OMG Nintendo

In North America, the Sega Master System had almost no real market share to speak of. It was a big deal in the UK and Europe, but Nintendo just blew Sega out of the water here.

There was always one game that got people a little curious about that other system, though, and that was Phantasy Star. Whenever you picked up a magazine that wasn't Nintendo Power, there were usually a few lines about it; I remember Game Players' Guide running many letters concerning how to find the hovercraft or how not to get petrified. I knew a lot of guys who rented a Master System back in the day just to check this game out, to see how it stacked up to Dragon Warrior or Final Fantasy.

Time hasn't been kind to either Phantasy Star or its series, sadly. The first game is a very 8-bit RPG, complete with an unstated expectation that you will grind your face off. (I have a pet theory that so many people about my age are so prone to constant multitasking because of grindy PC and console games. You had to be watching TV or listening to the radio or something while you circled Corneria killing imps for four hours because otherwise, you would go utterly mad.)

Phantasy Star's big innovations within the genre are some of the earliest RPG cutscenes, the first-person dungeon crawls, its weird science-fantasy setting (wizards riding around in hovercrafts; magic-wielding warriors hacking robots apart with swords), and being one of the first games in general to feature a female protagonist. Alis Lansdale has about as much personality as anyone else does in an eight-bit game, but this is a point in time when Samus Aran suddenly being female caused a medium-wide seismic event.

The game's focus on grinding is most of what makes it hard to play now, after grinding was all but absent in the sixteen and thirty-two bit console generations. (Of course, then it made a big comeback on the PS2, because... I don't know, somebody lost a bet.) Phantasy Star is still an important game, though, especially if you're like me and spent your adolesence wondering about this strange and foreign game for that system nobody had. If you bought Phantasy Star IV last year, you can play the original and get a lot of cameos and references from PSIV that were previously indecipherable.