Final Phantasie

One dungeon left, and it's only a short swim away from the starting town of Pelnor, which I teleported to, after swapping Lenny back into the lead.

I went into the castle, protected from its fear curse by Zeus's rune.

Predictably, black knights guarded the gate. Predictably, I beat them easily.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of black knights guard the rooms here. They aren't much of a threat to an appropriately leveled party with good HP management, but you need magic to kill them efficiently, and this took its toll on my once-substantial potion supply as I explored the castle. Spirits, though less common, proved costlier, often needing multiple casts of the expensive Quadruple Mindblast to kill most of them.

A devil guard

New enemy - Dragon King! He's a wimp, but sits on good treasure.

Never seen that before, but he goes down in round 2 without needing magic.

A dead-end.

But the next one, also guarded by water elemental, teleports me to the southeast corner!

More dead-ends with water elementals.

Checking out the other side, just to be sure.

 

Before taking the teleporter, I left and returned to Pelnor one last time to heal, save, and level up Minmax, who finally learned Quadruple Quickness, though as of late I had not been relying on Quickness spells very much, preferring to save MP for direct damage spells on monsters resistant to physical harm. The run's loot, sadly, had been nothing but pointless gold and gems, and only four magic potions remained.

I returned and took the teleporter, and advanced through the stone passage it took me to. An entrance to the throne room was at the end of it.

Yup, more black knights!

 

Three chairs sat at the north end.

I smashed the center one, and walked through the secret passage to the north, where The Black Lord fired a warning shot.

"That tickles!" - Minmax

I kept going, and he fired a few more lightning bolts at premarked spots through the corridor, until I caught up with him at the end of it.

Obviously, I picked option 1 here.

 

I went north first, after the wand. The ground trembled again.

I waved it, and found myself teleported.

A scroll sits on a pedestal in one corner. An old man sits in the other.

Of course I want to fight!

He awaits at the end of the fissure.

And like a palooka, he goes down in round one from a mere two castings of Quadruple Fireflash. Doesn't even get a chance to hurt us.

 

We are magically whisked away to Olympus.

I have to fight a few more orcs and trolls to get back to town, where the gifts are a gold fox, gold ox, and gold box.

I wasn't kidding.

The scroll I picked up is nowhere to be seen, but as for the "divine spell," everyone in the party has a unnamed new spell; #60. I cannot determine what it does.

But I was able to retrieve the scroll - and the wand too - by returning to the final dungeon, where the dungeon state had not been committed to disk, repeating the ending sequence up to the point of finding the scroll and then leaving when given the chance.

The game doesn't stop, but for all intents and purposes, it's over. If Phantasie has any remaining secrets worth discovering, then by all means let me know, but otherwise I'm done.

I think, in retrospect, that priests are the best class in the game. With MP reserves as high as wizards, access to powerful healing magic, as well as the most powerful direct damage spell, and okay melee combat, not to mention an array of debuff spells, why use anything else? Okay, so you need to have transport magic too - a monk or a wizard can fill that role. A thief might also be necessary - I never had the opportunity to see if my monk's thieving skills were adequate, and backstabbing is a nice perk. But if I were to replay, I'd try a team of five priests and a monk.

 

GAB rating: Average. Phantasie is mechanically fine and decently paced, if a bit simplistic and sometimes flawed. It is probably the most casually accessible RPG I've covered yet - it isn't brutally unforgiving like Wizardry, and gameplay is more streamlined than Ultima. In some ways it feels like a lost missing link between those games and Final Fantasy. But it's ultimately too shallow to really merit much of a recommendation.

The best aspect, by far, are the dungeons, which are dense with special encounters, events, and puzzles, and are attractively designed, feeling like they could be actual game world locations rather than the abstract mazes seen in Wizardry, Ultima, or the majority of RPGs out there, really. I don't think I've seen this sort of mimetic design in any game I've covered yet except the Temple of Apshai series, which were a lot more primitive, and the room descriptions in the manual did a lot of heavy lifting there.

But the connective tissue, which borrows heavily from both Ultima and Wizardry, doesn't do anything as well as either. Combat in particular just doesn't offer the sort of tactical depth it ought to; even though it seems to have more options than Wizardry, most of the spells are either useless or clearly inferior to other spells, and they cannot target specific monster groups, robbing the game of a whole tactical dimension. Of the five melee options, I got by on "slash" most of the time, followed by "thrust" against monsters that were difficult to hit. "Lunge," the most tactically interesting option, was only useful once in the entire game. I don't think this is just because of how overpowered my party became either; with weaker characters I'd have done the same things, and just needed to go back to town more often. Gear is nothing but a one-dimensional numbers game - banded plate rated 8 beats ring mail rated 7 provided you have enough strength to equip it, and there are no other properties to consider.

The Ultima-style overworld doesn't quite capture the joy of Ultima-style exploration either. Other than finding the dungeon entrances, the three magic pools, and the one-time trip to Olympus, there's nothing to discover here except for eleven identical towns and some featureless inns. The sluggish movement speed (on Apple II anyway) and constant interruptions for random combat encounters not only made exploration a tedious chore, but even made walking short distances to known landmarks a tedious chore. Ultima could be tedious too, but its world had always been ambitious, and by Ultima III it offered a grandiose world dense with meaningful content. Phantasie just doesn't reach for the stars like that.

Phantasie is overall functional, and mostly inoffensive, but we've seen better.