Phantasie (Apple II)
I had known about this series of RPGs from back in the day, as I saw it mentioned in SSI catalogs and had (briefly) played the first game on my friend's Atari ST. For some reason, I decided earlier this week to start playing the first game in the series.
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Rambling commentary on difficulties getting this game to work, etc.
Let me tell you, it is VERY difficult to find clean disks of these games. This is especially important for the first two games, as the game writes to the game disk as you play it. This includes exploring dungeons and tripping encounters, exploring the wilderness (!), and of course the character roster. All versions of the game include reset utilities, but I've found that the C64 and Atari ST versions reset only the dungeons/encounters and character roster, but NOT the wilderness. This allows the game to be played and completed, but a huge part of the game is exploring the wilderness and revealing the world square by square, and you lose that on a copy that has been played. I found this to be the case even on uncracked images, and even on a set of C64 images labeled as "never been played."
Luckily, the Apple II version comes to the rescue. The reset utility on this version actually does clear the wilderness map as well, so you can generate completely fresh disks for all three games in the series. It's probably for the best anyway, since the Apple II versions are the originals and the only ones designed and programmed by the same guy. The C64 versions suffer from much worse visuals, strange changes (the world map is rotated 90 degrees from the original in Phantasie I!), and a frustrating control scheme that completely ignores the keyboard and forces you to move a cursor through menus to select actions. Likewise, the Atari ST version forces you to use the mouse to do absolutely everything in the game (though it looks great).
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Phantasie is really quite unique, for back in 1985. Outside of Ultima III/IV, no other game up to this point provided such a complete RPG package as this one. You have tactical combat (including several different attack options with varying damage and accuracy modifiers), a wilderness to explore, great dungeoneering mechanics (listening at doors, picking locks, finding/disarming traps, the ability to look down hallways to see beyond your immediate vicinity), unique plot-based encounters in dungeons, and plenty of spells with all sorts of effects. It also feels quite modern once you get used to the interface, and even has automapping of both the wilderness and dungeons (in fact, filling out the automap is a key part of the game). All the hints you find are written on scrolls discovered throughout the world—as long as you hang onto those scrolls, there's no need to take notes (however, inventory space is limited so it's best to read the scrolls, take a photo of the screen with your phone, and then drop the scroll!). The game does autosave, but only when you leave a town, so it's not the kind of thing where it will save you in an unwinnable state or anything. Just in case, the game even has a backup utility to save your characters to a backup disk. Very friendly! I am very impressed with how this plays in 2021... in fact, I ended up playing it three hours straight without realizing it.
Combat is difficult at first, but the game is pretty generous in allowing you to flee and you quickly learn which enemies are too strong for you. Winning just a half-dozen battles or so is enough to level up some of the more basic classes, and the power difference from level 1 to level 2 is significant.
I am playing on actual hardware, and the loading is not too bad from disk. It would obviously be a much smoother experience on an emulator with disk acceleration turned on, and I think I would recommend that for most people. For me, this was a good reason to (finally) spend some quality time with my Apple IIc.
