The Let's Play Archive

Phantasy Star 2

by Thuryl

Part 6: Bonus Update




First things first: remember those Sega CD text adventures I mentioned at the start of the thread? One of them's just been translated, courtesy of MIJET. Phantasy Star 2: Kinds' Adventure follows the backstory of Kinds (named Kain in the official translation of PS2). The above link is to the translation patch: if you need a copy of the game itself, you can find it here.

FairGame posted:

Hooray, now we can get another character! (One who isn't very useful unless trained to high levels, but another character all the same)

Man, but do we ever have really different taste in characters. What's not to like about  a healer who gets Gires at level 6? 

kw0134 posted:

Should have tried to sell Teim to a vendor. The reaction is priceless.

Oh ye of little faith. I did bonus updates for PS1 and I'll do bonus updates for this game as well.



This is what happens if you try to sell any unsellable item other than Teim.



By contrast, this is what happens if you try to sell Teim.



Most key items can be used from the inventory screen to give a short description of them. This is what happens if you use Teim.



This is just the generic "can't throw this item away" message, but it's still good advice

Semiru posted:

Man, the Teim and Darum scene gets me every time Although that bit of text after it was always a bit awkward. Lessens the impact, somewhat.

Yeah, I considered leaving that text out. The same bit in the retranslation is just as awkward if not more so, so I suspect it's not a whole lot better in the Japanese version. (For those of you who haven't already played this game, I'm already leaving some bits out: for example, every single character who joins you asks you if you want to change their name, and since I decided I couldn't make a sufficiently funny running joke out of it I'm just omitting those parts of their introductions.)

The more I think about that scene, though, the harder it is to take it seriously as a whole: Teim is stupid for just running up to Darum like that with her veil still on, Rolf and co. are stupid for letting her do it, Darum is stupid for not recognising his own daughter's voice. This game really does throw common sense out the window sometimes for the sake of giving its plot twists maximum groin-punching impact. Sometimes it works very well, but other times it feels like the game is trying too hard.

(And if you think that was harsh, you should hear what I have to say about the ending to Romeo and Juliet. )

Tuxedo Ted posted:

Alright, alright, I've been avoiding this thread for a while now. Though I greatly enjoyed your PS1 LP, Thuryl, I thought that the second one might be easy enough or have a good enough interface that I might be able to play through it myself, and I didn't want to have the story spoiled by your thread. In the end, though, I've decided to go ahead and read this, since you'll probably make the game umpteen-billion times better.

That doesn't mean I've given up on playing through it myself, though. If nobody else has started, I might try playing along with the re-translation for fun and help show the differences in the wording.

Well, I definitely encourage anyone who's interested in the game to go ahead and play it. I mean, I wouldn't be doing an LP if I didn't enjoy playing the game. I think I'll be sticking pretty strictly to the "one town or dungeon per update" rule for the most part, so it shouldn't be too hard to avoid spoiling yourself if you're playing along.