I'm finding that there isn't too much to say when it comes to Phantasy Star II; it's a pretty basic J-RPG. The futuristic / sci-fi elements give it charm for sure but the gameplay is pretty rudimentary. You go from town to town, dungeon to dungeon solving problems or grabbing key items. The battle system is different in that you don't select moves the way you do in most J-RPGs. Usually you select all your moves with each character and then the battle plays out... in Phantasy Star II you have a button marked fight (FGHT) and a button marked orders (ORDR). If you click fight the battle starts and does not stop until either one side is defeated or you press a button to interrupt the battle which stops after the current round of turns. The button marked orders lets you change each characters moves, but is a time consuming process and whatever you set here will play out every turn when you hit fight. So on one hand it streamlines the fighting down to hitting a single option, but it also makes it quite the process to change up what you are doing... if say you want to use a technique (magic) only for one turn... you'd have to cancel the current fight command then go into the orders section and change that characters orders again.

Phantasy Star II is grindtastic. Just like the first game it will mostly be for money but in PSII you will need to keep your characters leveled and equipped with the latest gear as the monster difficulty in each new area spikes pretty drastically. The other thing that causes the grinding is when you get new party members they all start at level 1 which means you are forced to raise them up so they don't just die immediately. Then there are the dungeons... these are over head mazes of teleporters. With maps they are only difficult if you are under-prepared for the monsters which are quite a bit tougher than the ones outside the dungeon. I think that about covers most of the gameplay mechanics... just like a lot of old 8 and 16 bit RPGs this game suffers from old-school issues like all the menus closing after using magic or items and a lot of the spell names are meaningless... you just try and guess what the hell Foi, Sagen, Shinb, Zan, Hinas or Ryuka do because the game isn't going to tell you. That's fire elemental attack, damage biomonster, make biomonster run away, wind elemental attack, escape dungeon and return to the last town you saved at in case you were curious.

As I said that about covers it for this update. I am enjoying the game, let me make that clear but some of these old-school design choices are tough to battle through at times. The next update will hopefully arrive in the next few days but we'll see what happens. I'll talk to you then. Loading Complete!