Phantasy Star - Virtual Console

[Cranberry]

Hi guys. My name is Cranberry, many of you may know me from PSO.

Phantasy Star is comming to the Virtual Console in Japan. Alas it's not currently scheduled to be released in the US. However 2, 3, and 4 are currently available.

It would be great to start at the beginning, but I have only 3 options for that.

Option 1: Buy Phantasy Star Collection for Gameboy Advance (reasonable option)
Option 2: Buy another system and the game (pricey!)
Option 3: Hope it someday comes out on Virtual Console in US (Might happen)

So, I currently have 1700 Wii Points. I could get 3 NES games, 1 PS game and an NES game, or 2 PS games. Turning out to be a tough choice, especially since I know nothing of the PS games.

Any suggestions from you classic fans? What do you think of the Gameboy Advance collection? What suggestions would you have for the virtual console? I would love to hear your opinions on this.

[Frog]

I'd buy 2-4 on Virtual Console and then later buy 1 when it hits Virtual Console in the US.

[The Starbird]

The GBA version is very much the same as PS1, except for the fact that you only have 3 save slots and there is that weird save glitch in that game (if you save in the middle of the bgm loop, the game will freeze).

I'd wait for the VC release (it should be released shortly). Just keep your hopes up.

In the meantime, if you can manage to scrounge up a Genesis pad, there are converters out there that can change the Genesis pad to work on a GC port. I'm getting myself one so that I can play these old games on the pad they were meant to be played on.

[SammaeltheDark]

In the meantime, if you can manage to scrounge up a Genesis pad, there are converters out there that can change the Genesis pad to work on a GC port. I'm getting myself one so that I can play these old games on the pad they were meant to be played on.
That won't help you much for the original Phantasy Star, now will it? ;P

[The Starbird]

That won't help you much for the original Phantasy Star, now will it? ;P

on the contrary, if you look at the original controller ports on both the Master System and the Genesis (and even the Atari for that reason) they are all the same, so they it works on any of the pads.

and even so, by the time I got around to playing the game in the early 90s, my uncle had the Master System converter which allowed him to play SMS games on the Genesis, so I just used the Genesis pad to play those games.

[Cranberry]

Hi guys. Thanks for the replies.

This is how I decided to go.

I bought the GBA collection off Ebay and I downloaded Phantasy Star 4 on virtual console.

So now I can play all 4, or rather once the GBA cart is shipped to me I can. I'll load it into Gameboy Player on my Gamecube to get the console experience. I never owned a genesis or master system so I won't miss the original game pad. Gamecube controller will be fine for an RPG.

Can you go into more detail on this save glitch?

[The Starbird]

alright, the save glitch is something like this:

sometimes when you save in Phantasy Star I, the game will freeze. There is a way to prevent this from happening, but you have to get an idea of how the background music plays (most of the PS1 songs are very catchy, so you should be able to pretty much memorize how the song goes). If you save the game while the song loops, the game will freeze (in other words, when the song ends, it will loop back to the beginning of the song and play again, if you save during the end of the song while it is in loop process, the game will freeze).

I have PSC myself and I absolutely loved it, but I still prefer the VC versions as the game sounds better (the music had to be compressed around to make all 3 games fit on the GBA cartridge, thus it isn't as good as the original), plus the graphics are a bit off as well (noticeably different in PS2). But all in all, PSC is still worth it.

[Frog]

Phantasy Star is now up on US Virtual Console!!!

So you can get PS1-4 for Virtual Console and play PSO Episodes1-3 via Gamecube backwards compatibility on Wii!

:)