In December 1987 Sega gave Master System owners in Japan a role-playing game that looked like nothing on the Famicom. The hero was a young woman, Alis, out to avenge her brother, killed by the soldiers of the tyrant Lassic. Her quest took her through space to three planets, and underground the screen turned into a first-person view of corridors that slid smoothly past as she walked, where Wizardry, the computer game that inspired it, simply jumped from one still picture to the next. Phantasy Star was, as Famitsu describes it, Sega’s first role-playing game. It filled a 4-megabit cartridge, at a time when Sega was squeezing its arcade conversions into one or two, and it started one of the company’s longest-running series.
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: Sega.
- Released: 20 December 1987 in Japan, for the Mark III and Master System; in America and Europe by early 1989.
- Cartridge: 4 megabits, with a battery to save up to five games.
- Team: Kotaro Hayashida (planner and scenario writer), Rieko Kodama (graphics and character design), Yuji Naka (programming, including the dungeons), Naoto Ohshima among the monster artists.
- Setting: the three planets of the Algol star system: Palma, Motavia and Dezoris.
- Sequels: Phantasy Star II (1989), III (1990) and IV (1993) on the Mega Drive; Phantasy Star Online (2000) on the Dreamcast.
Making a Sega RPG
Dragon Quest had made the role-playing game a Japanese sensation, and Kodama admitted its success was “very mind-blowing”. But she remembered the team’s motive differently: “we wanted to make an RPG for the sake of trying something new - not because it was more profitable for the company.” The planner and scenario writer, Kotaro Hayashida, said the team took its ideas from American computer games played on the Apple: “Phantasy Star borrowed ideas from both Ultima and Wizardry!”
The world was science fiction and fantasy at once, with robots and spaceships alongside swords, spells and dragons. Kodama, who had joined Sega in 1984 and drew under the credit name “Phoenix Rie”, said she wanted “a universe like Star Wars” in which every planet had its own cultures and customs. She drew on Star Wars and Alien, table-top games like Dungeons & Dragons and Norse mythology. Her one regret was a technical one: the cartridge was too small for both Japanese alphabets, so the Japanese text is all in katakana.
Naoto Ohshima, later the designer of Sonic, was a new artist on his first project. On his first day he had drawn Superman on Sega’s light-pen drawing system to learn how it worked, so when Kodama wanted a muscular warrior for the party she asked him to design Odin. The rest of his time went on monsters: “my Phantasy Star experience was just drawing one monster after another.”
The dungeons and the monsters
What players remembered were the dungeons. Hayashida found the 3D mazes of Wizardry clunky, because the view “simply pasted a new screen without any kind of transitional effect”, so that “there was often no way of telling if you’d moved at all”. Phantasy Star animated each step instead. To save memory the dungeon walls used “a rotation trick where each of the four corners is identical, so it only took one-fourth as much memory”. The programming was Naka’s. Takashi Shoji, then a young Sega programmer, remembered the “smooth movement of the 3D dungeon” and Naka “developing the dungeon animation at the development booth next door”.
The monsters moved too. Hayashida believed Phantasy Star was the first console role-playing game of its kind with animated enemies. The Master System could not show sprites that large, so the team drew most of each big monster into the background and used sprites only for the parts that moved.
The heroine
Alis sets out alone and gathers a party on the way: Myau, a Musk Cat; Odin, the warrior; and a wizard. The Western box art shows her with her companions, against a sunlit planet. Kodama, one of the first women in Japanese game development to become well known, said later that she had not thought much about being a woman while making games, but that her games “might have been a bit different from the ones that were made by an all-male team, both in terms of story and art style”.
Reaching the West
Sega announced Phantasy Star for America at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago in June 1988, and Tonka, which then handled the Master System in America, advertised it as “Sega’s newest adventure role-playing video game”, with “space travel to three worlds” and a built-in memory to “save up to five separate adventures”. John Sauer, the Tonka copywriter who localised it, recalled that the translation came back from Japan “in very stilted English”, and that he rewrote it into copy that read well.
British magazines admired it and winced at the price. Computer and Video Games reviewed it in March 1989, alongside Y’s, as one of “two excellent RPGs released this month”. Its reviewer found “puzzles, battles, lots of interaction and a fair bit of depth”, and thought “real RPG fans should definitely check Phantasy Star out”. His “only reservation” was “its monumental price”: forty pounds seemed a lot, even for a big game with a battery-backed memory. He gave it 75%. In America, Computer Gaming World looked back in 1990 on a game that “was really different”, praising its combat system and the way characters joined the party “each bringing unusual skills or magical talents”, and passed on the “accepted wisdom” that the response to it had “propped up Sega long enough for it to introduce the Genesis”.
In Brazil, Sega’s partner Tectoy translated Phantasy Star into Portuguese.
The series
The sequels moved to the 16-bit Mega Drive. Phantasy Star II followed in Japan on 21 March 1989, with Naka and Ohshima working together in Sega’s new AM8 department; Phantasy Star III came next, and Phantasy Star IV, directed by Kodama, returned to the Algol system a thousand years after II. In the spring of 1994 it stood at the top of Edge’s Japanese Mega Drive chart. At the end of 2000 Naka’s Sonic Team turned the series into Phantasy Star Online for the Dreamcast, in which up to four players from different countries explored together over the internet. Phantasy Star Online 2 followed in 2012 and its large update New Genesis in 2021. Kodama, later a producer on Sega’s Sega Ages reissues, went back to the original game for its Nintendo Switch version.
Sources
- Steve Jarratt and Damien McFerran, SEGA Master System: a visual compendium (Bitmap Books, 2019): pp. 52–53, recollections of Naoto Ohshima (Odin, the Superman drawing, the monsters) and Kotaro Hayashida (Ultima and Wizardry, the animated dungeon transitions, the rotation trick, the animated monsters); pp. 76–78, interview with Rieko Kodama (joining Sega in 1984, “Phoenix Rie”, Dragon Quest, Star Wars, katakana, Phantasy Star IV, Sega Ages, working as a woman); pp. 97–98, interview with John Sauer (the localisation); p. 143, interview with Takashi Shoji (Naka and the dungeon animation); p. 186, box art (Alis at the centre).
- Famitsu.com, “『ファンタシースター』シリーズが発売35周年”, 20 December 2022 (web, secondary): release date, Sega’s first RPG, the 4-megabit cartridge, the heroine and the Algol system, Phantasy Star II on 21 March 1989. https://www.famitsu.com/news/202212/20286703.html
- Computer and Video Games issue 89, March 1989, pp. 92–93: Phantasy Star and Y’s reviewed (Alis, Lassic, three planets, three companions, five save slots, the price; 75%).
- Computer Play, September 1988: report from the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, June 1988 (Sega announces Phantasy Star, a “Mega role playing game”).
- Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 1, 1989: Sega/Tonka advertisement for Phantasy Star.
- Computer Gaming World issue 76, November 1990, p. 84: Roe R. Adams III, “An Overview of the Evolution of CRPGs on Dedicated Game Machines”.
- Sega Visions, August 1994: Phantasy Star IV (Palma, Motavia and Dezoris; a thousand years after Phantasy Star II).
- Edge issue 7, April 1994: Japanese Mega Drive chart (Phantasy Star IV at number 1).
- Retro Gamer issue 26, 2006, pp. 24–28: Sean Smith, “Company profile: Sonic Team” (Naka, Ohshima and Phantasy Star II in AM8).
- Edge issue 92, Christmas 2000: Phantasy Star Online.
- SuperGamePower (Brazil) issue 42, September 1997, p. 12: Tectoy’s Portuguese Phantasy Star.
- Wikipedia, “Phantasy Star” (web, secondary): Phantasy Star Online 2 (2012) and New Genesis (2021). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantasy_Star