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Phantasy Short

  • Dyhalto
  • 07/21/2016 04:20 AM
  • 1586 views
Preamble
Mine was a Super Nintendo household. I never got to play the Phantasy Star games during the impressionable period of youth when they were meant to be experienced. I did, however, come back to see what all the fuss was about thanks to the magic of emulation. It turns out PS4 is one of the era's titans, PS2 was also way ahead of it's time, and PS3... not so much.

Fortunately, Accelerated World is 25% PS2 and 75% PS4.

Visual: 4.5/5
"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step" ~ Lao-Tse.
Luchino is fast gaining recognition as an accomplished sprite artist on RMN (and soon the world), but even she had to start somewhere. Accelerated World is her first major excursion into the handicraft of original graphics and, as one might expect, there are a number of flubs to note.



Oh, really now. Corner lines couldn't have been that hard.


Regardless, her futuristic utopian society on the brink of a cataclysmic event is exactly that. Our two heroes begin in a paradisiac city, presumably with flying cars that weren't sprited in for budget reasons, and move on to a dimly lit and mildly infested tectonics monitoring facility. I'm pretty sure the two portraits portraying our heroes' grinning mugs would have made the character artist for Phantasy Star IV mostly proud, though some polishing is in order.
Long story short, the Phantasy Star flavor was very faithfully recreated.

Audio: 5/5
This is both my age and my nerdiness showing through but... the boss BGM has a brief riff from Hans Zimmer's Broken Arrow theme. That's okay though, because both Phantasy Star and Broken Arrow are from the 90s, and are both awesome. "F--k 'em if they can't take a joke."

The soundtrack is both original music and appropriately futuristic. I don't know where Luchino finds this stuff, but good grief, she knows where it is.

Storyline: 2/5
The storyline starts off unassuming enough. "Go check out some irregularities at the XYZ facility." No problem. We, the player, know we're going to find some bad stuff, and the plot will take off from there. The problem is, the game draws to a close just as it starts getting good, treating us instead to an infodump along the lines of "...and then the world blew up." This approach to storytelling doesn't work as a small, episodic tale, and it doesn't work as a "more-to-come" prologue game either.
Which is a shame. All evidence points to Accelerated World wanting to be so much more. I mean, come on. Look who makes a cameo.



Darkforce!


Gameplay: 2/5
AW has great battles. They're fast paced, strategic, and able to impart a real sense of danger. Out of combat, the dungeons are sufficiently mapped and stocked with loot, and the two heroes have a vast arsenal of tools to afflict different effects on different enemies.

Tragically, the game's short length really deprives it of the longevity it needs to make effective use of them. For one thing, by "different enemies", I mean mechs. All mechs. Ayla and Hyke's largess of weapons and skills also have a lot of redundancies given the scope of their quest. Heck, even the currency is pointless beyond purchasing a couple of medkits.

Overall: 3.5/5
Accelerated World best serves as a teaser for what Luchino can and will do in the future.
And if Phantasy Star was a part of your childhood then it also serves as a short trip down memory lane. A very short one.

Posts

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Thanks for the review, Dy. =) Out of all the projects I want to make into a commercial game, this is the one. So maybe, just maybe, other gamers could get their classic PS-era fix too.

Oh, and thanks for pushing me into the 6K MS club. :D
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