before the final boss. Ah, misspent youth.
