The color of the water here certainly
I’ve been playing Phantasy Star II on Virtual Console.
PS2 is the first “true” RPG to be released on VC – I don’t count Paper Mario, since it’s just too simple, and I don’t count probably a half dozen games Jay would yell at me for because they’re SRPGs (Shining Force) or Action RPGs (Landstalker).
PS2 is also really freaking grindy. But that’s a good thing, in some ways.
Let me explain. Imagine you’re making a trip to the Amazon rainforest. You’re going into the deepest parts, and you know you’re going to be facing all kinds of nasty critters, including piranhas, various poisonous insects, enormous snakes, et cetera. If you don’t prepare, you’re going to die. That’s all there is to it.
In this sense, Phantasy Star 2 is an Amazon expedition simulator. You prepare a ton when it’s safe, and then you enter a dungeon. The individual enemies in a dungeon are no problem, but each one is going to take its toll – 5 HP here, 10 HP there – and if you prepared, you’ll be able to last a good while. Between an inventory full of healing items and healing spells, you can last long enough to explore every branch of the early dungeons.
The later dungeons pretty much require infinite patience or maps. I recommend the Climatrol map for a good idea of what a mid-game dungeon is like. All those little X marks are lava/poison squares. Look at the 6th and 7th floors (3rd and 2nd image from the bottom). Each D is a down stair, each U an up stair. If you don’t plan your route, you’d better be high-leveled or you will die. In fact, at the top of this dungeon is a boss (one of two in the whole game!) who killed my weakest party member in one shot; by the time I won, only my two strongest members were alive, and they’d used up every healing item worthy of the name.
In other words, this is a good “intense” tough game, rather than a nasty or unfair game as I would characterize SMT: Nocturne or even Ys 3. Both are also grindy, but in the sense that even with grinding, you are eventually going to run up against a simply unfair situation which will murder your party. These can occur in PS2, but I have had them happen only twice, whereas potentially unfair situations crop up about once every 20 minutes in SMT… the entire final dungeon is unfair in Ys.
Thus far, I think I’m about 25 hours into PS2 and I’d say its status as a classic is well-deserved. It’s a little bit inaccessible if your biggest conquest is Final Fantasy X, but it isn’t any harder than Dragon Warrior 7 and is only somewhat tougher than Dragon Quest 8.
So if you’ve got a Wii, and you’re looking for something RPGish… and you’re willing to put up with a bit of tedium for some tricky battles, labyrinthine dungeons and occasionally coherent sci-fi story, it’s definitely a good bet.