Phantasy Star TTRPG
The TTRPG Conversion of a classic JRPG series, but how does it measure up?
Logo and character image for the Phantasy Star TTRPG
The Phantasy Star franchise goes way back, so far back that I start to feel aged just thinking about it. I played the original Phantasy Star on the Sega Master System, followed by Phantasy Star II and Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom, and Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millenium on the Sega Genesis. If you want to check these old-school classics out, you can usually find entires 2 through 4 bundled together in the Sega Genesis Classics Collection that’s available on pretty much every gaming platform.
To sum up though, the original entries in the series were very much part of that era’s JRPG collection of games with top-down world and town exploration woven together with “first-person” dungeon crawls for your combat and dungeon explorations.
Classic Phantasy Star town exploration.
Classic Phantasy Star dungeon crawl.
I’m not going to spend too much more time talking about what the Phantasy Star console games were since we’re here to talk about what the new Phantasy Star TTRPG is, but I thought it would be good to ground this discussion in the history of the franchise. It’s also important to note that many people’s exposure to the franchise is likely to have been through the Phantasy Star Online MMORPG (which, once again dating myself, I first played on the Sega Dreamcast!) PSO would later be ported to Gamecube and Xbox and is widely considered the first successful MMORPG made for consoles. It retained the franchise’s blending of science fiction and fantasy elements, and opened the door for a variety of franchise follow-ups.
It’s been (as far as I’m aware) a little over a decade since the last major event / innovation in the Phantasy Star line though Phantasy Star Online 2 has been up and running for quite awhile, now. The Phantasy Star TTRPG from Skybound Games has potential to mark an exciting new era for the franchise, so let’s dig in and see what’s actually under the hood!
The Good
It’s got all the trappings of Phantasy Star, particularly the original 4 console games. It’s a whole book dripping with nostalgia: space heroes with laser swords in shiny ceramic armor, talking magical cats, space ships and vehicles, it’s all there in the lore and art of the game, faithfully reimagined for a tabletop roleplaying experience.
Image of three characters wielding swords and sci-fi equipment.
If Phantasy Star is the specific blend of sci-fi and fantasy you’re looking for, you’re going to be excited about this game and you’re going to enjoy this book. The game is built on the same basic engine as Dungeons & Dragons 5E, so barring a few notable issues I’ll bring up later, it’s pretty easy to jump in and start playing. The digital version of the rulebook we received with our preorder included a handful of pregenerated starter characters that can be useful for players who want to jump in without having to navigate the rulebook first (and the pregens can be helpful for deciphering some of the more poorly explained rules if you or your players are getting stuck.)
The 3rd-level starter adventure that came with our preorder is a great way to get a good feel for the game, and the inclusion of pregenerated characters was wise and made it much easier to start playing. If there was a party member of a cool species in Phantasies Star I-IV, it’s available as a playable species for your character here. This is absolutely the go-to game if Phantasy Star and TTRPGs are your things.
The Bad
The rules structure and presentation for actually building characters and playing the game has some issues, and these issues are large enough and pervasive enough that anyone wanting to play is probably going to have to find a way to navigate them. Taking a guess based on my experience with other TTRPGs, it seems like the designers here started with a version of D&D 5E, grafted in a little 3.5 psionics for the Technique Point system, and then skimmed some Starfinder 1E rules and ideas for certain areas. There’s nothing wrong with that in theory, but the final products shows the welded spots a bit too clearly.
For example, on page 16 of the rulebook we’re introduced to the term “agility”. Agility is basically your initiative stat, used for determining your turn order during combat. However, when the term is first introduced, it’s given no explanation outside of it being part of the initiative equation, and you only get “(listed in the character sheet’s “Movement” section”) for more information. The character sheet sure does have a box with “(DEX + Misc Bonus)” beneath it, but I still haven’t really gotten a definition for agility, or any idea of how I should be thinking about it as a part of my character or the game. So I go to the index to see if I can’t find the full rules on agility, only to discover that agility doesn’t have an entry listed with the other game terms. Now, eventually, after reading through the entire book, I did find more explanation of the agility statistic, including a better description of how to actually calculate it, but the book wasn’t helping me navigate to that information with any kind of ease.
That anecdote or something like it repeats a lot throughout this book. If a new game term is introduced and it’s not a term from the Dungeons & Dragons SRD? It’s a crapshoot whether or not it’s even listed in the appendix, let alone if the page references are complete or useful. The layout and graphic design can help as much as hinder; little things like the musk cat species breaking awkwardly across pages with its header and much of its stats sitting on top of the art of a different species (or a paranthetical telling you to “see Damage and Healing, below” when the Damage and Healing entry is actually 3 pages later) aren’t game-breakers individually, but they do contribute to a book that feels crowded and poorly organized, trying to weld too many adjustments onto an inherently simple system without keeping a good diagram of the changes.
Not a musk cat.
Now, if you have a lot of experience with TTRPGs, you’ll probably navigate these issues relatively easily. A lot of times when something is unclear, you can make a pretty safe guess about how it’s supposed to work, especially if you’re familiar with the lineage of Dungeons and Dragons games running from 3rd through 5th edition. We’re running a Phantasy Star game now, and while there was some head-scratching during character creation, everyone ultimately got the characters they wanted and whenever there was confusion about how something worked, everyone ultimately got to the same answer (or were satisfied with the answer the GM landed on.) But there is a throughline to the product where it’s not just 5E D&D anymore; they’ve changed a lot of content and added lots of their own little flourishes. Typically when they’ve done so, it’s by borrowing or adapting terms and rules from existing systems, so if you recognize where a thing came from, you’ll be able to figure out how to use it fairly intuitively. If you aren’t a big TTRPG player who’s familiar with multiple editions of D&D-lineage games, though, there’s a lot of speed bumps that can throw you off or impede your ability to get into the game.
Also, as much of a fan as I am of the inclusion of a starter adventure, the fact that it starts out at 3rd-level showcases another issue with the game. In the pre-2024 version of D&D 5E, it’s fairly common for people to skip over levels 1 and 2, jumping to 3rd level when everyone has their subclass and treating that as the “start” of the game. But this is a new game. It may use the 5E engine, but it doesn’t indicate that you need the 5E Player’s Handbook or anything like that. And it makes plenty of changes, replacing D&D’s spell system for the mana pool / power point style Technique system, tweaking expectations of damage types and equipment scaling, introducing new terminology, etc. If you’re going to make a standalone TTRPG and you don’t think levels 1 and 2 of the initial engine are worth playing, why would you keep those levels? And if they are important and serve a purpose, why does your intro adventure (and the accompanying pregenerated characters) start at 3rd-level? This just feels like yet another place in the game where there wasn’t much thought or thoughtfulness paid to significant mechanical decisions before they were made.
Final Score: 2.5 / 5
That score and the issues called out above may sound rough, but I think it’s important to reiterate that we’re still playing a Phantasy Star game using these rules right now. There’s clearly a lot of love for both TTRPGs and the Phantasy Star franchise in this book, which is unfortunately hindered by some poor choices in both the mechanics and presentation. If I were to speculate, it feels to me like this started out as a book that was supposed to be more like a 5E campaign setting, but which the designers rightly realized needed to expand a fair bit beyond the 5E engine in order to do all the things it needed to do in order to be a good experience that felt like Phantasy Star. And it does feel like Phantasy Star; the terminology, the art, the equipment, the inclusion of ships and vehicles, it knows what it needs to have to be the game it wants to be. Where it falls short is in making sure that the player can get to that experience.
An incomplete index helps highlight that while the designers understood how to get to the experience they wanted for the game, they didn’t do a very good job of explaining that journey to the reader. The product presents itself as a standalone TTRPG product, but if it’s your first experience with a TTRPG, it’s not going to be a very good one. The game introduces too many changes for a player to coast on their knowledge of 5E D&D, but also doesn’t always do a good job of adequately explaining its new functions and terminology. It ultimately feels choked and stymied by using D&D 5E as the foundation and then just failing to do a good job of explaining the changes it made to deal with that issue after it recognized it.
To compare to another recently released sci-fi TTRPG, Archetype Entertainment’s Exodus TTRPG faced most, if not all, of the same challenges and just did a better job of its adaption, IMHO. It reduced the level spread from 20 levels to 10 levels to focus the engine in on the appropriate scope of the game, and deploys its lore a bit more effectively through a better layout and graphic design that showcases the rules and references in a more natural and intuitive way. It’s also more consistent about explaining, referencing, and indexing its new terminology, both for story and rules components. In that comparison, it’s also notable that at $69.99, the 228-page Phantasy Star TTRPG is more expensive than the Exodus Traveler’s Handbook and Exodus Encyclopedia (about 600 pages of content) combined (though given that the Exodus books are currently sold out, that might not be an issue!)
If Exodus is a 3.8/5 (and we think it is, stay tuned for that review!), then Phantasy Star just can’t be considered to hit a 3. There’s too many little issues in editing, development, and presentation for it to get there. But, it’s also the only science-fantasy game our group is playing right now, and we’re excited to continue doing so. Phantasy Star is all about the vibes and the vibes are strong enough with this TTRPG that we consider them to be worth the struggles of actually getting the characters built and getting the game up and running. If you love the old-school science-fantasy vibes of games like Phantasy Star and Shining Force, they’re all wrapped up in delicious nostalgia and it’ll be easier to fix the issues in this game than to do the work of building a new Phantasy Star setting for your D&D game. But if you’re a brand new TTRPG player, you’re going to have some frustrations; only pick up the Phantasy Star TTRPG if you’ve got an experienced GM to help guide you through the early steps. I’ve got no doubt we’re going to have a long and fun campaign with the Phantasy Star TTRPG, I just wish a little bit more of that was being earned by the actual game engine and not the rose-colored glasses the IP has spent decades earning.