good luck

I've mostly sampled Phantasy Star Online. Seems like a worthy franchise. Though, I was well out of the RPG'ing days when I even sampled the Sega originals via emulation. Have fun.

Then I don't imagine you have much knowledge as to the precise hell of which I was jesting. Because if there's one takeaway a person is likely to have from playing through Phantasy Star 2, it's being traumatized by the complexity of the dungeons. With a few in particular, such as the green dam mentioned in the journal, being especially complex.

Not in the slightest. I don't even recall Phantasy Star Online using true dungeons. It seemed to be more like a false attempt at exploration, while keeping things to a confined set of trails where multiple people fought for survival and stat building. Even at that, I had fairly little experience, as I just don't remember having a lot of fun with the game. I do remember building a character up a few ranks and then just barely ever coming back. I did, days before the original servers shut down. And I had joined a party of far more experienced players. Whom had to continuously pour revival potions on me, as my character was just far too weak for the final boss.

Besides, I grew up Nintendo. The Genny was that counterpart that was rented on rare occasions from the video rental store. Now, Granada and Road Rash drew me into that console. Phantasy Star... I hardly know if that was even in the store's meager selection. Believe it was PlayStation... 2 (?) with it's Genny collection where I finally sampled the PS games. By that point, it was just too late. I no longer had time for long RPG style games.

Some of them also haven't aged the best. Unless your jam is outdated, archaic RPGs, then the only one I feel I can easily recommend to people is Phantasy Star 4. That's pretty much the best in the series in every regard, and has aged well enough that it's still very much worth playing to this day (but it's also my favorite Genesis game, so take that for what it's worth). Phantasy Star 2 in particular though, one needs to be a fan of old-school RPG tropes like grinding, vague directions, repetitive battles, complex dungeons that will probably require you draw a map, awkward menus, and the game providing you with minimal information. It's the whole works of features that would likely drive mad all but the most hardcore retro RPG fans. Heck, I once even saw a YouTube video somebody made of the worst RPG dungeons of all time, and when he got to the entry of his pick for a Phantasy Star 2 dungeon, he started off by noting that he could've filled the entire list with dungeons exclusively from that game, but then the list wouldn't have been very interesting.

As for the console thing, I can understand that. Heck, even as a kid, I wanted a Super Nintendo, but had a Genesis instead. And while I would've probably preferred having the SNES back then, nowadays I'm eternally grateful that I didn't. Because all of my friends had a Super Nintendo, but none of them had a Genesis. I was the one kid with the Genesis, which meant I never would've been exposed to some of my favorite games if not for me being that one kid. Whereas I didn't need to own a Super Nintendo to be exposed to games on that, because all my friends had it.

I, for one, never partook in the Genny vs. Nintendo 'wars'. Nintendo was just what my grandparents gifted to me. I just stayed loyal and only rented the other half on great occasion. Now, I would eventually find a working Genny at the swap meet and build a tiny library for it. But that would be years... decade(s), even.

These days, there seems to be a whole lot of talk about AI this and that. Makes me wonder how soon one can port in that ancient code for those outdated games and see what this AI can do to modernize it and improve it. Not that I would have the time to ever get back into RPG'ing. Long ago are the days when I could get into a session of Dragon Warrior III... a game I casually remark as a yearlong grind session.

Then again, we're not there for redesigning old games... just yet. After all, I saw this video the other week where someone tried to get this chat AI to program code. If asked just right, it would do it. But it would program like it was still just learning the language. So, it made a lot of mistakes. I thought it was weird. A computer-based thing that didn't know its own language like a native speaker.