30 Years Ago Phantasy Star IV Pulled Off Final Fantasy VII‘s Big Plot Twist First
Phantasy Star IV is as good as any other RPG you’ve played from the 16-bit era. It doesn’t have the kind of breathless following of Chrono Trigger, nor does it have the kind of defenders that Final Fantasy VI does against people who like other Final Fantasy games. It doesn’t get name dropped as an inspiration in features covering the latest indie RPG like EarthBound, and it didn’t change the entire landscape like… well, pick a 16-bit Dragon Quest, it doesn’t matter which one, it’s Dragon Quest.
That lack of massive influence or a huge fan base that’s persisted for decades or developers willing to tell the media that “everything you’re about to play is Phantasy Star IV’s fault” doesn’t change the fact that the game rules. Unfortunately, despite being a first-party title developed by an internal Sega team for the popular Sega Genesis and Mega Drive, Phantasy Star IV never stood a real chance in its day.
The Genesis might have been popular, yes, but by the time Phantasy Star IV released, that popularity was past tense. There were 40 million Genesis systems out there in living rooms around the world, but just 3.6 million of those were in Sega’s home country of Japan, where RPGs were still far less niche than in North America or Europe, despite trends in those regions heading in the right direction. Phantasy Star IV came out in North America in February of 1995, mere months before the arrival of the Sega Saturn, and months after the 32X add-on for the Genesis had been released in the same region. And Phantasy Star IV wasn’t much cheaper than the 32X, either: it retailed for just under $100, which is the kind of thing that just happened sometimes in the much less regimented ‘90s gaming environment. Sure, $70 games are maddening, but check out an inflation calculator to see what a $100 game in 1995 would cost today to see how bad things used to be.
Sega’s success with the Genesis had peaked in the summer of 1993; after that, a freefall began. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was the best-selling (non-bundled) game for the console, at 7.6 million copies, and Sega couldn’t get anything else to come close. Sonic the Hedgehog 3/Sonic & Knuckles was their next most successful effort, at four million copies, and just 19 titles crossed the one million seller threshold. Compare that to the rival SNES, which logged 54 million sellers, 30 of which released after Sega’s peak period—Donkey Kong Country was one such title, and it outsold every non-bundled game in the Genesis library despite not coming out until November of ‘94.
Sega caught up to Nintendo as they’d hoped to during the Genesis era, and then held them off for a time thanks to console sales in places like North America, Europe, and Brazil. Despite coming out with so many classic, killer games, though, and with third parties producing plenty of excellence, as well, people just weren’t buying the software to go with the hardware. By the time Phantasy Star IV hit in 1995, the Genesis might as well have not existed. The 16-bit era, as a whole, had effectively come to a close as far as sales and profits were concerned, with a game industry expert even going so far as to say that this period was “like a return of the 1982 Atari Shock,” an event which collapsed the games market in America. So no, the $100 Sega Genesis RPG did not reverse those fortunes, not when that $100 could have been stashed a little bit longer to go toward a 32-bit system: the 3DO had been out for almost a year-and-a-half at that point, the Saturn was coming in May of ‘95, and the Playstation was set to follow. The SNES would hold on a bit longer as a bridge to its 64-bit successor, but the Genesis couldn’t manage the same even with games like Phantasy Star IV to turn to.
Reviewers of the day were positive, but not that positive, with complaints that Phantasy Star IV looked too similar to 1990’s Phantasy Star II (what?) and hadn’t changed nearly enough (what?!) from that game from five years before. There were even complaints about Phantasy Star IV’s music (WHAT?!?!?). Retrospective reviews have (correctly) been much more willing to outright praise the game as one of the best on the system—not just among RPGs, but Genesis games in general. It took this word of mouth campaign some time—and plenty of re-releases in various Sega Genesis collections and through Virtual Console and the like—for people to come around on Phantasy Star IV and realize just how great it was. Which all came too late for that game, but not too late for the people willing to give it the shot that it didn’t get back in ‘95.
That Phantasy Star IV wasn’t an instant success did rob the zeitgeist of something, however. It managed a feat that Final Fantasy VII was—and still is—lauded for, nearly a year before Square’s genre-altering megahit had even picked the console it would release on. Now, Phantasy Star IV wasn’t the first RPG to permanently kill a party member—it wasn’t even the first Phantasy Star game to do this—but it managed to be far more successful with the poignancy of the act than its predecessors. Just for a couple of examples: Final Fantasy IV (released as II in North America) killed off the mage, Tellah, who was in your party for the second time, all the way back in 1991. What separates the death of Tellah from that of Phantasy Star IV’s Alys Brangwin, however, is the shock of it all.
Tellah outright said he didn’t care if he died so long as he got his revenge on the villainous Golbez, who had killed his daughter in an air raid. Tellah used a spell he was too old and too weak to cast without suffering severe consequences, knowing that this was the case, when he got his chance at said revenge. There was no shock there, other than maybe surprise that Tellah couldn’t be talked out of casting Meteo(r). Which is not the same thing as saying that it wasn’t sad to see play out, by any means, but it lacked that wide-eyed surprise that, say, the death of Aerith in Final Fantasy VII held, and didn’t impact the overall plot in the same way Aerith’s death did, either. Tellah was an old man, willing to throw his life away for revenge as he felt himself without any other worth or future that meant more than that act. Aerith was a young woman, just learning about the world at large and herself, and she was violently cut down by Sephiroth in a way that we just didn’t see happen in RPGs…
…but only because so many people had missed out on Phantasy Star IV. Like with Tellah, the death of Nei in Phantasy Star II was still effective as a storytelling device, but since that game—first released in 1989—was so sparse with its dialogue and character backstories and personality, as was the style at the time due to limited cartridge space, it didn’t have anywhere near the impact of the death of Alys in Phantasy Star IV. Alys was the character at the front of your party as it walked the map. It was her voice that’d pop up to comment on anything you inspected or NPCs you spoke to. She was the older, wiser, more experienced of the two co-protagonist hunters you began the game with, and you were given far more opportunities to know her, with the promise of even more, than Nei or Tellah. And then, literally out of nowhere in your first encounter with the dark wizard, Zio, Alys was struck with a magical wave of pure darkness, which she jumped in front of to save her young partner, Chaz, who, it turns out, is the actual protagonist of the game, and its central hero.
Chaz and company escape the battle. Alys ends up lying in bed, feverish and struggling to speak. The game sets you up for a quest to retrieve a mystical item and a mage capable of wielding it—the Psycho Wand and Alys’ mysterious old friend, Rune—while implying that doing so would be the key to saving Alys since this was the key to stopping Zio. The party climbs to the top of the Ladea Tower after meeting Rune on a lower level, defeats the beast Zio had sent to retrieve the wand before Chaz could, and then Rune, after noticing some kind of mystical change, commands a return to Alys’ side while that’s still possible. She has just enough energy to say her goodbyes to Rune, to the 16-year-old and not yet ready for this Chaz, and to you, the player, who has just lost a character you assumed would have been there with you for this entire quest.
It’s an incredible scene, in no small part thanks to Phantasy Star IV’s fantastic use of mood-setting music and its paneled cutscene storytelling that allowed for so much more character expression and visual fleshing out of a scene than sprites alone could accomplish. But like with a tree falling in the forest with no one around, Phantasy Star IV wasn’t the subject at recess or in between classes like Final Fantasy VII would be, because the Genesis wasn’t the Playstation, and Phantasy Star, for all its innovation and excellence, wasn’t Final Fantasy as far as commercial success goes. The Sega Genesis was already dead, even if it didn’t know it yet. The era of the Playstation, and the rise of RPG popularity in the west through it, was imminent. Phantasy Star IV missed the moment, and when it returned in 2000, it was as Phantasy Star Online, an online multiplayer experience that, while amazing in its own right, went in a completely different direction than the series it sprung out of.
While the timing wasn’t right for Phantasy Star IV in 1995 for myriad reasons, nothing is stopping you from picking it up, 30 years later, and experiencing it now. The death of Alys hits hard whether you know it’s coming or not, whether it’s the first time or the fifth or the… I don’t know how many times I’ve played Phantasy Star IV since first picking up a used copy at a Funcoland in the mid ‘90s, but trust me when I say that I’m testing the upper limits of this theory. The game did innovate in meaningful ways, despite what reviewers of the day might have said, and it’s both a joy to look at and to listen to thanks to a clear mastery of the Genesis’ capabilities, with bright colors and loads of detail on these large sprites, both in and out of battle, to go with the incredible soundtrack and paneled cutscenes.
Phantasy Star IV is one of the highlights of the 16-bit era, despite sales figures that suggest otherwise. It’s a true classic, however, and one you should set aside 15-20 hours for in the present. It’ll stick with you, as much as its far more successful contemporaries already have, and what more can you ask for from a game than that?
Marc Normandin covers retro videogames at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Twitter at @Marc_Normandin.