YMMV / Phantasy Star

• Awesome Music: Many examples peppered throughout the series. Proof that yes, the Sega Master System and Genesis were capable of producing epic and emotional tunes suitable for an RPG. Naturally, it has its own page.
• Broken Base: There's one between fans of the original tetralogy and fans of the Online and Universe series. The fact that it's almost a completely different storyline that goes for an Action RPG approach compared with the turn based RPG of the original, and that Online has easily eclipsed the original games in popularity doesn't help. There's virtually zero crossover fans between the two franchises save for the truly diehard.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Since Online, one thing has held true: the only good Photon Blasts are the support-oriented ones. Many players consider the vast majority of offense-oriented Photon Blasts inferior to the ones that buff/heal on use or provide bonus effects such as Zero's Flozir. This even applies to Nova's Gigantes Blasts, of which there are a much larger variety than other games, but in most cases you'll settle with the one that gives party Shifta/Deband/Resta because the others are next to useless.
• Complete Monster: Zio & Kumhan. See those pages for details.
• Contested Sequel: Phantasy Star III doesn't even look much like a Phantasy Star game given its radically different art style and its storyline separation from Phantasy Star II. It does however have its fair share of fans for it's branching mechanics that were perhaps a bit too far ahead of its time, the excellent music, and the ending of the game revealing some ties to the main story after all.
• Cult Classic: While the series is quite popular in its country of origin, its fanbase outside of Japan is far, far smaller, even though many of its early games are quite fondly remembered among RPG fans, especially the original tetralogy and Phantasy Star Online, the latter of which essentially paved the road to console MMOs taking off.
• Fanon:
  • Go ahead, ask some of the fans if Lutz and Noah are the same person. Then read some of the long, long justifying fan-fiction. May also qualify as Alternate Character Interpretation. In the original Japanese and Fan Translation hacks, this is indeed the case.
  • For that matter you might as well ask if Rika and Nei are the same character, due to a case of What Could Have Been.
• Fandom Rivalry: Unsurprisingly, with Final Fantasy, with some added heat of the famous Genesis vs. SNES rivalry.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Phantasy Star, specially the first game, is still a cult classic among older Brazilian gamers. This is due SEGA's strong presence in the market, and that game was one of the very few to be fully translated to portuguese at the time there were almost none, which helped a lot since RPGs are text-heavy and english would be a rare skill for a kid in the 1980s or 1990s.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Nei from II is one of the most recognizable characters (if not the most recognizable) from the series as a whole. She has a lot of fans in part because of her Moe appeal and being most well known for her death, one of the earliest examples of a Player Punch. She was even considered to represent the series in Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing over characters like Alis! However, she didn't make the final cut.
• Nintendo Hard: All four games of the tetralogy, although PSII is the most punishing, even with Level Grinding.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: PSIV is generally regarded as the best game in the original series. PSIII is... mixed.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Many fans of the original tetralogy do not like the Genre Shift from a single-player JRPG series to an action-based MMORPG series.
• Tough Act to Follow: The story of Online is fondly remembered for being largely atmospheric and effectively using Story Breadcrumbs to convey a Cosmic Horror Story plot with just enough left to the imagination. Many of the games afterwards feature more direct storytelling and a heavier lean into anime tropes, which while not necessarily bad, makes them significantly more contentious plots for long-time fans.

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