Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 375: Phantasy Star

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

Jeremy Parish, Nadia Oxford, and Alex Fraioli venture across the span of a solar system (or at least a few continents) to look back at Sega's first proper entry in the role-playing genre: The phenomenal phirst Phantasy Star, phor Sega Master System. Art by Leeann Hamilton and edits by Greg Leahy. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. To hear more great shows or to learn how you could become part of our consortium of independently owned podcasts, check out Greenlit Podcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, we enjoy a nice, warm, meatball parma. Everyone, welcome to episode 375 of Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish, and this week we are talking fantasy star. I think once upon a time, a very long time ago, we did a fantasy star episode, and it might have been with one of our guests this week if memory serves, but it could be possible

that I am just making things up because I'm elderly and delusional at this point of my life. So please correct me if I'm wrong. But Alex Frioli, have you been on a retronauts about fantasy star before? Hi, check it out. No. No. Okay. I was thinking back in the olden days of one-up, we did an episode.

But maybe we did an episode of Fantasy Star. I should have looked this up. But no, it's much more fun to fly by the seat of my pants. It was, yeah. I've been on two episodes about it. Dragon Quest, of course. One, I guess, on one TGS episode one year. Maybe you talked about Fantasy Star in the TGS episode.

I don't know. Yeah, that's it. It might have talked about Fantasy Star. But yeah, it's first time in an official capacity. Let's do it. We're going to an ice planet. Get your cat. Get in the ship.

Let's go. My God. All right. And who else is here? Alex is in Japan. But this person is in Canada. Hi. I am Nadia Oxford again.

I am the second half of the Axel of the Blog God RPG podcast. So I believe I am well suited for this topic, even though I did not join you. I don't know who your friend was who joined you, but I don't think it was either of us. No, we may not have done a fantasy star, or maybe it was just like, you know, with the locals at the one-up offices. It's really been a long time. Like, this podcast is almost 15 years old. So I've been doing, I've done a lot of these. So please forgive me if memory slips.

But I will say that I have only recently played Fantasy Star for the first time. I played it last fall. I was delighted by the very strange names of the monsters that do not line up with the monster appearances whatsoever, like the owl bear, the owl bear that is a flying eyeball. Yeah, okay, sorry, I was about to say owl bear. Albear, yep. It's so good. There's also, there's also a few insects, like, it's called, like, scorpion, but it's a spider. It's so good.

It's just like, they were just like, here's the D&D bestiary. Let's just line up some of these names with these random monsters. We don't know. I think dragon is still dragon, at least. Oh, okay. So there are some standards. There are some standards. Yes. But anyway, I really enjoyed the game. But I will say that I played the optimal version with which to enjoy it. Had I played it back in 1988 on Master's System, I probably would have enjoyed it, but I wouldn't have really have gotten it back then because I didn't really grok RPGs until after like Final Fantasy. So this game did actually come out in Japan, originally, the same week as Final Fantasy, the original Final Fantasy for Famicom.

But in America, this game beat Final Fantasy to punch by like two years. So this was, you know, it's kind of easy to forget about Fantasy Star now a daze, I think, and its legacy, because it's pretty much just become an MMO, which, you know, some people really, really love and it has a very dedicated fan base. But for, you know, the first five, six, seven years of its existence,

it was just a single player story-driven RPG. And for a lot of Americans, it was the first one they'd ever played because it beat everything on NES to the U.S. Like, say you localized this within like six months of its Japanese release, whereas the Famicom RPGs took, you know, two or three years to come over to the U.S. So those relatively few people who owned master systems were able to get in on the RPG revolution in America or North America long before the Nintendo nerds. Yeah, if I'm not mistaken, actually, thinking about it, I think by the time we were getting Final Fantasy, Fantasy Star 2 was, if not out on Genesis. It was very close. It was indeed out on Genesis. Final Fantasy came here in the summer of 1990, and Fantasy Star 2, I want to say, came to the U.S. in very early 1990. I don't know if that's 100% correct, but let's just say it is and that I'm right and I'm cool. So you are also right and cool. Way to go, Nadia.

Sweet. Recognition. That sounds familiar, definitely. Okay, yes. March 1990 for Fantasy Star 2. So it beat Final Fantasy 1 on NES to the Punch by several months. Wow. Yeah, it's funny because people look back and they're like, oh, yeah, the Nintendo systems were where all the RPGs were back in the 18-bit days.

But that's not correct. Sega was here first. They planted the flag. And then Nintendo brought this big steamroller. and just crushed the flag. It was terrible. Very, very unsported. Yeah. We, uh, we had a master system. My brother had one, um, before I was old enough to know what video game was. And by the time I was like six or seven, like, it was kind of nice that, uh, I used to discover video games like right around the time I was starting to learn how to read.

Oh, wow. There's games where you got to do that. Read or die. Yeah, uh, quite literally. One of the, one of my, I think one of my, I think one of my, I think one of the most endearing qualities about the original fantasy star is the fact that the translations not great um as you know a lot of games a lot especially RPGs back in the day were and to i i think for me that made the game and the planets and the monsters like even more alien does that make sense because it was just so weird um i remember thinking okay i'd ask my mom what a secondhand shop was oh you buy use things there okay and then right next to it there's a there's a first food shop and as a kid I'm like wow is there is there's like some kind of ordinal relationship

between first food and second hand I'm sure as a seven year old you were thinking ordinal also I was well it was my first word no I understand yeah baby geniuses I saw I saw the movie about you thank you but yeah it was stuff like that and and and final fantasy had a little bit of that and you know dragon warrior had less of that because it kind of went over the top with you know the whole dialect but fantasy star had its own style that I was acutely aware of, like, as a six or seven-year-old. Yeah, there definitely was, I mean, I was older than you by a few years, but there definitely was this kind of a certain rhythm or, like, linguistic logic to eight-bit video games and

even some 16-bit video games before people were like, oh, what if we made this, you know, cogent? And, yeah, like, it did kind of add to the mystery of the games. it also made me think, well, you know, video games are not very smart because look at this writing, but at the same time, like, it did feel like they kind of had their own language and you sort of had to decrypt it. It did make everything feel kind of like, you know, this is a different medium. This is a different experience than reading a book or watching TV because it's cryptic. It doesn't, what's happening? And that kind of goes doubly for a fantasy star, which has always had its own item rack in terms of healing items, revival items and stuff like that. as more fantasy-based RPGs. They're like, oh, use herbs, use magic water or whatever.

Fantasy Star was always like, use these items whose names I still to this day cannot really pronounce. If I'm playing Fantasy Star 4 even, and looking at the item list, I don't know what is what, and I have to consult a guide. And that's actually one reason I'm disappointed.

We never got M2 to do further Fantasy Star games. I'm sure we'll get into that. Yeah, so, you know, kind of on that note, fantasy star debuted in Japan within a few weeks of another major series, Megame Tensei from Atlas and Namco at the time. And that's another series that kind of developed its own, um, abstruse. naming conventions. And actually, you know, all of that goes back to wizardry because wizardry came up with its own spell names that, you know, it's not like, uh, D&D where everything you can kind of say, well, you know, magic missile, that's going to, that's going to shoot a projectile at someone with magic. Uh, but, you know, wizardry, you had these really bizarre spell names. And then

so many Japanese game developers were inspired by wizardry in the 80s. Uh, they just, I think, you know, said, well, this is, this is how it's done. This is the style. We're going to do something in this vein. So, you ended up with really arcane spell names. Like, you know, Dragon Quest is moderately arcane. Like, you can generally kind of figure out, uh, what the, what the spell names are supposed to mean? Even I still got confused with those. Yeah. But then Magame Tense, you know, you've got like Bufu and, uh, Zion and things like that. Like, what does that mean? Yeah. Like, uh, it's, it's way out there. So fantasy star, you know, kind of builds on that. Fantasy Star, one especially, really feels like a synthesis to me,

going back and playing it many, many years late. It feels in a lot of ways like a synthesis of the early Ultima games with kind of, you know, what was prevailing in sci-fi, manga, and anime around the same time. So kind of pulling together a lot of trends like Western games, but also Japanese media. And that's probably not surprising because the designer on this, the planner and writer was Kotaro Hayashita, who had made Alex Kidd, which apparently was, I was told recently, was originally conceived as a Dragon Ball game, which would explain why Alex Kidd is a monkey. And then his next game was Zillion, which is based or built around like a marketing tie-in with a Tatsunoko anime, and also with a toy, toy light gun that

the Sega light phaser actually resembles. So, you know, it's, it's kind of natural for that sort of Japanese animation of the 80s vibe, I think, to sort of soak into Fantasy Star because it comes by it very, very naturally. It was just like, you know, here's the Hayashita cartoon trilogy. It's just this one wasn't actually based on anything. That's a good point. I never even considered like the whole anime, like the anime of the time influencing the initial game, but that would explain a lot. Such as? just the overall sci-fi theme of the RPG

it's not even like traditional sci-fi as we know it as Westerners maybe but there was always kind of a it's own flavor almost like it's I mean let's just call it anime like we didn't know what that was at the time but it certainly carries over

there does feel like there's a certain like yeah 70s 80s like space aesthetics going on in all the designs like, this guy is wearing a vest, but it's probably called a space vest. That's what it looks like. You know, that kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, you've got obviously a really strong Star Wars influence here because what

was not influenced by Star Wars? I know we did an episode a long time ago saying, let's talk about the Star Wars influences in video games and everyone ended up coming up with Buckkus. But, like, I know in my heart that's wrong. There's so much Star Wars influence in 80s media, everything. thing. And sometimes it's filtered through a few different layers. Like, you know, space invaders was heavily inspired by Star Wars in a way. And then things were then inspired by space invaders. Or, you know, something like Ursa Yatsura, Lum was, was heavily inspired by Star Wars. But then

that went on to inspire other things and kind of inform other things. So there is this kind of like trickle-down effect. You know, that was big in the 80s. Yeah. Oh, God. What would you say about, like, say, um, Final Fantasy 2 and 4, its story being inspired by Star Wars. Like, would you think that would count? Hmm. Hmm. Are you talking about Japanese too? Uh, yes, yeah. For Famicom? Yeah, that's, that's like super heavily inspired by Star Wars for sure. You've got like your evil emperors. And of course, in this one, you also have, you know, like the evil emperor and everything. Emperor, yeah. So, yeah, like there's, there's a whole lot of that

just kind of going on. But at the same time, this is not a case where you look at the game and are like, oh, they just watch Star Wars and we're like, let's do that. It's, you know, it's not like Tinchie Muyo with the lightsaber, sabers and stuff. It's two degrees of separation from Star Wars. So you have, you have Alice Lansdale, the heroine, wearing, you know, kind of like armor and a tabard and using a broad sword as opposed to a light sword or something, a laser sword. But then you also have a junior party who uses a laser gun. Actually, it's the cat, right? Meow uses the laser gun. No, it's one of the dudes.

Odin. Oh, Odin. Yeah, Odin. Even though he's the beefy dude, he uses guns. That's right. Yeah. He's just not very smart. I tell you what.

He's not. Go fight Medusa just on, you know, with a gun and no mirrors. How about Madonza? She. Don't do that. Odin, or no, Alice actually does get an honest to goodness lightsaber later on in the game. That is true, but you only know that because of its name. It's not like you.

Well, hang on. Hang, oh, excuse me, wait a minute. So the striking animations, when you use your weapon, this one is a distinct, like, laser-cutting swath. Oh, okay. Sweet. I guess, yeah, I wasn't thinking that so much, but yeah, you're right. Okay, so I stand correct. I'm thinking, like, the title screen, because you see Alice on the title screen for Fantasy Star, and in my mind, I'm seeing her hold a lightsaber, but I guess I'm wrong about that.

I just a standard sword. Yep, just a blade. Just to beat down fools. She gets that from her brother, right? Her brother's like, I'm dying. Please take my sword and go kill things. Oh, I never caught that. Is that true? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm just making stuff up. Like, you know, I don't have strong childhood memories of this because I did not play it as a child. So this is not burned into my brain. I played it, like I said, pretty recently. And at this point of my life, anything I play is kind of like a blur. I don't remember it as well as the stuff that I spent, you know, months obsessing over. That's just kind of the nature of things. So, I think, I think that makes a lot of sense because it would be monumentally boneheaded for her brother Nero to try to, I don't know, attack Lassick's guards with his fists. He would probably have a sword or something. No, I mean, Odin would do it for sure, but Nero probably. Oh, that's true.

He'd throw his gun at them. He wouldn't even, like, try to shoot the gun. He just throw the gun in it. Oh, no, my laser gun ran out of ammo. I got to throw it now. I did find it anti-climactic, just a little bit in terms of, like, that Odin and the laser gun. And your whole strategy, like, he ends up with this laconian axe that was his prize for defeating Medusa. And it's just got the worst accuracy.

It's got stormtrooper accuracy. So, like, you have to put, you have to put the laser gun on him. Or he's not going to hit anything. The axe is ornamental. He's a toy. Okay. I actually lied. Nero does not give Alice a sword.

He just dies. He just dies. And she's like, well, I guess I'll go bring my own. own sword to the party. Good thing she had one, as every young lady does these days. Hell yeah. Okay. You know, when he was, uh, mastering, taking up, uh, dissidents, she was, uh, she was mastering the blade. She was mastering the blade. She was studying the blade. Well, Noah was out partying. Anyway, so the premise is, yes, very, uh, sci-fi fantasy blend, like you've got, as mentioned before, spaceships and ice diggers and you travel between

planets, but also you're fighting owl bears and ant lions and zombies and casting magic spells and things like that. There's a flying cat, which is, God, what even is that? Like, what would that be from? It seems like, that's like He-Man or something. You know, cringer. You know what's funny, you think about all the flying cats and JRP's, and in particular, of course, when you think flying cat, you think Lunar, which they're actually dragons.

And I always wondered what the story is about that. And someone mentioned to me, maybe it's a total coincidence, maybe it's not. But you look at the ronken bass version of The Hobbit, Smog looks a lot like a cat. And I think that the Ronken Bass version of The Hobbit inspired more in the way of Japanese RPGs than we know. I was actually talking to longtime friend Scott Sharkey the other day about how the moblins from Zelda look at a lot like the goblins from Ronken Bass as the Hobbit. So I don't know if that's, it's just a thought off the top of my head. It could be complete garbage, but like many of my thoughts are, but I just thought I'd toss that out. No, I would totally buy that.

You know, you also have just the Asian vision of dragons in general looking somewhat dog or cat-like, depending on how they're drawn. Yeah, kind of, you know, they're long, like long cat. Long dragon is long. R-I-P long cat. Yeah. But, yeah, I definitely, I could buy that for sure. All right, anyway, so, as well, All right, anyway, so, as mentioned before, fantasy star

debuted in December 1987 in Japan, which was a busy month. You also got Final Fantasy, Mega Man, a few other really cool things coming out that month. Video games were getting good, basically. Came out the following March in, or summer in the U.S. And sometime, it came out sometime in Europe. No one knows because Sega did not bother to write dates down. They're just like, yeah, whatever, here's a game, Europe, enjoy. And Europe was like, yes, we love you so much more than Nintendo. It was an abusive relationship. It was really, you know, it was, it was, it was not a symmetric relationship. But, you know, I'm not going to judge whatever makes them happy. Anyway, so in Japan, it came out on the Sega Mark 3, which was the system they had instead

of master system, which is basically the same thing, but it had a few technical differences. One of the differences being that it had a plug-in device called the FM synthesis module, which basically gave you expanded music. You know, we've talked about how certain Famicom cartridges in Japan had special processor chips that allowed better music, richer music, like Castlevania 3 is the really famous example. And that was on the software side, like built into the cartridges. On Sega's part, they were just like, hey, what if we did that, but we just, you know, built it into an add-on for the cartridge. or there was actually a Mark 2 version of this Mark 3, if that makes any sense,

that had the FM synth module built in. So this was one of the games that took advantage of it. And so you had, it's called PSG music for the American version. And then the FM synth music, which had like a richer sound, more instrumentation, more channels, more percussion, sounded kind of like the music you heard in arcade games around that time or would hear a few years later on Sega Genesis,

I guess a year later on Sega Genesis. So kind of a discrepancy there. But other than that, the two games were pretty similar. They did, you know, make obviously some localization changes. So the weird distinctive name for items, like the kind of low-tier healing item was a reference to calorie mate called like Pellerymate in Japan. And here they just called it burger. Oh, no, cola. And the other thing, which is like, I guess, supposed to be some sort of nutrient ration was just called a burger here.

So you're going to the first food shop and buying a burger, a space burger, but it is a burger nonetheless. It's like, remember astronaut food from the 80s when it was all like freeze dried and stuff? Maybe it was like that. I miss astronaut ice cream. I missed astronaut ice cream was the bomb. No one has ever said that. What? You miss astronaut ice cream?

It was so cool. You'd, like, put it in your mouth, and it was like, I ate a styrofoam block, but then it melted into deliciousness. It melted, and it tasted vaguely. So many children tried eating styrofoam in the 80s as a result of that stuff and were toxicified. It was terrible. Yeah, see? I did that without the help of astronaut ice cream. I just ate styrofoam when I was a kid for some reason.

Wait, they're called shipping peanuts, but they don't taste like peanuts. Why doesn't this peanut taste like the circus? It kind of does. It tastes like the elephant cages. I was going to say, it tastes like monkey after, after mussels. I was gonna say oh god I was gonna say I have a I think a lot of people have a fondness

for that PSG1 music soundtrack just because that's what I heard playing the game as a kid and when I grew up and I played oh here's fantasy star on this collection here it is in this collection they all come with this option to switch it to the FM synth

and it just always sounds completely unappealing to me it's like the PSG1 sounds like I'm on a different planet it can sound like scary and mysterious and foreboding, and the FM synth just sounds like, oh, I'm listening to a video game soundtrack. Actually, I have to, sorry, Paris, I have to say that I thought for sure that the master system came with the FM modulation thing built in, but I guess I'm wrong.

It did not. That was unique to Japan. But, you know, when M2 has put together their collections of Fantasy Star, they always include the FM synth option. And I think there is a tendency among. American collectors and retro gaming fans to be like, oh, the Japanese versions of the music, those were always better because they had more, they had more music. But it's not always true. Like, I can see people liking the PSG more in Fantasy Star because FM synthesis does have a

tendency to all kind of sound homogenous. Like, unless it's in the hands of someone really, really good, like Yuzo Koshiro, there is a tendency for it to just kind of like sound, you know, like here is a robot humming and it's humming a different melody now. but it's still the same robot humming kind of in the same timber, whereas, you know, PSG can sound quite a bit different. And there are definitely some soundtracks that, you know, they were richer on Nintendo Famicom or Disc System, but that doesn't mean they were better than the NES versions. Like, I dare you to tell me Castlevania 2 sounded better in Japanese. It sounds like, but. And the American version has a really, really great soundtrack.

So, you know, I like the FM synthesis. soundtrack in this one. But, you know, I did come into this game much later. So I can see where people would be like, nah, PSG. Retronauts contributor, GSK, I know, tweeted this morning about how their response to my call for mailbag submissions was just to say PSG is greater than FM synth. So, so, you know, there's public statements of support for PSG. Yes. But, yeah, so let me ask you both, actually what I was going to ask you both. Actually, I don't remember what I was going to ask? because I was going to ask, when did you first play this game? But you kind of talked about that already.

So instead... I don't think we did, actually. Oh, well, Alex kind of did. I didn't. Okay, so you should tell us. It's actually kind of funny, Parrish. Here's what I remember, really, is I played... It was one of those games that you play when you first learned the magic of emulation.

And you decide you're going to download it for yourself because you hear all these great things about this game and you're curious about it. and I grew up with an NES, never had a master system, but Fantasy Star was certainly one of those games where you would look at screenshots in a magazine and say, wow, I really want to try that, especially since, from my point of view, it was so interesting, unique and cool

to have a female lead who was like just kind of out there with a sword killing things. I mean, even with Samus on the NES, that was just not something that happened very often. I didn't really get to see myself in a lot of games. So I was always kind of fascinated by Alice. You don't run through Losson. in a swimsuit?

No, unfortunately. Unfortunately. So I was always a little bit fascinated with Alice from the start, but I only finally got really deep into the game with the M2 release the same way you did because it has so many quality of life improvements that as influential and inspirational as the original fantasy star is, without those improvements, it got dated quite quickly, in particular, the underground dungeons, with kind of the wizard remaps, but you didn't have a map, and that was the problem.

So it was a difficult game to play, but it did, at least let me be aware of the Fantasy Star universe, which I got into again with Fantasy Star 4 when, again, sorry, I emulated that, but I've always been fascinated by the Fantasy Star universe, and I think it's a really, really interesting setting. And I'm no hate to Fantasy Star online, because actually my husband likes it a lot, but I would like to see another single-player fantasy star that really takes advantage of that star system that was just so unique and cool and still is, in my opinion. Yeah, I know people have asked Rieko Kodama about, you know, the possibility of a fantasy star five. I asked her about that a few years ago. And, you know, her answer is always basically, you know, I feel like we kind of told the story and it's pretty complete.

But, you know, if someone wanted to create a fantasy star five, I think she means like someone internally at the company. wanted to pitch it, and it looked amazing enough, they'd be into it. But, you know, it's a question of actually making that happen. So, yeah, so I feel like the series is probably complete as is. I know the story wrapped up. So, like, which was, when you think about it, that's a very admirable thing for an RPG to do, to just have a story, close a loop. We're done. Have fun. Do something else with your time. It's very rare to see a series, an ongoing series that is profitable, the creators to step in and say, you know what? We're tying this up. It's going to be the end. But, you know, that's good. As for myself, you know, I was obviously aware of this game

back in the day because everyone who owned a Sega Master's system, which was like two people that I knew were bonkers about it. And it looked really cool in magazines, you know, really great graphics. But I never played it. And, you know, probably like a decade later, I was trawling flea markets and things like that, buying cheap old video games during the PlayStation era in 64 era because no one wanted NES games, et cetera. So I picked up Fantasy Star just as a cartridge. It was like $10. It was so expensive. I couldn't believe how much money I paid for that old video game because everything else was like $2 or $3, but here was $10 for Fantasy Star, but I said, you know what? I'm going to do it. And so I picked it up and my master system didn't

really work right. So I did not ever get to play it. And it's always been on my like, I should play this sometime. But I've never played more than like 15, 20 minutes of it until the switch version came out from part of the Sega Ages lineup. And it's amazing. And I played that through last year and really, really enjoyed it. I feel like it is a game that, you know, accounting for the changes they made to the switch version and the fact that it is, you know, kind of this stayed old RPG. So it does have some quirks and some design elements that obviously have it aged amazingly well. But on the whole, it holds up really well. It's really good. Very just like a pure RPG experience. Not a lot of story, not a lot of complexity, but a very satisfying sense of

progression and also, you know, just enough interesting kind of weird stuff to kind of keep you guessing. So I really appreciated it. All right. So I mentioned Kotaro Hayashita earlier, the planner and writer of fantasy star. I think we should also give credit for its existence to someone named Chieko Aoki, who was the original story concept creator at Sega. And weirdly enough, on Moby Games, the only credits I can find for her are Fantasy Star 1, 2, and 3.

Not even 4. She was the kind of visionary who came up with this concept and wrote a ton of the dialogue. They've said in interviews, like, yeah, by the time we sat down to actually make the game, most of the dialogue was written because she was just that into the concept and that excited about it. That's cool.

On the art side, you had Kazuyuki Shibata, who I'm not really familiar with, Nauti Oshima, who was brand new to Sega at the time, but would go on to be kind of the lead artist on Sonic the Hedgehog, so the kids love him. And of course, Riego Kodama, who had done some work with Sega's internal development on the, you know, the SG-1000 and master system. but this was kind of like her big, you know, she was kind of like one of the leads on the project and has sort of gone on to be associated with this game, the series, and RPGs in general. The music was by Tokuhiko Uwabo, and finally, a young plucky programmer named Eugene Naka

did the coding for this game. I'm sure you did nothing else. Yeah, probably nothing. I'm sorry, you said Eugene? I've never heard of this. Eugene, yes, Eugene Naka. Okay. Cool.

Very good. Yeah. Eugen Occa was, of course, the programmer on Sonic the Hedgehog and the creator of blast processing. Oh, yeah. And, of course, the, you know, the prowess he brought to bear on Sonic and Sonic 2, et cetera, he applied here as well. And he is the guy who made it possible for the dungeons to be smooth scrolling 3D, you know, viewpoint. It wasn't just like wizardry-style wireframes. It wasn't, you know, 90-degree instant turns like you'd see on NES.

It was, you know, there was like rotation and movement forward movement. Very, very impressive. Apparently, at the very beginning of the game development, the dungeon was so fast and so smooth, the scrolling, that it actually made people nauseous. So he slowed it down. He made the animation less smooth, like took out frames of an image. interpolation and it became much more tolerable. But, you know, it is a very impressive effect. You can kind of see the seams like when you're walking down a hallway and there is a, you know, a passage to your left or right. That doesn't really show up on the, on the walls as you're

scrolling. So you kind of have to stop and turn a lot to make sure, like, are there doors or something here that are missing? Especially if you don't have an auto map. But, you know, aside from that one sort of large weakness it's it's a very very impressive technical feat yeah it looks like eugenaka has always been obsessed with the gotta go fast thing yeah the that the first

person dungeon effect uh spoiled me for other RPGs after this because this was I think I played this before I even played Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior at the time so I go from you know that these these beautiful and and the master system has a more vibrant color palette than the NES to begin with

So going from these big, beautiful, bright dungeons to, hey, I'm in the Marsh Cave, where's the crown? Everything's blue and black. And it lacked something. Yeah, it lacked something. It lacked that immersion in it, it was, I don't know. I was wondering, like as a kid, I was wondering, why doesn't every game just do this? It's because not every game could be programmed by Eugene Naka. Exactly.

Eugene, get it together, man. They need you. Yeah. The technology here was very impressive. And, you know, to me, I don't know if I'm correct in this. I didn't see anything in any of the articles I read prepping for this. But to me, this really calls back to the original Ultima, Ultima 2, where you had this kind of division between sort of the 2D overworld map and towns,

and then you had immersive wireframe dungeons. It's a pretty unconventional combination of design elements. The whole game is not a wireframe. it's not just a dungeon crawler like wizardry. You do have kind of the overalled dragon quest style. And, you know, on top of that, the original Ultima, Ultima 2 were seemingly fantasy games with spells and sorcery and things like that, but then you go into outer space and you fight tie fighters.

So, you know, you had that kind of combination hybrid of fantasy sci-fi. So I really feel like maybe not drivet. But even indirectly, the ultimate games really inform the design of Fantasy Star. But again, I can't actually confirm this with the creator's own words. So I could be lying. I don't think you're lying. I think you might have something going there. I might.

I might. But yeah, it does give Fantasy Star a unique flavor. Even from its own sequels, the sequels dropped the wireframe scrolling. And according to the creators and Naka, that is because, Naka was not able to create a sufficiently convincing effect on Genesis within the constraints of the memory. The game was allowed, Fantasy Star 2. As you go into better resolution, more colors, just kind of the expectations would grow that the immersion would be even more convincing. And to make that happen, they would have required a much larger cartridge than they were given.

And considering the Fantasy Star 2 was the biggest console video game cartridge ever created to that point, that was not a reasonable request. So they went with more traditional top-down 2D dungeons for the sequels. But it's also noteworthy that Fantasy Star itself, the first game, was also at the time the biggest cartridge ever given to a console game ever at that point. point and also cost more than any other cartridge game, at least in the U.S. I remember I was reading through Computer Entertainer magazine, which was the only U.S. publication that was actually covering console games or video games in general at the time. And they were like, yeah, this is going to be $70 Wappen dollars. This game is really expensive. But, you know, for that price, you are getting a huge game with really cool graphics and sound. So, you know, your mileage may vary, but it's not

like they're just ripping you off. Like, there is a lot here, and it's just you're going to have to pay a lot for it. That was kind of the mark of the RPG fan back in the day, because, of course, as long as cartridges were around, RPGs were extremely expensive. So we understood that tradeoff. Like, yeah, we were paying $70, oftentimes $100 in my case with the exchange rate. But it was for the likes of Final Fantasy 6, holy crap, was it ever worth it? Oh, yeah.

I remember Fantasy Style 4 in particular was one of those hundreds. dollar RPGs and was also speaking of the first person dungeons was fantasy so they were thinking about going back and all right let's try this first person thing again we couldn't pull it off again in two but they tried to go back and do it for four and they got so far as it might have been just a couple of mockups that they put together but there were screenshots of this first person dungeon in fantasy star four in a few magazines and I didn't know that that's really cool I think you can you can find scans of them so they're not terribly high quality they're You know, circa mid-90s and magazine scans, but it's a fascinating look into like what almost they were almost able to pull off. But they just, I think at the end, NACA ended up saying like, yeah, like we thought we had this, you know, after not pulling it off in two, but it just isn't feasible on the Genesis. So they could have used the chip for virtual eraser or whatever in the cartridge. So you had like the $100 virtual eraser cart, the $100 fantasy star cart, add in the virtual eraser chip. And you got yourself a stew going. Just turn all the dungeons into Green Hill Zone.

What's the problem here? Exactly. Kids would have loved it. That would have been great. Can you imagine? Just all the Financy Star 4 characters running, their capes billowing up behind them, they do loop-de-loops. I'd play it. All right.

So we have given the setup for this game. And when we get back from this break, we are going to talk about the game. Hi, Steele. Hi, Stu. Do you fancy doing a podcast covering every segment of every episode of the beloved 90s cartoon, animeanies cartoon, animanies. No, I hate Animaniacs. Join me, Luke, the Warner lover, and him, Stu, the Warner Resister for Animanii Chat, covering every segment of every episode of the hit 90s cartoon Animaniacs,

as well as its many spin-offs, including comics, video games, and the movie. Not to mention the recent reboot, it's going to be Explainty to the Max. We're the Spirit Hunters, and we're a show that treats Hunter Hunter and Yu-Hakisho's author as the center of the universe. Some weeks, we do linguistic analysis. So, the Chinese meaning of this character is to smelt or refine, but so the changed meaning, in Japanese, it means, to temper. Other times, we get absolutely smashed. So we take one shot every time.

Yuske uses the ray gun. One hour later. This is the least coherent episode. I think your pirate is haunting. I think you're trying to find out more about the spirit hunters right here on the Greenlit podcast network. All right, so we came back from the break, and I listened to them talk about Final Fantasy 14 a lot, which is the wrong MMO for this episode.

You should be talking about Fantasy Star Online, too. That's the new hotness. But we're not talking about MMOs. We're talking about single-player RPGs. We're the only people who can be a douche to you is it's just Dr. Mad. Did you guys make the mistake of giving Dr. Mad what he wanted? Yes, I was seven, okay? You know what?

I trusted him. Sorry, I have to admit that I did not finish the game. So, is this one of those dragon lord choices? No. Oh, it's so much worse. So there's a, dude, okay, there's a quest chain that involves a Laconian pot. And anyway, that's how you get meow in your party. And is that, did I pronounce Mao?

Miao? Miao. Yeah. Miao. Miao. Yeah. Okay. That's how you get him in your party.

And at some point, there's another dude who's like, hey, I'll trade you for your cat. And, you know, because you get the cat in a trade, you think, okay, sure, why not? And then you trade the cat to him, and that's it. Miao is permanently dead. He eats Miao or something. He kills Miao. And you are down to a three-person party. So it's- Why would you give it to him?

Well, dead for that fight at any rate. Oh, is it just for that fight? I thought it was for good. It's just for that fight. Yeah, meow is crucial to the story because you got to feed him nuts and fly on his back to Magic Castle. But before that, yeah, you have the option of giving him to Dr. Med. Yeah, I made that mistake and was like, whoa, guess I'll reset. I didn't realize that.

Why did you give your cat to someone named Dr. Mad in the first place? Because, like I said, the quest, the quest chain that you used to get meow in the first place involves trading for meiao. So it just, I don't know, it seems like. like, well, this is maybe the next step in that chain, but no. I don't even know if it's a trade. I think the dialogue is something like, what a strange cat can I see it? And you could just say, yeah. And then if you say, yeah, you give me meow over and then the text is just like meow is killed.

And then the fight starts and you got three people in your party. That's so sad. Imagine being a kid and having that happen. You must have been traumatized for life. I feel better knowing that it is not a permanent death because, um, oh yeah. But then I also feel stupid for real. resetting my game, I could have just powered through. Because I've got Meathead Oden there.

He can just soak up all the damage. You just throw his gun at the thing. Yeah, that's right. Hey, take this. Ooh, ooh, oh, no. He's still coming. What now? Okay.

So anyway, yeah, that's one of the more memorable battles. There's lots of weird little quirky things like that. There's the weird sacubus battle in a dream. It's not a succubus. It's a sacubus. Oh, that sounds, that sounds very tea for teen. It's not a sexy succubus. It's not like, darling, from Castlevania Symphony Night.

That freaking succubes. No, it's just like a weird, evil face that you fight, and I don't think you can win the fight. Oh, guess what? You can. Oh, my God. What happens? Because I've done it. What happens if you win? Do you get anything? Or is it just like, wow, okay. The exact same thing happens. It's the exact same. It just spits you out the next day and say you had a nightmare. Okay. You had a nightmare.

So, yeah, it's not a permanent, you know, it's not a game over kind of battle if you lose. it's one of those story battles, but it's weird. It just kind of pops up and you're like, what the hell is going on? With the saccubus, there's also the famous cake shop. Everyone loves the cake shop. Yeah. Okay, that's something that I'm not familiar with. Was it drugs or something?

No, I'll let Alex take over from here. Hi. Cake and drugs. So, we all know the best cake is made miles below the surface of the planet in caves. In dungeons. And, yeah, in dungeons. Oh, that cake shop. Yeah. So our intrepid party wants to meet with the governor of Motavia, the desert planet. So they do what anybody would do is you go to the bottom of a cave and you pay a thousand bucks for a shortcake and then you go on a spaceship and you give it to his robot butler when you get there.

Okay. I remember that because that was a very strange sort of. I do remember wondering, what is the store's bottom line? Yeah. I mean, they're charging a thousand dollars for a cake. So they could be above the surface and charge a lot less and probably still make more money. But I'm on a business person. could, but, you know, zoning and just tough competition. That's true. Yeah. No, it's one of those strange things. They talk about this in some of the developer interviews that are up on shmupplations.com.

Basically, you know, they wanted some sort of, you know, rigid requirement to be able to meet the governor. So they were like, well, we should bring a gift because that's a very Japanese kind of thing to do. Bring the omiagia. And so, you know, they were like, well,

what's a good gift? What's something deluxe. And they decided on cake. And they attribute that to the fact that the team was so heavily populated by women. Like there were a lot of women working on the team and they were like, well, we love cake. Cake is, you know, desserts are awesome. So obviously we're going to take them a cake. But then they were like, well, you know, you can't just, you know, have this in a shop. It has to be someplace difficult to get to. So it ended up being at the bottom of the dungeon. And then, you know, at this point it starts to make less sense. Like there is this kind of disconnect in logic. But they went through with it and it is one of the more memorable elements of fantasy star and you know

you can find uh like fan art of it there's in one of the shmoplations interviews there's actually like a drawing of someone in a little shop in the bottom of a dungeon selling a cake so so they probably only sell one of these cakes a month but they sell it for a thousand dollars or meseta or whatever it's called meseta yeah uh and uh so you know i feel like they they they probably can stay in business. I imagine the rent is very, very, very low. Very, very low, yeah, if anything. Speaking of money, what was the unit of currency that you used,

meseta or something like that? Yes, mesetas, yeah. Is there like a, that you know of some kind of like reference that takes from? I'm just curious. I don't believe so. I don't know. It just sounds cool. There's not even like a real, I guess a Japanese term that might correlate.

I don't know. I just thought that was kind of a neat sound. term for a currency. It's, you know, it's spacebucks, Spacian. Spacebux. Instead of spelling out space bucks, like BUX, they just decided to make something a little cooler. Right. I would have gone with BUX, but that's just me.

But, you know, you appreciate the fact that this is kind of like a European Union situation. The Messetta is like the Euro, and it's good across Palma, DeZoris, and Motavia, the three planets in the Algole system, which we haven't really talked about. But, yeah, there are three different planets, and all of them, you know, you're money is good here. It is not no good. And you can go and buy stuff and spend stuff and trade stuff. There's a lot of trading quest chains, but also just a lot of go grind for money on the zombies or the eyeballs. The owl bears. Zobos. Yeah. Speaking of commerce, this was the first game that I know of that has the blank option when you go to a specific shop to buy the secret black market stuff. That's true. Yeah. You can't even get out the first planet without that.

Yeah. Because you need the road pass. You get the road pass by selecting the blank thing. And the guy's like, no way. And you got to do that three times. And he's like, all right. The first time I ever encountered that was Dragon Warrior 2. Yeah. The jailer's key, or one of the keys is the only way to do it. And I thought that was so cool. Yeah. I didn't know what originated from there. That's awesome. Well, I think those games actually came out around the same time in Japan. I think Dragon Quest 2 actually shipped a little earlier because it was like one year after Dragon Quest 1, which was made. 86. But yeah, it was like the idea was kind of percolating internally around the same time. I don't think they played Dragon Quest 2 and were like, oh, we have to cram that into our game

at the last second. Yeah, it just sounds very much like someone who's been making an RPG all day, playing with menus like, uh-huh, you can have a valid choice here, but make it blank. And someone else was like, we should do that. We hate players. Yeah. I actually love that because just the

is a really cool, early interesting example of that fourth wall breaking. Yeah. How else would you convey to the player? You're asking the guy about black market goods. You were asking for something you should not have. Yeah. I think that's really awesome. Yeah. So there's actually a fair amount of, like I said, quest chains in the game, key items. There's really kind of a pretty straightforward flow to the game. You have just a few major tasks you have to complete. But in order to complete each of those tasks, you have to usually perform some sort of feat or acquire some

sort of item. And sometimes it takes a few steps to do that. So, you know, even though the overall story is pretty simple, it's like go to the other planet and kill the emperor, like actually making that happen, you have to beat Medusa along the way and you can't defeat Medusa until you get the mirror shield and you can't get to the mirror shield until you have the right vehicle. I mean, you can I'm going to interject with these every time you say something, so I apologize. How much grinding do you have to do

to defeat Medusa? It's a lot. I bet. If you try to do it, she insta kills one person per round, so you have to do it in under four rounds. Yeah. And you did that.

You're telling me you did that. Yeah, well, yeah, I'm very into, there's a cycle retro achievements, and that's one of them, Well, you know, fan-made challenges. One of them was Kill Medusa without the Mirror Shield. My child, my child. Yeah.

It's fun. Yeah, I didn't realize you had to get the Mirror Shield when I played because I was not using a guide and, you know, who pays attention to dialogue? Jesus. So I just, I stumbled right into Medusa. I was like, wow, cool. I'm making good progress. And boy, you know, she took care of that pretty quickly.

I mean, I did, I did whittle down like three quarters of her health before she wiped on my party. But, you know, I could still tell, like, I was going to have to do quite a bit of grinding to get the damage up that high, you know, high enough to do sufficient damage to take her out because, you know, the curve on skill growth is not super high. Like, this is a game that's very dependent on your gear as opposed to just leveling. So, yeah, like, leveling is more for, you know, hit points and you'll occasionally learn new spells along the way. And a lot of the spells are utility spells. So not much good against Medusa. So, yeah, you know, you'd have to grind for quite a while because there's no way to get a, you know, super powerful sword by that point or a better gun or whatever.

So it's just like attrition. So, yes, I can see that happening because she doesn't have a huge amount of hit points, but it's just high enough that to be able to hit that threshold before she wipes out your party with the instant kill each turn is pretty unreasonable. So you want to go find that mirror shield. Mm-hmm. And it's more interesting to do the quest chains to get the mirror shield than to just kill the same, the same owl bears over and over again. Yeah, I didn't even know it was possible to do it without it until like a couple months ago. Oh, okay. So it's not like you did as a child when he's out there, Brian.

No, no, no. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I'm always learning things about this game, like even now, which is kind of cool. Nice. But yeah, you got to go around town, talk to, I think you have to talk to the chief in the middle of poison town, wherever that is, the town's in the middle of the poison wasteland. right the town of the poison the poison with the town the poison town that sounds completely nice they must have really nice parks it's they're beautiful um i think that's also the talent

with uh the woman miki who asks you if you like Sega games yeah yeah she's one of the developers um oh yeah yeah i can't remember her name but she was uh in one of the interviews they said she like became the person that everyone that everyone wrote letters to like she would get a hundred letters a day from fans who wanted to talk about video games. That's great. Early correspondence. I think it was like Mailbag Miki or something. Nice.

But yeah, so it is a pretty straightforward quest chain, but, you know, there are enough road bumps along the way that you really have to go out and explore and do all the little plot things and find the ice digger that'll let you break through glaciers and so on and so forth. And I would say combat in this game is actually pretty enjoyable. The encounter rate, at least in the... Switch version is not insanely high the way, you know, sometimes in like Final Fantasy games or Dragon Quest, you take a step battle. You take a step battle. Yeah. Even Fantasy Star 4 on the Genesis

has a really almost unbearable random encounter rate to me. Yeah. And you know, Rieko Kodama's Skies of Arcadia was the same way. Like that, especially in the ship, you get in the airship and it was just like, why do people hate this ship so much? They just keep trying to kill this ship. Please, please, let me be. Where are we going to totally damage your dumb jerk ship? Exactly. Oh, guys, we're just trying to get to the store. Oh, protect Coupel.

So, yeah, so it's turn-based combat, and I like the kind of seamless transitions. It takes place in a first-person point of view. And so there's a transition between, at least outside, you know, in the outer spaces, between the top-down view and the first-person view. But the music doesn't have. have this like abrupt change. It kind of rolls smoothly from the exploratory music into the combat music. The combat music's not super strident or like hyper intense. So it does kind of create the sense of like an uninterrupted adventure. And then in dungeons, like you'll take a step and then a monster will just appear. So it really does feel like, whoa, we took a wrong step and just

stumbled into a giant dragon that takes up the entire corridor of Silius. That is pretty cool. I love those dragons. They're big. And they're big. And they're kill you. Big necks. Big necks. Got to have the next, man. Huge. So we've also probably should just kind of touch on the characters really quickly. We've mentioned all of them. Actually, I don't think we've mentioned Noah, which is

kind of weird because I think Noah is the, uh, kind of weird because I think Noah is the character who is, uh, the, like, reoccur is the most, like, shows up in four. I know that for sure. Yeah, and two. Yeah. Oh, and two as well. Uh, Noah was originally going to be the protagonist of Fantasy Star 2, but then they were like, actually Noah was kind of boring in the first game, so maybe they wouldn't be a good protagonist. So instead, uh, they become kind of like a, an ancillary character. And someone else gets to be the hero. But in this case, Alice Lansdale is the hero. My description here in the notes says a tough

sword-sling teen with a hunger for vengeance. She's kind of the all-arounder, the hero type class. She is a good, strong physical fighter, has really good stat growth in terms of hit points and endurance. She's okay at magic. I would

not use her as like the main damage dealer because she kind of sucks at that. But she has a lot of utility spells which is cool because there are things you can do in this game that are really pretty interesting and unique for a game of this time. One of them is that you can use telepathy or just, you know, try to parley with enemies. And a lot of monsters will just be like, whatever and kill you.

But, you know, when you come across humanoid enemies, centars and the little Jawa dudes on the desert planet, they'll often talk to you, they'll give you hints. Sometimes they'll just go away peacefully. Like, if you talk to the Jawa dudes, they'll be like, oh, yeah, we're actually not your enemies. That's cool. So you never actually have to fight those guys. Yeah, they're like the natives of the desert planet, aren't they? And they're just kind of living their lives.

Yep. They are, but unfortunately, they are loaded. Oh, no. It's in your best interest to take them all out. Oh, no. Yeah, they have so much money. It's unreal. They're just out there living their best money.

Not just the men, but the women and the children, too. God. No, Anakin, don't do it. Oh, no, Anakin. Does that work? Why do you do such a thing? Okay. All right. So in addition to Alice, there's also Odin, who is named after a god, but I ask you, would a god let himself get stoned by Medusa?

God would get stoned according to great mythology. But that's a different kind of stoning. This is not Bacchanalian. The unfun stony. Yes. This is turned into a statue. He's got the body and the brains of a brawny muscle head. He's a big dude. He's got great endurance. Somehow he decides to use his muscles to attack. with guns. So not the brightest guy, but, you know, he's, he's a good meatwall to have alongside Alice. And, uh, he's kind of one of your first quests. You have to find asselin, which is a, a, um, I guess a potion or something that softens stone. It, you know, turns him back into a human. So, uh, yeah, Odin. He's a dude. He's a dude. His, um, his Japanese name is Tyrone. And I guess they had to squeeze up. it down to four letters to make it fit.

Yeah, I guess all the names are like four characters, aren't they? Yeah. Although I don't know. I think Tyro would be a pretty cool name. Yeah. I love it when Japanese games in the time gave us completely Western names for really fantastic settings. Like, I'm still over the moon about Ralph Belmont.

I will never not be in love with Ralph Belmont. I'm 100% in favor of the change to Noah. Noah's name in Japanese was Lutz. It's just not a good name. Now, I have a theory about this because Rieko Kodama is very into figure skating. This is true. And I don't know if that's if, I don't know, she was influenced by that or if, I don't know who's in charge of naming the characters. But just a little coincidence I noticed.

Don't put any stock in that. That's kind of cool because I know like Japan is absolutely crazy about figure skating. I know that we had a, I mentioned this in our Corona Trigger episode, a Krono cross episode. We had Kevin, I can't remember his last name at the top of my head, but he was extremely popular in Japan because they called him Krono because he had this like spiky red hair that they absolutely loved over there. And he often did routines to Mitsuda music.

Oh, that's great. Oh, yeah, look it up. Canadian Olympic skater. He did a routine to a Krono Cross medley. So it's on YouTube somewhere. Look it up something. Nice. Anyway, that's Noah for you.

Noah is the magic wielder, very androgynous and even looks like Ciphoblonades, but, from Castlevania 3, but the shock twist here is not that Noah, the dude is actually a lady masquerading as a dude. Noah is just a dude. But interestingly, they've talked in interviews about how Noah was originally intended to be non-binary and would become either a man or a woman based on the outcome of the story, the way you develop your characters apparently, which kind of reminds me of the character. or frall from the anime, they were 11, which is kind of a deep cut. But, you know, given the sci-fi sort of manga and anime-inspired vibe of this, that wouldn't surprise me because that was, I totally forgot what the name of the collective was, but it was originally a manga by the all-women manga collective in the 70s. They also did five-star stories. Anyway, so that's a kind of an obscure reference there, but I feel like that was probably the inspiration was the character fall from that.

I could be wrong, but anyway, Noah, like I said, was originally intended to be the protagonist of Fantasy Star 2, but they said, eh, kind of a boring character. They were going to completely change Noah from a magic wielder to like a warrior type, which, like, at that point, why do that? Why completely change what a character is? Yeah, I'm kind of, I might be mistaken here, but wasn't Noah also, the whole general neutral thing kind of suits them because they throughout the games were, I mean, just kind of a force, almost like a constant presence, almost like godlike in a way, kind of ethereal. Yeah, I was thinking kind of somewhat Gandalfian. Very, very Gandalfian. Yeah. All right.

Well, that's interesting. I haven't played enough of Fantasy Star 2 or 4 to be able to speak to that. But that fits. I like it. Sorry. Well, one more point about, I'm just, I'm just learning about the,

the Noah originally intended to be non-binary thing. And it kind of makes sense in the context of. There's a famous, well, a lot of the game script is all over the place. But there's a part where the governor refers to Noah using she, and then elsewhere uses he. And it could just be that in the original script, and no one should just always refer to by a name, or Lutz rather.

And whoever was translating, it was like, um, do I flip a coin? What do I write here, guys? I don't know. And they just guessed, I guess. Yeah, yeah, that happened a lot in, uh, in kind of eight big games where you go from Japanese, which, you know, it doesn't have really the, the gender specific pronouns, the way English does. Yeah.

And gender definition distinction is kind of determined. by the way the character speaks, as opposed to the way someone speaks about a character. So when you bring that into English and you have to put down those definitive gender-specific pronouns, it's like, well, we're going to toss a coin. I guess this is he. Samus, he's tough. He's cool. Wow. And he looks great in a one piece. I never consider that, that like, I don't know Japanese nearly as well as you two find people, but the idea that gender is more defined by how you speak about yourself versus how people speak about you. Well, not even how you speak about yourself, but just the language you use and the way you phrase things. There are just, like, there are very specific ways that people speak that are kind of like the feminine way, the masculine way, the really coarse masculine way, the super delicate feminine way. It's a, it's a very complex language with many shades. It's fun.

And it's fun juggling those because I use, I'll use different words for myself depending on who I'm talking to, which is just tons of fun. That is pretty cool. Yeah, I really wish I knew more Japanese than I do. Well, I don't know any Japanese, really. I only know about Japanese. It's not what I speak. It's what I know about it. Anyway, so then finally, the final cast member,

but definitely not the least, is Meow, the Flying Cat, who is actually a cat, not a Dragon, like a Lunar, actually a cat. And actually a very edible cat, that turns into a very large, and turns into a very large cat at some point in the game

and becomes a vehicle. I guess it makes sense that Meow would not be permanently killed because, yeah, you do have to... Yeah. Now is a party member

but also a vehicle. It's great. It's very versatile. I am pro-flying cat aliens. I think they are the perfect alien species. I agree. The telepathic cats,

what is that from? I'm just thinking of like a series with telepathic cats, like a sci-fi novel series from the 70s. Maybe that's what Meow is supposed to be. Well, the way you put that, I was thinking the Final Fantasy series has to curl, carol enemies that are what D&D would call up to Displace your Beast after a while, I suppose. But, yeah, they were based on a sci-fi novel about a telepathic cat that was taken on as a pet and was killing the crew one by one.

And it had very much the same design that they used in Final Fantasy with the tentacles and all. I love those. Wait, have I been saying that wrong forever? Is it a co-whirl? I have no idea what it is. I just called a curl. I call them those damn cougar guys God, I hate them

The ones I use Blaster on you Yeah, I was about to say I call them Stop Using Blaster Boy, I hope it's the paralysis one Not the instant kill one No, it's instant kill one They were I like how consistent they are with the

So when Here's what goes down You go to Ice Planet You find some nuts You put them in a pot You give them to your cat Your cat turns into a giant Flying Beast

And the attention to detail here Is pretty great Because you ride on your cat up to the castle and you've got to fight a giant golden dragon. If Meow dies in this fight, everybody dies because you're riding them. Oh, that makes sense. You're all falling together. You plummet back to Palma. Odin's like, damn, if only I could turn back into stone. Yeah. But Meow is a great party member because Meow can kind of do everything. Meow has pretty decent magic. A lot of support and utility spells, buff spells to make the party stronger or more

powerful, but also physically powerful, a good melee fighter, with cool claw attachments. And what is, what is Meow's armor? It's like pelt or something. Um, okay, so Meow gets one piece of armor in the game and it's gloves. Famous, famous cat clothes gloves. Oh, that's cute. Yeah. So it keeps, does that like to keep his claws in because he keeps scratching the furniture? I guess. I mean, yeah, because he fights with fangs. He wears like these, these double-bladed knives that are just called fangs. It's like iron fang, silver fang. I think in Japanese, they're called tusks. That makes sense. But he just puts those in his mouth and goes nuts. That's awesome. That's why you always use the beast characters. I mean, if you've ever been bitten by a cat. My mother was bitten by a cat, and she was in the hospital for a week. So, yeah. Oh, God. They have all kinds of infections and bacteria and stuff that they can cause. Yeah. Oh, yikes. I used to be a dog groomer in a past life. And, it was always like, if he got bit by a dog

on the job, whatever, if your hand was still attached, you went back to work. If you were bit by a cat, you went directly to the hospital and gun antibiotics because if that was left, you could easily get sick enough to die. Like, my mother came very close. It was really frightening. Wow. Infection.

So, meow, a serious business. Anyway, so that is the party and it's a pretty good quartet, unlike the game quartet, which you can only control two characters. This is the actual Sega quartet. And so your goal is to fight King Lassick, but actually it's to destroy the evil dark force, which, you know, again, doing some real Star Wars stuff there. Although in Japanese, it's Dark Falls or maybe Dark Fallas.

So let's not think about that too much. They've reconded Dark Falls, at least in Fantasy Star Online. Got the whole H.R. Geiger thing going on. I've also seen it translated in a lot of games as just the profound darkness. I kind of like that. Yeah, right. I like that a lot. Actually, that brings up one thing that I wrote an article about Fantasy Star 4 on US Gamer, if you want to go look at that.

Because I was thinking about how Fantasy Star 4, and I guess Fantasy Star in general, almost reminds me a lot of the, I don't know how many of your fans are like Madeline Longley, it's Rinkle and Time Quartet. But there's a lot of parallels that I notice between the series. And one of them being Dark Force, profound darkness, the return. turn to just like oblivion and how that's always kind of, the heroes have to struggle against that often using weird fantasy things like flying monster cat horse things. So I don't know if the inspiration is there, but I always found parallels and I always appreciated them. Hmm. Interesting. Well, you know, that is a very popular thing just in JRP's. I mean, this was, again, released like the same week as Final Fantasy. And at the end of that, you literally fight chaos.

That's not just the guy's name. It's also what he is. He's chaos. He's the four fiends plus garland and one big mushy pile of chaos. So, yes. The evil cosmic force behind the throne. I like that thing. Anyway, yeah, I don't know that there's necessarily too much more to say about how the game plays or how the plot plays out,

because there's not really that much plot to it. No. But, you know, it's definitely as an older type RPG, it's one of those that's better experienced than, read about or listened to, like heard about. But the good news is that it is very easy to play now. There have been several ways, several reissues through the years. We can go through those really quickly. The very first reissue was actually the Fantasy Star Collection for Sega Saturn, which only came out in Japan, but that was less than a decade after the original Fantasy Star. So it was still kind of a thing. Like Fantasy Star 2 was only a couple of years old at that point,

or four, sorry. But then ever made it to the U.S., and then a Western developed Fantasy Star collection. Totally different came out for Game Boy Advance, which had one fantasy star one, two, and three, not four. And the port of fantasy star to that version was famously bugged. And I believe it would just occasionally barf up save files. And yeah, it happened to me when, uh, well, when you save the game, there was a chance that, uh, it would save the game and then it would just immediately crash and lose the save. That is such, that sounds like fantastic architecture right Pretty great. Bravo.

So that was not good, but the PlayStation 2 actually received two versions of Fantasy Star 1 in Japan only. One of them was the Sega Ages fantasy star collection from M2, which was phenomenal because it had all the games, every version of every game, including the text adventure. It was not localized into English, but it did have the English language versions of the localized games on there, which was cool. Yes. In fact, that's the version that I often recommend to people who are like, how do I get in a fantasy star? I'm like, if you have a Japanese PS2 or a way to approximate a Japanese PS2, get that collection because it has all the games, all the English versions. It also lets you set the experience point and money drop rates and speed up the game, you know, without screwing with the sound. Yeah, it's a great collection.

There was also another fantasy star game, or version of Fantasy Star on PlayStation 2, which was called Fantasy Star Generation 1. That was part of the early Sega Ages project where they remade the games. You had like a really bad 3D version of Monaco GP, a really bad version of Golden Axe. And then you had a pretty good version of Fantasy Star, which had kind of like the modern, you know, Final Fantasy mobile remake graphics. the most amazing. It kind of had that kind of cheap high-res, but not well-made animation look to it. But if you look beyond the graphics,

they had a ton of new features, and most of those were carried forward to the Switch version. But first, before we got to the Switch version, there was also Sonic's Genesis Collection, which was developed in the U.S. And offered, even though it was a Genesis collection, it offered the Master System version of Fantasy Star 1 as an unlockable.

Ooh. There actually was a Genesis, version, or sorry, Megadrive version of Fantasy Star 1. Oh, yes. It was given out as a promotional opportunity or something with Fantasy Star 4. Is that right? I don't know about that, but I do know that it is kind of common because I see it and use game shops all the time.

Yeah, I think it was a promo reissue or something, but it is literally just the master system or Mark 3 ROM in a Mega Drive shell, cartridge shell. But because the system is backward compatible, Now, you know, with the use of an adapter, then you can just, you know, play any Master System game on Genesis just about, or Mega Drive. But in this case, you know, they basically built that into the cartridge. So it is, you know, a Sega Master System game, Mark 3 game, that was released in a Genesis cartridge, Mega Drive cartridge. So that's kind of a cool little novelty, a little extra for people to play. But that doesn't explain why it was in Sonic's Genesis collection.

But it wasn't unlockable if you beat, I believe, the first boss. of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 with two players, then you immediately unlock Fantasy Star. So that was about it for a decade. And then M2 did the Sega Ages collection for Nintendo Switch and put together the definitive version of Fantasy Star, which is Sega Ages Fantasy Star. It came out like two years ago, and it's amazing. It's like everything you could want. It's so good.

It's one of the absolute best remakes of a game. game because it doesn't change that much and it makes the changes optional, but like anything you want, you can have at your fingertips. It's full of just all kinds of stuff. The quality of life improvements are off the charts. Like, not only do you have maps in the dungeons, which is vital, but also just things like I mentioned earlier about how fantasy star kind of describes its own lexicon, and I have no idea what I'm using half the time, but there's like a little in-game cheat sheet that they have that you can just access whenever so you know what you're buying and what it does. And just simple things like that really, really improve the experience

for me. I had a great time for as long as I played it. And I'm so disappointed that we can't get like Fantasy Star 2 with the same treatment or three or even four because two, I feel like could really, really benefit for some quality of life improvements. Yes. I agree. I played through two recently on stream and I hadn't played. I didn't finished it since it came out and replaying it. There is a lot of grinding and it's very slow. It's still a great game, but I forgot how absolutely slow it is. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, this sake of ages fantasy star on the switch is fantastic.

My only complaint, and this is very personal, because of the auto map, and I love the auto map, it pointed out all the flaws in the walkthrough that I wrote years ago. Uh-oh. It's not too late to update it. You're fired. It is too late. I actually considered, like, going into my parents' basement and digging out the binder and, like, fixing them, but no.

Because I drew all these maps by hand. I scanned them in, and I made this beautiful walkthrough. And now I'm playing, I'm playing the game on my Switch. And I'm like, why is that there? That's not supposed to be there. Okay. That's pretty amazing. Yeah.

But did you put like your maps up on an old website or something? They are, the walkthrough is still up at crunkgames.com. Oh, beauty. I love it. Ray Barnholt is still spending the money to keep that domain around. So people can still enjoy the fantasy store walk through. Yeah. All right.

So that is the way to play Fantasy Star in the year of our Lord, 2021. Except no substitutes. It's very affordable and it's very good and it makes everything just so accessible and undaunting. It really, yeah, just is a great sort of metagame experience surrounding a very strong RPG from the Aped Era and makes you appreciate like, you know, once you take away kind of the enigmatic BS that surrounded so many of these games and just the fact that there wasn't really the means to give you auto maps and things like that. It's not that different from modern RPGs. It's still really good.

So anyway, that's a fantasy star, but before we go, I did call for letters from the community, and you folks delivered. So we have a whole bunch here, and this first one is from Hymbee, which is a cross between Pinobie and Hymbo, I think. As someone who first played this game via the M2 Nintendo Switch Sega Ages, all caps version, it really didn't get its hooks into me.

The game's design almost seems to overflow what the master system is capable of, feeling like a game that is wearing two small shoes, and it is never comfortable to play as a result. The story is granted, but the text boxes are limited. The battle system works well, but the options are few. Dungeon navigation feels great, but admittedly without the map on the Switch version, it would be pretty tedious. I'm sure at the time, though, it was pretty awe-inspiring, maybe. Well, that's not in the spirit of the thing.

Where's our positive zeitgeist? We just spent an hour and a half praising this game. I don't know, Prime. It's kind of... It is absolutely bizarre to me to hear someone talk about the things the master system is capable of and in the same breath talk about not liking Fantasy Star? I think the idea is that it's too good for Master System. What?

Well, you know, it takes all kinds to make a world. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, even when those opinions are wrong. It takes all kinds of fruits to make fruit cup. I like that. This opinion was not the rare and precious cherry. It was the grape that's a little brown. It was a pineapple. I like pineapple, especially on pizza.

So, Alex, go ahead with the next one. Hi. All right. this one is from Mike and Mike writes I recently played the switch versions of Fantasy Star and Star Ocean. Both are sci-fi RPGs that proudly keep the genre's fantasy baggage, but of

the two, only Fantasy Star reminds you that space is cool. Every time I got bored slashing at Monsters, I got my passport, ran off to the spaceport, and rocketed away to another planet. It may not sound like much, but that is refreshing to have in an RPG even today. Man, I, you know, I played this game

for the first time, like I said last year. And yeah, when I first got my passport. It was shortly after the pandemic and the lockdown and the no travel. And I was like, man, this is like I'm really living out vicariously here. I'm getting a passport and going to places far away and having adventures. That is a, that's the escapism I'm here for. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I thought it was actually really cool. Just even coming from the game from like a modern viewpoint, the idea of going to another planet and just being that such a casual way of travel. in this world. I thought that was just such a unique flavor for an RPG. It's great. And I think the thing that enhances that is the fact that Alice gets that

fly spell. So you can just, when you're out in the open, you can return back to the last place, the last church that you visited anytime that you want. And you combine that with space travel, and you kind of feel like you have some power in how you get around this universe. Yeah, if you just go to the vacuum of space, no problem. Yes, fly right through it.

That's pretty cool. All right. Uh, Nadia. Well, we have a, uh, a nice letter here from Peter La Padre, I think we're pronouncing that correctly. I am prod, but when I see spelled like that, I want to add the accent, Igu, Peter La Pradee. Maybe it's, I'm sorry, it's either Prade or Prade. Either way, um, he said, hello, recent Retronauts listener here. I love the discussion about the Famicom disc system on the podcast. Unfortunately, I did not play the master system version of Fantasy Star when it was a current game.

In fact, it took me years before I'd even try a Sega game due to being a Nintendo kid who loved his subscription to Nintendo Power and calling the Tips Hotline when I was stuck on Goonies 2, a childhood favorite. Yeah, I'll shout out to all the Nintendo kids out there who just did not play the master system. I think that was most of us in North America. Recently, I had begun to rectify that, and I have discovered I really like Sega's RPGs. My experience with Fantasy Star is the Sega Ages version so lovingly crafted by the good folks of M2, which brought out the brilliance of the original version that Sega had created. An automap is a godsend to those like me who can never map out dungeons. Me too. I'm terrible with directions. This is why I can never finish Galgo 13 on the NES and why some old school RPGs had a barrier of entry that was too high.

Hearing the FM soundtrick soundtrack as Mark 3 owners got to experience, but on Americans with their master systems was also a great. Seeing an RPG of that vintage was not trying to be high fantasy or Dungeons and Dragons game was certainly different for me. The space age setting and the graphics of moving from planet to planet was great. Alice's story had enough hooks to make you want to see things through. Now the game has aged and the Dragon Quest-like need to slowly venture out and grind is not the most welcoming thing, but it's very common for 1987 RPGs. Playing the original made me interested in the series, and I'm currently playing through Fantasy Star 4 for the Genesis, which I'd also recommend.

Anyway, thought it sharing experiences with Fantasy Star since you asked for it. Hopefully the Retronauts episode discussing it will be a pleasant experience. It has been pleasant. Thank you very much. Yes. All right, let's power through these. Lucas White says, I wasn't a Sega kid, so I didn't know about this stuff

until I spent hours on PSO's GCN. That's GameCube Kids port. Even after getting older and more savvy, I just never got around to it. Eventually, I did get Fantasy Star a whirl out of the blue and was blown away. Never having played a master system game before,

I couldn't believe the quality and variety of very anime-style music that detailed and animated enemy sprites. That's true. They are animated, which really stood out at the time. Yes. And even the cool perspective depth effects in the dungeon. But for similar reasons, I couldn't hack the dungeons, too much to try, to process and hold on to without any help.

Fast forward a few more years, and M2 descends from emulation heaven to deliver salvation. Everything about the Sega Age's switch version hits perfectly. I was able to cruise through and only consulted a guide a few times. It was so fun to go through what felt like a sci-fi parallel to the original Dragon Quest. I wish M-2 could bolt this kind of treatment on like, every cranky old JRP ever. Now I'm playing the second game on my enhanced PlayStation 2 because I'm pretty sure the Genesis version actually wants me to die.

I think the Genesis wants us all to die. Yeah, yeah. You know, I tried playing the Genesis version of Fantasy Star 2 immediately after beating this one on the Switch compilation. Yeah. Not great. I don't know. Just like the combat interface is just like it's so cumbersome

compared to the first games. You have to like... It feels like a step down. Yeah, it's really weird. And there's a lot of flashing, and I find that extremely uncomfortable. It's very annoying, yes. I do like the grid, but...

The grid's awesome, very 80s. And that's kind of the tragedy of Fantasy Star 2 is that the first part of the game is such a slog, but after like the first 10 or so hours, it opens up and gets super good, but nobody gets that far because... Nobody gets that far. Yeah, plus everyone owns seven versions of it already,

and they've tried to play it seven times and said, No, this ain't for me. Yep. Yep. All right. So, Fantasy Star 2. Need some touch up. All right.

Alex, next one. All right. This one comes in from Anonymous mystery user. Oops. I first played these games on the GBA collection, but only ever got a few hours into the first game. Although I've always loved the lore and concept. I was always disappointed we never got the fancy remake versions and Sega only ever seemed interested in doing online games and not real sequels. Here's my question.

Is Meow the best cat in an RPG? he's the only playable party member cat I know of. There are thousands of horny teenage boys and girls who are going to say absolutely not Cat from Breath of Fire 2 is the best because she's cool and also doesn't wear pants. Yeah, I'm not going to argue that. Cat is pretty awesome.

And I mean, hell, if you play Final Fantasy 14 and you're Mikote, there you go. I don't think a lot of people had a sexual awakening with Meow, but with cat, I'm pretty sure, based on the banner I've seen. Yes. So I guess it depends on, you know, what your value is, like, in terms of a vehicle, yes, meow is the best. In terms of just a utility combat character, yes, meow is the best.

In terms of thirst, maybe not. It depends on your taste, but no, most people go for cat, who in Breath of Fire, too, is absolutely fantastic as a party member. All right, and Nadia, I like the fact that Google Docs assigns you anonymous moose because you're in Canada. I never noticed that before, but it's great. Well, this moose can read a letter, so here I go. As a child, I never owned... Oh, sorry, this is from Andrew M. As a child, I never owned Nintendo Entertainment System, and I didn't care.

I owned a Sega Master System and a copy of Fantasy Star. The Master System was the first game console I purchased with my own money, earned as a 10- or 11-year-old soccer referee. Now, that is a job. Wow. Fantasy Star was a Christmas gift a year or two afterwards. It was a perfect game for a 12-year-old Star Wars phonetic who, like, Clash of the Titans,

and whose father had read him The Hobbit and all three volumes are the Lord of the Rings. And then there was Alice. I didn't realize this until I was much older, but there was a string of female protagonists that encountered in games and films around this time that I do credit with strengthening my belief in equality between women and men. Alice completed the quest to avenge her brother's death and defeat Lassiak. That he pronounced it? Lassick. Lassick. Lassick. What did I say Lasson? Anyway, Sarah saved her baby brother from the Goblin King in the labyrinth. That's true. Alan Ripley protected Newt and defeated the Alien Queen. Sarah Connor defeated the Terminator.

It's a good reminder to future game developers that preteen boys will totally relate to strong female characters that may help them make them better people in the process. I agree, except now that Twitter has nothing but yelling, that sort of thing. It makes it kind of difficult to get the message across. I could keep running about how much I love this game, but I will sum it up with this. I have played every Fantasy Star game, most of the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games, and dozens of other JRP's. Fantasy Star is hands down my favorite JRP, and the Sega A.S. version is even better. Thanks for giving it the attention to Twitter. All right, we're going to wrap up here.

to this letter from normally retro. I mentioned this on the 47K games podcast, which you can listen to here on the Greenlit podcast network, but I'm sad that I missed out on this game during the time of its release because of thinking it would have the same gameplay mechanics as Miracle Warriors, a master system RPG without any of the charm, playability, or fun, the fantasy star. There were not many Japanese-styled RPGs during that time, and I'd only played Mebius, the orb of celestial harmony for the Mac, and Miracle Warriors. These were not good games. However, 30...

Disagree. Hot. Okay, cage match. However, 30 plus years later, I finally had the chance to play Fantasy Star on the updated Sega Ages format. It's still a great title with really cool graphics and style, but I do wish I could have experienced it at the time.

All right, Alex. All right. Here's one from Noah V, aka Big Mix. I have brief memories of Fantasy Star on the master system. My brothers and I had an NES and my friend Carlis and my friend Carlisle had a master system. When I go over to his house, we'd play what was available. His little brother Richard

wanted something other than an action game or racing game, so he got Fantasy Star. We'd all take turns grinding and doing early battles. We loved the concept that this game took place on a different planet, so that it didn't have the traditional monsters, weapons, or armor for most fantasy RPGs. Anyhow, I didn't get a chance to play through it, but I do have snapshot memories. Keep on, keeping on. All right, and Nadia.

We have one here from Kazin. It says M2 Swishport of Fantasy Star is the absolutely best release of re-release of any JRP ever. Having the item and weapons lists available instantly in game along with an automap has an experience in speedbooth took a game that I liked well enough to a masterpiece. It brings to four the quality design of the original games and limits exposure to the creaky unwieldy bits. Yeah, that's absolutely true, as we have discussed, and I'm actually happy that they brought up the lexicon for the items thing because that I feel like was just as important as the maps. Yeah, that that first letter we read was really kind of a curveball that just totally changed the kind of the X-Men expectations. It really threw people off, I think. So I'm glad we led with that. Thank you.

Yes. I forgot your name. Alex. No, it was a dude to be. Himby. Himby, yes. Thank you, Himby for throwing us off guard. Yeah, I apologize if I misunderstood that letter. I don't have good brain. All right. So one last letter, and then we will wrap up this podcast. When I was a kid, I first played Fantasy Star 4 on Sega Channel, says, Stephen. I wanted the game. So later, when I was whacked in the head by a two-by-four. that fell out of a bunk bed and had to get stitches. My parents bought me a game to help with my recovering from getting hit in the face by a 2x4 and getting stitches. I asked for Fantasy Star 4 and was thrilled to receive Fantasy Star 3!

Oh no! Anyways, that started my love for the series, and eventually I played 2, 3, and 4 and started the quest to play the first one, which basically I only knew about from reading James Maxillow's Fantasy Star pages, which don't seem to be live anymore. So jumping ahead, basically Stephen eventually got to play it and he spent the next few months following a guide step by step

to finish the game. But thankfully, the Sega Ages release on Switch allows you to get through the game much more easily without necessarily using a guide in less time without your babysitter turning his car into a fancy metal raft. Actually, that sounds like a pretty interesting story that I skipped.

Anyway, thanks for keeping it going. Always a pleasure to listen to blah, blah, blah. Okay, cool. Thank you, Stephen and everyone two wrote in letters. Sorry that there were a few, we had to skip over, but we are out of time. Some of us have things to do like, you know, work or play a Final Fantasy 14, which is kind of like work, but with other people. I got to do my roulette. It is work. It is absolutely work. It is. We should get paid for it, but I'm not doing either. I'm going to go shopping.

The $10 in your pocket a month subscription. They pay you to pay you to play. Anyway, thanks Alex and Nadia for joining for this episode. Yes. I would like to get back together with you sometime and talk about Fantasy Star 2 and 3. That can be the rough patch, the difficult middle years, and then we could talk about 4. But yeah, this has been long overdue. We've really needed to have a proper discussion of the original Fantasy Star. And now that I have properly played it, thanks to the incredible Switch Sega Ages port, that is possible. So it was great chatting from afar.

And now is the opportunity for each of you to tell us about yourself. I'll start by saying that Retronauts, which you are listening to now, is a podcast that you can find on the Greenlit Podcast Network and at other places such as the internet. Retronauts.com also. And if you really enjoy this show and want to hear every episode a week early with better audio quality, with no advertisements, and want to get bonus stuff, including extra podcasts on alternating Fridays and every weekend, wow, that's a lot of podcasts. you can go to patreon.com slash retronauts and subscribe to us. At three bucks you get early access and it's cool.

At five bucks a month you get early access which is also still cool as well as bonus Friday episodes on alternating Fridays weekly columns and mini podcasts by Diamond Fight. Other things that we throw in there surveys, I don't know.

There's a lot of stuff. It's really more content about old games than you could possibly handle. But I dare you to try. That's patreon.com. slash Retronauts. Nadia. Hi.

I, again, I am Nadia Oxford. I am the co-host of the Acts of the Blood God RPG podcast, which is coming up on its 300th episode as we record this.

So we've been at it for a time. Kat and I actually recently went independent and we are supported by Patreon. That's patreon.com forward slash blood god pod.

We'd love to have your support. We talk about all sorts of RPGs, Eastern and Western. At the time of this recording, I don't know when this is going up, but our latest episode was actually hosted by myself, because Kat was on vacation, and so I

brought on a very, very old internet friend of mine Andrew Vestal, who used to run the gaming intelligence agency, and before that, the unofficial Squarespace on home page, which was the first page I visited on the internet. So, I brought him over and we talked about, like, just the old, old days of, like, RPG

fandom online, like, when you had, like, RPG strine and stuff like that for your maps and your walkthroughs and the communities. It was a really, really interesting discussion, and I hope you go back and listen to it if you haven't yet. This episode goes up in exactly two months from today. Okay. So it'll be there.

It's still good. It's still good. It's, yeah. Podcasts are still fun to listen to, uh, even in the past or the future, whatever. Anyway, Alex. Hi, my name is Alex Fraoli. I own and operate a retro video game bar in Nagoya, Japan called Critical Hit. Come on down to Nagoya right off the belt line and have a drink.

Let's talk about Mega Man. Sorry, I thought you were a used game shop. now that... Excuse me, yes, that is true. That just happens to sell alcohol as well as games. Mostly alcohol. For legal purposes, it is a used video game shop. Ask me more about that on Twitter.

You can find me at Petui. That's P-I-T-O-H-U-I. I also stream on the Twitch platform exclusively retro J-R-P-Gs like Fantasy Star. That's Twitch. Dot television slash hooded Patui, all one word. Thank you. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, at Twitter as GameSpite, and on YouTube as Jeremy Parrish doing videos, and at Retronauts, and also at Limited Run Games, which is my day job, which I need to go do now. So thanks again for listening.

Thanks for talking. Fantasy Star, you too, and hope to chat with you again in the very near future. We'll be back next week with another Retronauts and looking at the schedule. It looks like we'll also be back this Friday with a bonus episode. from Bob Mackey about the dig. Lucas Arts. I'm going to go do some work on a Lucas Arts release for Limited Run games. Lucas Arts all over the place, just up in your face. But in the meantime, go check out the Switch version, Sega Ages, Fantasy Star. It's really good, really gives new life to a vintage RPG, makes it just so enjoyable,

so playable, so painless. And you are still welcome to disagree, and we can respect that. Anyway, great games, great time. times. Good night. I'm going to go down in the dungeon and find some cake. Thank you.