/vr/ - Retro Games

>>9692172
Dead is dead.

>>9692210
but you get clones

>>9692172
>Nei dies
>guy who brings you the news says she's "buried in the grassy plains outside Paseo"
>not really true, she isn't anywhere
>late game legendary equipment all called "Nei sword / shield / etc." for some reason
>fast forward to PS4
>get Rika
>"she is a life form that has been perfected for 1000 years bla bla"
>gets zero plot whatsoever

>>9692172
>create a futuristic utopia where death itself can be handwaved thanks to advanced clone tech
>still have perma-death as a plot twist

"we can't clone her anymore because... uh, WE JUST CAN'T OKAY"

>>9692172
Pretty sure you can in theremake

>>9692646
Too bad there is no cutscenes anything after completing this huge quest
She is just there like putting her back via gameshark

>>9692172
is this the girl from the arcade in the snes mystical ninja game? never knew it was a real character

>be 8 or so
>buy a Genesis cheats book
>they also have a full Phantasy Star 2 guide
>read it, it's pretty interesting
>find out that Nei dies
>only played PS2 this year
>tfw spoiled about the game 23 years ago

You can, though? Have Shir steal moon dew before Climatrol and use it on Nei during the fight after she dies. C'mon, anon..

>>9693181
I think that's Konami Girl.

Let's kill Alys too. And Selvaria.

>>9692365
What's that from?

>>9692172
a game ruined by absolutely deranged level/dungeon design

>>9693169
Is that so? It seems pretty complicated from what I read about it. First you need to finish the first game and not miss any scene, then transfer your save to the second game and not miss any scene.

She's not human anyway. She's a rapidly aging lab freak.

Phantasy Star 2 is surprisingly dark. It reminds me of 70s science fiction movies with campy visuals but with a setting and story that made me a little uncomfortable. They start you off telling you that everything is managed by an AI and everyone's gone soft and sheltered, and no one knows where this AI is even located. And instead of usual RPG revive spells your dead characters are cloned... made me feel weird.

>>9693306
it kind of is, yes. I just dislike that it has a really promising backstory, but doesn't deliver all that much on it. it is cool when you discover neifirst, but after that there isn't terribly much plot there. the ending feels so hasty and weird. finding dark force in a box? meeting people from Earth? wtf is going on?
PS4 tried to do it well, but I think they overkilled it a little with rehashing PS2 plot. like, half the game you just travel turning off supercomputers and trying to solve climate catastrophes. and the overall tone is a bit too optimistic for "gloomy" stuff to work. also, the plot point about nei species being a biological superweapon? gone. it had so much potential, but alas, Rika doesn't have any plot.
I think the worst part is when all the evil in the game just turns out to be the work of Dark Force. i think the latter could be the most unoriginal and boring main villain in JRPGs, hands down. its just an evil demon / whatever, they could do better than that with such a premise.

>>9693576
Phantasy Star II in particular seems to have been designed to make the player miserable, not engaged. From the tedious dungeon design, to tragic events like that mugger guy killing his daughter just passing by nonchalantly. The unfulfilling story is a part of it, too. It leaves you feeling hollow.

The intro of Rolf having a dream where he watches the final battle in the first game sets the stage... and he can't do anything but helplessly watch. He's passively going along for the ride after that.

>>9693614
the dream sequence is similar to PS1. you literally had a dream in it where you fight dark force and can't win. you die but then wake up.
if you didn't like the game, you absolutely should play it with a patch for faster walk speed and turning off red screen flash. and if you felt like the difficulty was too much, add a 2x exp/meseta patch too.
still, the game is all about the mazes. if you hate them, you will hate PS2.

>>9692172
I think you can revive her in the Playstation 2 remake.

>Nei dies at any other point
>Just clone her
>Get to that part
>Well we technically can't do that because she isn't a human...
Whatever.
>>9693306
Yeah, I love the theme of Phantasy Star II the most out of the early games. It has something the other three don't.

>>9693576
I've heard that Phantasy Star 2 was meant to be some ambitious, multi-media, experiment in Japan where you were meant rely on various pieces of related media to get the full story. Hence all of those adventure games for each character and even some pieces of print media as well. But this could all be nonsense someone on the internet made up for all I know.

>>9693716
I read that the initial concept was a bit more ambitious. Like, there was supposed to be more fighting vs biomonsters, a whole war with Motavians, searching fir the guy who controls the Mother Brain, and so on. see http://www.pscave.com/other/worldofps/rejectedps2plotoutline.shtml
as for the adventure games, I didn't feel like checking them, as the characters in PS2 had zero story. whatever they make up in Adventure games sounds like it'd be hardly relevant. I'd check the PS4 backstory though, like where Chaz / Alys came from.

>>9693659
>>9693739
Well based on that text the dream sequence had completely different meanings. The one in the first game was meant to hint that the dark force is lurking in the general's mansion.

>>9693739
I thought Anna was at least a cool character. The guardians were formed to take out hunters who go rogue, they didn't really do anything with that.

>>9692223
she's an experimental bio-monster that has a very short lifespan, iirc. so it's more like she should never have been allowed to be "revived" by cloning in the regular gameplay.

>>9693243
>Selvaria
They keep bringing her back. She's not that interesting.

>>9693306
At one point, your whole party gets cloned from whatever smeared remains were left after the prison satellite exploded too.

>>9692223
I actually looked into the original Japanese to figure out why. The reason is that the clone labs can only regenerate human matter, and Neifirst butchered Nei's body so badly that there was not enough humanoid mass to salvage in order to create a clone. In short; Neifirst kicked her ass THAT fucking hard.

>>9692223
>>9693838
Futanari gf?

>>9694219
I had Nei defeat her. She says that they're both part of one whole, so either way she dies. The guy in the cloning lab says that Nei's DNA is too degraded to clone.

My question is why does the cloning lab guy look like the joker?

>>9694373
She's just fucking hideous, leave her alone.

>>9693838
Does it ever say that she has a short lifespan? She consciously split from Neifirst because she didn't like what she was doing.
>>9694370
What? No.

>>9693260
From Sega Ages Columns 2 for Switch. Neifirst has a cameo too. Too bad they didn't release any of the other PS games and they're not releasing any more.

Who are the girls on the title screen? Are they Neifirst and Nei? The one on the left looks angry. They don't have the long ears though.

>>9694418

>>9694387
>What? No.
Wrong answer, man. Show him!

>>9694439
Go away, dick lover.

>>9692358
IIRC the Nei weapons having the same name is translation tomfoolery, but I could be remembering wrong.

Rika is spelled out for you. She's the result of Seed continuing the Numan research in order to produce a numan female designed to introduce beneficial genetic material into the Palman population because of how ass the apocalypse is. She's literally made for Chaz.

>>9692365
IIRC there was some essence sharing bullshit where if one died, the other died. You remember which one.

>>9694373
Yeah, this. Guess I don't have to worry about spoilers in /vr/.

>>9694418
>>9694420
Those are holograms of Mother Brain.

>>9692223
I remember WAAAAaaaay back in '89, little kid me, who had yet to age into the double digits and only barely spoke English at the time, thought the whole in-game "durr, we can't clone Nei, durr" excuse was bullshit because /I'd cloned her several times before NeiFirst killed her/. That explanation is fake and as gay as Ustvestia.

>>9694373
>guy
She's called the clone lab grandma. She's not a guy. And she looks like Boy George, not the Joker. Sure, she has Joker make up, but it's plastered onto Boy George's face.

>>9694948
In the manual she's called the Clone Clown.

>>9694452
U will lick it and you will worship it.

I finally finished. The ending is kind of a downer.

Was Dark Force in the first game originally from Earth? Or did it somehow make its way to Earth after the first game? Are is it a different one altogether?

>>9694017
I'm pretty sure they were rescued by the space pirate before it crashed. Then he kinda disappears... even though he has the last space ship aside from the one Rolf gets.

>>9695108
In the Japanese script they all died and were cloned after the crash.

>>9693576
>but alas, Rika doesn't have any plot.
She does but it's a bit of a lark.

She was created specifically to breed with Palmans and create half-breeds that can more easily survive Motavia's worsening climate. The future of the remaining Palman civilization in Algo rests on her and Chaz screwing like rabbits and propagating their DNA for future generations.

The AI that created her was literally called SEED.

>>9695095
>The ending is kind of a downer.
that's exactly how I felt too. I think there was a book that explained that humans set up everything to kill the royal family of Algol and make it look like an accident, similarly killing Rolf's parents (but he was saved by Lutz). as for why the fuck Dark Force was in that box… never found any explanation.
very minor spoiler, but in PS4, nothing is said about people from Earth whatsoever. it's explained that Algol system is like a seal on Dark Force. that's why it's hell bent on destroying the system every 1000 years when the seal weakens. I guess its goals went in line with those of humans from Earth, so you could make up many theories. either it controlled them, or they used it, or whatever. it's not likely they were the ones who brought it to Algol I guess.

>>9694420
God I love the first few seconds of the title theme.

>>9695095
Dark Force's presence on the ship is never explained, nor why it was locked in a box (they really wanted to get across that Pandora's Box allegory I guess). There's really no plot associated with it and just serves as another obstacle.

PSIV would later use that appearance to give give Dark Force a bit of lore.

>>9694898
>IIRC the Nei weapons having the same name is translation tomfoolery, but I could be remembering wrong
They had the same names in the Japanese version. PSIII reveals that "Nei" is an ancient word of power imbued into weapons. The weapons weren't named after Nei, but she (or Neifirst) were given that name possibly because she was created to be a weapon.

It seems prescient that the "evil AI" was actually programmed from the start to dumb people down.

>>9693243
Selvaria isn't in the same category as she's not a party member who's with you from the start then suddenly gets snuffed out. She's not even particularly likable, just big tittied fan service.

>>9695364
literally made for sex

>>9693306
Phantasy Star II as a Dark 70s Sci-Fi movie akin to Logans Run or THX1138 would be cool thing to visualize with AI.

>>9695440
Ooooh, that makes sense. As I said, it's been a while.

>>9695602
see>>9694370

>>9694414
>Sega Ages Columns 2 for Switch
You got me curious. What's that gallery mode? Is there some sort of achievement system where you unlock all that stuff?

I've seen concept art of an edgy looking Nei type that was clearly done by the same artist as the rest of the game. She had a different outfit and weird thorny growths all over if I remember right. Was that supposed to be Neifirst? She definitely looked like more of a biomonster.

>>9693659
>where you fight dark force and can't win
Technically you can win if you're leveled enough. You don't even need absurd levels. Doesn't make a difference though, you get like 10 experience for winning.

>>9697435
Sounds like it

Phantasy Star III should have had the the Gaiden title, and Phantasy Star IV should have been titled III. It feels weird how 1, 2, and 4 get clumped together and 3 set aside.

>>9693576
That's what happens when you want to be the first 16-bit RPG on the market ASAP

>>9695095
PSIII has you open the box again and one of the endings involves you finding your way to earth in the past, implying PSII-III is in some kind of time loop

>>9697435
>>9697493
Neifirst conceptual artwork has her wearing pauldrons and being given the classic "evil tan" skin pigmentation to show how sinister they are

>>9693838
>>9693692
>>9694219
In the Japanese version the clone station tech says all the non-human parts of her are completely broken/destroyed and can't be restored. It's not a very clear explanation (I guess the idea is they don't/can't use previously recorded cell data, they need recoverable cells from the current body?) but it's at least due to what happened to her, not because she's not human. (So prior to that you could clone her just fine.)

Related (?) to this is what >>9694373 said, that if you beat Nei First without Nei First killing Nei, then Nei still dies, saying she can't live if Nei First dies. Her monster cells to fall apart without Nei First I guess.
>なにをしたら こんなに さいぼうが めちゃめちゃに なるのじゃろう?
>すまぬが、にんげんいがいのところは みんな こわれていて もとにもどらん
>このこを、いきかえらせるのは、ぜったいに ふかのうじゃ

>>9697876
Generation:2 makes her blue like her original sprite.

>>9695095
>The ending is kind of a downer.
Seems like everyone treats this as them fighting a hopeless battle and losing but that never made sense to me
Why not teleport away with the sword and regroup? Why would Lutz teleport your remaining members to you just to fight a pointless fight by yourselves?

>>9697901
>Final battle for the sake of Algo
>doesn't join your party as he did with your ancestor a thousand years prior

asshole

>>9697901
It's a downer because Mother Brain already did its damage and Algol is on its way to a slow painful death. It sucks after Alisa's heroism in the first game. Algol system was used as a seal for the profound darkness by the great light, and according to Kodama a fifth game would have made the great light a villain.. so the series is just a spiral of misery altogether.

>>9697921
like the Star Wars sequel trilogy huahaha

>>9697916
Hey man, I don't get involved in struggles for the future of the solar system unless I see a notarized summons from a local government official first.

>>9697901
I did get the impression that no one survived that battle, including the Earthlings since there wasn't another Mother Brain. Earth is gone, Algo is on the way to extinction. Everything seems incredibly hopeless. Unless Phantasy Star and Mother Brain was a precursor to a Butlerian Jihad.

Are there any books or articles or anything with more background details about 4's setting? I always thought it was interesting when the people at Birth Valley freak out about the gods punishing them for disturbing the ruins. Felt like that could have been a cool plot point if people had developed some kind of religious reverence for old high tech stuff.

>>9697929
a proper remake would have had you traveling back to Paseo to speak with the current Motavian Governor in order to convince Lutz to travel with you as a nod to the first game

>>9694387
>Does it ever say that she has a short lifespan? She consciously split from Neifirst because she didn't like what she was doing.

I found this

http://www.psalgo.com/boards/sad-fate-of-nei-and-rika-vt4466.html

>Nei: Thank you. It makes me really happy that you feel that way. But you know, Rudy, even though we're able to talk with each other and laugh with each other, we're still far too different from each other. Yes, for instance, humans can have children and give their lives meaning.* But you know I.. er, no, we neitypes.. aren't able to do that. Moreover, our lifespan lasts only 3 or 4 years. It's so short that you can't even compare it to a human's.

>Now looking at all these, we have some 10 years before PS IV, Nm-1153 (nei) being the only survivor of the GENE Biodome. Her lifespan is 4 years max.

>>9695602
Its a good plan

ALL
YOU
NEED
https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/925/

>>9697969
>Felt like that could have been a cool plot point if people had developed some kind of religious reverence for old high tech stuff.
yeah, I also loved that. too bad the game quickly abandons most of this stuff after Zio, and the whole well-built world of Motavia as a whole. the plot on Dezolis and after it was somewhat boring and just pretty generic "saving the world" stuff. aside for literally one revelation about Rune, and maybe the plot twist with Seth (just for entertainment value).

>>9698134
meant for >>9697948

>>9697948
>Felt like that could have been a cool plot point if people had developed some kind of religious reverence for old high tech stuff.
yeah, I also loved that. too bad the game quickly abandons most of this stuff after Zio, and the whole well-built world of Motavia as a whole. the plot on Dezolis and after it was somewhat boring and just pretty generic "saving the world" stuff. aside for literally one revelation about Rune, and maybe the plot twist with Seth (just for the entertainment value).

>>9697921
So there was going to be a fifth game after all? I thought Kodama was untouchable at Sega, so why didn't it get made?

>>9698270
There probably wasn't, just if there was a fifth game that's where it might have gone. She said this in regards to the Online games being an entirely different series and continuity and don't like up with the original games.

>>9697884
>すまぬが、にんげんいがいのところは みんな こわれていて もとにもどらん
You're right, I got it a bit backwards. I'm not good with kana-only JP.

Do fans of original phantasy star dislike pso?

>>9698376
pso is based, psu and the portable games are based, pso2 is eh but ended up being great with updates. ngs is currently awful but may grow into a better game like pso2 did

>>9693169
I think there was a little something at least. And she appeared in the final cutscene too.

>>9698270
Money, time, bad luck? PS4 was originally going to be a sega-CD game. It got backported into the genesis and some content was inevitably altered or lost because of the new constraints. I think there was too much uncertainty at Sega for them to invest enough money into a PS5 project.

>>9698353
It's even worse in PS1. For some reason they decided to use katakana only for everything.

>>9698903
Memory limits, graphics and text share the same data and RPGs get hit the hardest by it. With it being a sci-fi setting it was the lesser of two evils.

>>9698376
I hate all post PSIV "PS" games. When I bought PSIV on release back in the day, I was already annoyed that the box was cardboard rather than a hard plastic clamshell but then they released PSO and I wanted to choke a bitch. The fucking box to PSIV said it would be the final game and the developers, like the filthy Segapedes they are, lied.
After that, I was glad Sega collapsed. Fuck'em, the lying fucks.

>>9698421
>based
quit typing this stupid shit.

Did Phantasy Star II's dev cycle overlap the economic bubble popping? Any time a Japanese game has a downer tone//ending, it's useful to look at the real world timeline. Like how certain late 90's // early 00's games took inspiration from the Y2K panic.

>>9699386 here.

>released March 1989

So it was probably being developed in the late 80's

> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_asset_price_bubble

>The Japanese asset price bubble (バブル景気, baburu keiki, "bubble economy") was an economic bubble in Japan from 1986 to 1991 in which real estate and stock market prices were greatly inflated.[1] In early 1992, this price bubble burst and Japan's economy stagnated.

The bubble officially popped a few years after PSII development and release. However, any time the good times are ending, the signs of its end are apparent after the fact. So there's no hard evidence.

Earthmen did nothing wrong.

Did anyone involved with the games ever talk about what their inspirations were? Everything I read just says Star Wars, which I can kind of see in PS1, but the other games go way beyond that. 3 especially feels like something you could find in an old collection of sci fi stories from the 60s or 70s.

Rulakir and the people of Lashuteare happy to tell you how evil they are.

>>9692172
Funny thing is, they actually did add a way to revive Nei via the Japanese Generation remakes, which if I recall involved a ludicrous amount of steps that seem out of a 90's schoolyard Pokéhoax.

>>9701945
>Can revive Nei only after beating the final boss
>Only thing left to do is to beat the final boss
>Nei immediately dies again with everyone else in the ending
Thanks

Since Rika was "perfected" can she live longer? It's a little odd that she's a 1 year old and has the body of a a teen. Seed said it gave her an education, but for just one year? It sounds like a memory implant but she doesn't seem at all cybernetic. It's odd to me.

>>9697946
They originally were meant to have survived and Chaz in the fourth game was Rolf and Anna's son, and he looks a lot like Anna. He was going to be have been put in cryogenic sleep, woke up without any memories and adopted by Alys. In the Japanese version Chaz's name is Rudy, he was named after Rudger/Rudolf the hunter in PSII. Rika was also originally meant to be a perfected Nei clone made after a thousand years of research by Seed, and Chaz was put to sleep by his parents until she was perfected...but the rest of the development team were strongly against it for some reason. It would have been cool if Rolf's son would have ended up with a Nei descendent... oh well.

>>9703237
Also Alis was going to be a player character, she was in another star system and also frozen. At the end of Phantasy Star Gaiden she was on her way back to Algol, but that was cut and Gaiden brushed aside from the continuity.

>>9702803
In an artbook it says Chaz dies from illness around 30 and Rika raises their kid alone, so it would appear so.

I should note that the creators seemed to waffle on that plot point since last year they were tossing potential PSV plots around that involved descendants of everyone.

So Chaz had the perfect wife created just for him

>>9703286
The creators are still working for Sega?

>>9703552
Kiyoshi Takeuchi and Toru Yoshida seem to still work for Sega. Kotaro Hayashida and Naoto Ohshima left, Yuji Naka left then got locked up, and Rieko Kodama left and is graveyard dead.

After Alys' funeral, at night on the balcony, Rika was the spitting image of Nei.

>>9697876
Which art book is this? Is there a complete scan?

>>9703992

>>9699525
The idea behind PS1 was: "let's look at what Dragon Quest does and do the opposite", so
DQ has boy protag - PS has girl protag
DQ is fantasy - PS is sci-fi
DQ is overhead - PS is 3D

>>9703676
>Yuji Naka got locked up
Source on that? Last time I checked abusing insider info is not a felony in Japan.

>>9703339
>This
I wish for bio-engineering futanari elf wife

>>9704317
>Last time I checked abusing insider info is not a felony in Japan.
Then who is indicting him and all the other people involved in the recent Squenix insider trading bust?

>>9703552
It was one of the artists.

>>9704157
here's another one:
DQ can only save in one area - PS lets you save anywhere