Just for posterity, I want to add here that it's now my 1 year anniversary of being a member of this site. At the moment I'm going through a Phantasy Star phase. I've got really far in PSIV, maybe around halfway through PSII, have started PS again after getting pretty far in it on GBA years ago, and am planning on starting PSIII at some point. On top of that, I keep toying with the idea of playing PSO again but will probably end up playing PSU. I had the latter on Xbox 360 and played it a lot but didn't complete it. I think I got very distracted by the "make your own character", non-storyline mode.

Just to sum up my feelings on the PS games I've recently played:

PSII seems really appealing and is great on paper but the gameplay is so horribly shallow and overpoweringly repetitive that it's actually really unpleasant to play. Such a shame. It has the basics of a great setting, storyline and characters but barely scrapes the surface of any of them. The gameplay seems okay at first - "good for its age!" you might hopefully tell yourself - but eventually becomes an abhorrent chore that threatens to totally ruin the experience.

PSIV is really good although also suffers in some way the more you play it. It kind of feels like they didn't know what to do with the story once they killed Alys and disposed of Zio in an almost laughably anti-climactic way. The storyline then just kind of lazily wobbles around, sending you on dungeon crawls to get one magical artifact after another and bring back a total of 3 versions of Dark Force in a way that seems kind of desperate. It keeps reaching for some epic moment but never quite getting there. It could've spent a lot of this time on developing the characters more rather than effectively retreading the same hour of gameplay and story over and over again in an attempt to pad the game out. Oh well, still a good game.

The original game is oddly compelling. There's nothing particularly good about it, indeed it's really clunky and slow with only a very faint storyline that rarely makes itself known. Still, there's something really satisfying about the kind of open world setting that just lets you wander around and try to figure out what to do.

I also recently completed one of the short Phantasy Star II Text Adventures, the Shilka one. Hopefully I'll do all of them as well as the Game Gear spinoffs.

It'll be interesting to look back on this in a year and see how it all turned out.