HI GUYZ

So in my adventures in Spain, I find that right now it gets way too hot to make any adventures between 10 AM and 8 PM at all worth it, especially because with the program’s insistance for us to blend in, I brought ONLY PANTS plus one pair of shorts.

Thus, when I’m not doing Homework, I end up with a fair amount of free time in the afternoons that I’ve spent watching spanish TV with the family. Or surfing around the net inanely.

Well, the temperature isn’t supposed to drop until November-ish, and even when real classes begin I’ll have random gaps of time between classes where at best I can read, so, I was thinking…

How would you guys feel about my doing a screencap adventure here?

The idea was inspired first by Zarla who does these for old less-well-known games so that people can get a chance to experience some of the early trendsetters of the gaming generation. She started a livejournal community called screencappery which currently has several games and series being played through and catalogued, along with others finished. Such titles include Earthbound, Mother 3, Sanitarium, Golden Sun, Quest for Glory, and others, many of them classics and at the same time fairly obscure for people who missed the whole start of Sierra and Lucas Arts and whatnot back in the early nineties, before windows appeared and when people still had to use DOS commands.

Anyways I’m rambling.

My point is, I’ve had a game in mind that I started playing back in Junior year of high school, but then classes began and I never managed to finish it. I got more than halfway through, though. The title?

Phantasy Star.

Or rather, Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millenium. I’ve played 1, and I haven’t finished 2, and 3 confused me like woah. THE FORTUNATE THING, you can safely ignore the third one because it doesn’t have a significant impact on PS4, as it takes place elsewhere.

ANYWAYS, The Phantasy Star series is one of the first major RPGs to be produced, and was exclusive to Sega consoles, setting multiple precedents within the genre. The first in the series set a few graphical benchmarks due to the dungeon and cave exploration employed. The second was only hindered by tedious tedious level grinding if you wanted to be capable of going anywhere. The third was the first to employ multiple endings based on the decisions you made as you played the game. However, the general fan favorite tends to be Phantasy Star IV, which also introduces a few tropes that precede things that generally get accredited to Final Fantasy (I’m thinking 7, in particular :P)

The Phantasy Star series was one that hit me a bit late, because I first fell into it with Phantasy Star Online for the Gamecube (originally for the Dreamcast), and it is also the first game series to impact me so significantly with its music. As a result, I went back and played it’s old iterations to learn about the history of the series, and was pleasantly surprised with what I found. It’s still something not well appreciated, and that is why I want to share it here.

Phantasy Star 4 is an average-length game for an RPG, but it has a lot of depth to it and is fairly entertaining. Screencaps will include some battle sequences, lots of NPC talking, some adventuring, and cutscenes! I’ll also be providing commentary and background for scenes that refer to old characters or things in the past games, as reading through lots of screencaps can get boring, I know.

The question however is whether or not any readers would be interested, because I can always make another blog for the purpose of this screencap adventure. Updates will begin regularly until schedules begin keeping me busy, but for now I’ve got no gripes with this.

I just need to find an emulator and an appropriate screencapping device. I’ve already got a photobucket account to load these things to, though, so that should be fine.
Anyone interested? Does anyone even care?

Well, back to the future tense I go. I owe a post here about the bull fight I saw Sunday, but otherwise, life is fairly uneventful; orientation classes are just not that interesting. Hence the lull in Spain-posts

Take care~!